The London Initiative - The Jewish Standard

More than 1,000 prominent Diaspora Jews signed their names to a letter, called the London Initiative because that’s where it began, asking Israel’s President Isaac Herzog to stop the violence that some small number of Jewish settlers are using against Palestinians in the West Bank.

“Mr. President, the terror, death, and destruction inflicted by Jewish-Israeli extremists against innocent Palestinians across the West Bank is an abomination,” the open letter reads. “It is not only morally shameful but a strategic threat to the future of Israel. It damages world Jewry and the relationship of future generations with Israel.”

Abraham Foxman of Bergen County is among the leaders signing the letter.

Abe, whom we often quote because he knows so much, can be such a voice of reason, of reasoned optimism, and of such deep connection to the Jewish people and to Israel that sometimes that connection overrides reason, is no radical.

He survived the Holocaust as a child, and in the decades he spent as the head of the Anti-Defamation League, he showed himself to be a determined moderate, always looking for the good, always hopeful that he’d find it.

But this is too much for him.

“I am troubled because Israel has been more tolerant of Jewish extremist behavior under this coalition” — that’s the government led by Benjamin Netanyahu and filled out by many politicians whose orientation is even to his right — “when internal security is headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is an outright racist.

“While Israel is far from perfect in this area, in the past the police have dealt with extremism. People are arrested, tried, fined, put in prison. Preventing Jewish extremist terrorist behavior used to be taken seriously.

“But in the last year or so, to my knowledge, there have been no arrests, and certainly no convictions, for Jewish extremist behavior in the West Bank. And so the message from the government is that it’s okay to do that.

“But that behavior hurts Israel. It hurts the Jewish people, particularly during wartime, when they — when we — need all the help we can get.

“And even if it wasn’t wartime, this kind of behavior would be unacceptable.”

Israeli police haven’t practiced the kind of restraint they use with domestic extremists when they are faced with regular demonstrators who show up to protest the government’s actions. “The police feel that they have a free hand to act in harsher ways to prevent demonstrators with anti-government views from speaking,” Abe said. “But it’s different when it comes to settlers.”

The situation is bad in many ways. It makes Israel look bad to the outside world. It is important to acknowledge that Israel looks bad to the outside world all the time now. That is wrong. But it is unwise to add legitimate reasons to illegitimate ones.

The London Initiative could be useful because “sometimes it is only criticism from the outside that gets the government’s attention,” Abe said. “And a lot of Israelis have been upset about this in recent months.”

And then, of course, there is an even deeper reason why this behavior is unwise. It’s immoral. “It is wrong,” Abe said. “It is against everything we believe, and everything that the Jewish state is about.”

As we approach the second half of Pesach, as the counting of the Omer, with the introspection that it often brings, comes near; as spring continues to bloom, with the daffodils out now, and some tulips joining them, as the forsythia grace us with their very short but intensely yellow beauty, as the magnolias and flowering cherries get ready to burst out, let’s hope that somehow wisdom and sanity and beauty somehow — somehow! — prevail.

—JP

Opinion

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