Letter to an Arab Friend

...Was it so very long ago that Egyptians were performing in their own country those tasks which their recent European masters did not want to perform...

...On the surface, you and the Palestinians both speak Arabic and live in the same cultures in the largely Arab Middle East...

...President Sadat is himself engaged in trying to persuade American Jews...

...The American people as a whole, which has become through its own history hospitable to all kinds of differences, accepts and understands our Jewish fears and our commitments...

...I am sure that you have come to these conversations with one overriding purpose in mind: to work towards "moderating" American Jews...

...The ties between the Jewish community and the rest of America are therefore as strong as those between American Jewry and Israel...

...let us continue to meet, and not only at back tables in obscure coffee shops, and learn not only to talk with one another, but to listen to one another...

...It is not because we are "brother Semites" but because our fundamental situation in the last century, our deprivations, and our needs, are parallel...

...My involvement in Israel is, paradoxically, even more intense than your link to the Palestinians...

...What political meaning does all this have...

...At its very core, Zionism was an outcry by Jews who had lived in the West for many centuries, where they were essentially a kind of colony...

...All of my relatives on that side were murdered by Hitler...

...I, for one, have no desire to confront you...

...Israelis have been insisting for at least a generation that it is the prime duty of every Jew to make aliyah, that is, to come to Israel to live...

...First, there is this: Jews like myself, even those who live in the United States, cannot forget the Nazi years and many centuries of pogroms which preceded them...

...There are always too few of them...

...You have even thrown the Palestinians up to me, telling me that those who have found their way into the Western world are not Palestinian nationalists in any serious sense...

...Why, you therefore ask, am I a Jewish nationalist, a Zionist...

...And yet—deeply though you feel for the Palestinians, passionately though you have labored for them, what happens to their cause will not, for good or ill, fundamentally change your own sense of yourself...

...There were too few to save my family...

...I live my life in the United States and I am writing these lines in English and not in Hebrew...

...Whether we fared better under the Arabs than under the Europeans simply makes no difference...

...You, who are so deeply Egyptian, Muslim, and modern, and I, the East European Jew whose "homeland" is Israel but who is deeply an American, we meet not to confront each other...

...President Sadat went to Yad Vashem, to the memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, during his visit to Jerusalem, and he walked by a line of trees planted in honor of gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews...

...Nonetheless, a whole host of domestic American Jewish problems are unsolved and waiting for our urgent attention...

...I would be telling you less than the truth if I did not add that Israel's existence gives me every day of my life a bad conscience for not living there, and that for me personally the most essential part of my relationship to it is to keep open that question for myself and for the next generation...

...Those who guarantee an "insurance policy" (in this case the Israelis) assess the risks more or less realistically...

...When some of the ghetto walls finally were broken down in the nineteenth century, Jews were offered the choice of entering the majority society, if they accepted its values and assimilated to its way of life...

...accommodation will be found...

...You can depend on Jews like me to give Israel advice on one or another issue which will be more dovish than its immediate policy...

...Israel's existence gives me every day of my life a bad conscience for not living there...

...I look forward to seeing you again soon precisely because you, or someone like you, will be standing beside President Sadat in his conversations, direct and indirect, with American Jews...

...He was a consulting editor of the 1972 Encyclopedia Judaica...

...it may even increase them—but let us at least try to understand why you and I, like magnets, both attract and repel each other with unusual force...

...Must the lives of Jews always depend on the presence of such people...

...It is for people like me who send their children for part of their education in Israel, so that they can have a sense of themselves which they cannot get in a society, even the freest and the most influenced by Jews, such as America, where Jews are forever a minority...

...I cannot and would not and do not yield on the essence Moment /10 of my connection to Israel...

...what profit is there in that...

...You have faced the fact that Israel exists and that its patriotism is real and ineradicable...

...You can lessen American Jewish support for Israel only by letting Israel feel totally secure...

...Jews like myself are tired of the tension and the threat of war, and we want peace...

