With Herzog at Jewish Agency helm, Netanyahu faces rerun of his father’s fights
Appointing a perennial critic of the PM to head the quasi-governmental body risks reopening an ideological chasm that goes back to the formation of the Israel-Diaspora relationship
For the vast majority of Natan Sharansky’s term as chairman of the Jewish Agency, the quasi-governmental body meant to serve as a bridge between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora fulfilled its traditional role as a steadfast representative of the Israeli government.
But, in June 2017, a year before the end of Sharansky’s repeatedly extended term, the former Prisoner of Zion took an unprecedented step in publicly opposing both the government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had appointed him to the position eight years earlier.
One day after the cabinet voted to suspend its plans for a pluralistic prayer platform at the Western Wall and, separately, to advance legislation to cement the de facto ultra-Orthodox monopoly on conversions to Judaism in Israel, the Jewish Agency canceled a planned dinner with the prime minister and unanimously passed a resolution calling on the government to rescind its decisions, saying they contradict the vision of Israel’s founding fathers and the spirit of Zionism.
The resolution marked the first time the institution, which predates the State of Israel, explicitly called on the Israeli cabinet to walk back a decision.
The Western Wall compromise, passed in a January 2016 cabinet decision that reflected the work of years of negotiations, provided for a permanent pluralistic prayer platform — with joint oversight including by leaders of non-Orthodox streams of Judaism — to be built along the southern end of the Western Wall in an area of the Davidson Archeological park, otherwise known as Robinson’s Arch. Temporary prayer platforms for pluralistic prayer are currently set up in that area, in two distinct areas of the park.
The plan was heralded as a symbol of “Jewish unity” throughout most of the Diaspora. But within days of its jubilant unveiling, the cabinet decision drew the ire of the ultra-Orthodox parties in Netanyahu’s tenuous coalition, who essentially view the Western Wall as an open-air Orthodox synagogue. The main Western Wall area is separated by a mehitza barrier between men’s and women’s sections, in accordance with Orthodox norms.
The Jewish Agency’s dissent, as the cabinet backpedaled, was the first major snub of Netanyahu by the organization, which, under Sharansky, served as a trusted arm of the government, extending deep into Jewish communities abroad.
The second major snub came a year later — on Sunday — when the venerable agency’s Board of Governors unanimously elected opposition leader Isaac Herzog, the former head of the Zionist Union faction and perennial Netanyahu critic, to succeed Sharansky as its chairman, against the prime minister’s explicit wishes.
Last year’s schism laid bare the tensions between the Diaspora and the Israeli government over religious pluralism in the Jewish state. The appointment of Herzog, who has voiced vehement criticism of the government`s Western Wall about-face, was a clear nod in the direction of the unhappy Jewish community leaders outside of Israel.
Herzog immediately staked out positions at odds with some government stances. “We have to make it possible for anyone who wants to be Jewish to join easily,” Herzog said in a radio interview Monday morning, for example, in clear contrast to the government`s current stance in favor of strict conversion procedures.
In his acceptance speech on Sunday, Herzog, whose grandfather Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog was a chief rabbi of Israel, also stressed that all Jews should be accepted by the State of Israel.
“We have to strengthen the centrality of Israel within the heart of every Jew, especially the young generations; to fight BDS [the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement], to educate, to connect and to promote aliyah [immigration], and to bring more and more Jews to Israel,” he said.
“A Jew is a Jew is a Jew, and it doesn’t matter what stream he belongs to or what he wears on his head,” Herzog went on. “We are all one people, and this is what we need to do to preserve and foster the great story of the Jews, and the great story of the State of Israel being the beating heart of the Jewish people.”
Beyond religion and state, the Jewish Agency`s choice of Herzog could also highlight rifts over a plethora of other issues on which the US Jewish community has traditionally been closer to Herzog`s center-left worldview than that of Netanyahu.
In fact, the appointment risks reopening an ideological chasm that goes back to the formation of the Israel-Diaspora relationship, via the prime minister`s ideological mentor — his father, Benzion Netanyahu.
