By David Bedein
JERUSALEM — In February 1977, after four years of activity, the US based organization Breira held its first and only national conference in Washington, DC.
I was witness to the event, which convened only one month after Jimmy Carter was sworn in as the US President.
The Israel Labor Party was then in power in Jerusalem.
Yitzhak Rabin was Prime Minister, Shimon Peres was Defense Minister and Yigal Allon was the Foreign Minister of Israel.
Breira’s platform was to organize Jews in the diaspora and Israel to support the creations of a Palestinian Arab state in the areas acquired by Israel ten years earlier, after the 1967 war.
Shortly before the Breira conference, Golda Meir, Israel’s previous Labor Party Prime Minister, gave a seminal interview on Israel TV in which she repeated the Labor Party position at the time that there is no such thing as a Palestinian Arab people and she could not understand why and how Jews abroad could think of a Palestinian Arab state. .
However, the momentum of the Breira conference in DC, drawing on more than 100 Jewish communities from around North America, seemed unstoppable.
Using pent up energies from Jewish involvement in the US civil rights movement and the anti Vietnam movement- only two years after the end of the Vietnam war, Breira brought Jews from more than 50 Jewish communities from across America and had the makings of a real grass roots movement that challenged the norms of Israel at the time.
I wrote at the time was that the government of Israel should not underestimate the sudden widespread support that the Palestinian Arab state idea was gaining and that Israel should prepare itself for unprecedented new US Jewish support for any Palestinian Arab initiative in the future, in tandem with a new US Administration that hinted that it would support new efforts for Palestinian Arab self-rule. Indeed, one month later, President Carter delivered a seminal speech in Clinton, Mass – the first time that a US President endorsed the concept of a Palestinian Arab State.
So what happened to Breira? Why did Breira not capitalize on such support, after such a grandiose start, especially in light of Carter’s implicit support
I asked that question of the late Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, the chairman of Breira.
Rabbi Wolf told me what had transpired.
Rabbi Wolf explained that representatives of the US State Department and the Carter Administration offered generous funding to Breira TO bolster grass roots Jewish support to galvanize American support for a Palestinian Arab state.
Rabbi Wolf explained that such a US government initiative convinced him that he should disband Breira.
Rabbi Wolf explained that while he wanted American Jews to speak up on this vital issue, but that he felt that it would be morally wrong to accept financial and logistical support for this effort from the US government.
The late Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, Rabbi Wolf’s eminent cousin, then the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, confirmed to me that that the US administration has indeed made these gestures to support and energize Breira, and that he supported Rabbi Wolf’s decision to reject American government funding.
Rabbi Hertzberg, like Rabbi Wolf, supported the concept of energizing American Jews to support a Palestinian Arab State, even if the Israeli government did not favor the idea at the time.
However, both Rabbi Hertzberg and Rabbi Wolf felt very strongly that it would not be morally correct for an American Jewish grass roots effort to be coopted by the American government.
A generation later, the Israeli Knesset Parliament is debating legislation to require the registration and monitoring of the vast financial support that Diaspora and Israeli political organizations now receive from foreign governments to lobby for a Palestinian Arab state, now firmly under the control of the PLO and Hamas, whose respective covenants call for Israel’s annihilation. Gone are the voices of Rabbi Wolf and Rabbi Hertzberg, who questioned the moral implications of accepting funding from foreign governments in what they viewed as a grass roots Jewish and Israeli initiative.
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Bedein is director of the Israel Resource News Agency of the center for Near East Policy Research. His blog may be accessed at www.israelbehindthenews.com