The Jerusalem Report Magazine: Columnists : Columnists Article

Click for Contents

Click here to subscribe to The Jerusalem Report

P.O. Box 1805,Jerusalem 91017
Tel. 972-2-531-5440,
Fax: 972-2-537-9489
Advertising Fax:
972-2-531-5425,
Email Editorial: [email protected]
Subscriptions: [email protected]
Web site: http://www.jrep.com

David Horovitz: Intolerable Complacency

President Bush devoted lengthy passages in the major speech of his late-November London visit to the crimes and failings of the Palestinians and their leadership. Without deigning to mention Yasser Arafat by name, he essentially accused the rais and his acolytes of abetting terrorism, financial corruption, and acting against the interests of their people, the region and international stability.

For Israel, by contrast, he had only one sentence of complaint. But it was devastating. He told the government that it had to stop playing games and just dismantle settlement outposts that even Ariel Sharon defines as illegal; that it had to freeze the expansion of existing settlements; that conditions had to be eased for ordinary Palestinians; and that he wouldn�t condone a security barrier that loops deep into the West Bank. Further criticism was implied by omission: The president chose not to include Israel when he listed conflict zones in which governments had a "duty" to employ "the measured use of force" against violent enemies.

Sharon, as is his wont, swiftly dismissed the president�s verbal assault as marginal. "I don�t advise anyone to see it as a sign of new tension," he declared. But such nonchalance is as inappropriate as his finance minister�s offensive claim the day before -- at a time of 300,000 unemployed, mounting homelessness, a collapsing edu-cation system and cata-strophic social service cutbacks -- that the three-year recession is over. And the complacency emblemized by the prime minister�s response is profoundly damaging to Israel, its supporters and its future.

The Bush Administration is a proven ally of Israel in general and Sharon in particular. With an election year about to dawn, Bush may be in no position to exert sustained pressure on Israel, and Sharon is happily anticipating the comfort zone this offers him. But when the U.S. president gives irritated public vent to anger that has been percolating through private channels for weeks (as documented by Leslie Susser�s "Administration Angst" in the last issue of The Jerusalem Report), it behooves the prime minister to take him seriously.

This is no repeat of the reprehensible presidential admonitions of two years ago, when Bush publicly ordered Israel not to send troops into the territories to try to prevent suicide bombings. Rather than blandly asserting that differences of opinion between allies are routine and no source of alarm, Sharon must recognize that Bush�s criticisms today are those of a worried friend who plainly believes that some of the prime minister�s policies run counter to Israeli, Jewish and American interests. Now thoroughly familiar with the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.S. administration sees Sharon building more homes in the territories, skewing the fence to encompass some of them, and declining to confront the most militant settler radicals, and simply fails to understand the logic. Why, the Americans wonder, is Sharon following a strategy that further complicates the prospects of an accommodation with the Palestinians, undermines Israel�s existential aspiration to maintain a Jewish democracy, and is leading outside critics and domestic defeatists to conclude that a two-state solution is no longer viable? And how can the prime minister continue to shrug off the demographic realities with fatuous talk of imminent mass immigration from the West?

Making matters worse is that the Sharon policies that so trouble Bush also play into the hands of Islamic terror, which can easily cloak its perverted religious cult of violence in the disguise of anti-Zionism. They are also making life dangerously comfortable for those who would spread the poison of anti-Semitism.

In the space of just a few weeks, we have witnessed a horrifying rise in hostility to Israel and to Jews -- a ratcheting up of verbal and physical violence across Europe, the Middle East and the Far East that is rapidly turning some countries into danger zones for Jews. Anti-Semites are emerging from the woodwork with a fervor not witnessed for two generations, and while their hatred needs no ammunition, they are feeding excitedly on the very issues that are straining relations between the Jewish state and its superpower ally. From Malaysia to Greece, opinion shapers spout vicious rhetoric to wild applause. In France, the Jews are told by their chief rabbi to hide their kippot under baseball caps. In parts of north London, where a large ultra-Orthodox community coexists uneasily with a substantial Arab population, hasidim fearful of being assaulted

stave off such attacks, I�ve been told, by telling their would-be Arab assailants that they are supporters of the rabidly anti-Zionist, Arafat-admiring Natorei Karta sect. In Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey and France, of course, the physical hostility has tragically moved well beyond the occasional punch-up.

The American Jewish community, now almost unique worldwide in being able to maintain a proud and public lifestyle, cannot afford to be sanguine either. At the recent General Assembly in Jerusalem, a celebration of solidarity with Israel by thousands of the most active North American Jews, emphasis was rightly placed on the challenge of assuring the U.S. community�s spiritual future under the perennial shadow of assimilation, with much despair over the staggering proportion of non-identified Jews, the high numbers of parents eschewing costly Jewish education for their children, and Jewish students� on-campus apathy to Jewish and Israeli interests.

But the physical well-being of American Jews is also less than assured. Some Americans already hold that they face a heightened terror threat because of their nation�s support for Israel. Had 9/11 been concertedly presented by its murderous perpetrators as a revenge assault for Israeli actions, there would be many, many more such claims. And it would take, heaven forbid, only a single bloody act of "anti-Israeli" terrorism in the U.S. to galvanize a public groundswell against Israel and even against Jews.

In so fraught a climate, Sharon�s cavalier dismissal of Bush�s heartfelt concerns is frankly intolerable. For its own sake, for the sake of American Jews, and for the sake of Jewish communities around the world, Israel simply cannot afford to be publicly and substantially at odds with its only real ally.