In Latest Push for Mideast Peace, Which Side Will Organized American Jewish Community Be On?

By Allan C. Brownfeld

The latest push for a comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East finds the organized American Jewish community in an increasingly ambivalent position.

On the eve of November’s Annapolis meeting on Middle East peace, Washington Jewish Week reported that “a battle is erupting over whether the American Jewish community should be supporting or obstructing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s efforts to negotiate with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.”

Within the U.S., wrote reporters Ron Kampeas and Ami Eden, “Olmert’s opponents are pushing their case at the two main communitywide pro-Israel groups—the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations...A spectrum of Orthodox and right-wing groups are mobilizing against potential Israeli concessions and are ratcheting up their criticism of Olmert. Meanwhile, some centrist organizations have generally been sitting on their hands.”

Israeli Prime Minister Olmert was sharply critical of American Jewish groups opposing the peace efforts. According to the Nov. 30 edition of The Forward, “In a rare public spat between Israel and its supporters in the U.S., Prime Minister Ehud Olmert bluntly denounced efforts by a coalition of American Jewish groups aimed at maintaining a united Jerusalem. Following statements by several hawkish and Orthodox groups that appeared to question Israel’s right to broach discussion of dividing Jerusalem with the Palestinians, Olmert told reporters...that Israel has exclusive purview over negotiating the future of its capital.”

Olmert declared: “Does any Jewish organization have a right to confer upon Israel what it negotiates or not? This question was decided a long time ago. The government of Israel has a sovereign right to negotiate anything on behalf of Israel.”

While the Conference of Presidents said the Annapolis meeting “can be a significant step toward launching meaningful, bilateral negotiations,” it hosted Jerusalem’s mayor, Uri Lupolianski, an ardent opponent of dividing the city, on the same day it issued the statement. Lupolianski was brought to the U.S. by Agudath Israel of America, which had just adopted a resolution opposing relinquishing any Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem.

Opponents of the current peace efforts both within Israel and the U.S. are working in concert.

Editorially, The Forward was sharply critical of the lack of Jewish support for the peace process: “For 40 years, the major Jewish organizations have taken on as their most important task the defense of Israel in the American public square. They’ve placed a taboo on questioning Israel’s actions publicly, and those who so raise questions have been taken to task, publicly humiliated, hounded from jobs and community positions. Israel, we’ve been told over and over, has the right to decide its own security needs. Roadblocks throughout the West Bank? Not our business. Inadequate safeguards for enemy civilians? We can’t judge, but Israel knows what it’s doing. Now, when Israel decided to take a dramatic step toward the peace of which it had dreamed for decades, there’s screaming silence. Major organizations on the right actively lobby Congress to tie Israel’s hands...but face no censure from the central community bodies that never hesitated to censure the left. As for those in the center, they’re not sure how they feel.”

Recognizing that there is an ally opposed to a negotiated peace settlement within the organized American Jewish community, Israelis who are opposed to current efforts to move forward, argue, as Natan Sharansky did in The International Jerusalem Post of Jan. 25-31, that “Israel must not decide alone...Jerusalem is not just Israel’s capital; it is an integral part of the identity of the entire Jewish people.”

Noted Sharansky, who served for nine years in Israeli governments in a variety of posts, including deputy prime minister: “Today, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government is about to begin negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas on key issues, including the fate of Jerusalem, the debate over the role of the Diaspora Jews in the process of decision-making is becoming all the more heated. But the real question is much broader: Does the State of Israel belong only to those who live in it and thus is the state of all of its citizens, or was it established, as well, to ensure the continuity of all the Jewish people and the ingathering of Zion?...Among the decisions that could affect the future of our entire people, for good or bad, the future of Jerusalem is perhaps the most prominent.

In an open letter to Prime Minister Olmert, Ronald Lauder, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, called upon the Israeli prime minister to consult with the Jews of the Diaspora before the government makes a decision about the future of Jerusalem.

Given the fact that opponents of the current peace efforts both within Israel and the U.S. are working in concert, the influence of the organized American Jewish community has, thus far, been a largely negative one—despite the fact that public opinion polls clearly show that the overwhelming majority of American Jews support a compromise which would lead to the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state.

Akiva Eldar, senior columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and co-author of the book Lords of the Land: The War for the Occupied Territories, l967-2007, wrote in the Nov. 9, 2007 Forward: “We consistently hear that the Jewish community supports Israel—wherever its government stands. For more than 40 years, however, the community’s moral, political and financial power has been mostly occupied in building Israel’s strategic supremacy, and in containing any pressure from American administrations for Israel to change its policies in the territories. In the early 1990s, Jewish activists were all over Washington lobbying Congress to confront the first President Bush. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle stood up to the president, who had the chutzpah to push Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to stop expanding settlements as the White House tried to organize a Mideast peace conference. Four years later, as President Clinton was bringing Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat together to douse the fires in the region, AIPAC convinced Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole to introduce a bill demanding the American Embassy be moved to Jerusalem.”

In Eldar’s view, “American Jews can make a powerful contribution to helping diplomacy succeed. But doing so will require a break with the past...As always, the final decision will be in the hands of the Israelis. But the American Jewish community has to decide whether it wants to be helpful in making peace or only in times of war.”

