Certainly there have been ideologues who have been exceptions, but the long-term history of world religion inclines to the rejection by thoughtful religious minds and truly great religious leaders of any identification of the faith, values, norms, and goals of their respective religious traditions with the ideologies, values, norms, and goals of political powers and states.

Israel is a small but powerful national state; it has pursued reprehensible as well as admirable policies in the past, just as have the United States, Russia, France, China, Japan, and vast numbers of other national states. Why should one not be able to criticize Israel just as much as these states?

The fact of rising anti-Semitism in Europe, for example, does not make it acceptable to excuse Israel’s government when it violates human rights with state prisoners and Palestinian workers or uses anti-personnel bombs against civilian populations in Lebanon.

These matters have nothing to do with Judaism, its values, or its adherents; criticizing them does not amount automatically to criticism of Jewish values, let alone to anti-Semitism, even if anti-Semites also level the same criticisms.

Certainly thousands of faithful Jews around the world and even in this country and in Israel itself are critical of Israel when it deserves criticism, and to accuse them of being traitors to their faith is scurrilous and despicable. Any religious person of real convictions will almost always have criticisms to level at national states and governments that, in the very nature of political powers since time immemorial, pursue immoral and blameworthy policies from time to time if not regularly or even consistently.

Religious leaders have historically been the most vehement critics of the leaders of their own states and others, whether these leaders have been Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, Taoist, or whatever.

What is so remarkable in this week’s question is that it is considered so viable a question in the American context today. It ought not to be, both for the long-term sake of Israel and the United States.