May/June 1991, Page 64

Jews and Israel

By Andrea Barron

US Jewish Leader Says World Jewry Opposes "Armed Arab Presence" in West Bank and Gaza, But Not Palestinian State

If the Bush administration puts forth an Arab-Israeli peace proposal that would end Israeli control over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, US Jews should support this proposal "strongly and vocally," says Theodore Mann, chairman of Project Nishma. Nishma is a Washington-based organization which works closely with Israeli reserve generals who believe Israel would be more secure by giving up rather than holding on to the territories.

Mann, also a past president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, headed a Nishma delegation which met last month with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens. At the meeting, Mann challenged the conventional wisdom which says that virtually all of world Jewry opposes the creation of a Palestinian state.

"We told Arens that we share the opinion of the majority of Israeli reserve generals that political control over 1.7 million Palestinians is not essential to Israel's security, " Mann wrote in the Washington Jewish Week.

"What is essential is demilitarization, meaning that no armed state be permitted to emerge in the West Bank and Gaza and that no Arab armed forces be permitted to enter those territories, or Jordan . "

The Nishma delegation also asked Arens if he believed the absorption of over a million Soviet immigrants would improve Israeli security and if Israel could expect a $10 billion housing loan guarantee from the US if it continued building settlements in the territories. Mann did not indicate how Arens responded, but said the discussion was open, friendly and contentious."

Mann apparently shares the view of many Mideast experts that Secretary of State James Baker's attempt to get the Mideast peace process back on track will fail. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir will certainly have no regrets—he just wants to be sure Israel isn't blamed when the post-Gulf "window of opportunity "closes. According to Mann, many American Jews and Israelis really do want to see a peace settlement, including a Bush administration plan that makes an end run around Shamii and his right-wing Likud bloc.

US and Israeli Jews Express Support for Kurdish Refugees

Every year on Yom HaShoa, "the day of the Holocaust, "Jewish communities throughout the world commemorate the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. It is also a time when Jews discuss their responsibility to prevent mass genocide whenever and wherever it occurs. This year, when US Jews observed Yom HaShoa on April 11, they spoke out against the "massacre" of Kurds by the Iraqi government and called on President Bush to intervene and prevent further killings.

Jews, "the classic people who differ," have a special responsibility to intervene morally whenever a minority is being persecuted, Holocaust scholar Rabbi Irving Greenberg told supporters of the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. And the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, which represents Reform Jews, accused the US government of "demonstrating a shameful abdication of political and moral responsibility " by turning its back on the Kurds.

The strongest statement of all was made by New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal, the newspaper's former executive editor. In an April 3 editorial entitled "The Jews of Iraq," Rosenthal wrote: "This time the slaughter, the torture and the forced marches to death are taking place in Iraq and the killers have different names for the Jews.... They call them Kurds and Shi'ites as they spit in their faces and tear the beards of the men and throw the women down for rape, before the day's killing. It is a pogrom. "

Israel manifested its sympathy for the Kurds by sending planeloads of medical supplies, clothing and blankets to refugees on the Iraqi-Turkish border. The campaign to collect clothing was organized by Israel's Kurdish Jews, a community of around 100,000 who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s, mostly from Iraq and Iran. Israeli Kurds even demonstrated in front of Shamir's Jerusalem office when the prime minister was meeting with US Secretary of State James Baker, calling on the American government to protect the Kurds from Saddam Hussain. According to The Other Israel, an alternative Israeli newsletter, the Israeli Kurds said they had always lived peacefully among Muslim Kurds.

Jewish Community Re-examines Pollard Case

When Jonathan Jay Pollard was convicted of spying for Israel in 1986, the US Jewish community was nearly unanimous in denouncing the former US Naval Intelligence specialist. Besides his family, his only defender was New York Rabbi Avi Weiss, who has called Pollard an "American Jewish political prisoner."

But now the American section of the World Jewish Congress and Seymour Reich, past chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, say that Pollard has suffered enough and it is time to set him free. Reich has made a point of condemning Pollard's actions while insisting that his punishment was too severe. Pollard was sentenced to life imprisonment and spends 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, reportedly for his own safety. According to Pollard's lawyer, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, individuals convicted of spying for a US ally or a neutral country in recent years have not been sentenced to more than five years in prison.

After visiting Pollard in prison, Reich said he believes the Jewish community "is beginning to separate [Pollard's] crime from the separate issue of the justice of his sentence." Dershowitz commented that "organized Jewry is [now] getting behind the case while grassroots Jewry already thinks the sentence was too severe. " Other Jewish organizations represented on a committee to re-examine Pollard's sentence include the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.

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.