September 1995, pgs. 71-73

American Jews and Israel

By Nathan Jones

"Battling Rabbis" Grab Headlines

What The Jewish Week of New York called "The Battle of the Rabbis" unfolded in Washington, DC this summer as groups arrived to lobby Congress and the media for and against the peace policies of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The battle opened with the arrival in June of some 40 Orthodox rabbis from both the U.S. and Israel opposed to the U.S. government's Oslo agreement commitment of $100 million per year to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian National Authority. Then, in July, 600 rabbis representing all four of Judaism's major denominations in the United States sent a letter to Congress urging support for the Middle East peace process and, specifically, renewal of the Middle East Peace Facilitation Act (MEPFA), which had been scheduled to expire June 30. (Although proponents sought a six-month extension of the law while PNA compliance with its obligations under the Oslo agreement was examined, Congress voted only a 45-day extension before adjourning for an August recess. See "Congress Watch," page 89.)

"The point was to show that a small handful of mostly Orthodox rabbis are not representative of the broad cross-section of American Jewry," Rabbi Sidney Schwarz, of the national capital area, told The Jewish Week. "Our effort, representing more than 600 rabbis spanning religious movements, shows what polls show—that something like 80 percent of American Jews support Rabin and the peace process, and support active American involvement in the negotiations."

There were other rabbinical delegations on the Hill during the same period, lobbying primarily on domestic issues. The rabbis who received the most enthusiastic response from women legislators, including Rep. Connie Morella (R-MD) and Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), with whom they had breakfast, was a group of 100 women Reform rabbis representing the Women's Rabbinic Network biennial conference. Their interests centered primarily on how the Republican revolution in Congress is affecting women's issues.

Netanyahu's Anti-Pax FAX Attacks

If the rabbis spoke about domestic issues in modulated voices, the same was not true of participants in the blitzkrieg on Capitol Hill against the peace process conducted from both Israel and the United States. Faxed attacks against the Rabin government's policies originating with Israeli Likud leader Benyamim Netanyahu finally elicited a warning from Rep. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), a friend of the Israeli right, "to be more careful" in lobbying Congress, according to syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.

The attack was focused on MEPFA, which opponents of the peace process have defined as the vulnerable link in the chain of U.S. support for the Rabin-Arafat negotiations. Israeli opposition leaders are urging their friends in Congress to pass alternative legislation that would shut down all U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority.

The war of words spilled into the streets of the national capital as some 80 U.S. Jews stood in heavy rains in front of the Israeli embassy Aug. 6 to protest Israeli negotiations with the Palestinians. The last of eight such vigils held on consecutive Sundays was sponsored by five hard-line U.S. Jewish organizations: Americans for a Safe Israel, American Academics for Israel's Future, Brandeis District of the Zionist Organization of America, Women for Israel's Tomorrow and PRO-ISRAEL. The vigils were part of a national effort that also included demonstrations at Israeli consulates in Chicago, Miami, New York and Philadelphia.

The bitter rhetoric, and a physical assault on a member of the Israeli Knesset, Israeli Communications Minister Shulamit Aloni, in connection with the "Salute to Israel" parade in New York this spring (see this column on page 73 of the July/August Washington Report), alarmed a number of mainstream Jewish leaders. Warned executive vice president Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, "Public statements have consequences."

Hoenlein's appeal for moderation was criticized, however, by president Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, one of the loudest voices attacking the peace process. "It's an attempt to impose an orthodoxy under cover of hitting out at extremism," Klein said of a draft statement by the Conference of Presidents. "In the Jewish world there have been extreme and outrageous statements from all sides of the political spectrum."

Breaking stereotypes, six Orthodox Jewish organizations issued a declaration in late July that "there can be no excuse or justification for the extremist verbal attack directed against the elected leadership of the State of Israel." Their statement was issued in response to a controversial declaration by Orthodox Rabbi Abraham Hecht, who in June declared it acceptable under Jewish law to assassinate Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The Orthodox organizations made it clear, however, that they were attacking the proposed means, not the goals, of opponents of the peace process. Their statement protested "the demonization and delegitimization" of the Jewish inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza and the "ongoing destructive verbal statements by many Arab leaders oppposing the very existence of the State of Israel." The Orthodox statement also expressed "the right of every Jew to live in all parts of Eretz Israel."

Another group, the New Israel Fund, also attacked Hecht's call for assassination in less ambiguous terms. It said that "silence in the face of this accelerating breakdown in civil discourse is unacceptable. The atrocity in Oklahoma City should have alerted us again to the potentially catastrophic consequences of verbal violence."

