Focus on Jews and Israel

By Andrea Barron

Labor and Likud Seek Campaign Funds from US Jews

At least 50 percent of the campaign funds raised by Israel's Labor and Likud parties, which are competing in the upcoming November elections in Israel, will probably come from wealthy Jews who live outside Israel—especially in the United States, according to veteran correspondent Wolf Blitzer. Each of Israel's two major parties, Blitzer wrote in the Washington Jewish Week, expects to raise from $7 to $10 million in the diaspora—most of it from American Jews. Each party could also receive another $7 million from the Israeli government. Unlike the United States, Israel has no laws prohibiting politicians from soliciting campaign funds from non-citizens.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who also heads the Likud Party, prefers not to request directly campaign contributions from abroad. Instead, the party's fund-raising operation in the US is coordinated entirely by prominent Likud Knesset member Ehud Olmert, with the assistance of two popular former Ambassadors—Moshe Arens and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Olmert told Blitzer he was not embarrassed about his role, since the Labor Party has been doing the same thing for 40 years. "Should we (the Likud) just stand like a nut and do nothing? That would leave us without the means to fight for what we believe in. If Jews in America want to help me and they agree with my views about the future of Israel, why not? We are not going to say 'no' to their help."

Among the major reported donors to the Labor Party are Canadian businessman Charles Bronfman, CBS Chairman Lawrence Tisch, Walt Disney Chairman Michael Eisner, and real estate developer Philip Klutznik. (Klutznik, past president of the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization, has been a frequent critic of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians and has called for negotiations between Israel and the PLO.)

New Jewish Group Calls for Cut In Aid to Israel

For perhaps the first time since Israel's creation in 1948, a number of American Jews—including Jewish professors from 72 different universities—are calling for a drastic reduction in US aid to the Jewish state.

The Jewish Committee on the Middle East (JCOME), based in Washington, DC, was established several months after the Palestinian uprising began last December. The group has already placed its founding statement, headlined "Time To Dissociate from Israeli Policies" in the Nation (February 13), the Congressional Record (February 29), the Christian Science Monitor (March 4) and the New York Review of Books (March 3 1.)

The statement criticizes what it calls Israel's "tragically misguided approach toward the Arab world ... a racialist ideology and a growing militancy." The signatories call on the United States to "normalize" its relationship with Israel by re-evaluating its "sponsorship" of Israel and by radically reducing both economic and military aid to the Jewish state. "The citizens of Israel," the statement concludes, "will ultimately choose their own country's destiny. But at the very least the citizens of the United States should stop financing and supporting policies that are contrary to the principles and values we hold precious as Americans and as Jews."

According to JCOME chairperson Mark Bruzonsky, a former Washington associate of the World Jewish Congress, 500 Jews throughout the country signed the statement. Members of the group's executive committee include Professor Yigal Arens from the University of Southern California, son of former Israeli ambassador Moshe Arens; Harvard University Professor Zachary Lockman; prominent New York civil rights lawyer Henry Schwarzchild; Stanford University Professor Joel Beinin; and Professor Herbert Hill from the University of Wisconsin, a former labor director at the NAACP.

Schwarzchild testified on behalf of JCOME at hearings held by the Congressional Black Caucus on April 26. He told the congressmen that, "So long as Israel knows that the Americans will pay the bill, that the American Congress will bail them (the Israelis) out, that the American secretary of state will fly around trying to put out the fires they have created, so long as this unnatural situation is allowed to exist, Israel will not be forced to confront her own political and ideological problems."

Lockman, who teaches Middle East history, argues that American Jews who support a freeze or reduction in US aid may still care about Israel and its security needs. "But that does not mean we want the US to continue financing Israeli policies such as deporting Palestinians and blowing up their homes." Arens—like his father, a citizen of both the United States and Israel—acknowledges that Israel does not have the "friendliest neighbors. But it must learn to live with these neighbors. And this will happen only when the United States stops funding the occupation."

Prominent US Jews Welcome Abu Sharif Statement

Fifteen prominent Jews from the American section of the International Center for Peace in the Middle East, based in Tel Aviv, have called the recent statement issued by PLO official Bassani Abu Sharif "the clearest expression thus far, by any Palestinian official, of a readiness to negotiate peace between Israel and the Palestinians." The Abu Sharif document says that "the key to a Palestinian-Israeli settlement lies in talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis" and envisions the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip next to Israel.

Abu Sharif, a dose political adviser to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, distributed the statement at the Arab summit in Algiers last April, where it was virtually ignored. Arafat appeared to endorse it when he said the United States should respond by "making a gesture toward the PLO." (The State Department, however, indicated that Arafat must unambiguously support the statement before it can be taken seriously by the US.)

The 15 Americans who welcomed the document included Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow; international lawyer Rita Hauser, who chairs the International Center's American section; Rabbi Arthur Herzberg, past president of the American Jewish Congress; Theodore Mann, former president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; and Philip Klutznik.

Andrea Barron is a Ph.D. candidate in international relations at the American University in Washington, DC, and is a member of the Jewish Committee for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.