Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 44, No. 1, Ed. 1 Thursday, January 4, 1990 Page: 4 of 24
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Opinion 4 Texas JEWISH post, Thursday, January 4,1990—in our 44th year.'
THE 1990s-
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES
T In speculating on what the upcoming 1990s might hold for the Jewish peo-
pie, Dorothy Baker’s well-known bon mot comes to mind: “Jews are like every-
body else, only more so!’’
No serious reflection on Jewish interests in the 1990s can take place without
locating them within the geopolitical forces of East-West and North-South
relations.
The massive revolutions for democracy and in opposition to the ancient
regimes of Communist tyranny will have fateful, and ambiguous, consequences
not only for European Jewry, but for Jews everywhere, and especially for Israel.
Glasnost and perestroika will continue to result in massive emigration for
Soviet Jewry, probably the dominant human issue for world Jewry in the 1990s.
The challenges to financial and human resources for resettlement will be
monumental and will call for unparalleled commitment and patience.
The provision of Jewish religious, cultural and educational support for the
million-plus Jews who opt to remian in the Soviet Union will be a parallel com-
manding Jewish concern.
Glasnost has made possible unprecedented freedom of speech in the Soviet
Union and in the East European countries, and certainly that human right is to be
welcomed by Jews.
But now, right-wing, nationalist and bitterly anti-Semitic groups, foremost
among them the Pamyat, are beginning to have a field day in spewing out their
anti-Jewish bile. Echoes of that historic anti-Jewish bias now circulates in the
cultural bloodstreams of Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Rumania and the
other formerly Communist tyrannies.
Knowledgeable and skillful Jewish leadership will have their hands full coun-
teracting both the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel biases which have surfaced on both
sides of the collapsed Iron Curtain.
The Vatican, which has quietly emerged as a major architect in mobilizing the
anti-Communist forces in Eastern Europe, could play a constructive role in coun-
tering the religion-based anti-Semitism —that is, if Jews do not manage to
alienate the Vatican completely by strident, reckless attacks on the Pope and the
Catholic Church when a moderate, diplomat strategy would prove to be far more
effective in the Jewish interest.
World Jewry will also have to be vigilant over the potential negative impact of
a reunification of East Germany with the Federal Republic of West Germany.
Four decades of the GDR’s hostility toward Israel and Its pro-PLO, pro-
terrorist activity could become a serious negative influence on West Germany’s
positive attitudes toward Jews and Israel. Watch that closely in the 1990s.
The North-South coordinate’s impact on Jews and Israel is nowhere more'
dramatically shown than in the current surrealistic drama in Panama.
While the Panamian struggle was, in general, a conflict between U.S. and pro-
democratic forces and Noriega’s drug-sustained tyranny, when the looting star-
ted, Panamian Jewish shopkeepers and business-people got the worst of it. Un-
doubtedly, Latin American Jewry will look increasingly to their North American
co-religionists for appropriate aid, both political and economic.
Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, international relations consultant to the American Jewish Commit tee,
is immediate past chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations.
A DOUBLE MESSAGE
NEAR EAST REPORT
Twisting History
he Arabs had the determination to
I destroy the State of Israel, but they
lacked a workable idea or ideology, and it is
that which they put into place in 1973 and
1975. Using the United Nations as their pulpit
and the Palestinian Arabs as their evidence,
they accused the Jews of racism for denying
Arabs their rightful place in the Middle East.
And I think you all know exactly how this
inversion works. Having refused to admit a
Jewish state into what they designated as an
exclusively Arab and exclusively Muslim
region, they accused Israel of refusing to
accept an Arab people in the region. Having
mounted successive wars against Israel, they
accuse it of aggression for defending its ter-
ritory against attack. Having insisted that their
"The Palestinian Arabs
represent themselves to the
world as Jews."
fellow Arabs remain homeless in refugee
camps (and incidentally I would say that the
greatest crime of the Arabs, greater than the
crimes they commit against the Jews, is of
course the crime that they commit against
their own brothers), having maintained them
there as cannon fodder and as visible pressure
to be used to reclaim the State of Israel, they
defined the Law of Return as a plot against
other people, as a kind of centripetal Jewish
world conspiracy.
Now the Law of Return is, to my mind, the
highest expression of Jewish concern for fel-
low Jews. I don’t think even America, mother
of exiles, can boast the same record of resettle-
ment of impoverished, abandoned, hounded
refugees. . . .
Now, the wonderful columnist A.M.Rose-
nthal in a very recent column entitled “Out,
Out Bright, Brief Hope” points out that the
Arabs might have taken a small step toward
peace by dropping their annual ritual of trying
to throw Israel out of the UN General Assem-
bly. And he writes: “It would cost the Arabs
nothing and win them considerable profit, but
of course the Arabs are not after short-term
advantages. Their annual ritual of trying to
expel Israel is the main point of their thesis,
and they will never drop that because that is
their idea: the idea of maintaining Israel’s
exceptionalism in the world and Israel’s
(illegitimacy. ”
The essential element in the propaganda of
inversion is, as I say, the Palestinian Arabs.
The plight of the Palestinian Arabs is very real,
as we all know, but the given reasons for that
plight are bogus. I don’t have to tell you again
that partition was, of course, repudiated by
their Arabs, not by Israel. The Arabs were kept
homeless by the Arabs, not by Israel. The war
of ’67, which displaced more refugees, was
initiated by the Arabs, not by Israel. But nev-
ertheless, in keeping with the Big Lie of prop-
aganda, the Palestinians were sent around the
world, and above all to our campuses, and
terrorist activity was sponsored very widely as
evidence of Israeli aggression.
And what has happened increasingly is that
the Palestinian Arabs represent themselves to
the world as Jews. They are longing from the
“diaspora” for their “promised homeland.”
Their charter is called a “covenant. ...”
Their ship is named "The Exodus.” And, of
course, most infamously of all, they claim to
be subject to a “Holocaust. ” And they thereby
try, in a single stroke, to deprive the Jews of
their moral claim to the world’s sympathy and
protection and to charge Israel with the most
heinous crime of this or any another century.
Indeed, the newspaper Yediot Aharonot has
just reported that the Palestinian enforcers car-
rying out death sentences against so-called
collaborators now wear exact replicas of Isra-
eli defense army uniforms, with sewn in
badges of the PLO flag.
Now, no one v/ould like to deny the Palesti-
nian Arabs’ claims to be a people, a nation,
and, of course, far be it from me to challenge
their claim to be a nation. But I would say that
it is a very dangerous nation indeed that
defines itself as another nation, and that is no
joke. This assumption of Jewish symbolism on
the part of the Palestinians is, as far as I’m
concerned, the most blatant expression of
their determination to replace the Jews as peo-
ple. —Ruth Wisse
Wisse is a Professor at McGill University.
These remarks were excerpted from her
speech at October’s CAMERAconvention.
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Wisch, J. A. & Wisch, Rene. Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 44, No. 1, Ed. 1 Thursday, January 4, 1990, newspaper, January 4, 1990; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth753990/m1/4/?q=%22%22~1: accessed July 11, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .