washington | The hardest sell for American Jewish groups already signed on to promote Israel’s planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip might be other Jews.
Many major Jewish religious streams, lobbyists and civil rights groups are encouraging the Bush administration and lawmakers to maintain political support for Israel’s July 20 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby, is working to help win approval of $200 million in aid for the Palestinians when the U.S. Senate returns next week.
The U.S. House of Representatives already has approved the cash.
“AIPAC is strongly supportive of aid to the Palestinians, provided the proper oversight is in place to ensure the money is not misspent,” said AIPAC spokesman Andrew Schwartz. “Congress is currently working on making sure that such oversight is in place.”
It should be smooth sailing, except that a coalition of Israeli settlers and their U.S. supporters are making themselves heard loud and clear. They are raising hard questions about the historic — and traumatic — removal of thousands of long-established Jewish settlers and whether their removal is worth the risks associated with turning over the region to the Palestinians.
The difficulty of the situation means having to explain the withdrawal to American Jews, said Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the community’s foreign policy umbrella body.
The conference’s own rocky path to endorsing disengagement reflects the divisions: It held back until late last year — almost a year after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced the plan — when it issued a statement of qualified support.
Fierce opposition to the disengagement plan is a concern for the Reform movement, which has emerged as one of its most avid backers.
“We’re always concerned that a fairly small minority of Jews in the United States have a disproportionately loud voice,” said Rabbi David Saperstein, the director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center.
Saperstein is encouraging hundreds of Reform rabbis meeting this week in Houston at this year’s Central Conference of American Rabbis to tackle the issue.
Much of the American Jewish opposition is being fueled by the Zionist Organization of America, and its president, Morton Klein, who scored an impressive victory last year when his group funded an advertising campaign in Israel that helped opponents of withdrawal win a Likud Party vote.
Meanwhile, the Yesha Council, which represents settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, has sent representatives to the United States to enlist support for their opposition to the withdrawal.
They focused especially on the Orthodox Union, which has not taken an official position. Many Orthodox Jews in America have family members in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and feel a particular empathy for those who will be uprooted.
In Washington, support for disengagement has created an unlikely alliance between AIPAC and the dovish pro-Israel groups that work the Hill, Americans for Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum — although there are substantive differences over the details.
AIPAC and the dovish pro-Israel lobby groups disagree over what conditions should be attached to the $200 million in aid for the Palestinians. AIPAC was behind an effort to remove the presidential waiver, which traditionally is attached to such bills, meaning every dollar must be subject to congressional review.
Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum want the Senate to restore the waiver and make sure it makes the final version that lands on Bush’s desk for his signature.