The Reality Principle

After a decade of self-delusion, American Jews must face up to reality. The Palestinian leadership does not want peace with Israel, and there will be no peace.

For many American Jews, this reality has always been too hard to face. In 1988, a self-appointed group of American Jewish leaders met with Yasser Arafat in Stockholm--this at a time when no Israeli leader would meet with him--and were persuaded that all he wanted was a just political settlement. In 1993 came the Oslo accords and the Rabin-Arafat meeting, and most American Jews believed peace was at hand. They did not see it as a risk or as a bet but as a sure thing, easily justifying Israeli concessions. The American Jewish community and its national leadership (with rare exceptions like the Zionist Organization of America) were pro-Labor Party, distrustful of Israeli hard-liners, and committed to the "peace process." Today, after all the Israeli concessions, the truth is very clear: Palestinians and many other Arabs are still not reconciled to the existence of Israel. What is less clear is how American Jews will react to it.

In Israel, the "peace camp" is in disarray, for its miscalculations have been exposed--and shown to have put Israel in greater danger. And many of its members are speaking honestly about that fact. Journalist Ron Mayberg, for example, a leading voice of the peace camp, wrote in the newspaper Maariv that with the Ramallah lynchings, "the Palestinians stripped off the mask used to conceal their true faces since the beginning of the Oslo accords.... [W]e will never forget or forgive that which the Palestinians did to us yesterday."

And some Americans also recognize that the time has come to stand up for Israel. Ninety-four U.S. senators recently wrote to President Clinton asking that the United States stop being so "even-handed" and reaffirm its support for Israel. A group of retired U.S. military officers signed a newspaper ad on October 17, stating that "America's responsibility as a friend to Israel...should never yield to America's role as a facilitator in this process. Friends don't leave friends on the battlefield."

But where are the American Jews? The statement on the crisis by the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism read like something French diplomats at the U.N. might produce: "We are greatly saddened by the renewed violence in the State of Israel.... We affirm our commitment to continued efforts to achieve peace through direct negotiations." To call Arafat's war "renewed violence in the State of Israel" is morally obtuse. Is it just too much to ask the USCJ to blame the Palestinians, something their whole statement avoids doing? And do the Israelis really need lectures today about direct negotiations? Don't they need, instead, flat-out statements of support when they are literally under fire? Can't we leave it to Barak to figure out whether direct negotiations are useful?

The statement from the Reform movement is far better, making it clear that Arafat bears the blame for the current violence and asking Reform Jews to write to Congress to urge that aid to the Palestinian Authority be cut off if Arafat unilaterally declares Palestinian statehood.

Still, its deepest commitment seems to be to the "peace process," even now. "Call the White House and express your appreciation for and support of President Clinton's continued strong, personal role in the Mid-East peace process," it urges, as if Clinton's foolish effort to win himself a Nobel Prize by rushing into ill-prepared peace negotiations this past summer had not contributed to today's problems. Calling Arafat's rejection of the terms Barak offered "reckless," the Reform statement says, "[W]e cannot comprehend why it is that Chairman Arafat prefers war."

So what is to be done? "We urge all the parties to return to the negotiating table immediately," say the bewildered Reform leaders. But Arafat's behavior is entirely comprehensible if one admits--finally--that he does not want peace with Israel; he wants the elimination of Israel. That being the case, of course he prefers war when he thinks a bit of war will advance his cause. And a return to negotiations with him simply rewards that behavior. Like the Conservative Jews, the Reform leaders cannot break out of the box in which their thinking has imprisoned them.

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