Begin's Jewish critics

Nicholas von Hoffman

Washington

enachem Begin returns next week to a

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United States which he may not

recognise politically. Almost out of self- defence, if not exasperation, an American government has done what it had been reluctant to do for so long: it has proposed the outlines of a Middle East peace treaty. Whatever the misgivings of traditionalists who believe America has enough foreign entanglements, and whatever the feelings of some that Mr Reagan's plan unjustly favours one group or nation over another, It is the only remotely practical plan around and People are prepared to back it in the h ",.°Pe it may dispose of the appallingly chronic crisis on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. No other major Reagan in- itiative has the kind of prayerful good wishes from all Americans concerned. If it succeeds he may be like his predecessor, Mr Carter, in leaving the White House with rib°tIling more than his efforts in the Middle East to his credit.

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one of the reasons that the post- 'eoanese-war America which Mr Begin returns to is not the one he is accustomed to inleaniPulating is a shift in sentiment among ws here. 'Disassociation both from the stYle and the substance of Begin's policies, °lice rarely made public in the Jewish tahlishment, emerged rapidly after Reagan's speech on 1 September in places aS,„ sUrPrising as the America-Israel Public ;1'ffairs Committee — the pro-Israel lobby itself .....

the B'nai B'rith, and the American !!wish Committee,' writes Rabbi Arthur N. ertzberg, vice-president of the World

the Congress and former president of Ane American Jewish Congress. 'Most Illuerican Jews, even in the established !.rganisations, clearly preferred Reagan's man for negotiations to defiance.' ng,jewish leaders like Rabbi Hertzberg are ,i't Only criticising Israeli policies and ac- butway we have not heard before, 6itt With the most vigorously indignant -11guage• 'What happened had the ear- !.arlts of a pogrom,' the Rabbi writes of the ..ilings in Beirut refugee camps. 'The vazarist police and army had stood by e reless and purposely, while mobs of tim

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,, iks worked off their murderous in- stincts on Jews. Now Jews were the cops or f°arse. Sharon's army sealed off the camps, i nned the entry of the Phalange militia, .ailed to intervene after Israeli soldiers and lbournalists knew — and high officials had pin told — that the slaughter was taking thace. Begin and Sharon then compounded "eiiir government's disgrace . • .' wtrachertzberg's words are in arresting con- ction to those of Nathan Goldman. riting a few days before his death at the

end of August this patriarchal figure, who was for many years president of the World Jewish Conference, said: 'An overwhelm- ing majority of Jews unconditionally sup- port the right of Israel to exist (still certainly true) along with its politics; for fear of har- ming Israel, they rarely express public criticism. This leads to situations where the "dual loyalty" becomes an actual fact rather than a distorted figment of anti- semitic fantasies.' In the United States, where official criticism of Israeli conduct has been tepid, the dual loyalty thing has not carried too much sting, although there was a period at the beginning of the sum- mer when a sensitive ear could detect such mumblings.

That seems to have evaporated in large measure, one might suppose, because so many Jewish writers have been saying so many harsh things in a variety of American publications. Commentary's fidelity to Mr Begin appears unshaken, but the New Republic, occasionally if humorously refer- red to as 'that Zionist rag', even by some of its admiring readers, has embraced the Reagan initiatives and made it clear its editors want no part of Mr Begin. The Nation, a weekly to the New Republic's left, which has never had any particular difficulty in controlling its en- thusiasm for Mr Begin and what he stands for, has begun regularly publishing Amos Kenan, a gifted and forceful Israeli writer who gives no peace to American Jews. Now non-Jews in America can read a plethora of articles of substance and, by listening to this debate, they can learn. One of the most in- structive analyses, morally and politically, comes from the pen of Jacobo Timerman, and was published in the New Yorker, a magazine which has demonstrated that the wives and mistresses of stockbrokers and investment bankers will read stupefyingly flat prose, provided only that it is long, long, long. But from time to time the New Yorker will fool you and publish articles, like Timerman's, which are long and good.

A man like Timerman, who suffered jail and torture at the hands of anti-semites in his native Argentina, wants to vent a special rage against Mr Begin, a politician who he believes is destroying Israeli democracy, not to mention the country's unique moral foundations. But he has a problem, namely the attacks of those of us who, at least metaphorically, have compared Israel's actions with the Nazis: 'When certain critics accuse us of being Nazis, they do General Sharon a service. Truly, we are not Nazis, so the accusation serves Sharon by permitting him to discredit the accusers and to reclaim his innocence ... To speak of a Palestinian holocaust, to compare Beirut with Stalingrad or with the Warsaw ghetto will move no one. Jews know what genocide is, and a holocaust, and a Nazi. We don't need — nobody does — to resort to truculent comparisons to arouse desperate feelings about the victims of Lebanon, the innocent deaths brought about by the Begin government ... The holocaust must be kept and used in its pro- per context, so that the contemporary world can establish normal relations with Israel, and vice versa.'

You can argue with Timerman on this but you won't win. I for one am sorry that I allowed my indignation to warp my judg- ment. There are certain words and ideas that should be applied with the greatest of thoughtful restraint. Bigot, anti-semitic, fascist, McCarthyite, Nazi, racist, com- munist, etc ought to be used with exact precision. When they are not, they cause pain and misunderstanding, two com- modities that, even with the best will and the greatest care, are never in short supply. My apologies to the Spectator's readers.

On the larger scene, don't look for any abrupt changes in American policy. The Reagan Administration is at its most decisive in a conflict between two parties when it can label one Cubano-Marxist ag- gressors. Since neither the Israelis nor most of the Arab nations involved in this turmoil fit that definition, much groping around is to be expected. With George Shultz as Secretary of State and in the pleasant climate of free discussion on an issue once only touchable with tongs or asbestos gloves, we are having the open debate democracies are supposed to have. And, who knows, some good may come of it.