William Mehlman

The next time some know-it-all tries to disqualify you from voicing your objection to the policies of this or any other Israeli government on the grounds that you don’t live in Israel, be sure to check your wallet. You’re being targeted by the most transparent shell game of the past half century.

The “if you don’t live there, you better shut up” scam is two-dimensional -- historical and political. Israel is the shared legacy of the entire Jewish people. With all due respect to the percentage of that number residing there at any moment in time, their right to decide its destiny, even within the most idyllic democratic context, is mitigated by the impact of that decision on a global Jewish constituency to whom Israel may represent anything from a dream waiting to be fulfilled to a critical lifeline in a world becoming increasingly inhospitable to Jews.

From flag-waving idealists to the frightened Jewish escapees from Paris and Strasbourg to the impoverished Falasha of Ethiopia, the “ingathering” of which Herzl dreamt remains an ongoing process, a stream that could burst into a floodtide with one twist of tomorrow’s headlines,

From Day One of its reestablishment, the Jewish state and its governments have been vested with two categorical imperatives---guardianship of the global Jewish lifeline and its assets and custodianship of the dream of national Jewish renewal. They are embodied in Israel’s Declaration of Independence and the Law of Return, which vouchsafes to any Jew seeking it, automatic citizenship with rights equal to his compatriots. Any Israeli government that breaks faith with either of those precepts can and should be held answerable to the heirs to the universal Jewish legacy Israel represents.

From a political perspective the “if you don’t live there, you better shut up” put-down is an even bigger scam. First and foremost, it is extremely selective; it is almost never applied to Diaspora Jewry’s liberal-left. Those who were in fullest cry against any exception taken to the Sharon-Olmert government’s catastrophic destruction of 25 Jewish communities in Gaza and northern Samaria knew exactly who their target was---the national Zionist camp in America and throughout the world. Contrast that uproar over “outside meddling” in Israel’s internal affairs with the indifference that has greeted the efforts of leftist billionaires George Soros and Peter Lewis and their assorted hangers-on to create a new lobbying organization, certain to weaken an already wounded AIPAC, and clearly aimed at increasing State Department pressure on Israel for whatever concessions may be deemed necessary to the realization of a “two-state solution” to the Arab-Israel conflict. Soros, whose MoveOn.org website has pilloried President Bush for his support of Israel’s refusal to deal with Hamas, has yet to set foot in the Jewish state, but his still unnamed lobby’s perspective is spot-on with his stated conviction that Israel must bear at least partial responsibility for the rising tide of European anti-Semitism because of its allegedly overly harsh reaction to Palestinian terrorism.

To the noble cause of ensconcing a sovereign Palestinian entity along Israel’s southern and eastern flanks, Soros & Co. have rallied the usual gallery of far-left organizational elites, including American Friends of Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom and the Jewish Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center. Individually and as a group they are well documented case studies of blatant offshore interference in Israel’s policy-making decisions. It was the Israel Policy Forum, commandeered by David Elcott, an advocate of erasing the “illegal” Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria, that convinced Condoleezza Rice of the wisdom of pressuring Israel to effectively relinquish control of the Gaza Strip border crossings at Rafah and Karni. The predictable result was the influx of vast quantities of advanced weaponry into the hands of Hamas. Seymour Reich, past president of B’nai Brith International and a founding member of IPF, remarked of this diplomatic guerilla operation that “I have no doubt that we bolstered the secretary of state’s instincts and strengthened her opinion that aggressive involvement was needed to achieve practical results.”

The precedent for such offshore interference in Israel’s strategic affairs by the hypocritical left goes back a long way. Its employment captured headlines in the summer of 2003 when ultra liberal philanthropist Edgar Bronfman, in his capacity as president of the World Jewish Congress, co-authored with former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger a letter to President Bush denouncing Israel’s security barrier as an obstacle to peace and urging the president, on the eve of a meeting with Ariel Sharon, to treat with the Israeli prime minister no differently than with Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas. It was the same Mr. Bronfman, as reported by Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick, who took the Palestinians to task for failing to confine their activities to Judea, Samaria and Gaza . “If the Palestinian suicide bombers only went to the settlements and told the world they were wrong,” he is cited as declaring, “then the whole world would have had a case against Israel and there would be a two-state solution by now. Instead, they sent them into Israel proper (emphasis added), which is ghastly.” Were we to infer from this that the murder of Jews beyond the borders of “Israel proper” is less “ghastly,” or perhaps not “ghastly” at all?”

American Friends of Peace Now and Brit Tzedek v’Shalom are particularly noted for their offshore involvement in issues affecting Israel’s security. AFPN makes no secret of its generous funding of Peace Now (its Israeli parent organization) and the latter’s endless lawsuits against Jewish hilltop communities in Judea and Samaria. One of those legal vendettas led to the vicious police assault--captured on video and viewed throughout the world--on teenagers and members of the Knesset defending the Jewish residents of Amona against an Olmert government evacuation order.

More recently, the PN-AFPN partnership persuaded The New York Times to devote a full page to the claim that the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria, plus entire Jewish neighborhoods in the Jerusalem metro area, are built on “usurped Arab private property.” The allegation, as The Jerusalem Post’s Sarah Honig observed in a recent column, is “brazenly fraudulent, in part relying on the fact that the Arabs continue to claim lands they sold the Jews for exorbitant prices.” It should come as no surprise that the Times’ knee-jerk coddling of the self-loathing Jewish left again trumped any bothersome checking of the facts.