In Israel itself, opponents of moving toward peace are escalating their rhetoric. Just days after Pakistan’s opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, an Israeli rabbi called for Prime Minister Olmert and other Israeli government officials to be executed. Shalom Dov Wolpe, head of Save the Land and the Nation (SOS Israel), made his remarks during a demonstration condemning the Olmert government’s peace efforts.

“The terrible traitor, Ehud Olmert, who gives these Nazis weapons, who gives money, who frees their murderous terrorists, this man, like Ariel Sharon, collaborates with the Nazis,” Wolpe said in his speech. The Chabad rabbi, who has called for Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) to secede from Israel, added that, were Israel run properly, the prime minister, Vice Premier Haim Ramon, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak would be “hanged from the gallows.” Several religious lawmakers reportedly were on hand when Wolpe made the remarks, and no protest was heard.

Wolpe claims that his remarks were taken out of context, and that he was not calling for vigilante violence, but for law enforcement. Muslim terrorists are the Nazis of the day, he explained, and Israel’s laws prohibit providing assistance to Nazis. “Wolpe’s excuses are disingenuous,” declared Washington Jewish Week in its Jan. 10 issue, “and his comments outrageous and revolting. It is the type of language that was all too common in the time period leading up to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995.”

Many Israelis seek genuine peace. “In Israel in the weeks following the Annapolis conference,” wrote Israeli author Amos Elon, “I heard some futuristic talk of Jerusalem as an open city, the capital of both Israel and Palestine even though there have never been two national capitals in the same city anywhere in the world. There is even talk that Israel may eventually become a binational state anyway.”

Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, points out in his new book, Son of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections, and Regrets from a Political Life, that within a decade Arab Israelis may already make up as much as 25 percent of the population—even within the old l967 borders. “The attempt to fight the ‘demographic threat’ by dragging more and more new immigrants from every remote corner on earth has been carried to absurd extremes,” he writes. “The time has come to declare that the Zionist revolution is over.”

The Main Impediment to Peace

There can be no doubt that the main impediment to peace is the problem of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, settlements which have been built by Israeli governments of all major political parties, acquiesced to by the U.S. government, and quietly accepted and encouraged by the organized American Jewish community.

In Elon’s view, “These settlements are a huge, intentionally created obstacle that affects hundreds of thousands of lives. And for what? In the best case, the settlements extend the Israeli border to the east by a few miles, a distance devoid of serious strategic meaning; in the worst case, they could perpetuate the hundred-year war between the two peoples indefinitely. Yet there are now so many settlers—over 250,000 in the West Bank—that it may turn out to be impossible to dismantle communities created with the precise aim of precluding a repartitioning of the country. Too many lives, too many political careers and real estate interests—i.e., too many people and political factions within Israel—may depend on it. On the occasion of President Bush’s recent visit to Israel, the lead editorial in Haaretz blamed Bush for being an ‘accomplice after the fact’ in the illegal, constantly expanding settlement project in the West Bank.”

Ignoring international protests, Israeli governments of both left and right supported the settlement enterprise, either openly or by subterfuge. The financing was often indirect. Settlement funds were hidden in health, transportation or education budgets. The total amount is not known, but is estimated to be billions of dollars. As Eldar and co-author Idith Zertal write in Lords of the Land, “Deception, shame, concealment, denial, and repression have characterized the state’s behavior with respect to the flow of funds to the settlements. It can be said that this has been an act of duplicity in which all of the Israeli governments since 1967 have been partner. This massive self-deception still awaits the research that will reveal its full magnitude.”

“The settlement fever first spread among young men and women who believed they were following in the footsteps of the early Zionist pioneers, the fabled ‘beggars with dreams’ who between 1892 and 1948 had settled on land owned by Jews. This cannot be said of the settlers after 1967,” Elon points out, “who settled on requisitioned land in violation of international law that prohibits the movement of settlers into occupied country.”

According to Peace Now, 40 percent of settlements were built on private Palestinian land and 46 percent of all land in the West Bank is now directly controlled by the settlers’ local councils, whose powers extend beyond their communities. The Israeli government has built an enormous network of roads and tunnels which allow settlers to commute easily to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv without, in most cases, setting eyes on a single Palestinian. Indeed, there are now two road networks in the West Bank, one for Palestinians and one strictly reserved for Israelis. Water resources are controlled by the settlers, whose lawns and swimming pools are often within view of Palestinian villages where water is so scarce it must be brought in by truck.

While prior to the Annapolis conference, Prime Minister Olmert pledged to freeze new settlement construction, Haaretz reports that the Israeli government continues to expand a dozen existing settlements. Another settlement project, “the biggest ever since 1967,” at Atarot, between Jerusalem and Ramallah, was announced by the Israeli Housing Ministry in December. Now construction is also taking place at Har Homa, the settlement bordering Bethlehem designed for 15,000 housing units.

Many believe that Prime Minister Olmert is now serious about moving toward a negotiated peace settlement, and that President Bush is now committed to a real two-state solution. The continued resistance of the organized American Jewish community to the compromises necessary to move forward makes progress more difficult. If these groups represented the genuine views of the majority of Jewish Americans, a far different picture would emerge, and real peace would become far more likely.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.