Bitter Harvest at the Moshav

By Charles Fischbein

There weren't many Fortune 500 companies recruiting graduate students with advanced philosophy degrees in 1972. So after spending months looking for "philosopher wanted" ads in the Sunday classified section, my career choices boiled down to teaching or accepting a position as an assistant director for the B'nai B'rith Council of greater Chicago.

Little did I know that the choice I made would lead me down the road to becoming what the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League would call "one of the highest level defectors from the Zionist executive ranks."

It took 11 years of work on behalf of Israel and the international Zionist movement before I finally realized that I was supporting a government and movement that was, at the very least, blatantly racist, and at its worst genocidal.

During the first eight years of my career I moved from B'nai B'rith to serve as director of the Trades and Professions Division of the United Jewish Appeal of Greater Washington, and finally to the position of Executive Director of the politically-sensitive Washington regional office of the Jewish National Fund.

It was not until I came to the JNF that I realized that the Zionist movement was overtly racist, and that the United Nations declaration of 1975 equating Zionism with racism was indeed quite correct.

I began to see the light while preparing to spend a sabbatical in Israel. The executive vice president of the JNF suggested that I spend my year as a resident at Moshav Tomer Yosef. Since my wife and I had a background in farming, we were looking forward to our time on an Israeli communal farm. A few months before I was to take sabbatical leave, I traveled to Israel to look over the moshav and meet its members. The leaders of the moshav were elated at the idea of having a JNF executive as a member of their community for a year, and offered us the best housing available. There was only one formality left before I was to be an official member of the moshav: That was a vote of the other families in the community to accept me and my family.

The night before the vote was to take place, the moshav held a party for me and I was assured that I would be accepted unanimously as a member. A woman who ran the local school innocently asked to see photographs of my three children. I proudly showed her pictures of Jason, my son; Madra, my daughter; and David, my adopted half-black, half-Vietnamese son.

That one incident—showing my children's pictures to a school teacher in Israel—changed everything for me.

As soon as she saw the picture of David, the teacher excused herself and summoned three senior members of the moshav and left the room.

About an hour later I was asked to go to the main office of the moshav. I was told bluntly that the members did not want my son David to come to the moshav, and it was suggested that my wife and I send him to a boarding school at home for the year we were to be in Israel. I was told that Israel had enough problems with Arabs, and did not wish to deal with Blacks, even though David had converted to Judaism.

The next morning I called the office of the world chairman of the Jewish National Fund, Moshe Rivlin, and told him I was coming to Jerusalem and had to see him right away.

When I arrived, I learned that Rivlin had already received a call from the moshav and was aware of the situation. He took me out for tea and told me that I should go back to the New York office, where I would receive a check for a year's pay in advance, and that I should forget the sabbatical in Israel and study or travel in the US. I was warned that if I made trouble I would be fired from my post at the JNF.

Upon my return to Washington, I decided to postpone my sabbatical and attempted to work on behalf of change within the JNF.

Then came the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June of 1982. A major backlash had developed within the Jewish community in the United States, and, in an attempt to stop the criticism of Israel from within the American Jewish community, the JNF summoned all its executives to go to Israel and Lebanon to "see the facts for themselves."

Upon our arrival in Israel, we were met at the Knesset building by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who told us that he was upset by the adverse reaction to the invasion of Lebanon from within the Jewish community in the United States. As JNF executives, Begin said, we were expected to do whatever we could to change public opinion at home and gain support for Israel and its actions in Lebanon.

Shortly after the briefing, we were put on Israeli Air Force helicopters and flown to the northern border village of Kiryat Shimona. After landing we boarded buses with armored vehicles as escorts and went to the outskirts of Beirut.

During our drive north, Dr. Samuel I. Cohen, executive vice president of the Jewish National Fund of America, warned us that upon our return to the US we were expected to support completely the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He added that if we couldn't do so we would have to take early retirement or resign at once.

As my bus drove through towns and villages in Lebanon I exchanged glances with survivors of the Israeli invasion. They knew the bus carried Zionist agency executives and they knew that we were just as responsible for the death and destruction brought upon their villages as the Israeli army. Raw hate welled up in their eyes, hate that cut through the heavy plate glass windows on the bus, with a look that said, "If I could only kill you, I would."

I found myself fervently praying that my children would never be blamed for the violent deaths of innocent people, and then have to look into the eyes of the families of the victims.

Flying back to New York, I kept writing figures on paper. The numbers represented my car payment, my mortgage payment, my children's tuition, food, etc. I knew what I had to do, and I was trying to determine how long I could make it on severance pay.

When I left my position as executive director of the Washington office of the JNF, I dedicated my life to helping the millions of Jews throughout the world learn the truth about the racist and un-jewish movement that has deceived and manipulated them, while exposing them to the horror and hatred I saw reflected in the eyes of its Lebanese and Palestinian victims.

Charles Fischbein is a Washington, DC-based writer specializing in Middle East issues.