Israeli Politics and the Diaspora

The Influence of Diaspora Money on Israeli Elections

Mervyn Cassidy
Melbourne Australia

In the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv of January 18, 1999, Uri Avnery decried the influence of Diaspora Jews on Israeli elections. .Using the specific example of the activities of US millionaire Irving Moscowitz, Avneri wrote:

- "Bingo King Irving Moscowitz has come to Israel for a brief visit to determine who will lead this state for the next four years.

I do not believe that there is another state anywhere in the world with this phenomenon. People from other countries, who do not share our fate, who do not pay Israeli taxes, whose sons and daughters do not serve in our army, who do not suffer the consequences of our government's actions, are the ones who call the shots in our elections."

Moscowitz recently flew to Israel with a group of like - minded Jewish philanthropists to speak with right-wing ministerial candidates to decide who to back financially.

Since Israel passed a campaign finance reform law in 1994, foreign donations to Israeli political campaigns, including those from American Jews, have, in fact, been illegal. According to Hebrew University political science Prof. Menachem Hofnung, who helped draft the law, violators can face heavy fines and even prison sentences. He said wealthy foreigners and candidates continue to flout the law widely, either through covert funding or indirect channeling.

Direct donations are only part of the effort being made by these millionaires to maintain the power of the extreme Right. In the same article, in Ma'ariv, Uri Avnery stated:

On the eve of election day, planeloads of haredim arrive, some living and some dead (as rumor has it), and, having cast .their ballots, fly back home. In other words, thousands of non-Israeli residents with a fictitious Israeli citizenship, who can't tell the difference between Kiryat Arbah and Kiryat Shmoneh, who will not suffer if Syrian gas-laden missiles or Iranian nuclear missiles rain on Israel some day as a result of the policies dictated by them, are the ones who end up determining whether we face war or peace.

We in Australia have a case nearer to home, our own multi-millionaire, Australian, Rabbi Joseph Gutnick. In an interview with Gutnick by Dan Goldberg and Victor Kleerkoper, ( Australian Jewish News Jan.22) he said that he would support whoever the Likud chooses as its candidate for Israel's Prime Minister in the May election. They chose Netanyahu as their leader, which means that the Gutnick influence will again be directed to a man who lacks any credibility, to put it mildly, in the eyes of his colleagues, the Knesset, world opinion and even Rabbi Gutnick himself, who is quoted as saying he is "disappointed" with his performance.

The report states: "On the eve of Israel's 1996 election, as the electorate was balanced on a knife edge, Rabbi Gutnick orchestrated the eleventh. hour mobilisation of 5000 Chabad volunteers to canvass the populace. It has become conventional wisdom that this Chabad campaign swung the election in favour of Mr.Netanyahu, by the narrowest of margins - a mere .9%, of the votes cast - and the fact that it was funded by Joseph Gutnick is not considered " classified " information"

He said that he is in touch with Moscowitz and "certainly respects what he is doing, and we are talking to each other with regards to the elections".

A report by Yehonathan Tommer in the Australian Jewish News of April 2, based on his own report in the Israeli paper Yediot Ahronot,   stated: " Australian mining magnate Rabbi Joseph Gutnick’s activities in Israel have triggered a political storm in Israel, with opposition politicians demanding a criminal investigation of alleged political bribery."

Tommer alleges that Prime Minister Netanyahu and members of his inner staff were trading government influence to halt the peace process and cease further territorial concessions in return for a " petty cash " box supplied by Gutnick to fund gifts and financial aid to favoured right-wing institutions, private charitable causes and government political publicity campaigns in the United States.

In exchange, the Australian multimillionaire and prominent Lubavitcher activist was claimed to be receiving a " large coffer " of funds channeled through Israeli government ministries to Lubavitch institutions.

According to Yediot Aharonot, since the 1996 elections Rabbi Gutnick has had two Israeli Chabad aides, Haim Yankele Leibowicz and Yosef Aharonov, installed in the Prime Minister’s office. They are able to ensure that some 200 million shekels are funneled to Chabad-affiliated educational institutions and that they reach their destinations.

In their report, Yediot Aharonot detailed findings which highlight four recipients of Mr. Gutnick’s largesse.

Uri Elitzur, Netanyahu's personal bureau chief, allegedly requested and received $US75,000 for an association to promote culture, the arts and absorption of new residents in West Bank settlements.

Professor Ben-Zion Netanyahu, the prime minister’s father, allegedly received $US24,000 to help finance activities of the right –wing association " Professors for Political Strength " of which he is a member.

David Bar Ilan, who heads Netanyahu's political planning and media communication activities, is alleged to have received $US 20,000 to finance pro Netanyahu advertisements in leading American newspapers.

Sarah Netanyahu is alleged to have received $US25,000 from Mr. Gutnick's private New York account for the " One Step Forward " association which she heads.

In addition, Mr. Gutnick allegedly paid $US150,000 for a down town Jerusalem shop which the Netanyahus wanted him to purchase. The shop, which has no commercial value for him and stands empty to this day, once belonged to a nanny whom the Netanyahus wanted to get rid of.

When pressed on such claims, Gutnick confirmed that the facts were correct , but the alleged political bribery attributed to his good relations with Mr. Netanyahu and his advisers was false.

As a result of these allegations Labour Member Yossi Katz, Chairman of the Parliamentary State Auditing Committee, said he was calling a special session because it was " unacceptable that the Prime Minister’s Office should become a branch of the Chabad Movement or a funnel for Mr. Gutnick’s private charities. Mr. Netanyahu’s Bureau cannot act as a broker of gifts for services rendered."

