Israel and the Great Exodus

...All that smacked of the Brezhnev-era Izvestia...

...Motivated much more by fear and a desire for the good, safe life than by Jewish nationalism, they'll be less susceptible to the Likud and more open to Labor, which advertises itself as the party of peace...

...Rumors circulate that Zionist Forum will go political...

...Why, for example, not do everything possible to free up money being budgeted for the army, and for containing the intifada, and use it instead to absorb the immigration, an immigration apt to grow even larger if Israel unbends...

...Right-wing Zionists are especially tempted by such an airlift...

...The stampede is something of a race against time...

...Nor can the arrival of hosts of Soviet Jews be expected to answer the eternal questions behind the nonstop political uncertainty: In what ways should the Jewish state be Jewish...

...They have scant attachment to or interest in the occupied territories...

...It's unlikely, though not impossible, that if and when pogroms break out, they'll be officially inspired...

...L abor's campaign heading into an L election will stress the opportunity to compromise with the Palestinians and the folly of defying the world by spurning that chance...

...Things are fluid...

...And how should peace with the Arabs be pursued...

...But it probably won't, Sharansky obviously being aware that as things stand, it'seasier to keep your integrity in the Gulag than the Knesset...

...He decided to let the Jews go nevertheless not because he was converted to Zionism, but because he hoped to win trade concessions from the U.S...

...Which of course makes the Russian anti-Semites even angrier...

...hadn't imposed a quota...

...The trouble for Labor is that as they became more knowledgeable about the not-very-edifying workings of Israeli democracy, those ex-Soviets who abandoned the Likud in the eighties were probably as likely to move farther to the right as they were to switch to Labor...

...Both big parties have courted him in vain...

...And it isn't any relief to be inYou often hear Hebrew spoken with a juicy Russian accent by activists for parties whose ideas about the Arabs make the Likud's sound conciliatory...

...But many do have family and friends back in the USSR sitting on their own suitcases as the rumors of imminent pogrom multiply...

...Generally,big waves of immigration have triggered boom times, but a wave this big hasn't been seen since Israel's first years, which were years of idealism, austerity, and rationing...

...Putting it in American terms, this means the equivalent of 42 million new citizens in less than a decade...

...Ex-Soviet Jews who'd rather have gone to the States aren't eager to get into uniform and help suppress the intifada, as the boys and men among them up to the age of fifty-two will have to do...

...In May, more than 10,000 fleeing Bronsteins arrived in the Jewish state...

...But their natural inclinations are smothered or corrected, at least temporarily and often forever, by what they learned in their previous lives, that is, by the socialism and anti-Semitism they knew in the Soviet Union...

...To be sure, May 5, which is Marx's birthday and was unofficially heralded this year as Pogrom Day, passed non-violently...

...Though something of a religious revival has been noted among Soviet Jews of late, most are secular, not to say profoundly ignorant of all things Jewish—most of the men arrive uncircumcised...

...No one has yet suggested that the door be shut—that would be the repeal of Zionism...

...It has lived underground for generations, and now that free speech has been decreed, the old Jew-hatred is in the open...

...Where are hundreds of thousands of newcomers to be housed...

...Shimon Peres, for the time being still head of the Labor party, has already said that as soon as Israel gets on track and accepts U.S...

...Unfazed by the absence of full diplomatic ties between Israel and the Soviet Union, many parties have opened branches in Moscow, Leningrad, and other cities, where tea, Hebrew lessons, and propaganda videos are available to the Israelis-to-be during the months they must anxiously wait before they can leave...

...You often hear Hebrew spoken with a juicy Russian accent by activists for parties whose ideas about the Arabs make the Likud's sound conciliatory...

...Only the two Arab parties are leaving them alone...

...An expanded, accelerated exodus coupled with the start of talks would, for opposite reasons, be both their and Arafat's dream and nightmare combined...

...It's fairly safe to predict that the Communists won't get much backing from the newcomers...

...It long ago expunged "socialism" from its vocabulary, and the first ex-Soviet member of the Knesset is a Laborite, the Georgian-born Ephraim Gur...

...The conventional wisdom fits well with impressionistic evidence gathered in the company of ex-Soviet Israelis...

...They're refugees—most would be going to Brooklyn if the U.S...

...If it can hold on to most of the newcomers and their children, make good use of them and let them contribute, it will become a stronger, more secure, less nervous country...

...Meanwhile, the jumbos touch down, and if another "national unity" government doesn't emerge from the current political torture, there will probably be early elections...

...of any kind becomes a memory...

...No one is betting that there is going to be an electoral reform soon to curb the small parties...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 19 structed in the use of gas masks...

...Were they Israeli-born, most would hold dovish views about the problemwith the Arabs and vote for Labor and parties to its left...

...Besides, Labor has mended some of its ways...

...6 6 rr hey're ours," a Likud backI roomer said recently...

