Israel and the American Diaspora: A Troubled Relationship

Israel has long had a troubled relationship with American Jewry. I believe that this is primarily due to three reasons. First, Zionism as an ideology was conceived in late nineteenth-century Europe--a rather hostile environment for Jews. Hence, it conceived of the natural state of the diaspora (a Greek word meaning dispersion or exile) as anti-semitic. So Israel has problems relating to a country that is philo-semitic, that is one that is welcoming of Jews. This has been the case since the American Revolution and is due to America being both a democracy and being Protestant and not Catholic or Orthodox Christian. Second, most affiliated Jews in America are either Reform or Conservative, two denominations that do not receive official recognition as Jewish in Israel. This is because religiously Israel is like Europe before the Reformation or like Islam today. Most of these Reform and Conservative Jews would be secular Jews in Israel with no attachment to a synagogue. In America synagogues function as community centers and rabbis as community leaders. Third, under Labor Zionism the ruling ideology was anti-capitalist and thus opposed in class terms to the most successful Jews in America--the capitalist businessmen. The Labor Zionists were happy to take American money but thought that the Jews who earned it were somehow to be looked down upon.

Traditionally Israel has demanded three things from American Jews. First, that they glorify Israel and thereby promote aliya (immigration to Israel) by its members. Second, that they support a number of welfare projects within Israel through donations. Third, that Jews use their clout politically to vote for American governments that were and are pro-Israel.  They were to do all of this without having any real input into Israeli policies. American Jews were supposed to lobby for Israeli policies like professional diplomats, making no distinction between one government and the next. They were to embrace limited settlement in the occupied territories, then unrestricted settlement, then peace with settlements, and then military repression against the Palestinians.

What was impermissible and beyond the bounds for Breira in the mid-1970s became kosher for Israeli governments in the 1990s. Figures like Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir who were deemed to be terrorists by the Zionist establishment in the 1940s became the establishment in the late 1970s and 1980s. After having seen various Israeli governments fail to make peace with the Arabs, some American Jews became impatient and have now started lobbying for their own American Middle East policy in Washington. The establishment American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) now has competition in the form of J Street, and organization with 40 local chapters and 170,000 supporters after only three years in existence.

American Jewry and the Israeli government are moving in opposite directions. American Jewry is becoming more assertive and the Israeli government is becoming more closed off. Israel is becoming less democratic and American Jews are remaining defiantly Democratic.  Expect fireworks in the near future.

What has changed in thirty years?

I recently finished reading Yehuda Avner's memoir, The Prime Ministers, which was published last year to some positive reviews. It is a hefty volume of 703 pages not including notes and index.  Avner was a British Jew who immigrated to Israel in 1947 and after the 1948 War of Independence worked briefly on a religious kibbutz in the Galilee before he joined the Israeli foreign service. Eventually, because of his native English, he ended up serving as a wordsmith to four Israeli prime ministers from 1963 to 1983 before he finally became Israel's ambassador to his native country. The years covered in this book were important ones in Israeli history: they included four major wars (1967, 1969-70, 1973, 1982), the peace process between Israel and Egypt in the 1970s and the change in alliance by Israel from France to the United States.

Clearly the peace process was not a theme that Avner considered important. He has a chapter on it in his section on Rabin (which only covers Rabin's first term as prime minister from 1974 to 1977) and a couple of chapters on it in the half of the book that he devotes to Menahem Begin. The book's major themes are the relationship with Washington and the individual personalities of the prime ministers. Whereas I felt that I did learn something about Levi Eshkol, the first prime minister to follow David Ben-Gurion in 1963 and about whom little has been written, I cannot say the same about Golda Meir. A long chapter is devoted to an interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. Yet of President Sadat's peace initiative of February 1971 that Meir abruptly rejected we hear nothing. So we have no way of knowing whether or not it was genuine in his opinion. Likewise, Henry Kissinger's separation-of-forces agreements of 1974 are just mentioned in a single sentence in passing.

