January 1994, Page 62

Jews and Israel

By Sheldon Richman

Sign of the Times

Nine trustees of the American Jewish Congress met recently with Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat in Cairo. The meeting occurred during the trustees' visit to the Middle East to persuade Arab leaders to end the boycott of Israel. According to The Washington Post, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak invited Arafat to Cairo after the delegation began making the case against the boycott to Mubarak. He told an aide to call Arafat because "he should hear this."

"It was unreal," said Lester Brown, a Chicago businessman, after the meeting with Arafat. "You didn't believe it was happening." Lawrence Blum, another member of the delegation, said, "After all these years of having a mental impression of someone and then you see that he doesn't really comport with these ideas. I wonder how he felt!"

That was not the only sign of the changes in relationship between Jewish Americans and Palestinians. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Nabil Shaath, a senior adviser to Arafat, appeared on a panel of Middle East experts at a conference sponsored in Washington by the United Jewish Appeal Women's Division. The appearance of a PLO official at a major Jewish gathering was believed to be a first. Jordanian Crown Prince Hassan appeared at the conference earlier in the week.

Shaath was added to the panel despite the recommendation of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that its member groups not participate in meetings with PLO officials. The upheaval of events and attitudes prompted the weekly Forward to declare in a page-one headline, "U.S. Jews at Sea Over PLO Pact."

As Forward put it, "Less than a year after the Zionist Organization of America's president bashed the Peace Now movement as the 'political equivalent of Jews for Jesus,' ZOA is endorsing an Israeli government that embraces Peace Now goals . . . The Anti-Defamation League is looking to student Zionist organizations for advice on improving dialogue with Arab Americans. "

The New York Jewish weekly commented that the agreement between the PLO and the Israeli government is "forcing organized American Jewry to play catch-up with current events and setting groups in tortuous searches for new identities and raisons d 'etre. That, in turn, has led to no small amount of ideological flip-flops . . . "

"There is a crisis of purpose facing American Jewry," Forward quotes World Jewish Congress executive director Elan Steinberg as saying. "The old formulas—protect Israel, save Soviet Jewry, save Ethiopian Jewry—are noble, but they have little relevance to today's political and social reality." Forward said that "organization insiders" feel they may not be prepared to focus on domestic problems faced by Jewish Americans.

"The problem now is that none of the proper structures exist in the United States to revitalize Diaspora Jewry," Jonathan Glick, national director of the progressive Zionist Caucus, a campus organization, told Forward. "We've created a community that excels at producing Jewish fundraisers, but we can't for the life of us find Jewish leaders."

Gail Pressberg, the former president of Americans for Peace Now, once shunned by mainline Jewish American organizations, said a "Cold War-like dependence on Israel's traditional foes" had been developed by the Jewish community. "It's very hard when you've been used to fighting for or against something—and there's been a lot of fighting, fighting, fighting—[because] it's hard to fight to a successful peace process," Pressberg told Forward.

The New York Times reports that contacts between American Jews and Muslims are occurring as never before. Rabbi A. James Rudin, after attending a conference in Denver on Jewish-Muslim relations, said, "Increasingly Muslims and Jews are now meeting and entering into conversations with a seriousness and an openness that was rarely experienced before." The conference, cosponsored by the Institute for Islamic-Judaic Studies and the American Jewish Committee, was arranged before the Sept. 13 handshake between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. But, said the Times, "it clearly benefited from the events of that day."

Not all Jewish Americans are pleased with recent events. FLAME (Facts and Logic About the Middle East), the San Francisco-based hawkish organization, continued its series of advertisements, the theme of which is that the Palestinians are not to be trusted. The headline of one post handshake ad was, "Israel's Peace with the PLO: Can the leopard change his spots . . .the wolf become a lamb?" The text said in part: "Israel is making this fateful arrangement with a terror organization. According to the PLO 'covenant,' which has never been rescinded, it has only one aim: the destruction of the state of Israel through force and violence. The Palestinian state to be formed will not be limited to the 'West Bank' and the Gaza Strip. It specifically includes all of the state of Israel—and that means all of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, the Negev, and the Galilee—the whole country. Any deviation from that goal is only a temporary tactical maneuver. "

The ad goes on to say that giving the Palestinians control over Gaza or any part of the West Bank "puts Israel in mortal peril . . . The basic conflict is not between Israel and the 'Palestinians,' with whom some accommodation, some arrangement of autonomy, could certainly be reached. The basic conflict is with the Arab nations, all of which, with the sole exception of Egypt, are still in a state of war with Israel. "

The ad concludes: "We all want peace and, surely, besieged Israel, which has been under constant attack since the day of its creation, wants peace more than anybody. And it is likely that such a fervent wish for peace has led Israel into making fateful concessions to Yasser Arafat and the PLO. It will be almost impossible to reverse what has been done. The process of empowering the Palestinians will almost certainly result in a Palestinian state. Will it, as we are told, be 'democratic' and peaceful? Not likely! Every one of the 22 Arab states is totalitarian, ruled autocratically, and is ruthlessly abusive of human rights. Another Lebanon, carved on Israel's back, with never-ending strife and bloodshed is much more likely, a source of constant terrorist attacks against Israel and ultimately the source of a new Middle East war, in which Israel's ability to defend itself and to prevail would be in serious question."

Sheldon Richman is a Washington-DC based contributor to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.