...To make things worse for itself, until 1977, and even for a while afterward until the political earthquake of that year which brought Begin and the right to the top sunk in, Labor behaved like the Establishment and either patronized or rejected most of those ex-Soviets who tried to join up...

...Likud and Labor are both keeping a wary eye on Natan (Anatoli) Sharansky, the celebrated Zionist who spent years in the Gulag and was released to come to Israel in 1986...

...Gorbachev was the one who opened them, he made visas available almost on demand, even though he explicitly acknowledged that a Jewish exodus would mean a brain drain for his backward country...

...He already heads something called Zionist Forum, a nonpolitical pressure group seeking to cut red tape in the immigration and absorption process...

...The Likud will riposte that those who sound dovish notes aren't necessarily the ones best suited to make peace with the Arabs...

...The incessant arrival of chartered jumbos from Budapest and Bucharest, soon from Warsaw and Helsinki, too, and maybe even straight from Moscow, probably makes such talk all too realistic...

...A very high percentage of the Jews from the Soviet Union—especially those from the Baltic, Russian, and Ukrainian republics—are doctors, engineers, inventors, teachers, musicians, linguists...

...The Likud, however, the underdog party that lambasted socialism and all its bureaucratic works and exhibited no guilt about the occupation, welcomed the newcomers, as it did the Moroccans a decade before...

...But there is some grumbling and alarm undercutting the satisfaction of rescuing all these Jews, receiving all these reinforcements...

...There's no telling whether, if anarchy comes, the exits will stay open...

...Nevertheless, it's the conventional wisdom that the majority of the previous Soviet immigrants voted for the Likud, and that it was in part thanks to their support that Menachem Begin was able to come in from the wilderness in 1977 and become prime minister...

...0 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990...

...Meanwhile, Israel remains very much a democracy...

...This did little to dampen the panic...

...Between the two extremes of Communists and rabbis, however, all the other parties have a chance to win votes...

...It certainly is, especially in contrast to the land of empty shelves...

...Blessing or curse...

...Many Jews are taking the chance to get out to wherever they can, as quickly as they can...

...At exit polls during Knesset elections in those years, respondents weren't asked their country of origin...

...Prof...

...6 T and of milk and honey," the smooth Kremlin spokesman, Gennady Gerasimov, calls Israel...

...His successor could well have different ideas...

...It's frightening...

...It's possible that in the next five to seven years, a tidal wave of 700,000 newcomers, mainly from the Soviet Union but also from Hungary, Argentina, Ethiopia, and South Africa, will hit Israel...

...The door to the U.S...

...Benefits will be foreseen even before peace is made...

...The only things they have to declare in their ideological baggage are a loathing for socialism and a rather idealized love of its opposite, which they believe prevails everywhere in the West, of which Israel is a part...

...Such "material," as it is referred to, could be the country's salvation, but only with a lot of luck and intelligent planning on the part of a not exactly brilliant bureaucracy...

...having meanwhile been nearly shut by a new quota, they go to Israel, where the door is wide open—for a Zionist, what is being granted the Soviet Jews, what is taking place, is nothing more or less than repatriation...

...This is the agreement that the Arab League persuaded the Kremlin to put on ice following Yitzhak Shamir's remark last January about a big immigration necessitating a big Israel...

...The situation bears some comparison to that in West Germany when the Wall came down and the East Germans flocked over to be with their better-off brethren...

...They constitute a class, a type...

...Certainly, if in the next elections the conventional wisdom is borne out, and the majority of the new voters from the USSR help to return the Likud to power, this of itself won't mean that the "peace process" is doomed...

...And in public, there is already talk across the political spectrum of declaring a state of emergency, bringing the army in to take over from the bureaucrats and setting up reception camps of pre-fabs, even tents...

...That is also concentrating the minds of Soviet Jews...

...He's probably the most popular figure among the ex-Soviets, and probably could deliver a couple of added Knesset seats to the party he blessed—enough to enable it to make the next government...

...Everyone is hopeful, everyone is watching his back...

...So hopes Agursky, a Zionist himself...

...The great exodus is a rabbit that history has pulled out of its hat...

...The results were immediate and some have been long-lasting—today sixty-five ex-Soviets sit on the Likud's central committee, to only twenty-five on Labor's...

...If things go badly, Ph.D.s from Moscow University who find themselves on the dole in Tel Aviv are liable to head for the U.S., quota or no quota...

...Nor will the anti-Zionist, rabbinical parties in Israel appeal much to them...

...The deal would also appeal to the Soviet newcomers in Israel...

...The red flags at the Labor party's May Day parade in Tel Aviv evoked laughter at best and fear at worst among the new arrivals...

...Mikhail Agursky, a Moscow-born Sovietologist who arrived in 1975 and managed to become a Laborite soon after, says that the support of these latest arrivals is up for grabs...

...It didn't matter that Labor has ditched almost all of its ideology, that the flags are vestigial—it rubbed the wrong way anyway...

...A great Soviet exodus at this time is, and isn't, exactly what the Jewish state needed...

