This Is a Story of Two Cousins, and Why They’ll Never Meet : Soviet Emigration: Meanspiritedness crawls the Earth intent on smothering Jewish lives.

This is about my two boy cousins: Imri, 14, born into Hebrew’s native landscape in sun-dazzled Jerusalem, and Alexander, 13, born into mellifluous Russian in snowy Moscow. As a citizen of Israel, Imri grew up without a minute’s worth of domestic anti-Semitism, whether from government or gutter. Alexander has lived with both kinds since the day of his birth.

Though separated by distance, language and social experience, Imri and Alexander appear to be close--very close, in fact--at least in age. But even here they are divided. Imri, who will always be thought of as a galloping boy of 14, would now be a young man of 22 if Yasser Arafat’s gunmen had not murdered him on the Tel Aviv coastal road a dozen years ago.

Neither boy ever knew of the other’s existence. Yet my two boy cousins, who at first glance have nothing in common--one is in Moscow, the other in his grave--might have met one day and learned of their connection. To tell the truth, they are connected even now, though not by their undiscovered cousinship. What is the connection? Official Arab meanspiritedness--a meanspiritedness so vast that it crawls over a continent, from capital to capital, lobbying on behalf of smothering Jewish lives.

Alexander and his mother have been attempting to emigrate from the Soviet Union, where as Jews they are beginning to feel more directly threatened--physically endangered--than ever before. In Moscow, Jewish gravestones have been vandalized and synagogue windows smashed. The anti-Semitic network that calls itself Pamyat (Memory), and arouses memories of czarist pogroms while promising fresh depredations, has been allowed to hold a rally in Red Square; one of its publications, the Journal of the Public Committee, charges the Israeli medical rescue of Armenian earthquake victims with having spread AIDS. And Mikhail Gorbachev has just appointed Valentin Rasputin, Pamyat’s ideological mentor, to his new President’s Council. In January, 30 Pamyat stalwarts yelling anti-Semitic fulminations through a bullhorn invaded a Moscow writers’ meeting and pledged to come back “next time” with machine guns. In Leningrad, a Jew was found murdered in his flat, a Star of David cut into his flesh.

Some observers say that Alexander and his mother are being unnecessarily panicky. It is noteworthy that such pundits do not reside in the Soviet Union, nor have they heard (as I did this morning) Alexander’s grandmother cry out on the telephone from Moscow, “Save my children! Save them! Save my children!” Unquestionably, my cousin Alexander is a boy who does not feel welcome or safe in the land of his birth. He and his family have done nothing to harm that land and have asked for no more than the right to live peacefully and productively. Alexander, you can be certain, has never thrown a single stone or Molotov cocktail.

Alexander now has a chance--in principle--for exodus to freedom, genuine freedom, which for him means the opportunity to come to maturity in a democratic society where domestic anti-Semitism is unheard of. There is only one country in the world nowadays where no one, under any imaginable circumstance, no matter what the burden or what the crisis, will blame a Jew for being a Jew; only one country that has its arms out to Jews in travail without strings of any kind and with an unprecedented generosity of the spirit of haven. That country is Israel. And though the Soviet Union has told Alexander--in principle--that he can go wherever there is a polity willing to take him in, Alexander remains trapped in Moscow. A year ago, Soviet authorities promised direct flights from the Soviet Union to Tel Aviv; that promise is not being honored.

And meanwhile Yasser Arafat, backed by official Arab consensus, moves from city to city across the face of Europe, an apparition of meanspirited roving, turning up here and here and here--Romania, Austria, Czechoslovakia--with the single-mindedly obdurate purpose of choking off the reunion of Jewish cousins, of setting up stumbling blocks before fleeing, of jamming stones into Alexander’s passageway out of his Soviet tomb.

One can ask why. The current lies are not acceptable. It is not because Arafat is afraid that Alexander will go to high school in Hebron or Nablus instead of in Tel Aviv. Arab officialdom has always been opposed to Jewish deliverance. I remember my grandmother’s tears as she stood weeping into her Yiddish newspaper in our Bronx kitchen in 1939, literally beating her breast over the British “White Paper,” a decree that sent ships crammed with desperate Jewish refugees back to Nazi Germany, and soon enough into the ovens--a British brutality prompted by pressure from Arafat’s predecessors in an identical campaign. There was no West Bank issue then.

Still, there is something different about this contemporary Arab meanspiritedness. After all, it is not 1939, and jubilant German cousins have broken through a wall of tyranny so that both family branches can know freedom. What is different now, I think, lies not so much in Arab resistance to Jewish reunion--that is unchanged, and as bitter as ever--as in an emerging psychological element. What the Arabs refused to do themselves--the succor of their own cousins--they will not allow anyone else to do. “Generosity is the flower of justice,” Hawthorne wrote, and the Arabs, beginning in 1948, have accumulated a long record of withholding justice from their cousins. The newer politics of Palestinian nationalism may serve that record inthe Arab mind; but this repression was never more publicly evident than right now.

In Israel at this very moment, there is singing and dancing at Ben-Gurion airport, and cakes and embraces, in celebration of the arrival of those Soviet Jews who have managed to leap over Arab-instigated obstacles to their journey. The refugee newcomers are flooded with flowers and bed linens and baby carriages and hot dinners and refrigerators.

The Arabs, by contrast, dealt with their refugee cousins as if they were refuse, thrust them into inhumane camps and penned them there in misery for three generations, while opposing any attempt at amelioration from any direction. The object was to turn human beings into political instruments--an object that has notably succeeded. As the Holocaust is Europe’s 20th-Century shame, so are these used and abused cousins of the camps the Arabs’ shame.

“Selfishness is the only real atheism,” Israel Zangwill said. To such clarifying wisdom one might add that selfishness is eager to spawn more selfishness. It is this uncharitable psychological element--Arab shame (or perhaps shamelessness) over Arab ungenerosity--that is incarnate in Arafat’s malevolent scurryings from capital to capital as he tries to prevent Jews from saving their cousins. Here is Alexander’s tragic connection with his cousin Imri. The Palestine Liberation Organization ordered Imri’s murder; it was PLO thugs who cut the boy down. Now the PLO orders Alexander’s entrapment; this time the thugs belong to Pamyat. But the desire to snuff out Jewish freedom is the same, and so is the source.