A clandestine undertaking on behalf of Israel, the Jets and the Jews.

 
No Pragmatism

I usually visit Israel once a year, and one of the many aspects I look forward to is discussing issues relating to Israel with Israelis.

Increasingly, I find American Jews take uninformed and often extreme positions. While there obviously are exceptions, among the secular, settlements are all bad, a peace process is always good, and Israel has no business being in "the West Bank."

Among the Orthodox, there is a small but vocal minority who take a particularly strident left-wing position and act with the utmost obnoxiousness toward those on the right, as though the mere fact that they hold these views makes them intellectually superior. One such person has, for more than a year each and every time he sees me, ridiculed my first column for The Jewish Press, in which I argued in favor of Israel's right to secure borders, and showed that this required retention of more than 4 percent of Judea and Samaria. The borders proposed by the Clinton Plan are inevitable, he insisted on one such occasion. When I asked him whether, in that case, he accepted that the Old City of Jerusalem will be shared with the Arabs, he said absolutely not, that will have to change.

A much larger number of observant Jews in North America are becoming increasingly extreme on the right. Although many support Bush, who is de facto imposing a forced settlement in which Israel will retain very little disputed territory, these people insist that Israel must cede no territory, with Sharon's plan to unilaterally withdraw not only wrong, but essentially evil. There is no room for nuance, for recognition that Israel will have to give up a lot of land but must fight hard to keep whatever it can. There is no understanding that while either would be very painful, keeping 10 percent of Judea and Samaria would be a lot better than keeping 4 percent.

It's not easy being ideologically right-wing but politically pragmatic, but the issue is not about me. The tragedy is that the failure to articulate why Israel - while agreeable to territorial compromise - cannot cede as much as the Clinton Plan demanded, might well cause Israel to end up with, at most, the 4 percent proposed by Clinton.

What's the difference between 4 percent and 10 percent? It's the difference between destroying all of the Binyamin region, where Beit El, Ofra and Shilo are located, and keeping those areas. It's the difference between further developing Western Samaria and turning Ariel into a real city, or allowing a town of 20,000 and a region of 50,000 Jews to end its role in Jewish history.

Those who insist on ideological purity will end up mourning the ruins of Beit El. Some of these people are actually in the position of meeting with Bush and other Republican leaders, yet naively convince themselves that a very obvious trend toward the formation of a Palestinian state on almost all of Judea, Samaria and Gaza (and part of Jerusalem) is not well underway.
posted on 3/03/2005