Well, the June 28 issue of The New York Review of Books has just arrived, and it is not in this issue, either. This is something of a scandal. The "it" to which I refer is a long letter to the editor by Shlomo Avineri. The letter is a devastating rejoinder to an article by George Soros that appeared in the April, 12 issue of the New York Review. The title of Soros's article was "On Israel, America and AIPAC," and it was written partly in response to an article that I had published in TNR on February 12, about Soros and the Jews. Soros's subject in the New York Review was the damage that the American commitment to Israel does to American interests in the Middle East, and the suppression by Israel's supporters in the United States of any free and open discussion of this issue. Or more precisely, the alleged damage and the alleged debate. For as Avineri demonstrated, his allegations are completely unsustainable, even wild. Avineri sent his letter to the New York Review on March 29. He tells me that he has not heard from its editors. This is odd and outrageous. Avineri is a very distinguished man of ideas, a world-renowned scholar on Hegel and Marx and modern ideology. He is also a pillar of the Israeli left, and a politically formidable figure in his country. The proprieties of intellectual and academic respect alone should have required Robert Silvers to acknowledge the existence of his letter, and to make its contents known to his readers. There is also the fact that the letter is calm, decent in tone, and lucidly reasoned--a careful argument that is worthy of careful reflection. Avineri's piece is completely lacking in demagoguery of any kind. (In my view, in fact, it is too polite and in some places wrong in judgment.) More to the philosophical point: a journal that goes into high dudgeon over the suppression of debate in a free society now finds itself in the business of suppressing free debate itself. How dare the Review complain about the inhibition of discussion and then inhibit it? The fact is that the Review has always had something of a party-line on Israel and the Palestinians ... It began with Noam Chomsky and continued with I.F.Stone, two individuals not exactly known for their political or historical honesty. Then, some years later, Silvers picked up Robert Malley, a low-level Clinton administration peace processor who basically acquitted Yassir Arafat of responsibility for the collapse of the Camp David talks in 2000. Now Silvers is pretending that, despite his blatant ignorance of Middle Eastern matters, George Soros, the grand pooh-bah of Wall Street, is also an expert on Israel and the Palestinians. This is pathetic. His authority comes from nothing more than his money. Which is why I believe that Silvers will not publish Shlomo Avineri's analysis of Soros's silliness. A point of information, before the conspiracy theorists kick into action again: the text of Avineri's letter was not provided to me by Abe Foxman or any of the other Elders of Zion. Leon Wieseltier received it from Avineri, along with many other intellectuals and scholars such as Michael Ignatieff and Michael Walzer, and he then brought it to my attention. I then contacted Avineri, an old friend, to express my admiration for what he had written, and to ascertain the fate of the letter. In the name of free speech, and for the sake of a fuller and more complicated debate about Israel and the United States, and so as to express my disgust with the New York Review of Books, I attach the link to the letter here: AIPAC critics, heal thyselves! WHERE GEORGE SOROS IS WRONG (Letter to the Editor of the New York Review of Books) I am a great admirer of George Soros and far from being a fan of AIPAC, some of whose policies (like its attempt to go against the Israeli government in trying to undermine the 1993 Oslo accords with the PLO) have been extremely distasteful to me and to other Israelis of the Left. But it pains me to have found Soros's "On Israel, America and AIPAC" (NYRB, April 12, 2007) so ill-informed about Israel and the Palestinians, that whatever merit his arguments against AIPAC may have, they can be very easily undermined. Let me point out some of these issues. I will focus only on issues dealing directly with Middle East reality, and will not touch on his arguments about AIPAC: this should be left to those Americans who care about Israel, but there is no doubt that Soros's far from perfect mastery of the facts will diminish the impact of his critique among unbiased observers. 1. To argue, as Soros does, that the 2005 unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza under Sharon, without negotiating with the Palestinian Authority, has "strengthened the position of Hamas" is an argument constantly used by Netanyahu and the Israeli right-wing, and it is ironic to see a person like Soros adopting it. It also totally misreads the historical significance of Sharon turning from an arch-hawk, "Father of the Settlements", to becoming the first Israeli leader to have both the insight and the political guts to dismantle Jewish settlements in parts of the historical Land of Israel. In this, Sharon inaugurated an historical watershed in Israeli politics paralleled only by such volte faces as Nixon's visit to China and de Gaulle's granting independence to Algeria. It is for this reason that around 70% of Israelis supported the Gaza disengagement. To miss this point is a reflection of deep deficit in the understanding of the political and ideological dynamics of the forces that move Israeli society. 2. Hamas won the January 2006 elections not because of what Israel has done, but because of what the Palestinian Authority has failed to do--namely, to use the Oslo accords for nation-building and for the creation of the social and economic infra-structure for a viable Palestinian state. Instead, Arafat built up the Palestinian Authority as another Mukhabarat state--i.e. a state built on security services, on the model of Syria, Egypt and Iraq. He set up a dozen competing security and intelligence services, used much of the money provided by the international community not for social reconstruction but for competing Praetorian Guards, with more than 60% of the public servants of the Palestinian Authority being security officials. The money used for the underpinning of this authoritarian machinery starved the Palestinian population of much needed funds for education, health, housing and other socials services. The rise of Hamas has its origins in its ability to fill in this vacuum with its panoply of social services and economic outreach: it did what the Palestinian Authority --not yet a state, but already a failed one--so dismally neglected. 