July/August 1995, pgs. 72-73

American Jews and Israel

By Nathan Jones

Survey Shatters Jewish Stereotypes

American Jews generally are depicted by their leaders as an endangered species, at least half of whom marry non-Jews and then don't bring up their children as Jews. Israel, American Jews are told, is all that unites them and therefore all that can prevent their disappearance into the American melting pot within the next two generations.

As individuals, most American Jews are said to support the peace process as it is unfolding. Their leaders, however, especially the rich ones found on boards of directors of major American-Jewish organizations, tend to oppose land-for-peace deals that would make Israel smaller and safer but also would end the need for the national Jewish organizations that give those leaders power and prestige within American Jewish life and access and influence in Washington.

Do the stereotypes reflect reality? Yes and no, according to a recent survey conducted for the American Jewish Committee based upon interviews with 1,000 American Jews.

The survey's biggest surprise was that of the 1,000 American Jews questioned, about 75 percent said they did not consider themselves Zionists. So much for Israel as a unifying factor. However, among Orthodox Jews surveyed, 44 percent do consider themselves Zionists, contrasting with the 29 percent of Conservative and 17 percent of Reform Jews who called themselves Zionists. (Orthodox Jews constitute about 7 percent of American Jewry.)

On specifics of the peace process, differentiation among Jews by denomination also was apparent. Reform Jews favored the autonomy accord by 74 percent, but Orthodox Jews opposed it by 61 percent. Interestingly, whether or not respondents had a Jewish or non-Jewish spouse also made a difference in the response to this question. Three-quarters of those with a non-Jewish spouse favored the accord, while only two-thirds of those with a Jewish spouse approved it.

Contrary to the claims of Likud-oriented American Jewish leaders, a 53-percent majority of the Jews surveyed supported the idea of a Palestinian state, while a third opposed it. Those favoring the Palestinian state tended to be better educated than those who opposed it. Contrary to the stereotype, those with higher incomes were more likely to support the idea of a Palestinian state than the less affluent. Reform Jews were three times more likely to favor a Palestinian state than Orthodox Jews.

The demographic breakdown was similar on the issue of relinquishing the Golan Heights in exchange for peace with Syria. A majority were willing to give up some or all of the territory, but a third were unwilling to give up any. Orthodox Jews were most opposed (54 percent), followed by Conservatives (32 percent) and Reform Jews (29 percent).

On the crucial question of whether "Israel should be willing to compromise on the status of Jerusalem as a united city under Israeli jurisdiction," answers followed a different pattern. A third of respondents said yes and 60 percent said no. Some 30 percent of Conservative and Reform Jews were willing to compromise on Jerusalem, but only 11 percent of Orthodox Jews were willing.

Meanness in Manhattan

The annual Salute to Israel parade in New York was designed to unite American Jews around the one thing they're supposed to agree upon. It has survived disputes over whether gays and lesbians will march under their own banners, just as has the annual St. Patrick's day event. This year's May 20 parade itself went off without a major hitch but the pre-parade breakfast, to which the big donors who fund the parade are invited, turned out to be a fireworks display instead.

Even eyewitnesses disagree on what happened. Normally representatives of the state of Israel are designated by their government to speak at the breakfast and to be present on the reviewing stand during the parade itself. This year Israeli Communications Minister Shulamit Aloni was in the U.S. on other business. She was designated to head the official Israeli delegation, consisting of Israeli Ambassador in Washington Itamar Rabinovich, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gad Yaacobi, and Israeli Consul General in New York Collete Avital.

Big U.S. donors expected to be at the breakfast, along with the sponsoring organization, the American Zionist Youth Foundation, are at opposite political poles from Aloni, the most outspoken leader of the Meretz peace bloc, a keystone of the present Labor Coalition government. Therefore AZYF chairman Julius Berman was cool to the idea of an Aloni speech. Consul General Avital is said to have warned him that since other members of the Israeli delegation had to stand by their cabinet minister, neither they nor he had any choice as to who would be the official Israeli government speaker at the breakfast.

