Israel: "There to Stay" or "Just a Matter of Time"?

by Andrew I. Killgore

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."—The Balfour Declaration, Nov. 2, 1917

"To the German Kaiser I shall say, Let us go. We are aliens; they do not let us dissolve into the population, nor are we able to do so."— Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State

"But there are Arabs in Palestine! I did not know."—Max Nordau, 1897, quoted in The Israelis: Founders and Sons, by Amos Elon

We were old and intimate friends, but the arguments about Vietnam were so emotional that our very relationships were threatened. The time was 1970-1972. We were State Department desk officers carpooling to and from our homes to the Department in downtown Washington.

Four out of five of us were Middle East specialists. One held that we had to defeat North Vietnam and the Viet Cong no matter what the cost. Another argued that we had to maintain such pressure that eventually a negotiated solution would be possible. My friends blew away with ridicule my original argument that the United States should withdraw from Vietnam because the war was immoral.

Eventually I argued that we had no real national interests there. As the costs of the war continued to rise the American people would reject the politicians who wanted to persevere. Something like that happened.

Twenty-five years later, the passions have cooled. The other carpoolers and I remain friends. Vietnam divided us and the country bitterly, but the years have softened the pain and Washington's strangely powerful Vietnam war memorial has worked its magic of reconciliation.

The Vietnam war may now mainly concern the historians, but history still is being written in bloody deeds in the Middle East as the Arab-Israel dispute hurtles along its tragic course. Forged in its victorious 1948-1949 war against the Arabs, Israel today seems at the height of its power. Militarily dominant over the Arabs, its per capita income is now higher than that of many European countries, while its hold on the American political system assures it of unlimited financial and military support from the world's only remaining superpower. Thus Israel and its supporters say confidently and with fierce determination, "Israel is there to stay!"

Israel today seems at the height of its power.

The Palestinians were the big losers from Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration, which kept its promise to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, but broke its pledge to do nothing to "prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." Today the Palestinians number nearly seven million. Half of them live in exile outside Palestine. The other half live in Israel proper (about 1.1 million), the Israeli-occupied West Bank (1.4 million) and the Gaza Strip (about 1 million).

Lacking the all-important Jewish nationality, Palestinian Israelis are second-class citizens. Those living in the occupied West Bank have no rights at all.

The Arab states no longer provide much help to the Palestinians. Egypt, the biggest Arab country with a population in excess of 60 million, receives $2 billion a year as a reward from the U.S. for making a cool peace with Israel in 1978. The oil-rich countries of the Arabian Gulf hold back most of their millions from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat because of his egregiously stupid policy of supporting Saddam Hussain's 1990 aggression against Kuwait.

Thus the Palestinians and Arabs seem helpless as Israel's fascist bully, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, wrecks the peace process and displays ill-concealed contempt for President Bill Clinton, who heads the most Zionist of all U.S. governments. Yet, despite their apparently hopeless outlook, virtually no Arabs believe Israel will last long in the Middle East. Their common expression is, "It's just a matter of time."

Boththe Israelis who "are there to stay" and the Arabs who say that Israel's departure is "just a matter of time"cannot be right. It's therefore worth examining whether Israel has become a victim of the "cunning" of history.

A Provocative Concept

This provocative concept is borrowed from a brilliant former Israeli ambassador to Washington, Itamar Rabinovich. I take this to mean not just that history tends to play tricks with every era's current assumptions, but that any sudden attempted political mutation, such as creating a Jewish state in the Arab Middle East, is likely to fail; if not in the beginning, before very long. Events evolve slowly, not by sudden jerks.

Take Theodor Herzl's assumption, based on his narrow experience of covering the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused of selling French army war plans to Germany 100 years ago. Herzl, the father of political Zionism and ultimately of the State of Israel, was shocked by the outburst of anti-Semitism in "enlightened" France, and concluded that Jews and others could never get along, and had to live separately.

But look today at the United States, where more than half of American Jews marry a non-Jewish partner, something totally out of Herzl's ken. We are accepting each other in the most fundamental way, and everybody wins, including our country.

