Liberal American Jews Leaning Right

Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg is a founder of Americans for Peace Now, formed more than 20 years ago to pressure Israel into withdrawing from the Palestinian territories. As such, he is firmly aligned with the liberal wing of American Jewry.

But these days, the 80-year-old scholar of Jewish studies finds himself in an unusual place, foursquare behind Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his hard-edged approach to the Palestinian conflict.

“What’s coming out of Washington is sheer hypocrisy,” said Hertzberg, who taught generations of students at Dartmouth College and Columbia University. “You cannot be spending lives and treasure uprooting Al Qaeda and preparing to kill Saddam Hussein and then say to Israel, ‘You’ve got to stay still.’ We are being had.”

As Secretary of State Colin L. Powell begins meetings in Israel today to press the government for restraint by the military and new negotiations with the Palestinians, a small group of once-fervent peaceniks is watching to make sure that he gives Sharon enough room--and time--to complete the current military operation in the West Bank. Angry at the suicide bombings, worried about growing anti-Semitism, these liberals now fully support Sharon’s drive to root out terrorism in the territories.

“I’ve heard so many liberal Jews say that after all the suicide bombings, there’s nothing else to do,” said Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco. “If Israel stands still and lets her babies get blown up, the society won’t survive.”

Long reviled for his policy of expanding Israeli settlements into Palestinian areas, Sharon is now seen in a more sympathetic light. Like Democrats embracing a Republican president’s war on terrorism, some liberal American Jews are rallying to Israel’s Likud leadership, no matter its political stripe, at a time of national peril.

“The Jewish community as a whole is united with Israel in its current battle against Palestinian terrorism,” said Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress. “Some may differ on the aggressive tactics being used. Some would argue that isolating [Palestinian Authority President] Yasser Arafat is not a sound decision. But those are nuances. The priority now is Israel defending its citizens.”

James Zogby, who monitors public opinion among Arab Americans, has also seen the hardening of views among Jews in e-mails and phone calls from his counterparts. “From the e-mails I’ve gotten, it’s clear people were shaken by the Passover attack,” said Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. “The same progressive voices are still being heard--Peace Now hasn’t stopped being Peace Now--but there has definitely been a hardening.”

Zogby also notes a hardening of opinion among Palestinian Americans, many of whom have family members in Ramallah and Bethlehem, under siege and unable to call relatives in the United States. He worries that the increasing polarization between the two camps will make a return to the peace table more difficult.

Not everyone on the Jewish left is prepared to embrace Sharon’s military operations. Many liberals were relieved at President Bush’s decision to engage in the peace process, believing that U.S. intervention is the only hope for an end to the decades-long conflict. Many are convinced that Israel must leave the settlements that dot Palestinian communities, the islands of Israeli occupation that only incite resentment.

“Israel ought to get the hell out of the West Bank,” Hertzberg said. “That won’t buy peace. There is no peace without a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. But it will buy quiet.”

In Los Angeles, hundreds showed up Wednesday night at a meeting called by the Progressive Jewish Alliance to discuss how to back Israel without supporting Sharon’s military incursion. “We’re pro-Israel, pro-peace and pro-human rights,” said executive director Daniel Sokatch.

And Sunday night, at a glittering black-tie fund-raiser for the Israel Policy Forum on New York’s trendy Chelsea Pier, the biggest cheer of the evening came when planners broadcast on a wide-screen television a videotape of Bush announcing the Powell peace mission.

But if opinions vary widely about Israel’s military response to terror, other worries seem widely shared. American Jews of all political persuasions seem particularly enraged by the anti-Semitism they are seeing in Europe, where synagogues in France have been bombed and European leaders are talking about levying sanctions against Israel for its incursion into the West Bank.

“I am angry and shocked that 60 years after the Holocaust you see anti-Semitism rising on the part of so many in the European community,” said Rosen, of the American Jewish Congress. “There is a lack of political backbone. It was months before [French President Jacques] Chirac stood up and said something.”

As for the United Nations, Hertzberg recalls that Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who chastised Israel this week, had to apologize belatedly for not marshaling the international community to save Rwandans who were being massacred by Tutsis during the 1990s. “I do not want him or his successor, after Israel is the first Western country to be blown up with a couple of satchels of nuclear bombs, to say, ‘So sorry,’ ” Hertzberg said.

And, suspicious that Palestinians do not really want to share land with Israel but are out to extinguish the Jewish state, many American Jews agree that if Sharon is not the solution, Arafat is definitely the problem.

“People haven’t really switched on Sharon; it’s just that they’re disgusted with Arafat,” said M.J. Rosenberg, who runs the Washington office of the Israel Policy Forum.

Laura Geller, chief rabbi of Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills, said Israel’s future security requires “a negotiated settlement that can lead to a two-state solution.” She is now convinced that Arafat can no longer deliver that.

There is also concern among American Jews that Arafat and the Palestinians are winning the public relations wars, with images widely circulated of Palestinians uprooted from their homes in the West Bank, without food and water, humiliated by Israeli dominance.

Mainstream and conservative Jewish leaders are planning a massive rally in Washington on Monday to underscore that Israel’s fight against suicide bombers is part of America’s fight against terrorism.

But rally planners are already at odds about whether the event should, as the right prefers, endorse Sharon’s policies and criticize Bush for pressuring Israel, or, as the left wants, support the Israeli people at a time of crisis and the White House for attempting to mediate a solution.

“It’s a very confused picture,” said Stanley Sheinbaum, the Los Angeles publisher and philanthropist who led a group of American Jews to meet with Arafat in 1988. “American Jews, who are generally quite liberal, have been reluctant to get too critical of Bush, but that was when he was being totally supportive of Sharon. Now that he’s backed off . . . he’s getting a lot of flak from the Jewish community.”

Giving heat to American presidents is just fine with Rabbi Hertzberg, who recalls lecturing President Nixon in 1973, urging him to do more to rescue Jews who were trying to flee the Soviet Union. When Nixon’s face darkened, Hertzberg apologized for the rough treatment, reminding him that earlier generations of American Jewish leaders had failed to “talk tough enough” to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt when Jews were trying to escape the Holocaust in Europe.

“We dare not repeat that mistake,” he told Nixon.

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