TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100791/1007003.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.3 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 34

AMERICA ABROAD

They Come Bearing Hope


By Strobe Talbott


     When I visited Israel earlier this year, the night flight
from Cairo taxied to a spot between two El Al jumbo jets that
were already disgorging onto the tarmac a profusion of joyous,
exhausted humanity. Standing in line for customs, I was engulfed
by a sibilant jabber that I recognized from other journeys --
to Moscow, Minsk, Kiev, Tbilisi, Tashkent, Baku, Irkutsk.

    The people around me were the latest of the 1 million
immigrants from the U.S.S.R. who are expected to swell the
Jewish population of Israel nearly 30% in the coming years. I've
thought about them a lot in the past few weeks.

    In the short term, they're part of the problem that's
poisoning Israel's relations with far-off American friends and
diminishing the chances of peace with its nearby Arab enemies.

    The Likud government has been using the massive influx of
Soviet Jews to justify a tripling in settlement activity in the
occupied territories. Never mind that few of the new arrivals
have any desire to live in the West Bank or Golan Heights; never
mind that even though Israel is a small country, there's still
plenty of undeveloped real estate inside the pre-1967 borders.

    Likud is bent on settling the territories to ensure their
de facto annexation and preclude any exchange of land for
peace. If Housing Minister Ariel Sharon had his way, the Trojan
horse would be filled with immigrants speaking Russian.

    George Bush, quite rightly, doesn't want the U.S. to
subsidize Sharon's operation. That's why Bush has asked Congress
to hold off granting Israel $10 billion in loan guarantees to
help in the "absorption" of the Soviet Jews. Bush's critics, in
both Israel and the U.S., have accused him of playing a cruel
and cynical game with the immigrants, holding them hostage to
his political objectives. It's the right charge, but it should
be aimed at Sharon, not Bush.

    Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir is also dead set against
conceding one square inch of the West Bank. Inaugurating a new
settlement last week, he vowed that "all our territories that
can be built on will be populated by Jews to the end of the
horizon." But at least Shamir is motivated by a sense of what
he believes to be the historical birthright of his people.

    Sharon's goal, by contrast, has less to do with an
ideological commitment to Greater Israel than with the
aggrandizement of his personal power. His strategy,
breathtakingly obvious and all too promising, seems to be to
subvert the peace process, provoke a crisis with Washington and
then elbow Shamir aside in the resulting Cabinet upheaval.

    For Sharon, the Soviet Jews have appeared at just the
right moment. Desperate for somewhere to live, they're natural
constituents of the Housing Minister. Many are easy recruits for
Likud -- if only because the alternative, the Labor Party, flies
a red flag, celebrates May Day and has been known to sing the
Internationale.

    Nonetheless, because they've come to stay, "the Russians,"
as they're often called, may in the long run be part of the
salvation of their new homeland. They joined the aliyah
(literally, "the ascent") in order to move up in the world. They
didn't leave an expansionist, totalitarian empire that repressed
its minorities only to become citizens of a garrison state at
war with its neighbors as well as with 1.7 million embittered,
disfranchised and mutinous Palestinians.

    Nor are the Soviet Jews happy at the prospect of
foundering in another bureaucratized, militarized, socialistic
economy. They don't just need places to live -- they need
meaningful, productive jobs. Even if they bring nothing but what
they can carry in two suitcases, they are rich in education,
skill and ambition. Already there are enough doctors for a
clinic on every corner, enough musicians for a string quartet
in every apartment building and enough engineers and computer
programmers for a booming, high-tech, export-oriented
manufacturing sector on the order of Taiwan's or Singapore's.

    Yet Israel is too burdened by defense spending and too
isolated internationally, especially in its own region, to take
advantage of the infusion of human capital that the Soviets Jews
represent.

    Writing last April in the weekly magazine the Jerusalem
Report, Natan Sharansky, a former prisoner of conscience in the
U.S.S.R. and a leading spokesman for Soviet Jews, complained
that "in the existing stagnant economic and political system,
there is no place for the enormous energy the immigrants bring
with them." Unless Israel develops an "open economy," he warned,
the Zionist dream itself will be in jeopardy. Sharansky picked
up that theme again in the latest issue of the Report: "Whether
this exodus will become a great blessing or a terrible burden
for our country depends on how our government meets the
challenge."

    Sooner or later, Israel will face a stark choice: either
it can have Arab lands or it can have Arab markets; either it
can absorb the West Bank or it can absorb the Soviet Jews.

    Last week several planeloads of newcomers arrived at
Ben-Gurion Airport. Fortunately, most of them will be around a
lot longer than Sharon and Shamir.