America From Abroad : Rift Opens Between Israel and U.S. Jews : The new Labor government is accused of switching policy signals without explaining itself to supporters abroad.

By MICHAEL PARKS

July 27, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

JERUSALEM —

The deputy foreign minister of Israel was a “little slime ball,” declared the vice president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, accusing him of endangering Israel’s security in peace talks with the Arabs and then lying about it.

The committee, the deputy foreign minister replied, was a “right-wing Jewish organization,” apparently opposed to peace and clearly harboring “extremist” views.

That acrid and unprecedented exchange between Harvey Friedman, since dismissed as an official of the lobbying group, and Yossi Beilin, who remains Israel’s deputy foreign minister, exposed a serious rift between the year-old government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the American Jewish community.

The problem, as Israeli officials see it, is the degree to which American Jews accepted the previous Likud-led governments’ “not-an-inch” arguments in talks with Israel’s Arab neighbors and the uneasiness over the “land-for-peace” compromises put forward by Rabin’s Labor Party.

“Most of our people were shocked by the Friedman-Beilin exchange,” Stanley A. Ringler, director of the Labor Party’s American section, said. “They did not realize how deeply entrenched Likud had become in the U.S. over its 15 years in power, how convincing its arguments were there. . . .”

A Rabin adviser put it this way: “Israelis reassessed everything in our elections last year and voted in a new government to lead them in a new direction. . . . But our American friends kept on the old road. Now, they insist we’re going the wrong way and that they have to set us right!”

Liberal American Jewish leaders, however, reproach the autocratic and uncommunicative Rabin for failing to mobilize support in their community for Israel’s changed approach to the peace talks.

“American Jews need a clear, coherent, well-defined message,” Harry Wall, Israel director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, commented. “This government is moving markers, major markers such as ‘no return to 1967 borders’ and ‘no talking to the Palestine Liberation Organization,’ that have been in place a very long time, and it needs to explain why.”

Looking ahead, both Israeli officials and American Jewish leaders fear that their divergence could seriously impair the Arab-Israeli peace talks by making the Clinton Administration wary of mediating.

“If peace happens, the Clinton Administration will need to broker it, and brokering it will require an activist approach at the highest levels of U.S. foreign policy,” Wall said.

“But the Clinton Administration will appraise that effort carefully,” he added. “The upside is a historic opportunity, and Bill Clinton would benefit politically. The downside is that it will require leaning on Israel, and that could mean the same loss of support among American Jews that other mediators suffered.

“The current dissonance could discourage President Clinton from making peace in the Middle East a priority, and that is not what Rabin wants,” Wall said.

David Clayman, director of the American Jewish Congress’ Jerusalem office, said: “Because this (Rabin) government has not reached out to the American Jewish community to make its case, the Clinton Administration will primarily hear Likud positions from American Jews. If it is then labeled anti-Israel and anti-Semitic by them, it will back away fast from the peace process. . . .”

The rift between his government and the American Jewish community began almost as soon as Rabin took office. It stemmed not only from divergent views on peace and how to achieve it, but also on sharply different perceptions of the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora.

Meeting with leaders of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last August, Rabin told them that the Israeli government would now deal directly with the White House and that American Jews should confine their political activities to lobbying congressmen.

Two months later, Finance Minister Abraham Shohat told delegates to an Israel Bonds conference here to scale back their activities--Israel could borrow money more cheaply itself. At the same time, Rabin rebuffed efforts by American fund-raisers to tighten controls on how U.S. donations are managed.

In a reorganization of the Israeli Foreign Ministry last spring, its influential hasbara (propaganda) division, which had argued Israel’s case abroad, was downgraded into an “information and communications” department with the explanation that “If you have a good policy, you don’t need hasbara, and if you have a bad policy, hasbara won’t help.”

“None of it was meant the way it sounded, but the impression was left, ‘Who needs you?’ ” Clayman said. “The three basic functions the American Jewish community had in its relationship with Israel were, after all, lobbying, fund-raising and hasbara. “

Zalman Shoval, the former Israeli ambassador to Washington, who now heads the Likud Party’s international relations department, sharply criticized Rabin’s approach to the American Jewish community, but warned at the same time against involving it in the bitter partisanship of Israeli politics.

“The strength of the American Jewish community is in its unity,” Shoval said. “I strongly recommend to Israeli politicians that we not treat American Jews the way Leninists would, saying those who are not for us are against us.

