Two New Published Pieces--Dedication of the Minsk Ghetto Stone+ Op-Ed on Russians and The Jewish Left

Hot off the presses, my two most recent pieces
--coverage of the dedication of the commemorative stone for the victims of the Minsk Ghetto (NY Daily News)
http://www.nydailynews.com/boroughs/story/468255p-394076c.html

and an op-ed piece from the New Jersey Jewish News as to why my friends on the Israeli and Jewish left are clueless in terms of dealing with Russian Jews. Example A: Calling Avigdor Lieberman a "racist" for suggesting the same policy advocated by yefe nefesh Yossi Beillin a decade ago.


Why the Left should engage a voice of Israel’s ‘Russians’

Walter Ruby,a veteran reporter for American and Israeli newspapers, lives in Millburn.

Who is afraid of Avigdor Lieberman? In recent days, there has been a virtual cacophony of voices in Israel and the American Jewish community expressing alarm over the imminent ascension of Lieberman, a 48-year-old former immigrant from Moldova who heads the 11-Knesset-member Yisrael Beiteinu Party, to a powerful position in the Israeli cabinet. Those presently shreying gevalt include the left wing of the Labor Party, including many Israeli Arabs, Ha’aretz, The New York Times, and dovish American Jewish bodies like American for Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum.
In short, the detractors of Lieberman are exactly the sort of folks with whom I usually find myself in agreement. Yet as someone who covers the global Russian Jewish community for American Jewish media and just returned from a conference at Bar-Ilan University that focused on the condition of Russian Jews in Israel, I believe the expressions of alarm over Lieberman on the Left are overwrought.
Moreover, in their very tone-deafness toward Russian Jewish sensibilities, they will only serve to accentuate the drift of Lieberman and the million-strong Russian Jewish community in Israel he represents to the kind of hard-line positions vis-a-vis the Arabs that the authors of those statements so passionately declaim.
Yes, there are legitimate reasons for concern over the news that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, profoundly weakened by the debacle of the second Lebanon War, chose to bring Lieberman into the cabinet in order to stabilize his shaky coalition. Lieberman has indeed said some things that are dangerous for democracy. Several months ago, for example, he said that Arab Knesset members who meet with members of Hamas “are cooperating with the enemy” and should be tried for treason and executed like the Nazi leaders after World War II. Those comments were inexcusable demagoguery and incitement to violence that threaten the uneasy social compact between Israeli Jews and the 20 percent of Israel’s population that is Arab.
Similarly, neither Lieberman nor any other Israeli leader has the right to “transfer” to Palestinian sovereignty areas within Israel’s 1967 borders heavily populated by Israeli Arabs, as he proposed doing earlier this year, without the agreement of the residents of those areas. These residents were, after all, citizens of the State of Israel long before Lieberman himself arrived in Israel from the Soviet Union in 1978.
Nevertheless, the idea of transferring Umm al-Fahm and the so-called Arab Triangle to a Palestinian state in exchange for Israel retaining Jewish settlement blocs inside the West Bank as part of a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement did not originate with Lieberman. The idea was first raised in an academic study by Joseph Alpher in 1994, and was later advocated by dovish MKs like Yossi Beilin and Efraim Sneh.
To be sure, Beilin’s primary motivation in making the proposal during the post-Oslo period was to compensate Palestinians for the loss of West Bank settlement blocs. Lieberman, by contrast, openly acknowledges that he supports the idea because he wants to pare down Israel’s Arab population as much as possible. Yet the effect of Beilin’s proposal and that of Lieberman would be exactly the same. As far as I recall, nobody accused either Beilin or Sneh of being a “racist” or “fascist” as they did Lieberman.
Russian-speaking immigrants and their children are quick to notice the difference in those responses. This population already feels discriminated against and prevented from advancing in fields like academia, hi-tech, and the arts by native Israelis, especially the secular Ashkenazi elite that supports peace with the Palestinians. Russian-speaking Israelis are a proud people who manifest a strong connection to Russian and European culture. To dismiss as racist or fascist the political leader of a group of people who endured grinding anti-Semitism for many decades and once contributed mightily to the military defeat of Nazism amounts to a deeply hurtful conversation stopper that strongly reinforces Russians’ sense of being despised by the Israeli mainstream. It also causes them to tune out the political message of liberal Israelis, a group with whom the Russians potentially have much in common.
Indeed, the so-called “transfer” proposal is hardly the only area in which there is overlap between Lieberman, usually referred to in the media as an “ultra-rightist,” and much of the Israeli Left. Lieberman and his party differ from the rest of the Israeli Right in advocating civil marriage, a high-priority item for the Russian-speaking population — an estimated one third of which is not Jewish according to rabbinic law. In addition, Lieberman fought the introduction of “welfare-to-work” laws by the Sharon government when he served as the Minister of Public Infrastructure, in defense of an immigrant constituency beset by considerable poverty and unemployment.
Ze’ev Khanin, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan who chaired the conference on global Russian Jewry, said, “Lieberman’s popularity is growing because he comes across as a tough guy who is to the right of (Likud Party chair Benjamin) Netanyahu, yet in reality he is a pragmatist who is far less ideological than Bibi.”
Massoud Eghbarieh, an Israeli Arab scholar at Bet Berl, the Labor Party think tank, has known Lieberman since the two attended Hebrew University together 25 years ago. Eghbarieh is convinced Lieberman will move to the center of the political spectrum as he moves closer to power. Eghbarieh says he takes “very seriously” recent assurances by Lieberman to him that Israeli Arabs deserve to be treated as “full citizens” of the State of Israel.
In short, instead of treating the ascension of Lieberman to the cabinet as a cause for lamentation, dovish Israelis and American Jews should engage the new minister and the community he represents on the basis of equality and mutual respect. Yes, Russian speakers often embrace simplistic positions on issues of war and peace, but those opinions are largely informed by their life experience as a despised minority in the Soviet Union and consequent conviction that only a “strong hand” will strike fear into the hearts of those they see as their new persecutors, the Arabs. Instead of placing anathemas on Lieberman and the Russians, the Israel peace camp needs to engage them and help them to understand how the situation in Israel is different from the one they experienced in Russia and why hard-liners like Menachem Begin, Netanyahu, and Ariel Sharon all mellowed and made territorial concessions upon coming to power.
The stakes in all of this could hardly be greater. Unless the peace camp ceases its demonization of Lieberman and the Russian-speaking community and figures out a way to work fruitfully with them, the present right-wing domination of Israeli politics will likely continue for decades, and hopes for Israeli-Palestinian peace and reconciliation may all but evaporate.
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