March 1995, pgs. 69-71

Jews and Israel

By Nathan Jones

Coalescing Around Opposite Poles

Disputes within the American Jewish community over the wisdom of Israel's Labor government in negotiating land-for-peace agreements with the Palestine Liberation Organization and with Syria have forced most national Jewish organizations to take a stand, pro or con, since the first Yasser Arafat-Yitzhak Rabin White House handshake on Sept. 13, 1993.

The result has been serious fracturing and bitter debate over the one thing, Israel, that normally unites American Jews. The splits have been particularly perplexing to the majority of members of Congress who, until recently, were used to reaching their positions on Middle East matters through consultation with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and with Jewish constituents from their home districts.

What does a congressman do if his Jewish supporters back home disagree with the frequent visitors from the nearby AIPAC headquarters on Capitol Hill? And what does a member of Congress do if delegations from other national Jewish organizations weigh in with their own conflicting views? For starters, it's best to get straight the two opposite poles around which the various organizations are coalescing.

One of these opposing poles is the American Zionist Movement (AZM), an umbrella organization of 21 Zionist groups. Its current president is Seymour Reich, a former president of B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League and a past chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The Conference, as its name indicates, is supposed to serve as the coordinating body for virtually all major Jewish membership groups. However, as its membership reached 50 national groups, ranging from the hard-line right to the American branch of Peace Now, the more directly ideological subgroupings appeared.

Reich, for example, wrote an article in the Dec. 29 Washington Jewish Week urging American Jews to lend their support to "carrots for the PLO": the kind of foreign aid for Gaza and Jericho that would sustain Palestinian support for Yasser Arafat's compromises with the Israeli government.

Opposing this point of view with an article headlined "Don't Give Up the Stick" in the same issue of Washington Jewish Weekwas Morton Klein, the Philadelphia-based long-time head of the Committee on Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA), which placed hard-line advertisements in newspapers around the United States. Klein now is president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), around which like-minded hard-liners are coalescing.

Such groups are on the rise, spurred not only by opposition to the peace process as it is developing under the current Israeli government, but also by the victories of conservative Republicans in the 1994 congressional elections.

Former AIPAC official Douglas Bloomfield, whose syndicated "Washington Watch" column appears in Jewish weeklies across the United States, acknowledges the growing number of such organizations, but questions how deep-rooted they are in a Jewish community that long has identified with liberal movements in the U.S. and abroad.

"Terror campaigns gave impetus to those Jews opposed to the agreement with the Palestinians," Bloomfield wrote in a year-end review of 1994. "A plethora of right-wing, anti-peace groups has sprung up. Many appear to be funded by the same small circle of secretive benefactors and share their mailing lists. The only difference appears to be the names they give themselves. Their secretiveness leads some to suspect there are more organizations than members."

Nevertheless, the trend is toward the hard-liners. Klein's ZOA has succeeded in establishing a group of congressmembers, including new Chairman Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) of the House International Relations Committee, to monitor PLO compliance with the agreement with Israel. Likud-leaning American Jewish organizations also are behind the move within Congress to reject stationing of U.S. monitors on Syria's Golan Heights if Israel withdraws from the area. Both movements are designed to derail the Rabin-Arafat negotiations, which at this point seem quite capable of failing on their own, without any such push from the outside.

One of the latest individual organizations to follow the trend is Tsomet/USA, affiliated with the right-wing Israeli party, which has suspended active membership in the American Zionist Movement to protest AZM's lobbying for U.S. government financial aid to the Palestinian National Authority. In fact, however, the growing acrimony between American members of the Labor-leaning AZM and the Likud-leaning ZOA may turn out to be no more than a sideshow in the visible erosion of support for the peace process where it counts—among Israelis and Palestinians themselves.

AIPAC May Soon Be "Repositioning" Itself All Over Again

After vigorous lobbying in the U.S. in support of Likud-led governments in Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has had a hard time getting into the good graces of Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. To do so it has replaced top officers too prominently identified with the old order. Long-time executive director Tom Dine, after making some indiscreet remarks about Orthodox Jews recorded by an Israeli journalist, was replaced by Neal Sher, former head of the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations. Board chairman David Steiner, after boasting that he was negotiating with the incoming Clinton administration over who would be secretary of state in a phone conversation recorded by a prospective donor, was replaced by Steve Grossman, chairman of the Massachusetts state Democratic party.

In December, eight months after assuming office, Sher began to put his own stamp on the organization, while Grossman may be adopting a lower profile after the recent Republican congressional sweep. Complaining about a $1 million drop in fund-raising in 1994, AIPAC laid off 18 employees and abolished some additional unfilled positions. The organization also turned its weekly Near East Report into a bi-weekly.