‘The doctrine of resistance’
In the late 1930s and early ’40s, acting as the de facto Israeli pre-state administration and led by David Ben-Gurion, the Jewish Agency pursued a controversial campaign targeting US Jewish community leaders and non-Jewish politicians in an effort to get them to support the case for a Jewish state.
Ben-Gurion’s rightist rivals — the Bergson Group, a political action committee headed by Hillel Kook (who went by the name Peter H. Bergson), and the Revisionist Zionist movement, represented in the US by Benzion Netanyahu — felt that the Jewish Agency was not doing enough.
In a challenge to the Zionist establishment’s US outreach, they took the early hasbara efforts to heightened extremes by “trying to draw attention to the wholesale slaughter of Jews in Europe, using everything from full-page ads in The New York Times to a massive musical pageant commemorating the memory of Jewish martyrs at Madison Square Garden, in March 1943.” So writes veteran Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer, in his new biography of Benjamin Netanyahu, “Bibi,” which opens by charting the Netanyahu family’s years in the US.
Born Benzion Mileikowsky in Poland in 1910, the elder Netanyahu came to Palestine as a child, and eventually became involved with Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionists, the opponents of Ben-Gurion’s socialist Zionist camp and the precursors of today’s Likud party.
Benzion Netanyhau, sent to the US to represent Jabotinsky’s movement, employed Revisionist tactics that were not only attempts to spark outrage, but in fact leaned on the isolationist ideology of the group’s founder.
Jabotinsky’s guiding light, throughout all of his public activities, “was the principle of resistance to subjugation,” Benzion Netanyahu wrote his 2012 book “Fathers of Zionism.”
In Netanyahu Sr.’s reading, life in exile, in what is known as the Diaspora, leeched from the Jewish people the power to resist. Jabotinsky changed that. “He taught the doctrine of resistance to a people that had not known its meaning for hundreds of years,” Netanyahu wrote.
That “resistance,” which Benzion Netanyahu translated into fierce public campaigns aimed to shock the US into action, has been echoed in his son’s own sometimes brash efforts to influence US policy — and notably opposed by Herzog, along with many in the US Jewish community.
Netanyahu’s first presidential feud was with Bill Clinton. In the book “The Much Too Promised Land,” Aaron David Miller, the deputy director of the White House’s Arab-Israeli peace negotiations team, wrote that during their first meeting in the summer of 1996, Netanyahu lectured Clinton about the Arab-Israeli conflict. “Who the fuck does he think he is?” Miller quoted Clinton as remarking. “Who’s the fucking superpower here?”
A similar scene played out in May 2011. Seated alongside Netanyahu and before the national press corps, then-president Barack Obama listened respectfully, but with what looked like mounting annoyance, to a six-and-a-half-minute lecture from Netanyahu on Israel’s need for a peace that will not “crash eventually on the rocks of Middle Eastern reality.”
The most stark public example of the rocky relationship with Obama was Netanyahu’s 2015 address to a joint session of Congress, about his fears of an inadequate emerging nuclear deal between world powers and Iran.
The address to Congress infuriated the White House and Democrats because it was set up by congressional Republicans without consulting with the president, violating usual protocol. Officials also cried foul over the proximity to Israeli elections, and the content, which directly challenged the Obama administration’s foreign policy.
Herzog joined several left-leaning US Jewish groups at the time in lambasting Netanyahu over the antagonistic speech, saying that it “created a rupture in the relationship with the US.”
The then-leader of the Zionist Union faction also slammed the prime minister for turning support for Israel into a partisan issue in US politics — another controversial tactic used by his father used in the ’40s.
According to Pfeffer, in the 1944 US presidential elections between the incumbent, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Republican Thomas E. Dewey, Benzion Netanyahu was one of the pioneers in playing US politics for Israel’s benefit.
Traveling from New York to Chicago for the Republican National Convention, Benzion was part of a group of Zionists who successfully lobbied the Republican party to include on their platform a call for “the opening of Palestine to [Jewish] unrestricted immigration and land ownership.” Three weeks later, fearing a loss of support from the Jewish community, the Democratic party took a similar line.
