84 - 16

I woke up early Sunday morning to the horrible news that a Hezbollah missile had just killed 8 people in a train depot in Haifa, my old home town from my days of living in Israel during the late 1970’s. Then I went to the studios of Russian Television International (RTVI) in Manhattan where I did a session of Viktor Topaler’s Crossfire show, where I debated the situation in the Middle East with a Russian journalist named Mikhail Stoyanov. At the end of the session, Topaler announced that audience members, voting from their homes through some sort of high tech wizardry, had ruled that Stoyonov had won the debate over Ruby 84-16.

In truth, I thought I did pretty well in the discussion. I argued that Israel had the absolute right to hit Hizbollah hard and would have to do so for at least a while to restore its deterrent capacity. I cautioned however that an all-out attack on Lebanon that ended up killing large numbers of innocent civilians would strengthen Hizbollah, not weaken it, by bringing it thousands of new recruits and swinging Lebanon back to a pro-Syrian position. I urged the international community, spearheaded by the U.S., impose a settlement that would involve placing an international force in south Lebanon that would push Hezbollah far away from the border region.

Still, I was destined to ‘lose’ the debate from the very beginning when the supposedly neutral moderator, Topaler, asked me whether the latest chain of events had convinced me that I and liberal American Jewry—together with the U.S. government--had been wrong all along in forcing Israel into making all manner of egregious concessions, such as the pullouts from Lebanon and Gaza, which had now placed Israel in such a terrible strategic position. I replied that no one had pressured Arik Sharon to execute his unilateral pull out of Gaza—it had been his own conception--that he had sold to the Bush Administration, not the other way around. I also noted that every right-wing Israeli leader, from Begin to Netanyahu to Sharon moderates his position upon assuming power because he quickly realizes that tiny Israel--population 6 million--cannot win a decisive military victory against hundreds of millions of Arabs and 1.2 billion Muslims; that an efficacious combination of force and diplomacy are needed to bring lasting peace and security to the Jewish state.

It didn’t really matter what I said, because Topaler and his international Russian Jewish audience are not now in any mood to hear that Israel should do anything else but blow its Muslim tormentors to kingdom come. Talk and macho posturing are cheap of course, and it was noteworthy that when I asked Topaler and Stoyonov whether they were advocating that Israel should attack Syria or Iran, each equivocated and appeared to suggest that the U.S., rather than Israel, should be the one to attack Iran. On one hand, Topaler blames Washington for not permitting Israel to go to war against the entire Muslim world and, on the other he appears to suggest America should go to war on Israel’s behalf.

Of course, it’s easy to be macho from six thousand miles away, but, in fairness, much of the RTVI audience is right there in Israel, as one caller to the program living in Ashdod who called in to blame the U.S. for restraining Israel, reminded us. I feel very deeply their hurt, fear and deep anger at the present situation. After living for decades in the Soviet Union where they were routinely taunted as zhidi (kikes) on trams and subways, where they were prevented from entering universities because of their Jewishness; where they were forced to sit quietly while the Soviet government received Yasser Arafat on his many visits to Moscow as a great hero and Soviet newspapers showed hook-nosed Zionists wearing Nazi armpatches; Soviet Jews came at last to their Jewish homeland and have had endure years of suicide bombing and now a barrage of missiles directed at themselves and their loved ones. Of course, given all of that, many Russian Jews in Israel have a black and white cartoon picture of the world, where silnaya ruka (a strong hand), this time a Jewish silnaya ruka, rather than a Soviet one, is the only answer. And hundreds of thousands of ex-Soviet Jews here in the U.S., worried sick over close family members and loved ones in Israel and feeling far away and helpless, are feeling the same emotion in spades.

So I understand very well the reason so many Russian Jews have adopted a hard right wing position. Given that I am also very aware of how large and influential a part of the Israeli and international Jewish polity Russian Jews have become, I am ready to stick my neck out and lose many more debates 84-16, if I can impact a few of them to rethink such simplistic formulas and work instead for a just peace in the Middle East that gives security and a decent future both to the children of Israel and to Palestinian and Lebanese ones as well. Without inflating my importance too much—nu, so go ahead and inflate, already—that’s one of my main missions for what’s left of my life. God knows, it ain’t gonna be easy. And now, please God, if you are out there somewhere, please do something to end this horror in our beautiful Israel—where I am supposed to travel in three weeks—and in Gaza and Lebanon as well, before it consumes any more lives. Maspeek, Zastatichye, Enough!