The real revelation in the book is the story of a meeting between Avner and a childhood friend of Kissinger's who became a noted psycho-analyst. The latter diagnosed Kissinger as suffering from severe problems from his abrupt exile from Germany at age 15 during the Nazi period. Avner illustrates this with an incident where the man calls out to Kissinger using his original German name Heinz. Kissinger pretends to ignore him but with a look of disgust on his face--for the painful memories that the name has dredged up. The psycho-analyst tells Avner that Kissinger is ashamed of his Jewish background and will compensate for it in his shuttle diplomacy by bending over backwards to appease Israel's enemies. Avner advised Rabin of this diagnosis. But it never affected Rabin's personal friendship with Kissinger and Rabin continued to visit him every time he visited Washington. And the two were quite friendly during the signing ceremony for the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty at the White House in March 1979.

Fully half the book is devoted to Begin's premiership. Avner relates many telling incidents of Begin's personality that paints the man as friendly with traditional Jews but prickly with both foreign Jews and some secular Israeli Jews. Avner relates several incidents of Begin telling of figures whose government's are sympathetic to Israel such as Margaret Thatcher and her foreign minister, Lord Carrington, as well as Ronald Reagan and Casper Weinberger. Nothing here is really new--there is little of real novelty to reveal about Begin after the wave of biographies that appeared in the late 1970s, after he was elected, and after 1983, when he resigned from office in a severe depression.

Avner relates in great detail the ceremonies that accompanied the start of Sadat's 1977 peace initiative from his reception in Jerusalem to the breakdown of talks in Tel Aviv in January. But then he just relates that the talks broke down and he doesn't take up the story again until the ceremony on the White House lawn in late March 1979. He skips over the trip to Ismailiya in December 1977, the Leeds Castle talks in July 1978 and the Camp David Summit in September 1978 as well as Carter's summit diplomacy in March 1979.

The only topic that is really adequately covered is the relationship between Washington and Jerusalem. But the treatment is again not analytical but rather personal and anecdotal. He relates a summit at Johnson's Texas ranch in early 1968, a White House dinner for Rabin in September 1974 when Rabin told a white lie about it being Avner's birthday to cover up the fact that the dinner wasn't kosher (in accordance with Jewish dietary laws).

One gets the feeling that if Avner's career been a couple of decades later he could have happily related the exploits of Shamir, Netanyahu, Barak, and Sharon. But the book would have been much longer because he would have been writing about three Likud premiers and only one Labor premier. It's a pity--Shamir still lacks a biography in either English or Hebrew. Today Netanyahu allows his foreign minister to do his insulting for him. Begin and Meir did it themselves.

If Avner's publisher had possibly been willing, he could have fleshed out the section on Meir and released the book in two volumes about six months or a year apart.  But usually authors are the servants of publishers, not the other way around. This book is recommended for Americans who want anecdotes about the Israeli premiers of this period, but not for Americans interested in the peace process.

Israeli Interlocutor with the Palestinians Part III

In February 1983 the Kahan Commission, appointed by Begin under pressure by the Israeli peace movement and Labor following the massacres, held Sharon unfit to serve as defense minister and Eitan to serve as chief of staff. Sharon became minister without portfolio and spent the next fourteen and a half years in internal "exile" filling minor posts in Likud governments. Begin went into a deep depression and retired from politics in September 1983.

His successor was Yitzhak Shamir, a former leader of the Lehi underground movement and foreign minister under Begin. Shamir spent the next nine years making sure that settlement continued without stop on the West Bank--he met little resistance from Labor--and that no peace plan got anywhere. In 1992 after losing an election Shamir retired from politics and his designated successor, Moshe Arens, suprised everyone by retiring as well.

Shamir's successor then became an Arens protege, a scion, of a distinguished Revisionist and Israeli family, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu. Sharon would spend the remaining fourteen years of his political life attempting to outflank Netanyahu from the right or the left. He joined Netanyahu in attacking the Oslo peace process. Netanyahu appointed him foreign minister in October 1998 on the eve of the Wye Plantation Summit to fortify his own right flank. Bibi signed a deal but upon returning to Israel lacked the clout to sell it to his coalition. His government collapsed and Sharon emerged as leader of the Likud, a prize he had sought since founding it a quarter century before.

