DAR AL HARB - ISRAEL: AMERICAN JEWS SHOULD CHANGE THEIR STANCE

American Jews should change their stance
By George S. Hishmeh, Special to Gulf News

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is hoping that the Quartet principals will agree after their meeting in Washington next week on "ways to energise international engagement in support of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and progress in accordance with the roadmap". If successful, she will then meet, as promised, with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to start the peace-making ball rolling.

That's what the announcement promised before the upcoming meeting. The expectation, if not the temptation, is that any spectacular progress on this Mideastern front will provide President George W. Bush with a much-desired achievement that will contribute to his legacy, now totally charred by the crumbling US misadventure in Iraq and obviously will contribute to Rice's lacklustre record.

But the US manoeuvring may depend to a large extent on how the influential American Jewish community, now showing signs of splintering, may react, especially that the new US Congress has the highest number of American Jewish legislators in history, much more than one would expect for a community that does not exceed 2 per cent of the nation. The 43 Jewish legislators include 29 House Democrats out of the 30 members and nine Senate Democrats out of the 13.

And this time around, the American Jewish community flexed its muscles hopelessly in the reaction to former president Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, now on the best-seller list for seven weeks. But what has been more eye-catching about the outcry voiced by such luminaries as Dennis Ross, the former Mideast peace negotiator, has been the absence of non-Jewish critics. "That is the only card left in [Carter's] hand," observed Shmuel Rosner, Haaretz's Washington's correspondent on January 5: "but it is a strong one, which embodies a trap from which there is no escape."

He added: "On one hand, this problem, too, could be solved. All it needs is one well-known, well-respected, non-Jewish critic to come out publicly against Carter. If such a person does emerge, it will be possible to completely undermine the legitimacy of this miserable book. But on the other hand, what lies behind the assumption that such a critic is needed? Is this not a disturbing admission that even in America, when it comes to Israel, the word of Jews is still not, and may never be, completely sufficient?"

The Anti-Defamation League's director, Abraham Foxman, a key backer of the notoriously powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is described as "a one-man Sanhedrin doling out opprobrium or absolution for those who speak ill of Israel or the Jews". But, he too, is described in an article in The New York Times Magazine as feeling that the United States, the "great bulwark [against threats to Israel is] crumbling". Besides Carter, former secretary of state Colin Powell has linked Bush's Middle East policy "more to Jewish neoconservative influence than to principle".

...

In a column written last July, The Washington Post's prominent columnist, Richard Cohen, opined that "the greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake", adding that "the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims [and some Christians] has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, its most formidable enemy is history itself." Consequently, it is high time that American Jewry as a whole recognise the ugliness of Palestinian dispossession and pave the way for a decent settlement.


Would it be too much to ask that the reporter/author (Hishmeh) demand that the Palestinians change their stance?!?


Pertinent Links:

1) American Jews should change their stance

2) The Jerusalem Fund

George S. Hishmeh is a founding member of the Jerusalem Fund. He was on the staff of the Washington Post and Chicago Sun-Times and editor of Mideast Magazine before joining the U.S. Information Agency as senior writer/editor, where he helped to start the Arabic-language service. Since his retirement from USIA, he has written for the Jordan Times, Gulf News, and the Daily Star. He is President of the Washington Association of Arab Journalists.