Throughout his tenure in office Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was known to adorn his desk with a photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto, lacing his rhetoric and policies with anxious allusions to impending doom. Begin lost his parents and brother in the Holocaust and like many of his generation the experience had a profound influence on his character, breeding an intense mistrust of non-Jews. Since Israel’s founding, its foreign policy has been guided in large part by the maxim that there is no alternative to unremitting siege by hostile Arabs – “Ein Breira.” Every threat has been portrayed as existential in magnitude, the dichotomy resultantly stark: victory or holocaust. This siege mentality was indoctrinated as policy by the father of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, in his two often-misinterpreted articles published in 1923 under the heading “The Iron Wall.”
Jabotinsky’s program was underscored by a pragmatic assessment of the mutually exclusive political ambitions of the Zionist movement and the Palestinians. Indeed, nowhere in history, wrote Jabotinsky, have people born in a land, “no matter whether they are civilized or savages,” accepted settlement of outsiders in their country without a “stubborn fight.” Following this logic, Jabotinsky called for the construction of a “metaphorical Iron Wall,” fortified with both economic and military might. Until the Arabs exhausted the prospect of ever destroying the Jewish State, until the last “gleam of hope that they will succeed in getting rid of us” is eliminated, he contended, political overtures would be not only useless but also potentially dangerous.
But Jabotinsky never intended for his Iron Wall to be a permanent fixture on the Israeli landscape. His conception was rooted in a specific time and place, and in the current reality its continued application has proven inimical to Israeli interests. The Iron Wall has become a concrete obstacle to the formulation and implementation of a progressive vision of hope, a policy of peace. The Iron Wall has fostered a difficult—and as yet unresolved—perception gap between the reality of Israeli power and the cultural ethos of historical victimhood.
The non-ideological majority of the Israeli defense establishment has long since recognized that the settlements constitute an unnecessary security liability. A June 1992 poll of retired army generals and officers of equivalent rank in the security services showed that 68 percent favored security arrangements based on withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This year, a poll was conducted in order to gauge Jewish settlers’ opinion on possible withdrawal from the territories. 74 percent of the sampling stated that they would willingly leave their homes in return for monetary compensation, and only one percent would consider resorting to violence to remain in their homes. The extremists, then, are a vocal and supremely well-organized political constituency, yet numerically they are a surmountable minority.
It is time to say “Yesh Breira”: “There is an alternative.” And it must be pursued with the same steadfast vigor as the Iron Wall. American Jewry can and must play a central part in working towards the reconciliation of the perception gap. Sadly, many of the organizations that comprise the political face of the American Jewish community have played a destructive role in the quest for peace, pushing an agenda that is detrimental to Israel’s future.
Since the early 1980s, there has emerged a yawning disconnect between the old-guard leadership of major American Jewish, pro-Israel organizations—the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA)—and the majority sentiment of American Jews.
Under the leadership of Tom Dine, AIPAC—American Jewry’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby—took steps to free itself from the control of national Jewish organizations. It thereby became less beholden to the opinions of the broad spectrum of American Jewry, and instead developed close ties to the Republican party in Washington and the Likud in Jerusalem.
These events all contributed to the usurpation of the diverse voice of American Jewry by a small yet prolific minority. According to historian Steven T. Rosenthal, AIPAC’s rise in the 1980s and its perceived power “inhibited grass-roots Jewish dissent from Israeli policies.”
Now, the calling cards of many American Jewish pro-Israel organizations—ZOA, Middle East Truth, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA)—are emotionally-laden attacks, character assassination, and the reckless branding of communal opponents with the epithet “self-loathing Jew.” Instead of engaging in substantive debate, these groups dismiss reasonable and essential criticism of Israeli government policy and disseminate information through a distorted, Manichean lens: Jews unite against the anti-Semites. Whenever there is an outburst of violence they rally unquestioningly around the Israeli flag, giving no attention to the context in which blood is shed. This is, after all, what many of these so-called “watchdog groups” and political action committees, willfully blinded by tunnel vision, have been created to do.
The deleterious result is both an institutional inertia that stalls efforts to rally for peace, and a suppression of well-intended dissent. A cursory glance through the pages of Ha’aretz or Yediot Aharonot reveals a profound dialogue within Israeli society over whether Ariel Sharon’s strong-arm tactics are in Israel’s long-term interests. In America, by contrast, the Anti-Defamation League and the ZOA rattle off knee-jerk letters of protest to Secretary of State Colin Powell for commending Geneva Initiative architects Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo. And Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a staunch supporter of Israel, is lambasted by American Jewish leaders for endorsing a similar peace plan crafted by Ami Ayalon and Sari Nusseibeh.
This phenomenon, the process by which some of the more prominent elements of the American Jewish community have become, as Yossi Beilin has put it, “more Israeli than Israelis,” manifested itself in staggering proportions during the early years of the Oslo peace process. Then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was dismayed at the organized ranks of Americans lobbying for Israel in Washington, feeling they often undercut his own diplomatic initiatives with the Clinton administration.
“Never [before] have we witnessed an attempt by American Jews to lobby against the policy of a democratically elected Israeli government,” said Rabin after these groups’ successful push for a congressional bill to transfer the American embassy to Jerusalem, a major blow to the fledgling peace process.
During a trip to America in August 1992, Rabin addressed the executive board of AIPAC. He excoriated his audience, telling them “You’ve aroused too much antagonism, you make too many enemies for yourselves, and your record is poor.”
Needless to say the collapse of the peace process and the return of the Likud amounts to a grand reversal of fortunes for AIPAC and the ZOA, both of whom languished on the margins of the political debate during the Rabin-Barak-Clinton years. Tellingly, when the newly elected Ariel Sharon addressed AIPAC’s annual meeting and declared that “Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people,” he was greeted with a standing ovation. In stark contrast, Bill Clinton’s longtime Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, was booed.
The relationship between American Jewry and the State of Israel is multi-faceted and in many respects perplexing. Whatever we in America think or do, it is Israel that will bear the direct consequences of shifts in policy.
Israelis face a daily struggle, in which mundane decisions like whether to ride the bus or eat lunch at a café have become matters of life and death.
Nonetheless, Israel is no longer the nation that Abba Eban described to the United Nations as “embattled, blockaded, and besieged and fighting a battle for its security anew with every approaching nightfall and every rising dawn.” It is clear that Israelis and Palestinians need to be saved from themselves, and the entire Middle East needs to be spared the incessant fanning of rage and despair. We need a new generation of forward-looking American Jewish leaders. Leaders who will heed the words of Henry Wall, former director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Jerusalem office: “Of course American Jews have the right to get involved in Israeli affairs on their own political turf. But it’s not a question of rights, it’s a question of wisdom.” Nations, like people, need real friends who know when it is time to tell the hard truth, not mere apologists who stand silently or nod approvingly at agonizing self-destruction.
