Israelis are deeply concerned that the overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev by Communist hard-liners this week could halt or even reverse the far-reaching changes that the deposed Soviet president managed to effect during his six years in power.
Israel and the Jewish people have been important beneficiaries of many of those changes.
Most significantly, Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika led to dramatic changes in the way in which the Soviet government treated its Jewish population, the world’s third largest.
It was Gorbachev who freed hundreds of political prisoners of conscience, including Anatoly Shcharansky, and then allowed Jews and people of other faiths to practice their religion freely.
Gorbachev then opened the floodgates of aliyah, increasing the level of Jewish emigration from just over 1,000 in 1985, the year he took office, to more than 200,000 last year.
Those years also saw the start of a new peace process guided by the United States in tandem with a newly cooperative Soviet Union.
Finally, perestroika has led to burgeoning political, economic and cultural relations between Israel and the nations of Eastern Europe, formerly part of the hostile Soviet bloc.
As Israelis watch the drama unfold on the streets of Moscow this week, they wonder what will become of all this progress.
Events in the Soviet Union are too fluid for observers here to predict their consequences with any degree of confidence. The government has refrained from publishing an official reaction.
RETURN TO PRO-ARAB POLICY?
But there is hope here — though little more than hope — that nothing much will change, even if the hard-liners under Gennady Yanayev, the Soviet acting president who replaced Gorbachev, manage to retain power.
It is hoped that the new regime will not cut off Jewish emigration, for fear of offending Western and especially U.S. opinion.
Jewish Agency Chairman Simcha Dinitz expressed that view Monday night. It dove-tailed with the government’s decision to pursue “business as usual” with respect to aliyah.
Not all observers are optimistic. Professor Galia Golan, a Hebrew University scholar, predicted a swing back to a tougher, “pro-Arab” foreign policy by the new Kremlin leadership.
That could have an impact on Soviet aliyah and sour Moscow’s willingness to cooperate with the United States in orchestrating a Middle East peace conference.
For the immediate future, Israeli officials are expecting an upsurge of immigration as Soviet Jews rush to leave before the gates are closed. As long as transportation is available to the transit points in Eastern Europe, Jews holding exit permits and Israeli visas will continue to leave, the officials believe.
Some Israeli commentators have noted, with a touch of cynicism, that since the coup, the lines have disappeared from the Soviet consular office in Tel Aviv.
Many of those waiting for visas were Soviet olim unhappy with Israel who hoped to return to their former homeland. Suddenly, they are happy to be here, columnist Nahum Barnea observed in the mass-circulation daily Yediot Achronot.
Another column in Yediot suggested that a suspension or diminution of aliyah would be a welcome breather for Israel’s severely strained economy. But that is very much a minority view.
A STALLED PEACE PROCESS
On the other hand, some press cynics are suggesting that despite protestations to the contrary, leaders of the hard-line Likud government are secretly pleased that the peace process may be stalled.
“God is a Likudnik,” wrote the diplomatic correspondent of the Labor daily Davar, who guessed that Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir will be far from unhappy if the changes in Moscow mean the peace conference scheduled for October will not take place.
The prime minister, after all, is “faithful to the ideology of gaining time,” he wrote.
Barnea of Yediot reported jokes making the rounds in government circles that Israel actually helped the hard-liners unseat Gorbachev, in the hope of gaining such a delay.
When Agriculture Minister Rafael Eitan of the right-wing Tsomet party, a former Israel Defense Force chief of staff, met in Moscow last month with Yanayev, who was then vice president, “they discussed not agriculture but how to deploy armored personnel carriers,” Barnea jested.
But in a more serious vein, observers pointed out that even President Bush was unable to say with confidence at his White House news conference Tuesday that plans for the Middle East peace conference in October would proceed unaffected by events in Moscow.
“It’s far too early to say what will happen to the Middle East conference,” Bush told reporters in the Rose Garden. “I hope that there will be no frustration of that on the part of the Soviet Union, who have heretofore played a very constructive role,” he said.
Israeli analysts believe that if the hardliners in Moscow retain power, the peace conference will, at best, be delayed.
But others expect a radical lurch of Soviet foreign policy away from the rapprochement themes of the Gorbachev years.
They warn that Syria, whose agreement to attend a peace conference with Israel was the outstanding success of recent U.S. diplomacy, may now reconsider in light of the Soviet coup.
ARABS REJOICE AT GORBACHEV’S DOWNFALL
The Arab rejectionist states — which Bush referred to Tuesday as “renegade regimes” –rejoiced at the departure of Gorbachev. So, initially, did the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Subsequent statements by the PLO were fence-straddling, indicating an awareness that sympathy for Yanayev could cost it dearly in terms of Western opinion, as did its early support for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Meanwhile, Agriculture Minister Eitan had warm words to say for the Soviet acting president. He said that at their meeting in Moscow, Yanayev referred to the heads of certain Arab states as dictators and took pains to assure his Israeli guest that the Soviet Union would not return to a system of dictatorship.
But many analysts believe Yanayev is merely a figurehead and that the forces behind the coup are more hard-line officials whose records on Israel and human rights are questionable.
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