...Forone thing, he says, they're not Zionists like those who came in 1969-79...

...But when voting time comes its hard-nosed outlook on negotiations has so far always made more sense to more Israeli Jews...

...Some Israelis—they tend to be leftists and doves who fear that the Soviet Jews will vote right-wing—hope in private that somehow the influx will turn out to be not so great...

...Labor, which is in sad shape after failing to form a government, might have success too in selling itself, both to veteran Israelis and to greenhorns voting for the first time, as the peace party...

...The Soviet Jews represent 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 new voters, so almost all of the country's dozen parties, including the Communists, are earnestly wooing them...

...According to this scenario, every jumbo that lands improves the Likud's odds to form a government without Labor after the next general elections, which may be called soon...

...Furthermore, it stands to reason...

...It won't be long, according to Israeli officials, before the monthly figure reaches 20,000...

...Israel is a tiny, not very well-off or efficiently run country, that is going to have a hard time integrating, much less turning to advantage, this windfall of trained brains and great genes—this year, for example, 1,000 Soviet Jewish physicists are expected...

...Once in Israel, they are bombarded with everything from dinner invitations to offers of furniture by ward heelers...

...On the one hand, it demonstrates that the obituaries for Zionism were premature...

...A witty rabbi once said that the Trotskys make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins pay the price...

...Fewer than a thousand so far have chosen to go to the West Bank...

...His confidence is based on experience with an earlier, smaller exodus of Soviet Jews, which brought some 150,00,0 to Israel between 1969 and 1979...

...More likely, they'll be just one aspect of the chaos if perestroika fails, the Soviet Union collapses, and government Edward Norden is a writer living in Jerusalem...

...So did the dovish propaganda of some Laborites and many of those to Labor's left, decrying the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and plumping for talks with the PLO...

...This self-pitying canard was born even before Trotsky-the-demon burst onto the scene...

...Already, some of the immigrants who have been here long enough to catch their breaths have staged protests against the red tape...

...They're fleeing, but compared with Russians who have to stay behind, those Jews who have gottenout are privileged, the luckiest casualties of the simultaneous washout of Marxism-Leninism and Russian imperialism...

...The rush starts even before the flights land at Ben-Gurion airport...

...On the other hand, it may swamp the so-called "absorption" apparatus...

...Alternatively, he could field a list of his own...

...Though the left and center-left in Israel is where you find most, if by no means all, of the local academics, scientists, and bohemians, nevertheless the same sort of people who had come from the Soviet Union had good reason not to feel at home with the rhetoric and assumptions of their counterparts in Zion...

...by living up to basic human rights standards, of which freedom to emigrate is one...

...How will jobs for them be created...

...The romance of Soviet Jews with Communism, which was a minority phenomenon even when it was hot, long ago burned out...

...Secretary of State James Baker's ideas for talks, the USSR will renew full diplomatic relations, direct flights from Moscow will double or triple the number of Soviet Jews arriving, the intifada will halt, and American aid will actually increase...

...From being a country where the majority of Jews have grandfathers born in Moslem countries, Israel is about to become a place where European backgrounds are more common...

...Indeed, in what might be collusion, the State Department and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze have also let it be understood that if Israel relaxes its conditions for meeting the Palestinians (read the PLO) and pledges not to settle Soviet Jews in the occupied territories, it would become possible to honor the El Al-Aeroflot agreement on a direct Moscow-Tel Aviv route...

...Labor hasn't written the newcomers off...

...Tobe sure, the Likud is riven at least as seriously as Labor is by tactical disputes and personal feuds...

...The stampede out of the Soviet Union is a spinoff of glasnost and perestroika...

...No one knows how many Soviet Jewish refugee-immigrants will finally come, in part because no one knows how many Jews there are in the teetering Russian empire—guesses range from 1.4 million to twice that...

...After all, the peace treaty with Egypt was signed by Menachem Begin...

...The Likud is counting on the current, potentially much bigger wave of Soviets to do as its predecessor did...

...Yet it's also a country beset by a Palestinian uprising, threats of poison gas from Iraq, an unemployment rate of almost 10 percent, a permanent political crisis, strikes, and 25 percent annual inflation...

...What used to be only thought or whispered by some Russian nationalists can now be shouted and published—that the Jews collectively are the cause of the country's woes, economic, political, social, and cultural...

...Today's refugees may finally be influenced most by the views of the Soviet Jews who came in the seventies, a good many of whom by now have become acclimated, put their previous lives and experiences in perspective, and spread out across the spectrum...

...The question is whether any one party, or bloc of parties, will pick up the lion's share, breaking the deadlock between "doves" and "hawks," depriving the rabbinical parties of the balance of power, and either burying or breathing life into the so-called peace process in the Middle East...

...Other things may changetoo, but Israel's brand of democratic politics isn't necessarily going to be one of them...

...The path to more such breakthroughs is blocked, according to this argument, only so long as the men ruling the Arabs can believe that they have more to gain, and less to lose, by threatening war than making peace...