January 1991, Page 57a

Jews and Israel

By Andrea Barron

Tikkun Editor Calls For Strike Against Iraq

Michael Lerner, editor of the leading Jewish liberal magazine Tikkun (which means "to repair the world" in Hebrew), has shocked many of his fellow liberals by calling for a US strike against Iraqi military facilities. A former Sixties radical who says he "has opposed every US intervention from Vietnam to Panama, " Lerner is worried that if the Gulf crisis ends with Saddam's huge weapons arsenal still intact, the Iraqi dictator would eventually use these weapons against Israel.

Why should President Bush wage war against Iraq for the sake of Israel? "To make sense of any level of American intervention in the Middle East, Bush must have a policy that speaks to some of the legitimate needs of the Arab masses. And that leads us straight to the Palestinians, " Lerner wrote in the November/December edition of Tikkun. He argues that the destruction of Iraq's military capacity should be linked to the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state and peace between Israel and the Arab states. This kind of linkage would defuse radical Arab reaction to US intervention and also satisfy Palestinian national aspirations.

Not one prominent leftist has come out in support of Lerner's proposal. Several got the chance to respond in Tikkun, including Edwin Knoll, editor of The Progressive; Jerome Segal, president of The Jewish Peace Lobby; and Daniel Ellsberg, the former State Department official who released the Pentagon Papers and then went on to become a leader in the antiwar movement.

According to Knoll, the presence of US troops in the Middle East already has hurt Israel by "perpetuating a climate of murderous hostility" in the region, and a war would "drive Israelis and Arabs even further apart. " Jerome Segal says the main threat to Israel is Iraq's potential nuclear capability. International cooperation, not a military strike, is what's needed to prevent Iraq from acquiring nuclear technology. He considers Lerner's proposal a "non-starter, " since, he says, neither the US nor Israel is prepared to accept a Palestinian state.

Meanwhile Daniel Ellsberg accuses Lerner of "dreaming" that a US attack on Iraq would be limited to an air strike. There would be a ground war too, which means "a lot more blood on the ground. " Moreover, Ellsberg says, "unless permanently occupied, a hostile and vengeful Iraq, once violently disarmed, would use its oil wealth to rebuild its offensive capability as soon as possible—and to buy or develop nuclear weaponry. This would challenge the Air Force to repeat its 'surgery' every decade, like mowing the lawn. "

AIPAC Says It Will Fight Second Saudi Arms Sale

Tom Dine, executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), announced at the Council of Jewish Federations annual meeting that AIPAC is gearing up for a fight with the administration over its proposal to sell $15 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia. "It's time to put the brakes on the runaway arms race in the Middle East," Dine told 700 delegates assembled in San Francisco for the meeting.

AIPAC, the principal pro-Israel lobby, did not oppose the $7 billion arms sale President Bush sent to Congress last September, but says this year's package poses a far greater threat to Israel. Not only is it much larger—it also contains advanced F-15 fighter jets, which can be used for offensive purposes.

The Council of Jewish Federations itself passed a resolution saying it was "deeply concerned about the massive sale of highly sophisticated US military equipment to Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations in the Persian Gulf which maintain a state of war with Israel." Unlike the National Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic bishops, however, the council issued a strong statement backing President Bush's deployment of US forces in the Gulf as a way to counter Saddam Hussain.

The Mixed Legacy of Meir Kahane

Jewish leaders were united in deploring the recent assassination of Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn-born rabbi elected to the Israeli Knesset on a platform calling for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. Several leaders of mainstream Jewish organizations who had been targets of Kahane's wrath even showed up at his funeral. Among them were Seymour Reich, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and Abraham Foxman, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.

Establishment Jews who had branded, Kahane an embarrassment to the Jewish people acknowledged after his death that despite his radical rhetoric, he was the first to bring the persecution of Soviet Jews to the world's attention. In the early 1970s, Kahane's militant Jewish Defense League bombed Soviet targets in New York and Europe to pressure the Soviet Union to allow free emigration. Said Shalom Comay, president of the liberal American Jewish Committee: "Despite our considerable differences, Meir Kahane must always be remembered for the slogan 'Never Again,' which for so many became the battle cry of post-Holocaust Jewry. "

Still, Comay and most other US Jews continued to express revulsion for Kahane's ideas; besides supporting the forcible transfer of Arab citizens out of Israel, Kahane also wanted to make it illegal to insult Judaism or the Jewish people and to ban Jewish women from having sexual relations with Arabs. Support for Kahane in the US was confined mostly to the small Orthodox community. According to an American Jewish Committee study conducted by Professor Steven Cohen, in 1986 14 percent of US Jews sympathized with Kahane, compared to 30 percent of the Orthodox.

The Washington Jewish Week warned that Jews should remember the despicable ideas Kahane promoted to avoid turning him into a martyr and a hero. Meir Kahane, who thought of himself as the Jewish conscience, "should more properly be remembered, in the words of one Israeli critic, as 'the Jewish yetzer hara'—the evil temptation in all of us to seek revenge against the world and indulge our most primitive emotions."

Andrea Barron, a Ph.D. candidate in international relations at the American University in Washington, DC, is a member of the Jewish Committee for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.