Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2007, pages 50-51

Israel and Judaism

Pro-Israel Activists Resist Link Between Iraq, Solution of Israel-Palestine Question

By Allan C. Brownfeld

In its December report, the Iraq Study Group (ISG), headed by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, issued a number of much-debated proposals about how to address the deteriorating situation in Iraq. The one which has produced perhaps the most sustained criticism, particularly from some American Jewish groups and by many in Israel, was its advice that the U.S. position in the Middle East would be dramatically improved if the Israeli-Palestinian question finally were resolved in a fair and equitable manner.

American Jewish groups were quick to criticize the study group’s proposals. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) questioned recommending talks between Israelis and moderate Palestinians when Hamas heads the Palestinian Authority. According to an AJC statement, “The report does not explain what purpose will be served by negotiations between Israel and those Palestinians who, while presumably moderate, do not actually have the power to make and carry out agreements.” Additionally, the AJC declared that calling on Syria to press Hamas into recognizing Israel was “ingenuous” when what was needed was an agreement to shut out the group.

The part of the report that most angered pro-Israel activists was the attempt to link a solution in Iraq to progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “The situation in Iraq is linked with events in the region,” the report stated. “Several Iraqi, U.S. and international officials commented to us that Iraqi opposition to the U.S.—and support for [Shi’i radical cleric Moqtada] Sadr—spiked in the aftermath of Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon.”

In a Dec. 7 conference call of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, leaders of most member groups voiced reservations over this part of the ISG report and called for action to block any Israeli-Iraq linkage. Israel’s consul general in New York, Arye Mekel, who took part in the Americans’ discussion, said that while Israel will not try to intervene in an American decision-making process, it hopes to make clear that the two disputes are unrelated. Mekel allegedly portrayed the report as negative from Israel’s standpoint and said that James Baker was responsible for the report’s language on Israel. Other participants, including Howard Kohr, executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), stressed the importance of ensuring that the recommendations seen as linking Israel and Iraq are not adopted.

American Jewish groups were quick to criticize the study group’s proposals.

According to the Dec. 15, 2006 issue of The Forward, “The only dissenting voice in the call was that of Seymour Reich, president of the Israel Policy Forum, who said the Jewish community should not lose sight of the need to support peace efforts in the Middle East. ‘I’m against any linkage,’ Reich later told The Forward, ‘but at the same time it’s important to open every door that can lead to negotiations with the Palestinians.’”

Numerous Jewish groups issued statements opposing the Baker-Hamilton report. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) accused the study group of falling “into the trap of inappropriately linking stability in Iraq to a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) said the report’s recommendations would “cripple the war on Islamist terror.” According to The Forward, “In private conversations, Israeli officials expressed outrage over the report, arguing that the committee—while interviewing eight Arab ambassadors and many other Arab officials, spoke only to one Israeli, Ephraim Sneh.”

The president of the Arab American Institute, James Zogby, called the Jewish organizations’ response a “knee jerk reaction,” saying that America needs to restore its credibility in the Arab world. “It is possible to go on with a ‘U.S. and Israel against the world’ policy,” Zogby noted, “but then Iraq will disintegrate and Iran will take over. Will Israel be stronger then?”

Nothing in the report angered leading Jewish groups more than these words: “The United States will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the United States deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict. There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts.”

“The panel, in effect, urged Bush to abandon allowing a free hand for [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert to continue [former Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon’s policy of unilateral imposition of borders for a dessicated Palestinian state,” wrote columnist Robert Novak. “Colin Powell’s departure as secretary of state two years ago eliminated the administration’s last major figure who was at all serious about the peace process. Bush has been seen by his Arab allies as letting the junior partner in the U.S.-Israeli alliance dominate the senior partner. One Middle Eastern diplomat says that Bush, in dealing with Israel, acts as though he represents Luxembourg rather than the United States.”

An Increasingly Futile Charge

Those Jewish groups which seek to silence criticism of Israel are finding the tactic of charging critics with “anti-Semitism” increasingly futile.

