Yossi Beilin Delivers Video Address at New Israel Fund Symposium

By Elaine Pasquini

Yossi Beilin, Labor Knesset member and Oslo accord architect, addressed by video tape 350 guests at the New Israel Fund’s 20th anniversary symposium held at San Francisco’s Sir Francis Drake Hotel on Jan. 24. At the last moment, Beilin, scheduled to deliver the keynote speech in person, was unable to appear because of the complexities in the current Israeli electoral campaign.

In his taped address Beilin stated he believes efforts to create a major center party will not succeed and that the election scheduled for May 17th will be Likud vs. Labor. “Our [Labor] main challenge will be to control the peace process,” he said.

With respect to that peace process, he also stated: “The only solution in the context of the permanent solution is to have a demilitarized Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel. If we really want to have a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, we cannot rule over more than 4 million Arabs on the West Bank of the Jordan River.”

Beilin believes that once this is accepted by the majority of Israelis, it will be easier to find a solution to the other problems, including borders, refugees, settlements, and even the status of Jerusalem. Jerusalem “will remain united under our [Israeli] sovereignty, but it will also be recognized by the whole world,” he maintained.

Beilin acknowledged that Jerusalem is the only capital in the world that is not recognized by the international community. He said also that six months is sufficient to resolve all of the outstanding issues.

The New Israel Fund symposium, titled “A Changing Israel—A Changing Partnership,” presented a panel of scholars, religious leaders and activists from both Israel and the U.S. The panel included, among others, Norman Rosenberg, executive director of the New Israel Fund; Eliezer Yaari, New Israel Fund director in Israel; Stephen Cohen, president of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation; Miriam Mar’i Ryan, president of Acre Arab Women’s Association; Professor Itzhak Galnoor of Hebrew University; author and publisher Leonard Fein; and Ha’aretz columnist Ad Shavit. Topics discussed in separate workshops included the status of women, the environment, Jewish-Arab equality and coexistence, Israel at 50—What Now?, the future of lsraeli-Diaspora relations, collectivism to individualism, and a town hall meeting on religious freedom. In order to accommodate the unexpectedly large number of participants, an extra workshop was added on democracy, peace and the elections.

The upcoming elections in Israel were of great concern to each speaker and the members of the audience. “We are at a critical moment. We are in the middle of a domestic crisis,” said professor of political science Itzak Galnoor. “Every Israeli believes we will have a Palestinian state. We must find a leadership that will do it.”

This was echoed by Leonard Fein, who said, “This is the most dispirited time in Israel’s 50 years,” and by virtually every other speaker. Despite the variety of topics on the ambitious agenda, everyone, speakers and audience alike, wanted to discuss the peace process, Israel’s numerous internal problems, and Israel’s tarnished image in the international community.

President Miriam Mar’i Ryan of the Acre Arab Women’s Association, an organization that trains Palestinian women in early childhood education and other subjects, spoke of the sources of tension between Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews. These include land confiscation and attempts by Israel to undermine Palestinian economic autonomy, thus making them more dependent on Israel. Dr. Ryan pointed out that in the occupied territories there were more advances in education for Palestinians than within Israel, resulting in student strikes and much frustration on the part of Israeli Arab students.

The New Israel Fund, now based in New York, was founded in Mill Valley, California in 1979. The fund-raising organization has become one of the fastest growing Jewish philanthropies in the United States and the world today. Although generally apolitical, it recently ran a full-page ad in The New York Times urging Jewish Americans to protest to the Israeli Embassy the passing of any Knesset bills reversing religious pluralism.

Earlier this year the New Israel Fund, together with the Jewish-Arab Center and retailer Marks and Spencer, initiated an international management training program run by the Center for Jewish-Arab Economic Development. The project seeks to create business ties between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.

Stanford Professor Describes Islam’s Influence on Judaism

Dr. Aron Rodrigue, professor in Jewish studies and history at Stanford University, spoke Jan. 31 on “Sephardi and Eastern Jewries: Past and Present” at the San Francisco Public Library. More than 300 people attended the free lecture, the first of a series sponsored by the library and, among others, the Institute for Jewish and Community Research and the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco.