...For me, even though my life seems to revolve mostly in other orbits, Israel can never be a cause outside myself...

...But, what you have never understood, my friend, is me...

...There are many signs that the conversations, at least between Egyptians and American Jews, are moving from occasional meetings in secret to public dialogue across a broad front...

...Perhaps I do you an injustice, but I think that you have become comfortable with Zionism by thinking about it as a kind of nineteenth century European nationalism with the unique (and to you upsetting) feature that it had as its first object a land in which the bulk of the Jews had not lived for twenty centuries, even though they had remembered it in their religion and culture...

...I want to say this in a different way, which may not make any sense to you—but let me try it anyway: I suspect that an argument can be made for the notion that Egypt under what amounted to British rule was governed with reasonable efficiency and that it really did not make a terrible difference that certain European clubs were closed to Egyptians...

...Such a beginning is long, long overdue...

...Jewish debaters invoke the Almohades in Spain in the Middle Ages and paint the exodus of Jews from all the countries in the Middle East after 1948 as confiscatory and heavily tinged with persecution...

...it flows naturally from your perception of the Arab self-interest...

...The American Jewish community (again a paradox) is, in the very midst of its great passion for Israel, perhaps the most patriotic group within America...

...Palestine under the Mandate was closed even tighter—and so even in the face of the Nazi threat, the American government of good will under Roosevelt and a British Mandate government which Arabs regarded as too soft on Zionism failed to save my mother's family...

...In the last two decades, the rate of intermarriage and of a general loosening of ties to the Jewish tradition among the young has been growing to alarming proportions...

...The alternative is chaos, worse than the armed truce we had before...

...Since 1972 he has been President of the American Jewish Congress, and since 1975, Vice-President of the World Jewish Congress...

...He edited The Zionist Idea, a collection of classic essays on Zionism...

...we are doves, if at all, because of a tactical judgement that our policies are better for Israel's safety...

...Yet my feelings are ambivalent...

...He is also the author of The French Enlightenment and the Jews, which won the first Amram Award in 1967 as the best work of non-fiction in the Jewish field...

...Although we have both known that political decisions are not in our hands, we have, nonetheless, persisted in talking together...

...If some of us are doves, it is not that we need Israel less, or care for Israel less...

...In large part, these labors have held us together as a community and given us practical and tangible common purposes of great power and meaning to us...

...You have faced the fact that Israel exists and that its patriotism is real and ineradicable...

...You, who understand the depth of such an affront (even though your life was not endangered by it), who understand what it means to be a second class person in one's own country, will surely understand the indelible hurt of 2,000 years of Jewish dependence in every country, the reason it is simply intolerable to be required always and everywhere to find a friendly and protective non-Jew...

...I will not...

...We are not spectators sitting in some stadium deciding whether Israel is playing well or badly with the other states on its borders, or most important, with the Palestinians...

...These days Egypt and Israel, no matter how bumpy the road they shall travel in 1978, are inexorably moving closer together...

...It is a fact that almost all Jews are, in varying degrees, worried about the possibility of persecution even in the freest society...

...the present generation, therefore, owe us no recompense, certainly not in Palestine...

...I understand your hurt, which is why I have been a "dove"—that is, I am one of those Jews who seeks for every possible accommodation, because my feelings about my own irreducible needs are more pained than triumphant...

...You will be wise to address yourself to our fears and concerns...

...Your feeling of security—sheer, physical safety for yourself and your family—is not bound up at all in what happens to the Palestinian cause...

...In fact, in its own way, the American Jewish community is in a situation parallel to that of both Israel and Egypt...

...Since so much of the diplomacy is being conducted before TV cameras, it is apparent that both sides understand that they are doing battle not for pieces of territory in the Sinai, the Golan Heights, or the West Bank, but for world public opinion, and especially opinion in the United States...

...The United States, then in the midst of a depression, had its doors almost totally closed...

...What are Third World nationalisms if not assertion by all kinds of peoples, ineluding your own, that they want to enter the twentieth century by modernizing their traditions, without being Americanized or Russified...

