Mideast Briefing: Still Fighting the Battles of the 1980s

By Ed Rettig, Acting Director, AJC Israel

November 10, 2009

Two recent events, relatively minor in themselves, illustrate a significant political reshuffling within world Jewry on issues of Israeli security.  One was an op-ed by a well-known leftist intellectual that appeared in the Forward harshly condemning Jewish critics of the Goldstone Report. The other was a talk given by a retired IDF brigadier general and right-wing former MK at Buffalo University Hillel. The two represent, respectively, the classic dovish and hawkish approaches.

The Forward op-ed criticizes American Jewish community leaders and the U.S. Congress for their strongly negative reaction to the Goldstone Report and warns against turning opposition to the report into a "litmus test" for being pro-Israel.

The op-ed makes two important errors.  First, it characterizes the Goldstone Report as "a search for probable cause" when it is, in fact, little more than an accumulation of allegations. To be sure, not everything in the 575-page report is false. The noted left-wing Israeli thinker Moshe Halbertal, in a brilliant analysis for The New Republic, writes that "the Goldstone Report as a whole is a terrible document," but that Israel must provide answers to some serious allegations, the wheat, as it were, among the vast amount of chaff.   Goldstone himself acknowledges that in a court of law—that is, where established principles of proof and respect for the rights of the accused applied—his report would prove nothing. Yet Goldstone seems to have missed the moral complication: making harsh, poorly examined accusations and publishing them worldwide, pending serious investigation, is a classic case of libel, or what the Jewish community calls, in Hebrew, lashon harah.

Goldstone responds to such criticism with the argument that the UN Human Rights Council, which authorized the investigation and report, did not give the commission a judicial mandate. And not only that: When it came to adopting a resolution after the report was submitted, the Council undercut Goldstone in the same biased fashion, ignoring the brief section criticizing Hamas (which even in the original report took up only 26 of 575 pages) and focusing its wrath only on Israel.  Even were we to accept Judge Goldstone's explanations, they do not explain why his panel often neglected the most basic examination of the testimony it heard.  Transcripts reveal the credulous atmosphere in which the commission did its work. When a psychiatrist, Dr. Iyyad el-Sarraji, suggested that "inside Israel there is an identification with the aggressor, the Nazi," no one challenged the extraordinary charge. The credibility of the Goldstone Report, then, resembles that of an Oliver Stone movie, a problem that its author either cannot see or chooses not to address.

So, to respond to the leftist critic, what if Goldstone and his colleagues—whatever their intent—actually did create a litmus test by producing a document biased to its core against Israel? It is a litmus test for a specific failing—the willingness to give a respectful hearing to criticism of Israel even when its bias is clearly demonstrable.

The second error committed by the op-ed author has to do with the prominent Israeli voices that are calling for a commission of inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza operation (a step I personally support).  The people he cites—Dan Meridor, Michael Eitan, Avishai Braverman, and Isaac (Buji) Herzog—want an Israeli inquiry despite, not because of, the Goldstone report. They utterly and publicly reject the report itself. Indeed, the report would have little to teach an Israeli commission of inquiry, since most of what needs examining lies outside the military realm, involving questions of civilian well-being, medical care, morale, mental health, education, etc.

On the other side of the debate, we have the UB Hillel’s invitation to a decorated Israeli general, whose hard-line approach in the Knesset was epitomized in a 2006 declaration at the funeral of a fallen IDF officer: "We cannot be with all these Arabs, we'll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs from here and remove Israeli Arabs from the political system."  The attorney-general of Israel informed him that this constituted incitement and that he would be prosecuted if he repeated it. He has not done so, and yet he has never recanted or apologized, nor gave any reason to suspect that these are not his genuinely held beliefs. Why this particular Hillel thought that someone who has advocated the transfer of Arabs out of the country was an appropriate speaker on Israel-related issues is a question I hope the board of that institution is pondering.

Taken together, the two events demonstrate the intellectual bankruptcy of the old political elites that continue to fight the battles of the 1980s based on political and moral assumptions that are no longer relevant. The brigadier and his followers have so closed their minds to the Arab population and its experience that they do not recognize our moral responsibility to meet the Palestinians as equals. The op-ed author and his circle, meanwhile, have so opened their hearts to the concerns of our enemies that they cannot object when Israel is treated as though it did not deserve fundamental rights and political respect. These elites, on the Right and the Left, used to lead the Jewish world, but both have lost their way and, thankfully, most of their supporters.

In their place has arisen an amorphous Center, perhaps best understood as a heterogeneous agglomeration that encompasses most of Labor, all of Kadima, and a surprisingly large majority of the Likud. Depending on the issue, it sometimes even includes parts of Meretz, Yisrael Beitenu, and other parties farther afield. This Center seeks to balance an openness to Palestinian grievances with a vehement insistence on Jewish rights. It is this logic that enables the Labor Party to sit in a Likud-led coalition, and encourages the Likud to offer Palestinian statehood as the opening gambit for a new round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Contrary to the criticism leveled at the American Jewish leadership by the likes of the op-ed author, critics of the Goldstone Report (including AJC) represent the wisdom of that center, and speak for far more people, American Jews and Israelis, than either the old right-wing hawks or the old left-wing doves. We have suffered through the failures of both Right and Left. The new “quiet majority” in the Center, clear-headed on Palestinian responsibility for their own plight but unabashedly supporting Palestinian independence, gives cause for a certain degree of optimism.