When former President Jimmy Carter’s now best-selling book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, was published, the assault upon him was formidable. The ADL’s Abraham Foxman called Carter “outrageous” and “bigoted” and charged that the book raises “the old canard and conspiracy theory of Jewish control of the media, Congress, and the U.S. government.”

The former president responded to such claims in a letter to “Jewish citizens of America,” released by the Carter Center. He denied that he had ever claimed that American Jews control the media and said that what he sees as “overwhelming bias for Israel” comes from “among Christians like me who have been taught since childhood to honor and protect God’s chosen people from among whom came our own saviour, Jesus Christ.” He noted the “powerful influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is exercising its legitimate goal” of marshaling support for Israel in Washington, although he argued that there are “no significant countervailing voices.”

In fact, Carter’s criticism of Israel is similar to that which appears on a regular basis in the Israeli press. “Gaza is in its worst condition ever,” Gideon Levy wrote recently in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “The Israel Defense Forces have been rampaging through Gaza—there’s no other word to describe it—killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling indiscriminately…This is disgraceful and shocking collective punishment.”

Indeed, in his book Carter expresses strong support for Israel’s free press and its tradition of free and open debate.

What should by now be clear to all is that the organized Jewish community—which seeks to stifle debate within our own country—does not speak for the vast majority of Americans of Jewish faith, who are not members of such groups.

In a letter to Carter, Mitchell Plitnick, director of education and policy of Jewish Voice for Peace, wrote: “As American Jews, we’re thrilled to hear a former U.S. president speaking with such courage about the suffering and loss of life Palestinians are enduring. We are heartbroken that our own government is making this immoral occupation possible…We know some Jewish organizations are upset about what you’re saying, but we wanted you to know that a great many Jews in the U.S., Israel and around the world are not represented by these organizations. We share your outrage about U.S. tax dollars enabling human misery instead of freedom. We are working to make change in our own synagogues, schools, communities and families. We are speaking out so fellow Americans can be emboldened to speak honestly, without fear of offending Jewish friends, and knowing they have Jewish support.”

Among those on the board of advisers of Jewish Voice for Peace are Prof. Avi Shlaim, Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman, Prof. Daniel Boyarin, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, playwright Tony Kushner, and poet Adrienne Rich.

Another group, Americans for Peace Now, called on President Bush to adopt the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report in full. “It is gratifying that a bipartisan panel, comprised of seasoned policy experts, has reached conclusions that should have intuitively been adopted by this administration long ago,” said Debra DeLee, the group’s president.

Similarly, the Israel Policy Forum declared that, “There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the U.S. to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. Sustained American diplomatic engagement to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy even without a war in Iraq.”

A Stark Demarcation

Writing in the Jan. 8/15, 2007 issue of The Nation, Chris Hedges declared that, “The Israel lobby in the U.S. does not serve Israel or the Jewish community—it serves the interests of the Israeli extreme right wing. Most Israelis have come to understand that peace will be possible only when their country complies with international law and permits Palestinians to build a viable and sustainable state based on the l967 borders, including, in some configuration, East Jerusalem.

“This stark demarcation between Israeli pragmatists and the extreme right wing was apparent when I was in the Middle East for The New York Times during Yitzhak Rabin’s 1992 campaign for prime minister,” Hedges recalled. “The majority of American Jewish organizations and neoconservative intellectuals made no pretense of neutrality. They had morphed into extensions of the right-wing Likud Party. These American groups, to Rabin’s dismay, had gone on to build, with Likud, an alliance with right-wing Christian groups…whose cultural and historical ignorance of the Middle East was breathtaking. This collection of messianic Jews and Christians…believed they had been handed a divine or moral mandate to rule the Middle East, whether the Arabs liked it or not.”

There can be little doubt that there is a link between events in Iraq, the deteriorating Israeli-Palestinian situation, and the decline of respect for the U.S. in the Arab world because of our one-sided and often counterproductive policies. To restore American influence in the region it is essential—as the Baker-Hamilton report, former President Carter’s book, and the views of most informed men and women in the region make clear—that Washington take the lead in promoting a genuine resolution of the Palestinian question. To say so is not “anti-Semitic,” as many Jewish organizations allege, but essential for Israel’s long-term well-being, as well as our own.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.