...They lived in ghettos under special laws and were assigned those tasks in society that Europeans did not want to perform, such as peddling and, alas, money-lending...

...What has remained with me is the iron determination that never again shall Jewish life have to depend on the good will of others...

...Every time I walk there I am inspired with reverence for those who are so honored...

...How is it, you have asked, that someone who is an American, and whose children continue after him in the United States, is so very much involved with Israel...

...Perhaps you will understand this better if I tell you a personal story...

...Because Israel exists, it is easier for me now than it was thirty years ago to ask for kosher food even at a White House dinner, or to refuse to attend a meeting, no matter how important, on the Sabbath...

...My family came to the United States from Poland in the early 1920's when I was a small child...

...You know that the support of American Jews and the hosts of sympathizers of Israel whom they lead is critical to Israel's strength and, yes, to its stubbornness in defense of its interests...

...they are too clear already, and "your side-my-side" debate is sterile...

...But, please, please do not mistake such action for a shallowness in our commitment...

...What matters is not beins under anv more...

...Yet, I suspect our motives are not the same...

...Let us not spend any time in repeating all the well known arguments as to whether this return was right or wrong, for we will continue to differ...

...What does all of this mean to me, writing about it in New York...

...And you have every right to this endeavor...

...To tell you the truth—a truth which I do not know that you ever fully accepted in our coffee shop meetings—both sides of this argument are irrelevant...

...All of my mother's family was left behind, including her father, all her brothers and sisters, their husbands and wives and their children...

...Here, too, may I recall to your memory some of the recent history of Egypt...

...But why have I come to our coffee-trysts...

...Each of us is very nearly the opposite of what he appears to be...

...That means that Jews have a profound commitment to the existence of an airfield and a port somewhere in the world to which they can go as a right and without asking anyone for permission—and that can only be in Israel...

...Do not imagine that Israelis are all made happy by these feelings of mine...

...And that is why you can never hope to drive a major wedge between Israel and American Jews...

...He is also Adjunct Professor of History at Columbia University...

...I know that you know that Israel is here to stay, that the Israelis regard their State as their native land and that no diplomatic legerdemain can change their fierce determination to live in their country on terms which they regard as viable...

...Do not suppose that if you "win," I will do public battle with Begin even on those specific issues where I agree with you more than I do with him—and there are such issues...

...It is more important today than ever that you hear my answer to these questions...

...What I have hoped is that you, who are sophisticated enough to understand the Israelis, might ultimately understand me...

...We are crucial to Israel's political strength and, yes, we wield some power in the United States...

...It is an honest difference between people whose fundamental commitment to Israel's safety is equally powerful, but who differ, as thoughtful people will, regarding the best way of insuring that security...

...For what we both know is that the day will come, sooner or later, when we shall be neighbors in more than history and geography, in living...

...The quota on Polish Jews meant a sixteen-year wait for permission to come...

...The difference between doves and hawks in the American Jewish community is not a difference between weak commitment and strong, or even between bleeding hearts and warmongers...

...From your point of view, it is no doubt terribly unfair that this history of mine and these needs express themselves by recreating a Jewish state after two millennia in the Arab Middle East...

...Like Egypt, and like Israel, we too need to turn to our domestic concerns and to our inner selves—provided that all the world understand that such a turn does not mean the displacement of Israel from the very head of our list of priorities, that our continuing and intense connection with Israel is central to the sense of purpose and well being of American Jews...

...The trouble with the conventional description of Zionism, about which "we" have been arguing and fighting for eighty years, is that the essential revolutionary truth about Zionism is still obscure, in part because Israel itself does not yet fully live it...

...doubt become still more difficult before it is completed...

...In the 1930's we tried desperately to get them visas to somewhere, to anywhere...

...It is widely accepted as such, no doubt because everyone knows that "only in America" has a Jewish minority had such scope...