The American creed that we all were truly equal was never fully carried out. But the deaths in our civil war of more than 700,000 Americans over the issue of slavery meant that eventually we would live up to our fundamental beliefs. Herzl's limited European experience could not have foreseen today's America.

The Jews of the world, even Americans who call themselves Zionists, know that the United States is a better and more exciting place to live than Israel. Some Jewish fanatics from Brooklyn enjoy going to the West Bank and beating up Palestinians. But the real movement is quietly but overwhelmingly flowing the other way.

Some 60,000 Jewish Israelis arrive in the United States each year to join the one million Israelis who already live here. We know that when Soviet Jews, newly arrived in Italy, were given a choice between going to Israel or to the United States, some 95 percent chose the U.S. until, under pressure, the Soviets sent the emigrant flights directly to Israel and our own government shamelessly changed our rules on refugees.

Herzl envisioned a civilizing European Jewish state in Palestine as holding back the "barbarism" of Asia. Based on current Israeli brutality against the Palestinians, the question arises as to whom the term barbarism really applies.

Anyone who knows the Palestinians of today has to admire their bravery, their love of learning and their overall abilities. It is crystal clear by now that the Palestinians never will relinquish their claim to Palestine, and that Israel can only extend its life by making a peaceful settlement.

It never occurred to the early Zionists that colonialism would go out of style. That institution was alive and well when the first World Zionist Congress was held 100 years ago. But it was Israel's misfortune to come into being just when thoroughly discredited European colonialism was ending all over the world.

Israel claims it is different, that it was designed as a refuge for a people persecuted through the centuries. The persecution is all too sadly true. And Israel might make sense if its Jewish residents were ready to live on an equal basis with all other residents of the state.

But the current regime in Jerusalem believes Israel's Jews can have it all and give the Palestinians nothing. This tragic misapprehension is the unshakable dogma of Israel's more super-heated American supporters who, some have ventured, must take a crazy pill a day to sustain their fanaticism. The only logical conclusion is that if a country looks colonialist, it is. As they say, if it walks like a duck....

Legal segregation went very much out of style everywhere when the apartheid regime fell in South Africa. Housing in the occupied territories open only to Jews does not appeal to Americans. Who can believe that the American people, who fought such a long battle against so-called "separate-but-equal facilities" in the segrated South almost two generations ago, would allow their tax dollars to be used to finance a Har Homa housing project if they knew the facts? And make no mistake, none of the "Jewish settlements" in the occupied territories or within the expanded city limits of East Jerusalem, all recently carved out of the occupied territories, would be possible without American financing.

What about the quality of life in Israel? A few years ago it seemed that after the abyss between Jews and Palestinians, who can never enjoy the same rights under Israel's current creed, Israel's biggest domestic split was between the European (Askenazi) and Oriental (Sephardi) Jews. Time and intermarriage seemed to be healing the Oriental-European dichotomy when suddenly it again confronted Israel with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a secular European Jew, by Yigal Amir, a religious Oriental Jew. In fact, this underlined the growing and more dangerous split between the secular Israeli majority and the rapidly growing (by natural increase) Jewish religious minority.

That raises again the question that long has troubled immigrants to Israel, many of them offspring of Jewish Christian marriages, and that now divides even the Jews who have no intention of leaving the United States.

Who is a Jew? The Orthodox Jews, who constitute virtually all of the religious Jews in Israel and who provide 23 of the members of Netanyahu's majority in the 120-member Knesset, insist that non-Orthodox Conservative and Reform rabbis cannot perform valid conversions to Judaisma necessity for those who expect to enjoy the benefits of Israeli nationality. This is troubling to the 80 percent of American Jews who are not Orthodox.

So what happens if Netanyahu's government forces through changes in Israeli law that will require many Americans who consider themselves Jews to undergo "conversion" if they emigrate to Israel? From one point of view such a development might be hopeful. American Zionists might then finally see that the United States is the ultimate shining city on a hill.