Moderate statements also were issued by the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress and by national director Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. Foxman said epithets being hurled by opponents at supporters of the peace process such as "quisling" and "Judenrat" are "beyond the pale of debate." Had they been made by non-Jews, he pointed out, "the community would have been very much up in arms, certainly decrying them as anti-Israel if not anti-Semitic."

Foxman was quoted in The Jewish Week as saying: "If non-Jews had called the prime minister of Israel a traitor, or those who supported him Judenrat, the same Jews using those terms would be upfront calling them anti-Semites."

In Israel, More Than Rhetoric

If American Jews found the rhetoric of some of their own leaders disquieting, the extremist words and deeds (many by Israeli immigrants from America) coming out of Israel sounded like a prelude to civil war. Most shocking was a halachic ruling handed down in mid-July by Israel's former Chief Rabbi Avraham Shapira and 14 of his associates on the executive board of the Union of Rabbis for Eretz Yisrael.

As reported by The Jewish Week of New York: "The ruling, condemned by those from the left and the right, forbids soldiers and civilians from taking part in the evacuation of army bases whose sites stand to be turned over to 'goyim,' or in this case the Palestinian authority."

Prime Minister Rabin reacted angrily, saying that "It's unthinkable that a democratically elected government will be constrained by rabbis through halachic rulings that call upon soldiers to disobey orders." Even Likud chairman Benyamin Netanyahu called the ruling "a threat to democracy." Nevertheless, by making disobedience to orders a religious duty for Orthodox soldiers, Shapira seemed to be echoing the rhetoric of the most extreme Islamist leaders who call upon their followers to "redeem with their blood occupied Muslim lands."

Nor was such talk confined to fringe religious leaders in Israel. A militant Jewish settlers group calling itself the Headquarters for the Struggle to Abolish the Autonomy Plan issued what it called an "ethical code—what is permitted and what is forbidden: to soldiers, officials, businessmen, industrialists, judges and archeologists when facing the terrorist regime and the branches of the Israeli government that cooperate with it." The code, signed by 150 public figures, including retired military officers, advises settlers to resist attempts by Israeli soldiers to evacuate them from the territories. The settlers are, however, "advised" against using firearms against the soldiers.

The guidelines were put into action under the leadership of a former American rabbi, Shlomo Riskin, in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Efrat, near Jerusalem. He led his followers in setting up a campsite on a nearby hilltop and calling it a settlement. When Israeli troops began physically removing them, the settlers allowed themselves to be carried down the hill, but then promptly returned to the campsite. The activity, some of which seemed stimulated by the presence of television cameras, continued over a period of days, with no one hurt but some of the Israeli women soldiers, who physically removed women settlers, described as crying from pain and fatigue.

Things took a much more serious turn one night, however, when the Palestinian owners of the site, discovering it temporarily deserted by both soldiers and settlers, started dismantling the settlers' makeshift campsite. Settlers who discovered the activity promptly unlimbered their automatic weapons and shot one of the Palestinians dead and seriously wounded another. The sudden resort to weapons by the Jewish settlers the moment unarmed Palestinians became involved put the Efrat events in a different light. The much televised activities of the Jewish settlers and Jewish soldiers appeared to be a media charade within the family without serious consequences. By contrast, the confrontation between Jewish settlers and Palestinian villagers had immediate, fatal results.

In this light it was hard for American Jewish leaders to know what to make of a series of visits by retired Israeli military officers to Washington. Four such officers were joined by four retired American generals, John Foss, Crosbie Saint, Charles May and Jarvis Lynch, in a visit to the National Press Club sponsored by the Jewish Institute for National Security (JINSA), a non-profit lobbying group identified with the Israeli arms industry. The eight generals warned against the "consequences" of an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

More ominous was a statement by Israeli reserve Brig. Gen. David Hagoel at a New York news conference held by the International Rabbinical Coalition for Israel. He said that, although he opposes rabbinical edicts directing soldiers and civilians to resist withdrawal from the West Bank, disobeying orders should be a "personal decision" for individual soldiers. Hagoel, chairman of the World Zionist Organization department of information, said soldiers may respond to halachic edicts "one by one." Hagoel said he personally would refuse an order to evacuate or transfer a Jewish family from Hebron. "I would go to jail," he said.