Left-wing Meretz leader, Yossi Sarid, stated "Though Gutnick does not reside in Israel he bears his full weight and influence on the Prime Minister through his continuous funding of the Netanyahu family’s various private needs ". He is calling for investigations by the police and Comptroller-General Eliezer Goldberg into the Prime Minister’s alleged criminal breaches of the political party funding law.

Bibi’s Netanyahu’ comment. " A load of bullshit whose sole purpose is to attack me politically. Thousands and thousands of words, personal gibes and defamation, an army of reporters mobilised for Barak and the Left ".

Moscowitz and Gutnick have immense power, and their access to funds is virtually unlimited. It is to be hoped that these investigations will prevent them from once again returning a government that is regarded as the worst in the history of Israel.

 American Jews and Israel’s Upcoming Elections

By Murray Polner

Recently, two advertisements appeared in the New York Times. The first, "U.S. Jews, BREAK THE SILENCE," was signed by Jews (myself included) endorsing Shimon Peres’s observation that, "In order for there to be a Jewish state, there must be a Palestinian state." The second ad, published on the Times’s Op Ed page asked readers to "Urge your Senators/Representatives to investigate NPR’s [National Public Radio] Middle East coverage" and "Reconsider financial support for NPR until the anti-Israel bias ceases."

To a casual reader, these ads, so different from one another in their political judgments, probably mean that American Jews have a passionate interest in the outcome of the coming elections in Israel. But do they? And how intense is that concern?

My answer is a paradox: they do and they don’t.

Certainly the Jewish media care, but with rare exceptions theirs is hardly an impartial view. And certainly the religious denominations also care, inasmuch as they are competing for the right to control or share equally in religious rituals in Israel – clearly a matter of significance to many in this country. And Jewish organizations (many of whose members are aging or which in fact have no members at all) are also concerned with who wins the election even though very few dared to support publicly with rallies and ads the Rabin-Peres-Arafat peace process. Doves, centered in a handful of groups, also care, as they condemn Israeli torture of Palestinians, demolition of Palestinian homes, continual expansion of West Bank settlements, and the right of Palestinians to choose their own fate. And obviously so do secular Jewish nationalists who express entirely opposite views.

Still, adding all these together, I doubt that the total number barely – if that—represents a majority of American Jewry. And if they don’t, why should anyone lose sleep over who wins the election in Israel more than they care about who wins the war in the south Balkans or control of Congress in 2000?

For the key to understanding why interest in the elections and Israel too has declined is to recognize what should be apparent: the broad freedoms offered in our open society have redefined and dramatically altered the lives, status and security of American Jews. Intermarriage, the bane of organized Jewish life, is no stigma to millions of American Jews. "Continuity," yet another fuzzy shibboleth, may perhaps be nurtured in synagogues and schools, but hardly in "defense" organizations or in uncritical attachment to Israel. Most Jews are now unaffiliated with the multitude of organizations that inundate American Jewish life. Above all, they tend to reject definitions of Jewish narrow self-interest that too many would foist upon us. (As in the apocryphal headline in a Jewish newspaper: "Millions die in Earthquake in Honduras; Three Jews safe"). Many, too, were turned off by the tepid (at best) organizational support for the peace process, which for the first time seriously offered the possibility of a truce in the half-century civil war between Jews and Arab.

Fortified by the fact that overt anti-Semitism is by and large a thing of the past -- despite exhortations from some diehard Jews and Israelis that American tolerance for Jews is a hundred miles wide and one inch deep -- the truth is that never before have Jews been so safe, so accepted, so successful. The United States – not Israel -- has become the goldene medina, our golden, Promised Land.

Nor are we "assimilating," a badly misused term widely embraced by Jewish organizations. The truth is that American Jews have neither converted nor assimilated. In his valuable book "Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America" (Johns Hopkins Press, 1997), the historian Gerald Sorin makes an excellent case that we have, instead, acculturated. Assimilation, he rightly points out, means essentially the extinction of ethnic or religious singularity, which has not happened. Rather, Sorin writes, there has been an "accommodation to the larger society without total loss of traditional cultural traits." In this country, Jews built a "religiously authenticated Jewish American ethnic identity around philanthropy, Israelism, political liberalism and the search for social justice…."

All the above characteristics still apply save "Israelism" and the notion that Israel

is of paramount importance to the bulk of American Jews. Only a minority of American Jews can correctly identify to which party an Israeli politician belongs.

American Jews, an observer once said to me, may have a warm spot in their hearts for Israel but it's a small spot, so weak that it doesn’t lead them to really want to learn much about the country, perhaps a litmus test of how much they really care.

In the late 1980s a number of commentators began detecting a growing distance toward Israel as the Intifada and the battle over settlements raged. Few knew or seemed to care what Zionism meant anymore. Few visited Israel more than once if at all and far less than Christian pilgrims to their Holy Land. Couple that with the fact that for many people and groups Israel became an ersatz single

Issue "religion." But transforming Israel into a substitute faith is the sort of dogma that no longer works. Blind adherence to whatever Israel does just isn’t our style. In short, ethical and moral behavior and reliance on our humane traditions count far more.

It also means that whoever wins the elections will only matter to millions of American Jews if Palestinians wishing to establish their own independent government are allowed to do so. If Israeli Jews vote in a government that perseveres in denying Palestinians the identical human rights Jews demand for themselves everywhere else, then surely more and more perplexed and offended American Jews will continue turning away from Israel. But should the elections result in a candidate intent on completing the peace process begun by Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel may once again loom large here, less as an ersatz religion and more as fulfillment of Judaism’s and Zionism’s highest ideals.

Murray Polner,

NY USA

Murray Polner was editor of Present Tense magazine and co-editor of the biweekly newsletter PS.

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