Dr. Rodrigue, a native of Istanbul, focused in large part on the influence of Islam on Sephardic Jewry, asserting that “Judaism would be different without the Muslim influence.” He described the influence of Islam as a “decisive encounter” both for the Jews of Spain and the Middle East and for those of other areas because “the Jewish world is not hermetically sealed.” Because of trade routes, movements of families, and expulsions, the various Jewish communities were constantly in touch with each other and therefore Jewish culture everywhere would have been different without that Muslim influence, he said.

In the Middle Ages the largest group of Jews in the world lived in Spain when the majority of the inhabitants were Muslim, Dr. Rodrigue said. During that time, he said, there was “a profound, rich encounter between the Jewish world and Islam—a very important encounter,” until 1085 when Toledo fell to the Christians.

This Christian reconquest, unfortunately, culminated in the Inquisition of 1492. Of the Jews expelled from Spain during the Inquisition, 95 percent ended up in the Ottoman Empire.

Dr. Rodrigue ended with a sad commentary on the fact that the influence and interaction of Islam and Judaism has ended because of the changes in the Middle East after the creation of Israel in 1948. At that time many Jews left their communities in Islamic countries to immigrate to Israel. Most of the Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews are not where they were 30 years ago. Iraq, once home to the oldest Jewish community, has fewer than 100 Jews remaining in the country since the Gulf war. Egypt also was home to one of the oldest Jewish communities, many of whom left Egypt during the time of Nasser. There remain 20,000 in Iran, 1,600 in Turkey, and 1,000 in Tunisia. He lamented: “The Jewish encounter with Islam has come to an end. It only remains in Israel and is hard to characterize as creative.”

Former Head of U.N. Oil-for-Food Program in Iraq Appeals for End to Sanctions

Principal speakers at a Feb. 26 program at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California, were Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies and Denis Halliday, who last Oct. 31 resigned his position as head of the United Nations oil-for-food program in Baghdad to protest “genocidal sanctions” placed on Iraq by the United Nations in 1991 at the end of the Gulf war.

Halliday said that four months after he became head of the oil-for-food program in September 1997, he realized the program was inadequate. In spite of doubling the amount of food and medicines Iraq can import, the program still is insufficient for Iraq’s 23 million citizens, he said.

“Iraqi doctors go through hell on a daily basis because they don’t have enough drugs to treat their patients,” he explained. “In Iraq today, malnutrition is about 30 percent; chronic malnutrition is 20 to 25 percent. Not only are we killing the generation of children of today, we are damaging the children of tomorrow.”

Halliday said that in addition to food and medicine, Iraq needs infrastructure and the machinery to repair the infrastructure. In Baghdad, sewage runs in the streets, young children beg for money on street corners, and families are so desperate they debate which daughter to send into prostitution in order to feed their families. The educational system, once one of the best in the Middle East, has been destroyed. Agriculture has been ruined. Disease such as screwworm, which never appeared before, is now found in goats and sheep. Hoof and mouth disease is destroying the cattle population. Some of the oldest and most outstanding antiquities in the world are unprotected, and looting is commonplace, as there is a lucrative illegal trafficking in antiquities.

Halliday said younger members of the Ba’ath Party are angry. They are isolated and alienated from the West and are pushing Saddam Hussain into more extreme actions.

(See also “Northeast News” on p. 77 of this issue for further remarks by Mr. Halliday on his nationwide speaking tour.)

Phyllis Bennis, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN, among other books on the Middle East, spoke following Mr. Halliday. She spoke of the “low-grade warfare” currently employed by the U.S. and Britain against Iraq and referred to the economic sanctions as “high-grade direct warfare against Iraq.” She criticized the media for not reporting facts such as the fact that 150 children die each day in Iraq, charging that the media say “it’s not news.”

Discussing economic sanctions, she said, “These are not U.N. sanctions, they are U.S. sanctions. If a vote were taken to end sanctions, no one [other than the U.S.] would vote against it, not even Tony Blair.” In addition, she pointed out that U.N. Resolution 687, calling for sanctions against Iraq, also calls for a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East. She pointed out that the U.S. fails to address or acknowledge the well-known fact that Israel has had nuclear weapons for many years.

The well-attended event was co-sponsored by the Middle East Children’s Alliance, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, International Action Center, and Iraq Human Rights Coalition, among several other local peace organizations.

Elaine Pasquini is a free-lance journalist based in Ignacio, California.