In terms of negative impact on Israeli fortunes, nothing matches the “victory” AFPN, in league with the Israel Policy Forum and Brit Tzedek, achieved last fall in scuttling an AIPAC-backed “Palestinian Anti-Terrorist Act” that enjoyed the warm support of both houses of Congress. The bill would have cut off U.S. direct aid to the Palestinian Authority as well as assistance to any NGO or UN agency with connections to Hamas operating within the PA structure. Defining the PA as a “terrorist sanctuary,” the measure would have additionally hung padlocks on PA offices in the U.S. and placed restrictions on the travel of PA and PLO representatives within the U.S. Finally, it would have prohibited contacts by American personnel with officials of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine..

Despite huge majority approval in the House of Representatives, an AFPN-IPF-Brit Zedek steamroller, one of the more intensive lobbying campaigns the Senate has recently witnessed, flattened AIPAC and succeeded in watering the bill down to such a degree as to leave virtually no room for compromise between the House and Senate versions. In the end, with the echoes of an anti-bill telephone campaign that outnumbered supporting calls 3 to 1 ringing in their ears, the legislators decided to drop the whole matter.

The Olmert government, trigger-quick to condemn any imagined interference in Israel’s vital interests by U.S. Jewry’s national Zionist camp, stood mute before this mugging of its own AIPAC lobby and the embarrassment of scores of Israel’s most dedicated supporters in the House and Senate. That probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Olmert and Sharon before him have for years stood in worshipful admiration of the machers of the American Jewish left and their multimillionaire enablers. After all, it was an Israel Policy Forum dinner in 2005 that provided the venue for Mr. Olmert’s famous assertion that Israel had become “tired of fighting…tired of being courageous...tired of winning…tired of defeating our enemies.”

Almost on a par with the prime minister’s acquiescence to the Jewish left’s vaporization of the Palestinian Anti-Terrorist Act, was the relative silence of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, of which American Friends of Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum are a part. While the Presidents Conference is not, per se, a Zionist construct, it is difficult to see, Glick argues, how it can justify sheltering under its umbrella, groups whose apparent goal is “to weaken Israel, to weaken Israel’s alliance with the U.S. and to strengthen Israel’s enemies.”

Obviously emboldened by its success in crushing the Palestinian Anti-Terrorist Act, AFPN has embarked on yet another spate of offshore meddling in Israel’s internal affairs – this time in collusion with a group of Israeli leftists orgasmically aroused over the prospect of making Syria’s Bashar Assad a gift of the Golan Heights. There are any number of possible explanations for the “peace” gestures Syria’s puppet dictator has added of late to a policy mix that includes periodic threats of war, the rearming of Hezbollah, a firm alliance with Ahmadinejad’s Iran and continued hospitality to Hamas boss-man Khaled Mashaal. He might believe a deal with Israel would relieve the American political and economic pressure being exerted on him, compensate for his waning influence in Lebanon or simply enable him to cash in on an Olmert government so dislocated by last summer’s Lebanese debacle that it would be willing to trade the Golan Heights for any flim-flam agreement that could be construed as “peace.”

The fact remains, however, that more than 70 percent of the Israeli public, across the political spectrum, is dead set against any surrender of the Golan Heights with its strategic link to the defense of the nation, its critical water sources and its unique economic and tourist values. The Bush Administration’s corresponding aversion to any deal that would enhance the Assad regime’s strategic posture might have been regarded as of secondary concern in a Middle East not seething with Syrian-aided terrorist insurgency, but that was precisely AFPN’s cue to weigh in on the issue. Demanding a public pronouncement from President Bush that he does not oppose Israeli “peace talks” with Syria. AFPN, in a co-sponsored letter to the president, lamented that “unfortunately many in Israel and the U.S. believe that your administration is standing in the way of renewed Israeli-Syrian contacts. We urge you to clarify publicly and expeditiously that this is not the case.”

The stentorian tone of the letter was far more explicit in AFPN’s follow-up action. Irked by reports in the Israeli media that Bush was pressuring Israel to reject Bashar’s “peace” overtures, AFPN president Debra DeLee labeled the alleged pressure “outrageous.” “It takes a lot of hutzpa,” she railed, “to tell Israel not to even talk about peace with its neighbor.”

In the face of this mounting intervention in its policy decisions by the American Jewish left, what pretext of non-interference in Israel’s affairs could justify further silence on the part of the national Zionist camp and its Christian Zionist allies? Even as the forces arrayed against the Jewish state gather renewed strength and confidence in their ability to terminate its existence, rumors of the formulation of a plan involving high-ranking representatives of the Israeli Foreign and Defense ministries for the withdrawal of Israel from most of Judea and Samaria and the dispossession of up to 150,000 of their Jewish residents are gathering increasing resonance. The reported appointment of Yossi Amirani, former Israeli Consul General in San Francisco and fundraiser for far-left Meretz party chairman Yossi Beilin to coordinate the effort, adds small comfort to the picture. It was Beilin’s 2003 “Geneva Initiative,” calling for the establishment of a Palestinian entity within “temporary borders,” that some believe so spooked Ariel Sharon that he succumbed to the architects of the Gaza evacuation. Ominously, the establishment of just such a “temporary” PLO entity as a prelude to a permanent “two-state solution”--the “political horizon” the Olmert government is so eager to lay at the feet of the Fatah-Hamas newlyweds--is precisely what Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has been beating the drums about in her relentless march up and down the diplomatic circuit.

If such a scenario is unthinkable to those who hold Israel’s security, the Zionist dream and God’s promise to the Jewish people in sacred regard, then Israel’s friends--Jews and Christians in America and throughout the world–had better make their voices heard, loud and clear.

William Mehlman represents AFSI in Israel and is co-editor of the internet magazine ZionNet.