MICHAEL BERENBAUM
MICHAEL BERENBAUM GUEST COLUMNIST The world is changing dramatically. Reality is challenging traditional thinking. Yet Israel remains stagnant. The Berlin Wall is open. Poland is ruled by a...
...The world is changing before our eyes...
...They were dispirited by the unending sameRabbi Michael Berenbaum, political activist and journalist, is the project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and adjunct professor of theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D. C. ness of the U.S.-Israeli tensions...
...The status quo was being sanctified...
...change was in the air and no one could predict the final outcome of these dramatic shifts...
...Israel had abandoned the moral high road in favor of realpolitik, and now with the realpolitik changing what role did Israel want to carve out for itself...
...Reality is imposing bold changes on traditional thinking...
...After all, who among us can get excited about six clarifications to the five-point program meant to replace a rejected ten-point program, when the bottom line never changes...
...Everywhere I went in Eastern Europe the atmosphere was electrifying...
...I found my Israeli friends in and out of government bored by politics...
...I wondered what thought was being given to the significant global changes in the East-West rivalry...
...After all, in the decade of the 1980s, Israel and its American supporters based its appeal to American policymakers on Israel's role as a strategic asset and dependable democratic ally in the global struggle between East and West...
...I spoke with those in government...
...So too, on my next visit, there will be another impending crisis...
...Assad would have to contemplate Syria's future with more limited support from Moscow...
...They will inevitably succeed in boring George Bush and James Baker, who are seeing radical changes in region after region of the globe...
...The once unimaginable is now coming into being...
...Last month, I returned to Israel after an absence of several months...
...Every effort was being made to buy more time for the failed policies of the past...
...Under Shamir, Israel does not want to relinquish an inch of the land of Israel, and territorial compromise—at least in principle—is the minimum requirement for pushing any peace process forward...
...Hungary has become a non-Communist state...
...Only within the army did I find people who realized the necessity for change...
...All I heard was a reiteration of conventional thinking, increasingly made irrelevant by revolutionary changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...
...Poland is ruled by a government led by non-Communists...
...Arafat had said the "I" word— Israel...
...It is the sameness of the politics that is striking, especially now...
...The Israelis have succeeded in boring themselves...
...But there was no change in Israel: No change in a government stalemate or in the tired political leadership, and no change in the determined effort to resist change...
...Khomeini was dead...
...But they felt their concerns were not heard by the politicians because the political process has become self-absorbed and insulated from reality...
...The daily newspapers were carrying headlines of an impending crisis in TJ.S.-Israel relations over the Israeli rejection of Secretary of State Baker's five points, or over Israeli-South African partnership in missile development...
...And those of us who support Israel, who love Israel, can only wonder if Israel will arise from its lethargy while there is still time to reshape its future...
...Soon, they will bore the American Jewish community...
...Everywhere the world was changing— even the Arab world was in a transition of sorts...
...But Yitzhak Shamir is still trying to extract preconditions from an American secretary of state before he sits down with a Palestinian delegation for exploratory talks...
...I came to Jerusalem on the final leg of a journey that had taken me to Budapest and Belgrade, Moscow and Prague...
...It was in this heady atmosphere that I went back to Jerusalem...
...And he insists these talks concern themselves solely with ways in which Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews can live under Israeli sovereignty in the land of Israel...
...They believed that current military policies were creating a Palestinian state...
...Several months earlier on my last visit, there was also an impending crisis...
...Democracy is triumphant...
...The military men with whom I spoke were convinced that there could be no military solution to the intifada...
...Mubarak was speaking of peace...
...The Cold War may very well be over...
Vol. 15 • February 1990 • No. 1
