Rabin-Arafat Agreement Splits American Jewish Leaders

By Richard H. Curtiss

"American Jews, though in awe of the Jewish state's military prowess, are fed up with Israel's never-ending status as a poor cousin asking for help. For their part, Israelis are fed up with American Jews who resist the Zionist entreaties of the [Jewish] Agency's Aliya [emigration to Israel/ Department to make Aliya, electing to stay here and struggle for their Jewishness as Americans. ''

—Staff writer David Twersky, New York Jewish weekly Forward, Sept. 3, 1993

As individuals, most American Jews will support Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's agreement with Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, just as they eventually support all decisions by any elected government of Israel. Positions of leaders of mainstream U. S. Jewish organizations are not so clear, however. They were the big losers in the Sept. 13 White House ceremonial signing of the agreement. Although some will pretend otherwise, in fact none played any role in reaching the agreement.

Much has happened in the 12 months since President David Steiner of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was taped by a Jewish donor boasting that AIPAC would have people at every level of a future Bill Clinton administration, and that he personally was "negotiating'' over who would be Clinton's secretary of state. The fact that the Oslo agreement was reached in spite of them is just one more chapter in the symbiotic but troubled relationship between American Jewish organizations and the state of Israel.

The relationship first assumed crucial importance with President Harry Truman's decision to lobby members of the newly created United Nations to partition Palestine in late 1947. The U.S.-supported partition plan was to create one state in 53 percent of the British Mandate of Palestine for the one-third of its inhabitants who were Jewish, and another state in the remaining 47 percent of Palestine for the two-thirds of its inhabitants who were Arab Muslims and Christians.

That decision was made at the urging of Truman's chief domestic political adviser, Clark Clifford (the same Washington insider, now 86 years old, who has been cited in connection with BCCI activities in the United States). The subsequent decision to recognize the new Jewish state when the British pulled out of Palestine on May 14, 1948 also was made under heavy, direct pressure from America's Jewish community.

American Jewish support, both in obtaining arms and in learning how to use them, also was vital to Israelis during their 1948 "war of independence." However, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first president, was contemptuous of the unwillingness of most U.S. Jews to emigrate to Israel.

To Ben-Gurion's satisfaction, however, when he castigated American Jews for not "making Aliya" to the new "Jewish homeland," guilt-stricken American Jews opened their pocketbooks wide—buying "Israel bonds" and contributing directly to Israeli charities. Eventually these Israeli charities were granted a tax exemption by the U.S. Congress, increasing the outflow of private U.S. Jewish funds to Israel.

For their part, American Jewish leaders were gratified that "Israel" had become a cause around which they could rally an increasingly diffuse U.S. Jewish community. Although briefly unified by the horrors of the European Holocaust, in which about half of Europe's Jews perished, U.S. Jews otherwise seemed likely to dwindle away through intermarriage.

Relations between the initially liberal American Jewish community and increasingly conservative Israeli governments survived the accession of hard-liner Menachem Begin from terrorist underground leader to prime minister of Israel. American Jews, who might have been expected to repudiate a government so inimical to American principles of religious and racial equality, instead became a major source of congressional support for the Likud government. They also provided funds for the political movements that comprised Begin's (and later Yitzhak Shamir's) Likud bloc and for groups even further to the right such as racist Rabbi Meir Kahane's U.S.-based Jewish Defense League and his Israel-based Kach Party.

As virtually all U.S. Jewish organizations trimmed their sails to the rightist winds blowing in Israel, U.S. Jewish leaders increasingly saw themselves as the key players in U.S.-Israeli relationships. Their self-appointed role was that of apologists to the U.S. government and American public—who still retained an image of Israelis as beleaguered kibbutzniks making the desert bloom—for the reality of hard-eyed expansionists, promising their followers an Israel that would extend from "the [Mediterranean] sea to the river," with increasing ambiguity as to whether the river referred to was the Jordan, encompassing the occupied West Bank, or the Euphrates, encompassing Jordan and Syria as well.

Begin and then Shamir simply took American Jewish leaders for granted. Although they never consulted their American supporters about policy, they were generous in providing briefings and being photographed with the platoons of American Jewish leaders who got U.S. taxpayer funds from Congress for Israel and who visited Israel regularly. These American Jewish leaders, in turn, used their photos of themselves with Israeli leaders to enhance their personal standing within their own communities.

The national Jewish organizations, more than 40 of which are represented on the board of directors of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel's principal Washington, DC lobby, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, in turn developed an extraordinarily efficient money-producing machine. Half of the funds collected in the U.S. from private Jewish donations for Israeli government development work were in fact retained in the U.S. for use by the American Jewish organizations to mobilize support and to lobby Congress, and eventually the executive branch as well, to provide more U.S. taxpayer money for Israel.

It has been a spectacularly lucrative investment. In the 1993 fiscal year, Israel received more than $3.1 billion in U.S. military aid, $1.2 billion in U.S. economic aid, and $2 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. During his first month in office, President Clinton assured Israel that this total of $6.3 billion in U.S. government grants and credits would not be reduced in the 1994 fiscal year.

However, the tactics of Israel's Likud government, and its U.S. supporters, alienated President George Bush, who openly criticized Israeli Prime Minister Shamir. Both, in effect, wagered their political futures on the outcome of their personal contest. Both lost.