3. To characterize Hamas just as an organization deeply divided between a more radical military wing and a supposedly more moderate political wing is another example of Soros's failure to grasp the complex reality in question. It totally overlooks the stated aims of Hamas, which are a radical negation of any right of Israel to exist. Furthermore, Soros probably is not aware of the fact that Hamas's foundational Charter is committed to fighting not only Israel and Zionism, but sees the Jews as such as its arch-enemy. Paragraph 22 of its Charter states that the Jews (together with the Masons, Bnai Brith and Rotary) were responsible for the French and Communist Revolutions; that they instigated World War I and set up the League of Nations in order to abolish the Ottoman Caliphate; and that they instigated World War II in order to make money out of it. One can only guess what would have been Soros's reaction if a movement with such a gutter ideology would have come to power in, say, Hungary: surely he would not advocate negotiating with it. Moreover, despite the ambivalent language of the Mecca agreements, Hamas spokesmen continue to publicly state that they will never accept Israel and will continue fighting for the liberation of all Palestine: Israelis hear and see these statements almost daily on their TV, and they do to a very large extend determine their political attitudes to what Hamas is about. Are they as wrong as Soros, who naturally is not subjected to these invectives on a daily basis, thinks they are? 4. Soros maintains that a more robust Israeli support for Fatah in the run-up to the 2006 Palestinian elections might have prevented a Hamas victory. Besides raising the issue of principle to what extent Israel should appear as interfering in such a way in Palestinian elections, this is again a mis-reading of the local situation. When Arafat signed the 1993 Oslo accords with Israel, the Palestinian "Rejection Front" (made up of a strange coalition of Hamas, Islamic Jihad as well as the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) lambasted Fatah and Arafat as Israeli stooges and quislings, because they appeared to agree to a two-state solution. Israel has to tread very carefully so as not to de-legitimate moderate Palestinians as mere "tools of Zionism." When recently, in one of the meetings between Olmert and Abu Mazen, the Israeli Prime Minister embraced and kissed (in Middle Eastern fashion) the Palestinian President, this was viewed by some Arab observers as "a Judas kiss" (nice metaphor, isn't it?) and became fodder for Hamas propaganda against Fatah. 5. The failure of Arafat at Camp David 2000 to embrace the Barak and Clinton package is mentioned by Soros marginally, without realizing that it was a defining moment for many Israelis. Here was an Israeli leader accepting a Palestinian state, ready to give up more than 90% of the occupied territories, willing to evacuate tens of thousands of settlers, breaking the Israeli taboo about not dividing Jerusalem and being ready to share sovereignty with the Palestinians on the Temple Mount: this was the most far-reaching Israeli initiative, in line with what the Israeli Left has been advocating for decades. The Palestinian refusal-- even, as President Clinton has repeatedly said, Arafat's unwillingness to come up with a counter-offer--soured for many Israelis of the Left the hope for a reconciliation with the Palestinians in the foreseeable future. That the Palestinians not only reverted to massive terror and suicide bombs against civilians on buses, in schools and discotheques, but also called for a right of return for 1948 refugees as a matter of principle, was understood by most Israelis that the Palestinians are not limiting themselves to putting an end to the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but aim at undoing the consequences of the 1948 war and hope to dismantle Israel as a Jewish state. 6. Soros is unfortunately wrong again in the way he presents the Saudi initiative and the 2002 Beirut Arab League declaration. Both are important steps on the difficult road of the Arab world reconciling itself to the existence of Israel--but they are not what Soros appears to read into them. First of all, the Beirut declaration does not call for negotiations with Israel: it just demands that Israel "assert" that it accepts the Arab claims. Secondly, the Beirut declaration does not imply Israeli withdrawal "from large parts of the West Bank"--but calls for a total withdrawal from the whole of the West Bank and from East Jerusalem; maybe this is justified, but the two are not the same: it implies the uprooting of between 200,000-400,000 Israeli Jews from their present homes (the higher number includes Israelis living in East Jerusalem). Thirdly, it is utterly unclear what Soros means that such an eventual agreement would be "guaranteed" by Saudi Arabia: would the Saudis use their not very impressive military capability to enforce such an agreement should the Palestinians (or, for that matter, the Israelis) infringe it? They obviously would be shocked by such an implication. Last and not least, Soros fails to mention that the Beirut declaration calls for solving the refugee problem according to the Arab interpretation of UN resolution 194, and so as not to leave any doubts about its meaning specifies (in Paragraph 13 of the declaration, rarely mentioned in the current enthusiasm for this initiative) that it totally rejects "any proposals aimed at settling the refugees anywhere else than in their original homes." Beirut may be a basis for possible negotiations--but one should at least know what it contains. 7. I understand--and in many points agree--with Soros' general criticism of President Bush's policies, but he is again carried to unwarranted lengths when it comes to Bush's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After referring to President Clinton's futile attempts at peace making, Soros says that "President Bush never tried." This is simply not true: it can be argued that Bush should have done things differently, but to claim that he "never tried" is not the case. It was President Bush who initiated the Road Map, which became the common agenda adopted not only by the UN, the EU and Russia, but also by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority (Hamas never accepted it); a number of summit meetings took place in the region, and US secretaries of state have been visiting the area and trying to close the gaps between Israeli and Palestinian positions. They have evidently failed--but not for lack of trying, but because the gaps between the two positions are still too deep. Like everyone else, George Soros is entitled to voice his opinions on the Middle East, and any attempt to stifle his criticism--of Israel, US policy or AIPAC--by ad personam arguments is despicable. But Soros has been so influential and beneficial in affairs of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe precisely because his analysis of developments has been based on so much knowledge and understanding and what for a lack of an appropriate English term I would like to call Fingerspitzengefuehl. These qualities have, unfortunately, been lacking in his jumping into the treacherous waters of the Middle East. One may hope that his future incursions into this mine field--which should be welcome by many friends of Israel and in Israel itself--will rely less on not always honest advice he may be given by people with their own agendas, who may be using him in ways not calculated to make his important voice credible. Shlomo Avineri
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem