Forward right

One of the lead articles in this week’s Forward is Debate Underscores Orthodox Community’s Rightward Drift. Reporting on a recent debate between Michael Medved and David Luchins, Rebecca Spence reports:

The charged debate, attended by some 150 Orthodox convention-goers who hailed from Canada to California, opens a window onto the voting patterns of America’s Orthodox population. While the Orthodox, who make up 10% of the American Jewish population, once voted for Democrats — in keeping with American Jewry’s standing as one of the country’s most liberal voting blocs — in recent years they have slid heavily to the right, according to the O.U.’s own data. In addition, as Luchins’s own willingness to embrace Republican candidates underscores, they are more likely than other American Jews to cross party lines.

The next paragraph though, I think, explains the subject accurately:

“Orthodox Jews are much more of a swing-vote constituency and are more prepared to vote for a conservative Republican than other segments of the Jewish community,” said Nathan Diament, the O.U.’s director of public policy. “What we’ve seen over the past few election cycles is that Orthodox voters are very much issue-driven voters, with Israel and terrorism and security issues at the top of their list.”

Correct, Orthodox voters tend to be “issue-driven.” Those who pay attention to the issues find more in common with Republicans than Democrats. To say the Orthodox community has moved to the “right,” is to dismiss them. Obviously there are plenty of Orthodox Jews who feel more comfortable in the Democratic party, but those of us who are more conservative these days came to our conclusions by looking at the issues, not by mindlessly “moving to the right.”

Another article in the Forward shows the dismissive use of the term “right.”
GOP Leader Calls For Revisions to Fatah Movement’s Outdated Charter by Nathan Guttman – the Forward’s James D. Besser (and that’s not a compliment) starts:

A push by right-wing American Jewish activists to change the constitution of the governing Palestinian party is gaining momentum in Congress, even as Israelis are dismissing the document as “irrelevant,” and the umbrella body of American Jewish organizations has voted against taking up the issue.

Frankly I don’t care if some Israelis are saying that the Fatah constitution is irrelevant. They’re wrong. It’s just as wrong as ignoring the Palestinian National Charter. Yes, I know that in April, 1996 and in December, 1998 the Palestinian Authority supposedly took votes to abrogate those parts of the charter that were incompatible with making peace.

However as Prof. Yehoshuah Porat noted in 1997:

Several days after this resolution was passed, I asserted to the Israeli public that this was actually a sophisticated fraud. The resolution did not refer to specific articles that were apparently canceled, and therefore there was no way of knowing what was actually canceled, since there are deep differences of opinion over the questions of which articles of the Covenant run counter to the exchange of letters between the PLO and the Israeli government.Does this include only those articles which explicitly negate Israel’s right to exist, or does it also apply to the articles which deny any link whatsoever between the Jews and the Land of Israel, Zionism, the partition of the country, those which attribute the right of representing all Palestinians including Israeli Arabs to the PLO, and those which support the armed struggle to liberate Palestine?

The lack of clear action being taken was also notable in 1998, despite the presence of then President Clinton.

But even if the action to abrogate the offensive parts of the Charter were taken in one of those sessions, it really doesn’t matter. The Charter represents the beliefs that are still held today by even the “moderates” of Fatah. Prior to the Annapolis conference claimed that they could not countenance Israel as a Jewish state. This is the equivalent to the many articles of the Palestinian Charter that deny historical basis of Zionism.

But you say this is the Fatah constitution not the Palestinian Charter? Well Fatah is the main organization within the PLO, one must assume that its views are largely the same.

But don’t take my word for it, here’s what Morton Klein found:

Klein searched for the Fatah constitution on Google, the online search engine, and found several Web sites containing translations of the document. The translations contained explicit calls for the destruction of the State of Israel, the eradication of Zionism and the continuation of armed struggle against Israel.

Of course that summary could just as well apply to the Charter. Still there are doubters.

As the ZOA-led effort gathers momentum, Fatah members, Middle East experts and even Israeli officials are arguing that the campaign is a misguided distraction from the recently revived Israeli-Palestinian peace process, since the document no longer holds any significance and doesn’t serve as the party’s platform.“If it was such an important document, someone would be able to get hold of an authoritative copy of it,” said Nathan Brown, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies and a leading scholar on Palestinian politics. “The governing documents regarding any ideological issue come from the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, not from the Fatah party.”

This isn’t misguided at all. If even the “moderate” Fatah doesn’t accept Israel’s right to exist will concessions from Israel really bring peace? Nathan Brown’s statement is a demonstration of willful ignorance. The Fatah party was the main constituent party of the PLO. So its ideology would be the dominant one. If Fatah still holds those views, well then the Palestinian Authority does too.

If in 1993 Arafat set out to create a state that could live in peace with Israel, maybe I could see saying that the document is irrelevant. But since 1993, Arafat was committed to terror and to violating many of the provisions of the treaties he signed. Absent concrete action to the contrary, there’s no reason to give the Palestinians the benefit of the doubt here.

Crossposed on Soccer Dad.