Bush's opposition brought down Shamir's government. It also threw a scare into Israel's electorate, which feared cuts of U.S. economic aid. The subsequent election was won by Shamir's Labor Party rival, Yitzhak Rabin. Only five months later Bush, attacked unmercifully and often unfairly on the U.S. economy and other subjects unrelated to the Middle East by Israel's powerful sympathizers in the U.S. press, also lost his re-election bid. Exit polls showed 86 percent of U.S. Jews voted against Bush, largely because of his reluctance to grant loan guarantees to Israel in the absence of Israeli progress toward a land-for-peace agreement with the Arabs.

When Clinton assumed office, the boasts about Israel lobby influence by AIPAC President Steiner, who resigned when they were revealed, came true. Clinton appointed a former paid AIPAC lobbyist, Martin Indyk, as White House Middle East adviser, retained another former lobbyist for Israel, Dennis Ross, in the State Department to backstop the Middle East peace talks, and brought back from retirement Samuel Lewis, who had managed to remain for eight years as U.S. ambassador to Israel, to serve as State Department director of policy and plans.

All this indicated that there would be no land-for-peace pressure on Israel. It also assured, despite the wishes of many Israeli leaders including Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and, apparently, Rabin, that there would be no peace. Worst of all, from Rabin's viewpoint, was the assumption of hard-line American Jewish leaders, whose fellow travelers now occupied the key Middle East posts in the White House and State Department, that they, not Rabin, were in charge of U.S.-Israeli relations. Clearly, U.S. Jewish leaders expected the Israeli government to address its requests to the U.S. government via AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents, and other U. S. Jewish organizations which had cooperated with Rabin's Likud rivals.

Rabin, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., was determined to conduct his own foreign relations directly. He seized upon one of several secret channels between Israeli Labor Party supporters and PLO leaders or sympathizers. The result was the preliminary agreement in Norway, and the completed agreement signed in Washington, DC on Sept. 13.

The variety of reactions by Jewish leaders and by writers for the weekly Jewish press in the United States illustrates their surprise at the agreement, which suddenly burst into the public spotlight in the last week in August. Chairman Lester Pollack and Executive Vice Chairman Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations were briefed in Israel about the agreement about the same time that Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres flew to California to brief vacationing U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

Christopher later said he had been "aware" of the negotiations, which was true. But the speed with which they suddenly were embraced by the Labor government caught the U.S. government as well as U.S. Jewish leaders by surprise. To their consternation, the latter suddenly looked irrelevant after years of work by U.S. Jewish organizations to build themselves up as the key arbiters in any peace effort.

Caught by Surprise

"All sides recognize that America still has an important role to play," said Jess Hordes of B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League, one of the best funded U.S. Jewish organizations. "This week's events have shown that the parties themselves can be initiators. That may result in a period of reassessment for the administration."

"America's role was not critical in this," said Gail Pressberg, president of Americans for Peace Now, the largest U.S. Jewish peace group, which has been critical of support by other Jewish organizations of unconditional U.S. aid to Israel.

Executive Director Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League angrily insisted that U.S. Jewish leaders will be "active spectators" when the process of implementing the peace plan begins.

American followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Jewish Nazis of America, wasted no time discussing pros and cons of the plan. They demonstrated noisily against it outside Washington's Mayflower Hotel, where Israeli delegates to the peace talks were staying; the State Department, where the talks were taking place; and outside the White House during the Sept. 13 signing. In one case they tore away a Palestinian flag being displayed by members of a Palestinian family who had traveled from New Jersey to the U.S. national capital to demonstrate support for the agreement.

In general, the national Jewish organizations endorsed the agreement publicly, whatever their private reservations. This was true of Steven Grossman, current chairman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. Schindler, a Jewish moderate who was only a lukewarm supporter of Likud governments, turned the tables on hawkish U.S. Jewish leaders when he wrote in The New York Times of Sept. 17:

"Again American Jews are breathless at the sudden changes. But I have heard no supportive words from unreconstructed hawks about the need to uphold Israeli democracy. Instead, Norman Podhoretz, who more than once denounced as treason all public criticism of Israel, cannot now quiet his own 'conscience.' Americans for a Safe Israel, which has long assailed the Israeli movement Peace Now as outsiders, now attempts to delegitimatize the government itself as an outsider. And the Lubavitcher Hasidim take out a full-page ad in The New York Times accusing Israel's leaders of being willing 'to sell Israel's security for a Nobel Peace prize'...The elected leaders of Israel (deserve) from American Jews . . . fervent prayers at the very least—not muttered curses from those who, within the safe haven of these shores, still deify land over life."

Another moderate, pro-Israel editor Phil Jacobs of the Detroit Jewish News, wrote: "There is no more Soviet Union to agitate a peace. Yet, there's a rise in Islamic fundamentalism that wants no peace with Israel. With this is a rise in anti-Arabism that shows itself disturbingly with a large part of Israel's youth. . . Hopefully . . . history will show that in [the current Jewish calendar year] 5753 a peace plan was offered up that changed the world for the better. And by the time 5754 comes around, that peace plan will be sealed in this world's collective book of life."

Wrote liberal U.S. Jewish writer Leonard Fein in the Sept. 10 Forward: "We here have known to yearn for peace, to pray for peace, to sing of peace, but nothing in our experience has taught us how to live with peace. For that matter, nothing in our experience has taught us to live with the Palestinians in general, with the PLO and Yasser Arafat in particular. "

Journalist David Twersky wrote in Forward of American Jews that "about Israel at war they have much to say. About Israel making peace, well, they'd prefer to duck and back the government-of-the-day."

Summarized editor Gary Rosenblatt of The Jewish Week of Queens, NY: "This latest episode of Israel-PLO dialogue seems to have eclipsed us, regardless of our views. American Jewish reaction is particularly irrelevant now, with Israelis themselves having to decide how much security they are willing to risk for how much peace."