Remembering Moshe Arens and the Beginnings of Israeli Political Parties

MOSHE ARENS HAS DIED. Theodore Herzl in the 19th century and then Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Itzak Rabin, Moshe Dayan, Ariel Sharon, Shimon Peres, and now Moshe Arens. The founders of Israel. I have followed their passage since I was a child, even then knowing that they were very special people. They were the inheritors of the Hebrews dispersed almost 2,000 years ago and without a homeland ever since. They were scattered around the world, but many lived in the ghettos of Europe where they kept faith with their religion tied innately to their culture, educated their children, packed up their households and moved when pogroms struck, and waited. And, their moment came when the killing fields of Europe finally wakened both the world's conscience and the desire of Europe to rid itself of a people that would not agree to be destroyed. They went to Israel and fought to establish the Jewish homeland. That was only 70 years ago. So, the founders of Israel are still with us, but only for a few more moments. What would become of any of our cultures or religions if we had been subjected to a 2,000-year diaspora? Thinking seriously about an answer to that question suggests just how determined and singleminded the Jews have been. It also tells us Christians how truly "Chosen" they are. • • • MOSHE ARENS. He was the "American" founder. He passed away on Monday at the age of 93. His life was full of the details that we can read in the life of every founder, except that he went to America as a young boy. Arens was born in 1925 in Lithuania, but his family moved to the United States when he was 14, just prior to the outbreak of World War II. He attended high school in the US and served in the US Army Corps of Engineers during the war, and then he immigrated to pre- state Israel and joined the Irgun paramilitary group headed by future Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Just after the State of Israel's establishment, Arens helped found the Herut political party, a precursor to today's Likud. From 1951 to 1957, Arens was back in the US to study aeronautical engineering at MIT and Caltech. Upon returning to Israel, he used his knowledge to educate a fresh generation of Israeli engineers at the Technion in Haifa. Arens was just 36-years-old when he was made a professor at Israel's most prestigious technical college. A year later, in 1962, Arens was appointed deputy head of Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), where he was heavily involved in the Israel's indigenous fighter-jet project, the Kfir. For his efforts during these years, Arens was awarded the Israel Defense Prize in 1971, the same year he left IAI. In 1973, Arens entered the Knesset for the first time as a member of Herut. For the next 19 years, he would serve as one of Israel's top politicians, holding the positions of Ambassador to the US, Minister of Defense (three times) and Minister of Foreign Affairs. During his time as Minister of Defense, Arens oversaw numerous reforms and changes to the IDF and Israel's defense policies. Arens was also credited with giving Benjamin Netanyahu his first big "break" in politics when he made the current prime minister an envoy at the Washington embassy in 1982, and then backed Netanyahu's bid to become Israel's ambassador to the UN in 1984. Upon hearing of Arens' passing, Netanyahu on Monday mourned the loss of "my teacher and master," adding, "I loved you as a son loves a father." Arens was also eulogized by all the senior figures to the Israeli political left, who disagreed with him fundamentally over issues such as a Palestinian state, but held him in great esteem. Israel Today reported that former Labor Party leader and current head of the Jewish Agency, Isaac Herzog said : "Moshe Arens was an example of a clean and sincere leader and public servant, who always spoke his mind and contributed immensely to Israel’s security and standing among the world’s nations." Current Labor leader Avi Gabbay added that Arens was "exemplary, honest, wise, a man who knew how to make difficult decisions." • • • ZIONISM. Moshe Arens was seen as the epitome of right-wing conservative Zionism, wholly dedicated both to peace and the fulfillment of the Zionist vision. • Zionism is often defined as the re-establishment and the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel. A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, published by Schocken Books, states that the roots of Zionism lay in Eastern Europe, notably within the confines of the Russian Empire, where, toward the end of the 19th century, the largest and most dynamic of Jewish communities was located. But, the Russian Jewish community was also the most troubled. Seen by czarist autocracy as a major obstacle to its drive to transform the population into a uniform and malleable society, Russian Jewry was subjected to extremely severe pressure to change its customs, culture and religion. The Jews, for the most part, tended follow the laws that regulated their daily lives, while humiliating and impoverishing them. But, when wholesale expulsions from certain areas and successive waves of physical attack were added to the long‑familiar misery, life under Russian rule in the 1880s began to be seen as intolerable. This led to several reactions, all with the goal of finding a lasting solution : a vast movement of emigration, mostly to the West; the radicalization and politicization of great numbers of young Jewish people, many bending their energies to the overthrow of autocracy; and, among