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| Before Rabin's assassination, 1995 |
In a late 1995 demonstration in the center of Jerusalem, with the
leadership of the Likud overlooking a sea of people, signs showed then-Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin in a Nazi uniform and read “Death to the Oslo Traitors.”
The vilification by the radical right and religious of the democratically
elected leaders of Israel,
who were negotiating peace with the Palestinians for the first time in history,
reached the point of incitement. The extent of that incitement dawned on us
Israelis, Jews and friends of Israel
only on November 5, when a young Israeli, indoctrinated by his spiritual and
political leaders, pulled a handgun and assassinated Prime Minister Rabin. The
fighter for Jerusalem
in 1948, the Chief of Staff of the Six Day War victory, became fair game because
he was willing to make territorial compromises for the sake of peace. After the
shock, along with the deep mourning that followed, lingered also the hope that we
would have learned the lesson of the price of extremism, the cost of hatred,
the curse of violence. For a short time it seemed to work, but soon enough
polarization returned with renewed energy. Furthermore, the opponents of peace
became increasingly radical and enlisted support in the Diaspora, especially
among American Jews. Sixteen years after Rabin's assassination, the Jewish
community in the United States
is so polarized with regard to Israel
that people are scared to discuss it, not wanting to find themselves on
opposing sides. Polarization about Israel has now become an issue on
the political turf in American politics. The depiction by some so-called friends
of Israel of President Barak Obama as hostile to Israel is merging into the domestic
rivalry between liberals and conservatives. The competition among Republican
presidential candidates on the degree of their support for Israel, by which they mean support of the hard-line
policies of Israel's
government, borders on absurdity. The Republican US Representative in my
district described President Barak Obama as the worst American president in the
history of Israeli-American relations. Reality is quite different, but this is
not the time or place to discuss it. This is a time of danger, and it is time
to sound the alarm. Domestic hostility to the president by the ultra-conservatives
and/or other uneducated Americans, combined with incitement by Israeli and
Jewish hard-liners and the religious right, directs a stream of venom towards
President Obama. Thank goodness no one pulled a handgun on him, but sooner or
later someone was bound to go too far in interpreting the heinous message. It
happened to be the owner and publisher of a Jewish community newspaper in Atlanta. Unable to
distinguish between his zeal in what he believed to be support for Israel and the irresponsible misuse of his publication,
he mentioned a presidential assassination as one of Israel’s
options in the debacle over Iran.
This is an appalling expression which deserves all the condemnations it has
received. At the same time, however, it demonstrates the dangers of rampant polarization,
within the United States in
general, within the American Jewish community and within Israel. Instead
of unity, it leads us all into a downward spiral of alienation. This is bad for
Israel, it is bad for the
Jewish community, and it is bad for America. It is the duty of our
political and spiritual leaders to show responsibility in taming and reversing
the rise of hostility toward anyone and anything who does not agree with
"us," no matter what "us" means. It is time to keep Israel out of
American politics. It is time to reunite the Jewish community and to recognize
that there are different ways to support Jewish and Israeli causes. It is time
to reconnect.