When Aloni was handed the microphone to voice her greetings, such a chorus of heckling began that she could not be heard. Finally Jacques Avital, honorary chairman and a $10,000 donor to the parade, stood up and started toward the podium.

"I saw him running and I thought he was going to hush the crowd," the 66-year-old Aloni reported afterward. "And then he started to push me. He was shouting like a meshugah [madman], like he was in a jungle...The moment they wanted to stop him, he punched me in the stomach."

Avital, a 45-year-old New York garment manufacturer of Sephardic Jewish origin who was hustled off the stage still wearing his grand marshal's ribbon, said he was only trying to get possession of the microphone and denied to the Jewish Week of New York that he had punched the minister.

"I saw how angry they were. They were abusing her. And we had to go ahead. We were wasting time but she refused to stop," Avital said. "My only goal was to get back some order and move on to the next speaker." As he continued talking to the newspaper, however, the conflicting feelings within U.S. Jewish leadership poured out. "She's against anything that has to do with Judaism," he declared.

Aloni, who complained of stomach pain after the incident and was examined by a doctor the next day, filed assault charges with New York police who came to her hotel room. Eyewitness accounts of what happened varied largely with the politics of the witnesses. However, the reports revealed some pent-up feelings.

"I thought I was among civilized people," said Aloni as she tried in vain to make her remarks, according to Jewish Week columnist Tim Boxer, who was seated near the stage. "Shut up for the sake of Jerusalem," someone responded, and a third of the audience applauded.

When words failed and action enveloped the stage, chairman Berman shouted: "Stop fighting, this is not the Knesset!" Later, Berman said he now is convinced that the pre-parade breakfast should no longer be held. "We're better off just with the parade."

In subsequent discussions, in which she corroborated Aloni's version of events, Consul General Avital described a "spiral of radicalization here." She said American Jews are "mixing in Israeli politics with more violence, deciding what is good for Israel and what is not good. And whoever disagrees is a traitor. That is a Stalinistic viewpoint that never before existed."

She said she regularly is called a "traitor" and told that "the blood of our people is on your hands...I hear those insults every day." She said that such speech, and also the headlines in an extremist, Brooklyn-based Jewish weekly that refers to Israeli leaders as "Nazis," eventually "leads to violence."

"If you don't check the violence, it ends up growing," Avital told the Jewish Week. "One of the saddest and most painful realizations for me is that we have a lot of fundamentalists in our midst. I always thought it was Arabs who are incapable of thinking rationally, that Jews lived with an open-mindedness. But this attitude that all of you are wrong and only I am right is one I have not encountered among Jews...

"I don't recognize the right of people [in the U.S.] to munch on bagels and lox while our young people are getting killed in Israel. They are screaming that we have to continue fighting and continue killing Arabs. But they can't decide from here whether a mother is going to lose her child...It's our duty to stop this vicious cycle."

Avital noted that she received harassing telephone calls at home, sometimes repeatedly and far into the night. Israel Ambassador Rabinovich has had to dodge both eggs and tomatos thrown at him while he addressed American Jewish audiences, and Yaacobi, too, has reported harassment.

New Parties Muddy 1996 Israeli Election Prospects

At the beginning of the year Israeli polls indicated that if Israel's Labor coalition government headed by Yitzhak Rabin did not pull a peace agreement out of the hat by the end of 1995, its prospects of re-election in 1996 were poor. That's no longer so clear, not because of actions by Prime Minister Rabin or Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, but because of the appearance of two new parties on the left, a fracturing of the Likud bloc on the right, and changes in Israeli election laws.

In 1996, for the first time, Israeli voters will have the opportunity to vote directly for their choice as prime minister, and also to cast their votes for a party slate for the Israeli Knesset. In previous elections Israelis could cast their vote only for a party slate. Actual election depended upon how high up on the party ticket individual candidates were placed, and selection as prime minister depended upon which party leader could put together a coalition government that would command a majority vote in the 120-seat Knesset.

The new system, which also involves direct voting for party leaders by party members, has revolutionized Israeli politics. For one thing, it has split the formerly formidable Likud bloc. Telegenic, U.S.-raised Benjamin Netanyahu won the popular ballot for Likud party leadership. The result, however, was a walkout by veteran Likud leader David Levy, who is expected to take with him many of the North African-born Sephardic Jews who formed a dependable part of the Likud constituency. A new party led by Levy could remove as many as six Knesset seats from Likud control.

Also on the right, other Knesset members are campaigning on their own. They include Tsomet Party leader Rafael Eitan, National Religious Party leader Zevulun Hammer, and former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who has lost most of his support within Likud but who nevertheless could either draw some votes away from Netanyahu or, more likely, motivate some disgusted Likud supporters to bolt to other parties.

On the left, some voters trust Yitzhak Rabin more than his Labor party. He might get a plurality of voter support, even if his party does not. (A mid-June Israeli poll showed Rabin with 38 percent public support compared to 34 percent for opposition leader Netanyahu.) Weakening Labor is the defection of some Labor Knesset members who do not support the Oslo accord and who are expected to form a party they are calling the Third Way.

Former Soviet refusnik Nathan Sharansky is forming still another party, drawn largely from the 400,000 new Russian immigrants to Israel, but reaching out to the additional 200,000 who came to Israel before the breakup of the Soviet Union, and even to the new Ethiopian immigrants, who have had problems finding acceptance in a sometimes color-conscious Israeli society.

The Russian vote might have gone in various directions. But Sharansky's party could win six or seven Knesset seats, making it a natural coalition partner for Rabin.

This unprecedented fluidity among Israeli voters, who in the past seemed locked into party-line voting based more on habit than logic, is having several effects on the peace negotiations. First, it has made Rabin very careful not to make commitments beyond the psychological limits of his party followers in order to minimize defections to the "Third Way." Second, it has taken the pressure off him to make concessions to produce a peace process success before the 1996 elections. This is one reason he seems to have thrown out the timetable for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, already one year behind schedule and now being delayed further.

Finally, although the Palestinians are as desperate as ever for that withdrawal, they are increasingly wary of the promises of Labor party negotiators like Peres and Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin.

Judging by the recent scarcity of terrorist attacks, the crackdown on militants by Yasser Arafat's forces seemingly has been far more effective than anything that Israeli forces were able to do when they occupied Gaza. Yet the Palestinian efforts have not been rewarded with the promised withdrawals.

It may be that Rabin already has put the peace process on hold for the more than a year remaining until the 1996 elections. It may also be that it doesn't matter so much, since whatever government is elected in 1996 may be neither more nor less committed to the process than is the present government of Israel.

Jewish Groups Choose Sides On State Department Report

Just in case you've forgotten which U.S. Jewish groups support and which oppose Israeli government peace efforts, the breakdown was made clear by reactions to the State Department's report concluding that Yasser Arafat's Palestinian National Authority is making a good-faith effort to curb terrorism. (The report is a prelude to congressional approval of U.S. government payment of promised economic aid to the PNA, an action which is supported by the Israeli government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.) The National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council endorsed the semi-annual report as "thorough and balanced." Americans for Peace Now president Linda Heller Kamm agreed, although she criticized the Palestinian Authority's legal system.

Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein, however, branded the report a "whitewash" and maintained "there have been no prosecutions for terrorism against Israel."

Washington, DC Synagogues Threatened

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has alerted all synagogues in the Washington, DC metropolitan area to a possible threat of attack "according to a source of unknown reliability."

The report by the FBI's Washington Metropolitan Field Office Terrorism Task Force said it had been informed that "Iran and Libya are planning to cooperate in attacking a synagogue in Washington, DC frequented by senior American officials." The warning was followed by a June 23 briefing conducted by two FBI agents and a Montgomery County (MD) police officer at the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Washington in Rockville, MD.

Nathan Jones is a Canadian-born free-lance writer based in Washington, DC...