Nearly 100 American Jews, including many prominent rabbis, academicians, editors and writers have signed an advertisement in support of the “Peace Now” movement in Israel for which financial contributions are solicited. The ad, placed by “American Friends of ‘Peace Now'” has appeared in the Jewish Week in New York and in other English-language Jewish periodicals around the country.
It states that “Israeli and American Jews must not make the work of rejectionists easier by taking positions which do not benefit Israel’s interests and undermine its new relations with Egypt and its long standing relationship with the United States.”
According to the ad, “all further settlement of the West Bank must be stopped” because “Such a policy seriously impedes any eventual agreement with the Palestinians and distresses Israel’s friends and allies.” It also calls on the Israeli government to “conduct negotiations with any Palestinian body that renounces terrorism and accepts the path of peaceful negotiations as the only way to solve the conflict with Israel. Such negotiations should confirm each side in its national right, including Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in secure and recognized borders and the Palestinians’ right to a national entity.”
The ad states that “Peace Now affirms that Israeli security required normalization of relations between Israel and its neighbors” and that “The Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty is the essential first step toward that end… Continued Israeli rule over more than a million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza subverts the democratic and Jewish character of Israeli society.”
Signatories of the ad, who are also among the organizers of the group include Leon Wieseltier, a fellow at Harvard University; Rabbi Steven Shaw of Rutherford, N. J.; Irving Howe, author and critic; Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, vice president of the World Jewish Congress; and John Ruskay, vice president of the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation.
Others are Rabbi Eugene Borowitz; Rabbi Balfour Brickner; Rabbi Wolfe Kelman; Seymour Martin Lipset of Stanford University; Joshua Lederbem, Nobel Laureale in economics, Arthur Miller, playwright; Rabbi Joachim Prinz, vice president of the World Jewish Congress; John Slawson; Marie Syrkin; Diana Trilling; Leonard Fein, editor of Moment magazine; Michael Cohen, editor of Jewish Frontier magazine; Kenneth J. Arrow, Nobel Laureate in economics; Daniel Bell, professor of sociology at Harvard; Aaron Asher, editor in-chief of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, publishers; Nathan Glazen, professor of sociology at Harvard; and Irving M. Levine of the American Jewish Committee.
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