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Joshua S. Hecht is president of the Rabbinical Council of Connecticut, and Rabbi of Beth Israel Synagogue of Westport/Norwalk. He can be contacted at
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By Joshua S. Hecht
September 8, 2003
In response to "The Price of Not Keeping the Peace" by Arthur Hertzberg, originally published by the New York Times on August 27, 2003, and posted online here.
Of course, the title of this article is a play on Arthur Hertzberg's brash op-ed "The Price of Not Keeping the Peace" that recently appeared in the New York Times.
In brief, Hertzberg opines in 1088 words that the United States must use punitive economic measures to force Israel and Palestinians to take necessary steps toward peace that they have refused to make.
Please note Hertzberg's penchant for imposing moral equivalency as he makes the equation between the Jewish people and the rough PLO. He states in his op-ed that $1 billion of U.S. aid to Israel is directed by the Israeli government towards subsidizing settlements in occupied territories. Hertzberg wants that money be put into escrow to help those settlers who would peacefully move back into areas within Israel's pre-1967 borders. What he wants the Palestinian side to do is stop sponsoring terror or else all aid should be cut of from them as well. Indeed, Hertzberg's opinion is being embraced by every so called compassionate-liberal who is willing to continue to pay the price of not being right.
Well before 1967 and well after the Yom Kippur War, including the implementation of the Oslo accords, Israel's offers for peaceful coexistence have been rebuffed, but that means little to this professor of Jewish history.
It's obvious from the op-ed that the retired Professor Hertzberg feels that he is morally correct to call for Israel to evacuate more that one hundred thousand Jews to the pre-1967 borders.
This is of course showing a high degree of naivete and or contempt for the existential threats that the Jews in Israel face. The thousands of maimed adults and wounded children following implementation of the Oslo accords mean little to this man of letters.
The loss of hundreds of innocent lives only propels Hertzberg to amplify his call for the Jewish people to relinquish their right to self determination to live in security and peace in their ancestral home. Ironically, Arthur Hertzberg the great humanitarian has joined the chorus of the gentiles who proclaim "you are thieves of our land." (Rashi Bereishis 1:1)
The liberal theology of Hertzberg, who was ordained in 1946 by the Jewish Theological Seminary, is not the issue here. What is the issue here is that his pronouncements do not reflect reality and are a threat to the welfare of the Jewish people. In fact they serve to embolden the anti Israel lobby in the State Department and in the United Nations and within society as a whole to further endanger Jewish life and security.
Whether Hertzberg acknowledges the Torah laws of Pikuach Nefesh (saving life) or respects at all those that champion the rights of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is irrelevant. In fact Hertzberg has in the past utilized indecorous rhetoric to criticize our President of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, Rabbi Abraham B. Hecht, as being a right-winger and fanatic and of not being a realist. Sadly, Hertzberg's way of conflict resolution especially for the middle-East has cost the lives of thousands of innocent people on both sides. The good professor will surly recognize these inspired words by Emile Zola in J'accuse "if you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through, it will blow up everything in its way."
The 'price for peace' that Hertzberg is demanding of the Jewish people is shameful, self destructive and prohibited by Torah law primarily because it presents a clear and present danger to the concept of pikuach nefesh. Why won't Hertzberg own up to the truth?
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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