General Hagoel, who was Israeli military commander of the Jerusalem district from 1969 to 1973 and of the West Bank from 1976 to 1978, said orders to abandon the West Bank by "driving out Jewish people from the land" are illegal because they are against Jewish law. If soldiers in the field get an illegal order, Hagoel said, they should refuse to obey it.

Also in Washington, Yechiel Leiter, spokesman for the YESHA Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the major settlers organization, denounced the Rabin government in a teleconference with reporters from American Jewish newspapers. "The Israeli government strategy is not one of removing the fish [settlers] from the pond; they are just gradually draining the pond in hopes that the fish will die," Leiter charged.

Like-minded right-wing Israeli organizations are encouraging American Jewish visitors to become involved in confrontations with Israeli authorities. One such confrontation occurred at a Jerusalem court where Jewish teenagers were being arraigned after an earlier West Bank confrontation. American Jewish demonstrators who were allowed to enter the courthouse later were ordered to move away from the entrance to the court room.

"I told one of the officers that they were violating our civil rights," Paul Schnek, a 65-year-old Holocaust survivor from New York told reporter Shawn Cohen of the Washington Jewish Week. "He gave me a terrific blow to the right side of my face. I staggered and, bending to grab my glasses, the officer grabbed me from behind my neck, threw me to the floor, kicked me and jumped on my back." Schnek and other American Jewish demonstrators who said they had experienced or witnessed the alleged police brutality filed formal complaints with the American Consulate in Jerusalem.

Jews and Bosnia

While leaders of the American Jewish community generally have been in the forefront of American public demands for more forceful international action to halt the Serb assault on the Muslims of Bosnia, the Israeli government has been relatively silent. One explanation is that it is selling arms to the Serbs, in defiance of the U.N. arms embargo. Examples of conflicting positions abound in the U.S. weekly Jewish press.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that all nine Jewish members of the Senate voted in support of the Dole-Lieberman bill to lift the arms embargo that prevents the government of Bosnia from obtaining arms to defend its borders. Passage of the bill by a 69 to 29 vote was hailed by the American Jewish Congress, the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, and B'nai B'rith International.

The American Jewish Committee, however, opposed a unilateral move by the United States. "This could have serious ramifications for lifting other sanctions, including those against Iraq and Libya," said Jason Isaacson, director of the American Jewish Committee's Washington offfice.

However, Isaacson's stand seemed diametrically opposed to positions taken by the new president of the American Jewish Committee, Robert S. Rifkind, who also is a director of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Both institutions, Rifkind told reporter Stewart Ain of The Jewish Week of New York, "stand for the proposition that there is no conflict between being a Jew and being a modern man or woman. Both stand for the proposition that the Jewish community is at home in America. Both of those propositions lead to a third—we must assume responsibility for our own destiny as a community."

Since that includes watching out for other communities, Rifkind said, "One must be willing to exert force against ethnic cleansers—that's the whole lesson of the 20th century. The question on the table is whether we have learned how to protect the peace of the world or are we doomed to go around this circuit of violence over and over again."

Expressing a contrary view in a paid advertisment in The Jewish Week of July 28, chairperson John Ranz of the Survivors of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp asked, "How is it possible that some Jewish 'leaders' can be so blinded, brainwashed or corrupt and support Bosnian Muslims in their denying the Serbs their human rights." Ranz said Jews have to choose between urging "the president and the Congress to negotiate with the Serbs for a peaceful solution for which the Serbs are ready; or join the White Nazis and the Hamas Moslem Nazis and urge bombing the Serbs and widening the war."

Merger Plans for Jewish Fund-raisers?

With Jewish fund-raising organizations reporting a steady decline in receipts, The Jewish Week reports that "a comittee studying ways to restructure the billion-dollar Jewish federation system has for the first time begun considering the merger of its three major arms, the United Jewish Appeal, the United Israel Appeal (the conduit of UJA money headed for Israel) and the Council of Jewish Federations, the umbrella organization for nearly 200 federations in North America." The next meeting is scheduled Sept. 12 in Detroit to consider the project which, the New York newspaper reports, "has caused concern among those who feel that funding for Israel could take a backseat to local needs if UJA loses clout."

Maryland Politicians Tour Israel

Fourteen non-Jewish Maryland state legislators and Washington, DC city council members were guests of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington on a July 10-19 visit "to learn about Israel firsthand," according to Council president Peter Krauser. Among the junketeers were Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Maryland State Senator Christopher Van Hollen, and Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan.

Nathan Jones writes on political affairs from Washington, DC.