The Enemy Within
Jonathan Rosenblum
The Enemy Within
Jonathan Rosenblum
The failures of Israeli advocacy is only one of the many reasons for Israel's lessened world stature. No less significant is the loss of Israel's most powerful source of support: the American Jewish community. Within American Jewry, there is both a rapidly diminishing identification with Israel and a complete breakdown of the old consensus about just what is good for Israel.
The loss of identification with Israel owes to several causes, chief among them rapidly declining ethnic identity. As being Jewish ceases to be a primary identity for most American Jews, they have less and less connection to other Jews 6,000 miles away, especially as Israelis also tend to de-emphasize their Jewishness. Historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz noted more than a decade ago that, apart from the Orthodox, few American Jews vote primarily based on Jewish issues, Israel included.
Statements by Israeli politicians, chief among the Yossi Beilin, that Israel no longer needs American Jewry have also driven a wedge between American Jewry, which liked to believe it had a major role to play in securing Israel 's existence.
Finally, the ongoing portrayal of Israel as a theocracy by Reform leaders dissed that the conversions of a handful of colleagues in Israel are not officially recognized has succeeded in delegitimizing Israel in the eyes of many American Jews.
Even those with a warm spot in their heart for Israel no longer know what supporting Israel means. Since Oslo, Israel's Jews have been bitterly divided over the direction of the country, and those divisions have been reflected by American Jewry as well. Once the consensus resisted American dictation of terms to Israel. For much of the last eight years, Israeli governments have courted such dictation. And during the brief Netanyahu interregnum, President Weizmann counseled Madeleine Albright to squeeze Israel
harder.
While no position in American Jewry is without its Israeli antecedents, American Jewish opinion tends to be considerably to the left of Israeli opinion. Those who will not bear the consequences of miscalculations can always afford to be more forthcoming to the Palestinians. And in the social circles in which most American Jews travel, it is easier to adopt the dovish line than to make oneself a pariah.
Nothing better indicates the leftward drift of American Jewry than the mainstream status afforded the New Israel Fund, which raises over $20,000,000 annually from numerous Jewish federations and thousands of individual contributors while supporting a host of groups associated with fringe positions on the Israeli political spectrum.
The promotional materials of the Israel-Palestine Friendship Center announce that American tax deductible contributions can be sent to NIF, and the Center's directors credit NIF with giving them credibility. Yet the Center relentlessly advocates the Palestinian right of return - a position viewed as national suicide even by Yossi Sarid. One recent Center speaker, Israel Shamir, told his audience, "Jews exist only to drip the blood of Palestinian children into their matzas."
Another NIF recipient is Bat Shalom. From 1994 to 1996, Bat Shalom campaigned for the release of Abi Waheidi, who led a terrorist cell that murdered Zvi Klein after stopping his car and dragging him from it.. After her release, Waheidi, who was praised by Arafat as the model Palestinian woman, vowed to continue her terrorist activities and refused to express regret for murdering Klein.
Jeffrey Halper of the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions, an NIF recommendee, travels throughout American with a Palestinian colleague denouncing the "Nazis" and "apartheid" house demolition policies of the Israel. Halper speaks sympathetically of his Palestinian allies who cannot agree to accept a two-state solution for fear of foreclosing a unitary state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.
NIF's April 4 update proudly describes how the Israeli office hosted Amnesty International's Secretary General just weeks after Amnesty lambasted Israel as a human rights violator for not granting Palestinians the right of return.
A recent letter writer to the Post provides a good insight into the tilt of the NIF. Dr. Evelyn Segal describes how she was a "devout Zionist" until a 1989 NIF study tour opened her eyes to the "racist contempt of the Israel government . . . toward Palestinians [and] how the founders of Zionism schemed from the start to take over, by any means necessary, the whole of Palestine and to cleanse it of Palestinians." Today Dr. Segal is a Unitarian.
As long as the NIF remains mainstream for American Jewry, Israel has little to hope for from that corner.
AM ECHAD RESOURCES
[Jonathan Rosenblum is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, where this article first appeared, and is the director of Am Echad's Israel office]
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