The Right as outcast By David Bar-Illan (February 23) - Discrimination against Israel's political Right has become so commonplace, that rightists themselves accept it as a law of nature. Some trace the problem to the state's first 29 years, when the Right was treated as a pariah after David Ben-Gurion lumped it with the anti-Zionist communists as unfit to participate in government. But after assuming power in 1977, the Right was in government for 18 out of the next 23 years. A government led by the Right signed the peace treaty with Egypt - a breakthrough that paved the way to the possibility of peace with the Arab world - and it was responsible for one of Israel's greatest contributions to world security, the bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor. Yet the Israeli Right has never achieved true respectability. A typical example was provided by the Conference of Presidents, the umbrella organization of major American Jewish organizations, which held its annual meeting in Jerusalem last week. Presumably eager to listen to the whole gamut of Israeli opinion, it kept right-of-center spokesmen (who represent a clear majority of the Jewish population) to a bare minimum. Yet the organization did invite a "new historian" to speak, giving legitimacy to views of a fringe group of history rewriters headed by Ilan Pappe, a communist party candidate for the Knesset. They also listened to a panel of four journalists, all identified with ultra-leftist views of the Arab-Israeli conflict. No opportunity to be heard was afforded to representatives of the 200,000 Judea-Samaria-Gaza residents, whose fate will be determined by the final-status agreement the government is hoping to reach before year's end. American Jewry's leftist-liberal leanings are no secret. It votes for Democratic presidential candidates almost indiscriminately. Ronald Reagan, a dedicated friend of Israel running against Jimmy Carter, an avowed antagonist of Zionism, managed to get only a third of the Jewish vote. And President Clinton, who has unconscionably and brutally intervened in Israel's internal affairs and negotiation process, is hailed as Israel's best friend ever. But the Presidents' Conference's conduct is not just a reflection of American proclivities. If anything, its partiality to the Israeli Left is due more to Israel's own attitudes than to American preferences. The moral perversity and intellectual warp of these attitudes were recently demonstrated by a prominent journalist and close aide to the late Yitzhak Rabin, who published a self-abasing apology to the Communist Party. The reason for the abject mea culpa, he wrote, was that despite the abuse heaped on it, the party was right all along: it foresaw peace and coexistence between Israel and a Palestinian state. Incredibly, no one protested this obeisance to a rabid anti-Zionist party, supportive of regimes second only to the Nazis in committing mass murder. The communist party in this country, financed by the Soviet Union and spying for it, opposed the establishment of a Jewish state, objected to the war against Hitler until he invaded the USSR, supported the Stalinist persecution and execution of Jews and the prevention of Jewish emigration from the USSR, and justified the arming of the Arab regimes sworn to Israel's annihilation. Today the party is not only eminently legitimate but trendy. Popular radio personality Shelly Yechimovich recently announced she was proud to have voted for it. One can only imagine how long she would have kept her job had she announced she supported a radical rightist party. No wonder, then, that a Presidents' Conference invitation to a "new historian" does not raise an eyebrow. On the contrary, any objection to his appearance is considered "McCarthyism," while opposition to the appearance of a rightist is not only politically correct but a sign of supreme enlightenment. The political Right attributes this double standard to the predominance of the Left in universities, think tanks, the media, the arts, and even in the business community. But it is largely a result of the Right's own intellectual passivity. In the US a similar situation begat the neo-conservative movement. It was led mostly by Jewish intellectuals sickened by the Left's proclivity for "blaming America first," and by its indiscriminate identification with revolutionary tyrants and murderous national liberation movements. In a few short years the neo-conservatives created one of the most intellectually fertile and politically influential forces in recent American history. They were a central factor in achieving American victory in the Cold War, restoring America's self-confidence, and making conservatism part of the mainstream. The odds against a similar development in Israel may be formidable. But what is at stake is nothing less than Israel's survival as a Jewish, Zionist state. |
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