News Analysis: Shake-up in Israel Promises Parallel Jolt for American Jews

The victory of Likud opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu has only begun to reverberate through the American Jewish establishment, but it promises to shake the players and their platforms upside down.

Centrist organizations already are shifting their rhetoric to reflect a changing consensus on the peace process, while those marginalized in the past four years for their opposition to the Labor government policies are trading places with the left-wing “peace camp” groups.

For some, the biggest impact of the Israeli election reaches beyond the organizational landscape.

These individuals are asking whether Israel’s turn to the political and religious right could alienate Diaspora Jewry’s grass roots, which is largely non-Orthodox and more liberal.

Such alienation could result in a less central role for Israel in both non- Orthodox spiritual life and in mainstream Jewish fund raising, whose cornerstone historically has been an identification with Israel.

Israel’s Orthodox parties captured an unprecedented 23 seats in the Knesset and have pledged to roll back reforms granting some legal legitimacy to the non- Orthodox Jewish streams.

Of the most immediate concern is a commitment by these parties to pass a law nullifying a recent Supreme Court decision that opened the way toward recognition of Reform and Conservative conversions performed in Israel.

Also worrisome for the non-Orthodox is talk of passing what is known as a “basic law,” which would assign virtually quasi-constitutional status to the Orthodox monopoly on religious life, referred to in common parlance as the “status quo.”

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Reform movement’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations, said the political rise of the religious right is “an enormous blow to the possibility of partnership” between Israel and the Diaspora in enhancing Jewish religious life and civilization.

“Israel will be seen and present itself as advocates for a medieval religious point of view, a point of view which is openly and explicitly hostile to our religious concerns,” said Yoffie.

For his part, Rabbi Moshe Sherer, president of the Fervently Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, welcomed the changes.

“In essence it means the constant erosion of the religious status quo will now grind to a halt,” he said.

Diaspora Jews “should be delighted that in Israel there are enough Jews who want to maintain Jewish tradition and put and end to the waves of assimilation and intermarriage,” he said.

Sherer said he is saddened by the fact that this development might hasten the division between Israel and non-Orthodox Jews in the Diaspora, but he also sees it as “inevitable,” given the “path of Reform further and further away from religion.”

Blaming the Orthodox for disunity is like “blaming a faithful spouse for the breakup of a marriage,” he said. “The fault lies with those who stray.”

But Yaron Ezrahi, a political science professor at Hebrew University, said a coalition of nationalist and religious parties that tries to stop “Israel’s move toward an open society” would “create the largest Jewish ghetto in history.”

“This kind of Israel will not be attractive to the Jewish world,” said Ezrahi, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem.

Another Hebrew University professor, Steven Cohen, an expert on Israel-Diaspora relations, said non-Orthodox Diaspora Jews would “either walk away in alienation and disgust or stay to fight to retake Israel for themselves and for people like them.”

The conflict could be good for the Israel-Diaspora relationship, he said. “I’d be worried if American Jews didn’t protest the changes. It would mean they didn’t care.”

On the political front, surveys before the election showing that the majority of American Jews supported the Labor government’s handling of the peace process suggest that the shift to a Likud policy could produce tensions.

But Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, discounted predictions of any broad- based tension.

“I believe the American Jewish majority doesn’t identify with Labor of Likud but with the State of Israel,” he said. “I believe American Jews today, as before, will stand with the democratically elected government.”

“Bibi is someone who appreciates Israel’s relationship with the United States and with the Diaspora and won’t want to alienate” either one in politics or in religion, added Hoenlein.

Hoenlein’s conference as well as other centrist and umbrella Jewish organizations are expected to adjust gracefully to the political change, despite the fact that they have touted, with varying degrees of energy, the line of the Labor government on the Arab-Israeli peace process.

After all, they were forced to make the reverse swing only four years ago, after 15 years of a Likud-controlled government.

In the immediate aftermath of last week’s vote, the leaders of these organizations were warning against an overreaction to the result. They cautioned that it was the late Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin who, despite his hawkish politics, orchestrated the Camp David Accords with Egypt.

And they said that even though they expect modification from a Netanyahu-led government, it is far too soon to declare that the current peace process will be derailed.

“I don’t seen this as cataclysmic, I don’t see this as revolutionary,” Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said of the Likudnik’s victory.

The path of Peres represented “the express lane to pursue the peace process,” he said, while Netanyahu’s reflects “the local lane.”

For their part, some right-wing activists, such as Rabbi Avi Weiss, president of the Coalition for Jewish Concerns-Amcha, are shunning what he terms “triumphalism,” despite his “joy that Bibi won.”

Weiss called for unity, saying, “As concerned as I’ve been that this peace lacked security, the greater challenge facing Am Yisrael is we’re really polarized and that’s what really threatens” Israel and the Jewish people.

But the rancor that plagued the Jewish debate over the peace process both before and after November’s assassination of Yitzhak Rabin is nearly certain a explode again over hotbutton issues such as settlement expansion, U.S. funding for the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian statehood.

Left-wing organizations such as Americans for Peace Now have pledged to resume their time-honored role in the opposition and fight against any policy that it sees as undermining the peace process.

“We intend to organize to a maximum of our ability to prevent a rollback” in the process that would occur if Netanyahu makes good on his campaign pledges, said Gary Rubin, APN’s executive director.

Thomas Smerling, head of Project Nishma, a dovish peace process educational group, predicted that the larger Jewish organizations “will fall into line very quickly” with the new government.

Indeed, as soon as any of its policies “elicit world criticism, most will run even faster to circle their wagons because that is the role they’re accustomed to.”

But he said peace process supporters would be unable to “rationalize the indefensible.”

“If it’s a replay of [ex-Prime Minister Yitzhak] Shamir, where Bibi invites the Arabs to the table while building settlements madly, there will be exponentially greater dissent than there was five years ago, because so many people have seen what’s possible.”

Some insiders fear that the free-for-all that began on Capitol Hill in recent years would only intensify and further dilute and undermine the political clout of the pro-Israel lobby, whose hallmark had always been a unified front.

But Morton Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America who has been roundly criticized for his political lobbying against the Peres-led peace process, was sanguine about the future.

Saying that he has been vindicated as “mainstream” by the Israeli elections, Klein added that he foresees a “period of healing” within most mainstream Jewish groups.

At the same time, he predicts that those on the left will “be complaining vociferously about pressure that will be placed on Yasser Arafat to honor his commitments to the Oslo accords or about Jews moving to Judea and Samaria.”