“American Jews are entitled to their opinions and to express them (on the situation in the Middle East), but at the end of the day they should support Israel’s elected and legitimate government because that government has to make the decisions, especially regarding security.”

Even so, the relationship will have problems, according to Uri Dromi, director of Israel’s Government Press Office and a representative of the World Zionist Organization in Los Angeles for several years. And those problems are growing.

“There are questions like, ‘Why do we need you?’ and ‘Don’t you need us more?’ ” Dromi commented. “This is what lies beneath the quarrel between Beilin and Friedman, even between Rabin and the Jewish Establishment in the United States. . . .

“American Jewry is going through a tremendous crisis of its own right now, with a rate of intermarriage of 52%, declining participation in Jewish affairs, not even one in five going to the synagogue--but in Israel who really cares?

“At the same time, American Jews have trouble accepting that the future of the Jewish people will be decided in Israel, not in the Diaspora,” Dromi said.

Future relations between Israel and American Jewry could be even more fractious, said Michael Oren, a historian who heads the Israel office of the American Jewish Committee, because of the inherent conflict between Zionist ideology and Jews who remain outside Israel in the Diaspora.

“Israelis do not understand why, if there is a Jewish state, a Jew would remain in Buffalo, New York,” Oren said. “Zionism is an ideology of secular messianism, and the state represents redemption. To reject that redemption is tantamount to blasphemy. . . .

“This is the heart of the conflict. American Jews reject secular messianism, and for those who accept it--that is, most Israelis--this is an outrage. American Jews and Israelis don’t even share the same lexicon, their weltanschauung (view of the world) and ours barely overlap.”

Ringler agreed. “The traditional ideology of Zionism is the negation of the Diaspora for the center of Jewish life is here,” he said. “The validity of the United States as an alternative for Jews, a place where they could be free, religious, prosperous and even powerful has never been accepted by Israelis, for it contradicts the purpose of Israel.”

Oren argued that, as a consequence, the current problems represent “open, unhealed wounds” in the relationship, which David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, had established in an exchange of letters in the early 1950s with Jacob Blaustein, then chairman of the American Jewish Committee. “Their philosophical positions were divergent, even opposed, but in their working relationship it was agreed that American Jews would provide political, financial and moral support for Israel on the basis that Israel does not question, impugn or jeopardize their loyalty as Americans,” Oren said.

The bruising battles with the George Bush Administration had put this at risk, Oren said, as had Israel’s recruitment of a Jewish American working for U.S. intelligence as an Israeli spy.

“For American Jews, there is no contradiction between being Jewish and being American, and thus American Jewry breaks the Diaspora mold,” Oren said. “But this is unthinkable and, ultimately, unacknowledgeable for Israelis. . . .”

The Rabin government, according to its critics, has awakened to the problem. The prime minister has begun to cultivate American Jewish leaders once again, Cabinet members are explaining their approach to the peace talks, the Labor Party is working to establish a U.S. affiliate and Israeli institutions are starting to look at ways of helping American Jewry maintain its continuity as a community.

“There were many years when we needed the American Jewish community as our great reservoir, our support base, our hinterland,” Dromi said. “The balance has shifted to the point where American Jews need us, in quite different ways but just as much as we need them and maybe even more. The trouble is that neither of us wants to acknowledge the new relationship.”

Reaching Out From America

More than 30 American Jewish organizations maintain offices in Israel, by one count. Here are profiles of several mentioned in this story:

* AMERICAN ISRAEL PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

Type: Zionist and pro-Israel

Purpose: Registered pro-Israel lobby in Washington.

Activities: Lobbies on behalf of legislation affecting U.S.-Israel relations. Works for strong bilateral relations.

Founded: 1954.

* AMERICAN JEWISH CONGRESS

Type: Community relations

Purpose: To foster cultural survival of the Jewish people. To help Israel develop in peace, freedom, security. To fight all forms of bigotry. To advance civil liberties.

Activities: Brings key U.S. mayors to annual Jerusalem Conference of Mayors. Conducts tours of Israel.

Founded: 1918

* ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE OF B’NAI B’RITH

Type: Community relations

Purpose: To fight anti-Semitism and secure fair treatment for all Americans.

Activities: Conducts programs in education, law and human relations.

Founded: 1913

* STATE OF ISRAEL BONDS

(Development Corp. for Israel)

Purpose: To provide investment capital for development of Israel’s economic infrastructure.

Activities: Bonds purchased by (estimated) more than 1 million individuals and thousands of companies, funds.

Founded: 1951