the increasingly secular intelligentsia, a rise in modern ­nationalist consciousness. It was the nationalist tendency -- Zionism -- that was to have the most remarkable results. The Zionist analysis of the situation created four goals -- the humiliation of Jews required total, drastic, and collective treatment; reform and rehabilitation -- cultural, social, and political -- must be the work of the Jews themselves; only a territorial solution would serve to establish themselves as the majority population and normalize their status and their relations with other peoples and polities; and, only in a land of their own would they accomplish the full, essentially secular, revival of Jewish culture and of the Hebrew language. • These then-radical ideas brought the Zionists into endless conflict with an array of hostile forces, both Jewish and non-Jewish, because Zionism implied a disbelief in the promise of civil emancipation and a certain contempt for Jews whose fervent wish was assimilation into their immediate environment. In addition, by offering a secular alternative to tradition, Zionism challenged religious orthodoxy as well, although, the orthodox view of Jewry as a nation had something in common with Zionism. The Zionists were thus a minority among the Jews and lacked the support that national movements normally receive from the people to whose liberation they seek. And, the Zionists had to fight for international recognition and acceptance as the leader of the Jewish desire to re‑establish the Jewish people as a free nation -- the Land of Israel. Ottoman opposition hobbled the movement almost totally in its early years, and the violent opposition mounted by Arab states and peoples has to this day shaped the physical and political landscape in which Zionism has implemented its ideals. Finally, the reluctance of the majority of Jews worldwide to subscribe to its program in practice has presented the strongest challenge to Zionism, and has proved the greatest obstacle to its ultimate triumph. • But, Zionists continued their struggle, and Zionism was established as a political organization in 1897 under Theodor Herzl, and was later led by Chaim Weizmann. Today, Zionism has come to mean the support for a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the historic Land of Israel, roughly corresponding to Canaan, or the Holy Land. • Thus, we can understand the Times of Israel when it wrote in its memorial to Moshe Arens : "He has opposed Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza, suggesting instead that Palestinians could receive Israeli citizenship as part of a binational state [a one-nation idea since rejected]. He also opposed the nation-state law and advocated for full equality and better assimilation for Israel’s minorities. He served as a member of the board of Ariel University Center of Samaria, in the northern West Bank city of Ariel. After leaving politics, Arens researched and published a book on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 'Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto.' ” And, that brings us to the 19th century Jewish political concept of assimilation known as the Bund. • • • THE BUND. The General Jewish Labor Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, generally called The Bund or the Jewish Labor Bund, was a secular Jewish socialist party in the Russian Empire, active between 1897 and 1920. The General Jewish Labor Bund in Poland was a Jewish socialist party in Poland which promoted the political, cultural and social autonomy of Jewish workers. The Jewish Labor Bund, as an organization, was formed at the same time as the World Zionist Organization. The Bund eventually came to strongly oppose Zionism, arguing that emigration to Palestine was a form of escapism. • Yad Vashem tells us : "Originally, the Bund aimed to organize Jewish workers and encourage their involvement in the Russian Socialist movement. However, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Bund disintegrated in the Soviet Union when most of its members joined the Communist party. The Bund flourished in Poland after World War I and became an important force among Poland's Jews. Small branches were also active in Lithuania, Romania, Belgium, France, and the United States. The Bund completely opposed Zionism and Hebrew culture and language; it viewed Yiddish as the national language of Eastern European Jewry. It called for equal rights for Jews within a Socialist framework in which Jews would be given cultural freedom. Prior to World War II, the Bund fought Antisemitism in Poland, and even empowered its self-defense units to respond aggressively against attacks on Jews. Bund members also extended their influence by joining Polish city councils. When World War II broke out, most of the Bund's leaders fled Poland. Many members were arrested, exiled, or murdered. In Warsaw, the party elders refused to join forces with any Zionist parties or movements in creating a united Jewish fighting alliance, claiming they had ties with the underground outside the Ghetto. Younger leaders did support an umbrella organization. However, only after the major deportations from Warsaw in October 1942 did the young members join the Jewish Fighting Organization. A similar thing happened in Vilna, where the Bund had been founded in 1897, when the younger members defied the party elders by joining the United Partisan Organization. Four Bund squads also joined the fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943. Samuel Zygelbojm, a Bund leader who had fled to the US, was appointed to the Polish National Committee in London in 1942. After receiving reports of the mass murder of Polish Jewry, Zygelbojm desperately tried to enlist the help of international and Jewish organizations. After failing to garner support, however, Zygelbojm committed suicide in 1943. • • • A PARTICULAR VIEW OF MOSHE ARENS. The New York Sun published an Editorial on Monday to honor the death of Moshe Arens. The Editorial focused on Arens' Zionism vs. the Bund : "The death of Moshe Arens, who slipped away in his sleep today at the age of 93, stills one of the clearest voices in Zionism. He famously played a role in launching the career of another Israeli who had studied at MIT, Benjamin Netanyahu. A right-winger and three times defense minister of Israel, Arens nonetheless had an ability to embrace his ideological foes. We didn’t know Arens well. In each of the several times we interviewed him, though, he made an impression for the shrewdness of his analysis and the quiet strength of his character. Sensing that an abandonment of Sinai would be a strategic error, Arens voted against President Carter’s Camp David Accord. He also understood the folly of the Oslo agreement. For all of that -- and for his newspaper columns that for years appeared in Haaretz -- we admired Arens enormously. Yet the Arens moment on which we have found ourselves most often reflecting concerned none of the fine points of day-to-day policy. Rather, it was his appreciation of his movement’s Jewish ideological rivals in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. This emerged in sharp relief with the death, in 2009 in Poland, of Mark Edelman, leader of the vestige of the General Association of Jewish Workers known as the Bund....In the Warsaw Ghetto, Edelman had been in the Jewish Combat Organization, know as ZOB, that, when the attack on the Ghetto got underway, arose from the underground and stunned the Nazis. When the ZOB’s Mordechai Anielewicz was trapped and committed suicide rather than permit himself to be captured, it was Edelman who acceded to the leadership. He survived the war and spent his post-war life as a physician in Poland. He remained a socialist and a critic of Israel. When he died, his coffin was draped with the red banner of the Bund. Yet it turns out that Arens, a partisan of the right-wing camp and a foe of the Bund, had once traveled to Poland to meet Edelman. When Edelman died, Arens wrote in Haaretz one of the loveliest tributes, even while acknowledging that Zionism and emigration to Palestine had been “anathema” to the Bund. The question is why....Arens went so far as to say that 'Zionism prevailed over the Bund.' That, though, 'was not because most Polish Jews deemed its ideology superior, but because the human base of the Bund was exterminated, along with the rest of Polish Jewry, by the Germans during World War II.' Arens was no socialist. He reminded his readers, though, that the Bund had won among millions of Polish Jews a 'loyalty that sustained them during the war years, and gave them the courage to heroically fight the Germans along with other Jewish fighters, outnumbered and outgunned, in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.' His elegy to Edelman is one of the most affecting newspaper columns we’ve ever read. As Arens himself is laid to rest, the question nags at us still -- why did Arens make such a bow to a hero at the other end of the ideological spectrum? Certainly Arens understood that if we are not vigilant, the dream of Herzl could yet be dealt as cruel a fate as what befell the Bund. Yet he also understood how hard it is to predict whence, in the depths of combat, heroism will be revealed." • • • HERE IS ARENS' TRIBUTE TO EDELMAN AND THE BUND. It was published on October 20, 2009, in Haaretz and titled "Requiem for the Bund" : "Marek Edelman was laid to rest in the Warsaw Jewish cemetery alongside his comrades from the Bund. That is were he had asked to be buried. The last of the Bundists. It was a grand funeral, attended by the leading personalities of Poland, including President Lech Kaczynski and former president Lech Walesa. It started at the memorial to the Warsaw ghetto fighters, erected over the bunker at Mila 18, where Edelman's commander Mordechai Anielewicz and many of his fighters perished on May 8, 1943, and continued in a procession thousands strong, led by a jazz band, to the Jewish cemetery. It was not only Edelman who was buried that day. The Bund, which commanded his loyalty to his dying days, was also laid to rest. Edelman's coffin was draped with a Bund banner, which stated in Yiddish, "Bund - Yidisher Sozialistisher Farband," and the Bund anthem, "Di Shvueh," was sung by a choir while all stood at attention. It was a farewell to a great movement, which had a massive following among Polish Jewry before the war, and had led all other Jewish parties in the last Polish municipal elections held before the war. It was a time when many in the world believed in the solidarity of the working classes. The Socialist Zionists believed in the solidarity of the Jewish and Arab working classes in Palestine. The Bund believed in the solidarity of the Jewish and Polish working classes. Along with the Polish Socialists, a Socialist Poland would be built, they insisted, and there the Jews of Poland, maintaining the Yiddish culture and the Yiddish language, would find their rightful place. Zionism and emigration to Palestine was anathema to them. And so was the religious Jewish community. They reserved special hatred for Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky, who called on the Jews of Poland to leave for Palestine in the years before the war, and negotiated with the Polish government to achieve that goal. Addressing Polish Jewry in 1938 he said, "I warn you without respite that the catastrophe approaches." They, like many others, did not believe him. They called him a Fascist and a "paper general." The Bund's lofty ideals took precedence over reality. And cruel reality put an end to the Bund. Wiktor Alter and Henryk Erlich, the leaders of the Polish Bund, fled Warsaw and reached the Soviet Union as the German army approached in September 1939. There they were shot on Stalin's orders. The Bund continued its educational and cultural activities in the ghettos of Poland. In the Warsaw ghetto they refused to join Jewish resistance organizations at first, their leadership insisting that resistance to the Germans had to be based on a united front with the Polish Socialists. Only after more than 270,000 Jews, including many of their followers, had been sent to Treblinka, and Polish Socialists showed no willingness to assist an uprising in the ghetto, did they join the organization led by Anielewicz, nevertheless insisting that they could not join the political committee overseeing the activities of the military organization, but rather would participate in a special coordinating committee set up to meet their demands. Their dislike for Jabotinsky's adherents probably was decisive in preventing the two Jewish resistance organizations in the Warsaw ghetto - one led by Anielewicz, and one led by Pawel Frenkel - from uniting. Years later, Edelman insisted that Frenkel's organization was no more than 'a gang of porters, smugglers, and thieves' -- 'fascists.' In the end, Zionism prevailed over the Bund. That was not because most Polish Jews deemed its ideology superior, but because the human base of the Bund was exterminated, along with the rest of Polish Jewry, by the Germans during World War II. Those very few who survived, like Edelman, remained fiercely loyal to the Bund, an organization that had ceased to exist, a loyalty that sustained them during the war years, and gave them the courage to heroically fight the Germans along with other Jewish fighters, outnumbered and outgunned, in the Warsaw ghetto uprising." • • • WHY BOTHER WITH ZIONIST-BUND HISTORY? For me, history has been a lifelong passion. But, for even the least passionate, history should get an occasional perusal, because it tells a tale of who we were, where we came from geographically and far more importantly philosophically and politically, and thus, who we are. The "tale" of the Zionists and the Bund tells us, who do not follow the minute details of Jewish history, that they became the Likud and the Labor Party, Israel's two traditional conservative and leftist political opponents. To read a little about Zionism and the Bund makes today's Israeli political landscape much more easily understood. • The Labor Party has included some of the country's most recognizable names, including David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Abba Eban, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Ehud Barak. But, these founders of Israel, in the face of Nazi Germany atrocities, chose to abandon Europe and the possibility of "assimilation" to go to Israel and found a homeland. And, today, the honorable old Labor Party, formed officially in 1968 but the leader of Israeli governments from the founding in 1948 until 1977, is in deep trouble. Trends show that most voters seem willing to close the book on the movement that established the Israel homeland. Perhaps this is inevitable historically. The Social Democrats in Germany, the Labour Party in Britain and the moderate left in France have also been in steady retreat; American Democrats are lungeing to the radical left and may also implode. Perhaps, the Israel Labor Party was just ahead of other Western countries socialist movements. Labor has always presented society with a model of positive principles of high humanist and social values, but they often fall into dire straits as the reality of governing people sinks in and the socialists fall in popularity. In Israel, newer centrist, niche, and green parties are replacing the Labor Party. • The Likud -National Liberal Movement, is a center-right to right-wing political party founded in 1973 by Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon in an alliance with several right-wing parties, and today is the party of Israel President Reuven Rivlin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Likud literally means “unity” because it was formed by a fusion of two other liberal parties -- Herut (freedom, the party Moshe Arens helped found) and the Liberal Party. Likud was in the opposition until 1977. After that it has led Israel through Israeli prime ministers from the Likud : Menachem Begin (1977-1983), Yitzhak Shamir (1983-1984 en 1986-1992), Benjamin Netanyahu (1996-1999), Ariel Sharon (2001-2006), Benjamin Netanyahu (2009-now). We can understand its current political positions vis-à-vis the Palestinians if we consider that Likud wants peace through security, and security through strength. It doesn't want Israel to give away the responsibility for the security of its citizens. It wants a strong economy, unhindered by archaic structures of unions and state-owned companies. The Likud cares for the land, the people, the traditions, the language, and for the holy places and the bond with Jews everywhere in the world. AND, Likud in Israel recently grew to 312.000 members, a record which makes it the by far the largest political party in Israel. • While it is a large oversimplification, we