None of this presages any drop in effectiveness in what may be Washington's best organized and most feared lobby. AIPAC normally claims $15 million in annual contributions, and its staff, which hit a peak of some 140 employees in 1993, remained at approximately 110 persons after the end-of-1994 purge. It has increased its hands-on lobbying staff to six. It also is increasing its regional publishing program, and is stepping upefforts to ensure that any new members of Congress who haven't yet visited Israel be invited to do so.

Sher also claims personal credit for convincing Canadian Seagram whisky heir Edgar Bronfman to become a major donor to AIPAC. Bronfman, who is president of the World Jewish Congress, gave $130,000 to AIPAC in 1994, according to journalist and former AIPAC official Bloomfield. In fact, it appears, AIPAC's long-range problems have less to do with funding than with the Israeli and American environments in which it operates. A lobbying organization chaired by a partisan Democrat clearly has a problem after a "Republican revolution" like that of last November. And an organization that has remade its image to suit Israel's Labor prime minister may soon be faced with yet another turnabout, if Rabin's overwhelming slide in Israeli public opinion signals a return by Likud in 1996.

Beilin's Unpopular Proposals

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin's appeal is greatest to Palestinians and to Israeli and U.S. Jewish groups who support serious negotiations with them, and to U.S. taxpayers aware that Israel gets more than a quarter of U.S. world-wide foreign aid. He is less appealing to those American Jewish leaders whose raison d'etre is to raise money for Israel when he says that Israel no longer needs their money, but desperately needs their children.

An exasperated Rabin has called Beilin's message "insanity." In fact, however, it makes a lot of sense when the listener understands that there are some things that no Israeli leader, not even Beilin, can say. Israel doesn't need the personal funds of American Jews because their extraordinarily effective lobbying effort produces sufficient U.S. government funds.

Beilin's fear is that American Jews, who have been intermarrying at a 50 percent rate for a generation, are going to lose interest in the Israeli welfare state, its troubles in making peace, and in sustaining U.S. government aid to Israel through steady pressure on Congress. Beilin therefore proposes that U.S. Jews spend their own money on "Jewish education" for Jewish children, and make it possible for any American Jewish teenager or young adult to have a trip to Israel.

What makes Beilin even less popular with leaders of American and international Zionist organizations is his proposal that such groups be reorganized. He believes, for example, that in the U.S. the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee should be merged. He would make similar changes on the world Zionist scene.

Almost alone among major Israeli leaders, Beilin also seems to understand the serious concessions Israel must make if it is ever to have real peace and productive economic relations with the Arabs who surround it in the Middle East. His views on the subject seem to go beyond those of any other top Israeli leader, including his immediate boss, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Increasingly, his views differ with those expressed by Rabin (which may not hurt Beilin as Rabin's political stock falls) and seem out of touch with hardening opinion toward the Arabs within Israel.

Beilin, still a favored speaker with peace-inclined American Jewish organizations, may or may not be a beneficiary of the forthcoming shift in Israeli leadership from the pre-state "pioneers" of Rabin's generation to the generation born after the Jewish state was created, like Likud's Benyamin Netanyahu and Labor defector (but possible future Labor leader) Haim Ramon. Beilin's American admirers feel that if he is squeezed out in the hardening of political attitudes in Israel, it will be a loss for Middle East peace, for the integration of Israel into the Middle East and, most of all, for a long-term normalization of the relationship between Israel and the United States.

Jewish Agency Election: Status Quo vs. Change

The views of Yossi Beilin are just one of the factors in a hotly contested election to fill the shoes of ousted chairman Simcha Dinitz of the Jewish Agency/World Zionist Organization (WZO). Dinitz was forced to resign as of Jan. 1 because he has been charged with misuse for personal expenses of Jewish Agency funds. The quasi-official Israeli organization is in charge of all aspects of Jewish immigration to Israel.

One of the contending candidates to succeed Dinitz is Yekiel Leket, a Jewish Agency functionary for 20 years who has been running the organization since Dinitz was forced to take administrative leave when the charges against him arose. Leket is considered lacking in charisma but is a highly competent manager who would keep WZO on its present course. His candidacy has the support of Prime Minister Rabin.

Leket's rival is 39-year-old Knesset Member Avram Burg, a handsome and articulate speaker who has no record in administering a large organization. He personifies change, saying that the days of the ingathering of Jews in distress are largely over, but that the battle against assimilation of diaspora Jews into the countries where they live is more crucial than ever.

Among Burg's backers are Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Histadrut chairman and rising political star Haim Ramon, and Yossi Beilin. It is Beilin's proposal to scrap the Jewish Agency altogether, replacing it with a world-wide organization which Jews everywhere would voluntarily join and to which they would pay dues that makes the Israeli political establishment, and Jewish Agency/WZO employees, nervous. It makes the election, to be conducted among the 1,300 members of the Israeli Labor party's Central Committee, an important milestone on the road to forging a new relationship between Israel and diaspora Jewry.