In July 2000 the Camp David Summit ended with no agreement and Clinton failed to produce bridging proposals. Arafat prepared the Palestinians for a major uprising by stocking up on medical and food supplies, something that the Palestinian leadership had not done in 1936 or in 1948. Netanyahu, who had resigned his Knesset seat, looked to be preparing a comeback. The Likud voted in the Knesset for a law that would allow Netanyahu to become prime minister without being a deputy. Sharon needed to act quickly. He sought and won permission from Prime Minister Ehud Barak to visit the Temple Mount with a police escort at the end of September 2000. The visit lasted about an hour and provoked some minor clashes with Palestinian worshippers on the Mount. Arafat quickly exploited this to touch off the Al-Aksa (named for one of the two mosques on the Mount) Intifada. Barak called an election for prime minister for February 2001. Sharon handily won and then had to clean up the mess that he had helped to make.

The Al-Aksa Intifada quickly devolved into a contest between the Islamists of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Fatah Al-Aksa Brigades to see who could mount the bloodiest terrorist incidents. Unlike the mid-1990s, the Islamists no longer needed to fear any temporary jailing by Arafat. Arafat quickly returned to his true metier as leader of the "armed struggle." Attempts by Washington and Cairo to intervene got nowhere because Arafat was determined to improve his bargaining leverage and his popularity, seriously eroded due to the nature of his regime, and Jerusalem was determined to not allow Arafat to gain any advantage.

Sharon gradually adopted two main tactics. The first was "targeted killings" a euphemism for assassination of Palestinian terrorist and political leaders. The other was invasion of the areas of the West Bank from which the IDF had withdrawn in the mid-1990s under Oslo. After a major terrorist bombing in Netanya on March 27, 1992, Sharon sent the IDF back into the cities of the West Bank to destroy the terrorist infrastructure. Unlike in 1982, this time he had the complete sympathy of the American president who despised Arafat. After reestablishing control Sharon adopted the separation strategy proposed by Labor, but changed the boundaries. The separation barrier, a combination of electrified fence and high brick walls, ran along the Palestinian side of the green line or border and occasionally deep into the West Bank to include settlements like Ariel.

Sharon, who believed that a Palestinian state should consist of less than half the territory of the West Bank, began using the language of the Israeli Center-Left. He spoke of occupation and the suffering of the Palestinians. And he prepared a redeployment of the Israeli military to politically more defensible lines--he would withdraw from Gaza, abandoning the settlers who had lived there for a quarter century. And he abandoned four settlements in northern Samaria. The Likud bulked at this plan and Sharon had to turn to Labor for the Knesset votes necessary to win approval. The IDF carried out the redeployment in August 2005. Sharon then withdrew from the party, which he had founded thirty years before, two months later. Two months after that he suffered a massive stroke and his political career was over.

Sharon, except for the length of his political career, is typical of many of Israel's military politicians. He in many ways serves as a role model for military politicians in the Likud and Kadima such as Shlomo Mofaz and Moshe "Boogie" Ya’alon. Dayan had his first encounters with Palestinians fifteen years before Sharon in 1938-39 as did Yigal Allon. Ehud Barak had his about fifteen years after Sharon's in the late 1960s. His role in the assassination of Palestinian terrorist leaders in Beirut in 1973 helped to make his military career and establish him as Israel's most decorated soldier.

Except during Oslo in the 1990s and in 2008, most Israeli leaders have only dealt with Palestinians, either directly or indirectly, on the battlefield. In this they resemble Andrew Jackson who dealt with American Indians from 1788 until 1837, mostly on the battlefield or in one-sided peace negotiations. Jackson, like Sharon, also exceeded his orders in invading foreign territory in Florida in 1817. But unlike with Sharon, it helped his career. Maybe we can count Sharon's fourteen years in minor posts as a major advancement. Jackson, unlike Sharon, was able to carry out his dream of removing the natives. Sharon could only plan for this when he was a staff officer in Northern Command in the late 1950s.