“Playing the two parties against each other in this way was unprecedented in American Jewish life,” Pfeffer writes.
Sixty-eight years later, during the US elections in 2012, Netanyahu was accused of leaning toward Republican candidate Mitt Romney, and, in subtle ways, trying to aid his campaign for the White House.
Netanyahu was quoted, and his image was used, in Romney television campaign ads that aired in areas heavily populated by Jews, furthering the impression that he favored the Republican candidate and that Israel was being used as a wedge issue.
In 2016, while Netanyahu was widely believed to prefer Donald Trump as a candidate, he instructed cabinet ministers to refrain from commenting on the presidential elections or from giving an opinion as to which of the candidates they would prefer to see in the White House.
The most vehement disagreement that Benzion Netanyahu had with the Jewish Agency — which appears to be paralleled in Herzog and Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposing views on the modern-day iteration of the debate — was regarding the vote on the United Nations Partition Plan.
A supporter of the idea of a Greater Israel that would encompass today’s Kingdom of Jordan, Benzion opposed the 1947 Partition Plan that called for the creation of both a Jewish and Palestinian state within British Mandatory Palestine.
Ben-Gurion, seizing the opportunity for an internationally recognized state even if on a smaller plot of land than he had originally envisaged, reluctantly supported the plan and instructed his Jewish Agency to lobby for it. But the Revisionists fought for it to be rejected, with Benzion authoring a full page ad in the New York Times, claiming that the proposal “would spell the end of the great Zionist dream.”
Previously opposed to any form of Palestinian state, Netanyahu has in recent years professed support for a two-state solution, albeit with caveats, and continually called for peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. At the same time, however, he insists that under his leadership, there will be no large-scale withdrawal from the West Bank.
That position is at odds with most American Jews, who, polls show, overwhelmingly back the two-state solution.
Cooperation or conflict?
Last year, Herzog confirmed reports that he had entered negotiations to join a unity government with Netanyahu in 2016 in the framework of a secret regional agreement that was being discussed at the time, but said the potentially historic deal fell through because the premier eventually caved in to domestic political pressures.
Addressing American-Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, Herzog said Netanyahu had been willing to appoint him foreign minister to oversee a process that would include a freeze on construction outside the settlement blocs — areas of the West Bank that Israel would seek to retain under a peace deal — in return for international and Arab consent to building within the blocs.
But as pressure from his right-wing coalition partners mounted, Netanyahu eventually went back on the idea of freezing settlement construction outside the blocs, in Herzog’s telling. The prime minister said he was still willing to continue discussions about the possible regional agreement, but was no longer willing to commit to the plan in writing. At that point, the deal broke down, and Herzog aborted the talks to join a unity government, he said.
The account highlights Netanyahu’s and Herzog’s differing approaches, but also their possible willingness to work together.
In October of last year, speaking at a special session of the Knesset’s Caucus for Strengthening the Jewish People, Sharansky warned Israeli lawmakers that another major flareup between Israel and Diaspora Jewry is brewing on the horizon, and will hit if the government fails to take action on the Western Wall and conversion.
“I have to warn you that the crisis continues. We might have a new crisis,” Sharansky said.
Minutes after Monday’s vote, President Reuven Rivlin issued a statement congratulating Herzog on his appointment and predicting that he would be able to prevent crisis, rather than exacerbate it.
“There are few who understand better than Herzog the challenges facing the Jewish world today, and the need to teach and reinforce Jewish identity, and to strengthen the bonds between Israel and Jews around the world — today more than ever,” Rivlin said.
“I say to the government and to the prime minister,” Herzog himself said minutes after being elected, “we will work together with full cooperation.”
The Jewish people are at a crossroads, Herzog went on. “We have to do whatever we can to unify the Jewish people and make sure it is not split and divided. And we all know what we are talking about,” he added — in a comment that could equally have referred to the split over the Western Wall, or, more ominously for the future of the US-Israel relationship and the Jewish Agency`s role as a mediator, to Netanyahu himself.
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