...All the fields are fertile now, even though the rain of peace falls not gently like the dew, but in sudden bursts that sometimes drench...

...Yes, they know that because Jews have this continuing nightmare about Auschwitz, Israel can depend on almost unquestioning support from the Diaspora...

...I do not know that this truth will set us free from all the accumulated angers...

...This, however, is an internal argument within the world Jewish community...

...Zionism was born out of the desire to create a normal environment for Jews in a society of their own in which they could become men of the twentieth century in their own language, in the rhythm of their own calendar and in the spirit of their own culture...

...You maintain that, unlike the Christians, Moslems did not persecute Jews...

...But Israel is more than a kind of national insurance policy for world Jewry...

...Our task is to hasten that day, to seize this opportunity to bridge the vast historic and emotional chasms even as the others seek to bridge the political differences...

...Nevertheless, Israelis are annoyed, and sometimes even furious, with their most ardent Jewish supporters in the United States...

...so, too, more quietly, are others...

...He is a member of the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency, and a member of the Executive of the World Zionist Organization...

...I live near New York and love and trust America—but I cannot sleep the night anywhere unless I know that I can never be trapped, or made completely homeless, or killed, as was my grandfather...

...You understand that it is not important whether you approve or disapprove of the recent historic events, both diplomatic and military, which produced that State...

...Its meaning to you, my comrade of the coffee shops, is almost a paradox of paradoxes: you can lessen American Jewish support for Israel only by letting Israel feel totally secure, and therefore you are more likely to encounter public doves in Jerusalem than in New York...

...You have told me as much...

...You have therefore been looking for American Jews who would be less fervent in their support of Israel's most tough-minded policies...

...Our encounters have indeed been something of a courtship...

...Israel's existence and fundamental purpose are central to our lives...

...Let us leave those others to their appointed tasks...

...You have been too polite, or perhaps too politically wise, to ask the even more pointed question: how is it that in all the major countries in which Jews are present in significant numbers, and especially in the United States, this marked uniqueness of the way Jews feel and behave is accepted and is permitted to be politically significant...

...No, the point of our meetings is not to confront each other, but—together—the future...

...This was what President Sadat recognized when he took the step of flying to Jerusalem...

...I have not come hoping to persuade you of my views on what a settlement in the Middle East ought to look like...

...It has been on a "war footing" for at least two generations: the major energies of American Jewry have been spent (and will continue to be spent, if necessary) on Jewish refugees and on the support of Israel...

...Therefore, lest you and I, my comrade from the New York coffee shops, disappoint each other and mislead our friends, I think the time has come for me to describe what it is that motivates us—which really means, does it not, of what can you persuade us...

...Many Jews did exactly this for as long as they could (that is, when anti-Semitism did not intervene against them), but many more felt betrayed and wanted to find a way of entering the modern world on their own terms...

...Is it not strange, sad, but perhaps ultimately a seed of peace, that Zionism is the earliest form of the very Third World nationalism with which it is now in conflict...

...Israel is a creation of a kind of Zionism which I think even a man of culture and good will such as yourself does not really understand...

...the insured, the American Jews, tend to be more worried...

...Nor do I want to be confronted (or seduced...

...As much as any Israeli (perhaps even more, emotionally) I need, personally to know that the Ben Gurion airport and the port of Haifa be securely in Jewish hands...

...The road to that accommodation is not easy, and it will no Arthur Hertzberg is Rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in Englewood, New Jersey...

...Well, here I am (and there are five million or so like me in the United States alone and millions more wherever Jews are free to express themselves) for whom Israel is the emotional center...

...You are, in your context, a "moderate...

...My fundamental involvement is not conditioned or even created by anti-Semitism...

...It is no use to argue, as you sometimes have with me, that the Arab world is not to blame for these memories, that you were not the makers of Auschwitz...

...Nor have I any interest in simply clarifying the battle-lines between us...

...There is a point in our continuing to talk together, my friend of the coffee shops...

...I do not, however, want to deceive you: for all my flexibility, I am a Zionist...