can think about what is going on in Israeli politics today as roughly equivalent to the battle between socialist-globalists and nationalist-populists in Europe and the United States. • That is what history can help us to understand if we will just "google" and read a bit when a topic appeals to us. • • • DEAR READERS, as we offer Moshe Arens' family and Israel our heartfelt condolences at his passing, we should also pay attention to another facet of Israeli politics playing out in the US Congress. The Washington Free Beacon wrote on Monday that : "Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) tweeted Monday a 'significant [number] of Senate Democrats' support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. Rubio made the charge while hitting Senate Democrats for blocking a bill that would allow local and state governments to not do business with organizations participating in the BDS movement. BDS is a global boycott campaign against the Jewish state that the Anti-Defamation League considers an insidious effort to delegitimize the country. Senate Democrats have said they don't want to vote on bills until the government shutdown is brought to an end, but Rubio said that was an excuse. 'The shutdown is not the reason Senate Democrats don’t want to move to Middle East Security Bill,' Rubio tweeted. 'A huge argument broke out at Senate Dem meeting last week over BDS. A significant # of Senate Democrats now support #BDS & Dem leaders want to avoid a floor vote that reveals that.'....Pro-BDS Representative Rashida Tlaib attacked Rubio's legislation and any Senators supporting it for having 'forgot what country they represent.' Rubio responded by suggesting her language reeked of a longtime anti-Semitic canard : accusing Israel supporters of dual loyalties. This 'dual loyalty' canard is a typical anti-Semitic line#BDS isn’t about freedom & equality, it’s about destroying #Israel. And if boycotting #Israel is constitutionally protected, then boycotting companies that boycott #Israel is also constitutionally protected https://t.co/6yBM0bQB5L — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) January 7, 2019." • Senator Rubio also charged Senator Bernie Sanders with lying about his legislation, saying it didn't punish political activity but rather protected the rights of local and state governments to boycott BDS participants. Rubio tweeted : "This is a lie. My bill doesn’t punish any political activity. It protects the right of local & state govts that decide to no longer do business with those who boycott #Israel. So boycotting #Israel is a constitutional right,but boycotting those participating in #BDS isn’t? https://t.co/kY9MSmBkkh — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) January 7, 2019." • The ugly head of anti-Semitism appears even today, and most often on the Left, as in the US Congress where Democrats fear to expose their anti-Israel members. • The Washington Institute reminded us on Monday that on January 10, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will deliver a speech on America’s “commitment to peace, prosperity, stability, and security in the Middle East” as part of his eight-city tour of the region. The Washington Institute gave several pointers about what the speech should contain. One of those points is this : "Secretary Pompeo can best reassure allies and appropriately signal adversaries at a time of great uncertainty on key issues....We [the United States] believe it is up to the peoples of the Middle East to chart their own course, and we strongly support the efforts of our allies to defend themselves against threats posed by terrorism and Iranian aggression. We prefer to help from a distance: the best guarantee of any nation’s independence and freedom is its own patriotic resolve. Some of our closest friends in the Middle East are renowned for their proven ability to defend themselves. But sometimes even patriots need more than just a helping hand, as America did in its own Revolutionary War. So let there be no doubt : if our friends or our vital interests are endangered in the Middle East, we will not stand idly by. 'America First' also means that we are first among the world’s powers, and we will not allow any erosion of our position, or that of our friends....The first human right we all deserve to enjoy is the right to live in peace. So here in Cairo, the United States applauds Egypt’s pioneering role in forging a just peace with Israel, whose fortieth anniversary dawns just a few weeks from today. Jordan has followed your good example, with similar success in saving lives, reclaiming lost lands, preserving stability, and maintaining the possibility for progress on the Palestinian issue and the broader Arab Peace Initiative. We applaud the enhanced cooperation between these three neighbors in keeping the peace, combating terrorism, confronting Iran’s threats, and pursuing major energy, water, and employment projects together, to the great benefit of all. We don’t just applaud your efforts, we tangibly support them with many billions of dollars in security assistance. This is a record we can all be proud of, and it is one we can build upon in expanding the circle of real peace to include the Palestinians and other Arabs, as President Trump has pledged to do." • We suspect that Moshe Arens would agree with these pointers for Secretary Pompeo, all the while keeping his political feet planted firmly on the Israeli homeland soil and on its right to secure and develop that homeland. • Moshe Arens, thank you for your untiring work for Israel. We will miss your presence. Rest in Peace.