ועדת העלייה, הקליטה והתפוצות, כנסת 17, פרוטוקול מספר 90, 2007-05-16 09:00

קולט אביטל: אני מתכבדת לפתוח את ישיבת ועדת העלייה, הקליטה והתפוצות.

קולט אביטל: היום אנחנו מקדישים את הישיבה הזאת לנושא מעמדה של ישראל בארצות-הברית משתי זוויות: הזווית האחת היא האם התמיכה של יהדות אמריקה מובטחת בכל תנאי ובכל מקרה, והאם יש שינויים בדעת הקהל בקרב יהדות אמריקה כלפי ישראל.

קולט אביטל: הזווית השנייה היא מה התסריטים השונים שיכולים להיות עם חילופי ממשל אפשריים בארצות-הברית והאם התמיכה בישראל מובטחת בכל מקרה, ומה יחסיהם של המפלגות השונות כלפינו.

קולט אביטל: בישיבה של ועדה כזו הדגש כמובן הוא על יהודי ארצות-הברית, על מעמדם ועל יחסם כלפי ישראל.

קולט אביטל: האורח שלנו הבוקר הוא מר מלקולם הונליין שהוא סגן נשיא ועידת הנשיאים.

קולט אביטל: אני לא צריכה להציג את הארגון שהוא הארגון המאגד בתוכו חמישים וכמה ארגונים יהודיים מהגדולים בארצות-הברית ומכאן גם חשיבותו של הארגון כי הוא הקול המייצג של הקהילה היהודית המאורגנת, בעיקר כלפי הממשל.

קולט אביטל: שלא כדרכנו אנחנו ננהל את הישיבה הזאת באנגלית ונעשה זאת בגלל האורח.

קולט אביטל: בדרך כלל בכנסת אנחנו מצווים לנהל ישיבות בעברית ומהסיבה הזאת אני פותחת את הישיבה בעברית.

קולט אביטל: האורח ידבר באנגלית.

קולט אביטל: מי שרוצה להשתמש, יוכל להשתמש בתרגום הסימולטאני.

קולט אביטל: מי שירצה לדבר, יצטרך ללחוץ על הכפתור האדום שמונח לפניו במיקרופון.

קולט אביטל: המיקרופון הזה הוא גם המיקרופון שקשור לתרגום.

קולט אביטל: COLLETTE AVITAL, Chairperson:		 We are honored to host today Malcolm Hoenlein, from the Conference of Presidents of Major  American Jewish Organizations.

קולט אביטל: Malcolm will say a few words about the organization that you hold in your hands.

קולט אביטל: I your honor we are going to do this with simultaneous translation.

קולט אביטל: Whoever speaks has to speak into the microphone to push the red button.

קולט אביטל: Bevakasha Malcolm.

קולט אביטל: MALCOLM HOENLEIN:		Thank you very much.

קולט אביטל: In the translation they said that the conference represents fifty odd organizations.

קולט אביטל: It is true, some of them are odd.

קולט אביטל: But the translation – fifty odd organizations.

קולט אביטל: I want it to be clear for the record that the minority of them are odd.

קולט אביטל: The majority of them are fairly normal.

קולט אביטל: Their representatives are here and the majority of them are normal as well.

קולט אביטל: I want to thank you very much for convening this meeting and giving me the opportunity to see my colleagues, my mentors, some of them, people we work with on a regular basis to address the very issues you mentioned in your introduction.

קולט אביטל: You certainly are someone who knows both sides of the story well, especially from your service as consular general of  where you approached us on hasbara and many other issues in building the ties between tfuzot and .

קולט אביטל: What I want to talk about today and I know time is somewhat limited, so I will try to deal with certain issues that you mentioned, not so much from a political perspective, but I think at issues that challenge us.

קולט אביטל: The reason why I think it is so appropriate to do it here is that the nature of the issues we face today are really ones that we hold in common between  and the diaspora.

קולט אביטל: More so, I think, than in the past.

קולט אביטל: I also think that this is a watershed period in Jewish history in ’s history but also the history of world Jewry and the world and that the challenges that we face today are not going to be issues of months or consequences of months or years, but of generations.

קולט אביטל: That this is perhaps the most serious time in the more than thirty five years that I have been doing this work, I don’t remember a time when the challenges had greater significance or potentially greater consequence and that it is imperative for us to look at these issues together.

קולט אביטל: Many people talk about the divisions between the diaspora and .

קולט אביטל: I think, unfortunately, sometimes it takes our enemies to define us.

קולט אביטל: We saw that the first one to call us a nation  was Paraoh.

קולט אביטל: Unfortunately our relationship is defined by our enemies, whether it is in times of war or in other circumstances.

קולט אביטל: Now what we see is that the enemies we confront and the challenges we confront are really ones that bind  to the diaspora.

קולט אביטל: My hope is that out of this can come an ongoing enterprise, whether it is a commission, a taskforce, just consultation between the government agencies or here at the Foreign Ministry and others with whom we work very closely, the Prime Minister’s office, the Knesset as well as the Jewish organizations who are represented here who have the opportunity to deal with agencies on a day to day basis, but more so to look for the creation of a taskforce that will enable us to address some of the issues that I am going to talk about.

קולט אביטל: Clearly, one can’t get together in these days and not talk about the danger posed by .

קולט אביטל: I think it’s important for us to recognize that  is not a diversion and should not be a diversion.

קולט אביטל: What I mean by that is  represents an exponential threat.

קולט אביטל: It is one that people have come to recognize after many years and we have tried for more than ten years to put this on the agenda, both of the Jewish community and of our government with little success until, especially Mr.

קולט אביטל: Ahmadijenad came to the rescue, and got people to understand something that didn’t develop under his leadership.

קולט אביטל: This is something that has been developing for many years.

קולט אביטל: Rahmanjani who is today posited as a moderate and you hear the Europeans and others talking him.

קולט אביטל: This is a guy who was responsible for giving the order to blow up the   embassy in , and was head of the expediency council who signed many of these terrible decrees.

קולט אביטל: There is a long history to it that people are finally coming to terms with.

קולט אביטל: What we have to understand is that Ahmadinejad means what he says and says what he means and seeks the means to employ it.

קולט אביטל: Moreover, it is the …

קולט אביטל: of international terrorism but also incitement.

קולט אביטל: We saw it with the first state sponsored holocaust denial conference since the Shoah.

קולט אביטל: There have been other holocaust denial conferences, but never one that was state sponsored.

קולט אביטל: So it raises the significance.

קולט אביטל: Moreover, he is the …

קולט אביטל: of this movement.

קולט אביטל: I think this goes to a critical issues that is debated here.

קולט אביטל: Surprisingly how much it is debated here about whether this is1938.

קולט אביטל: I know that ministers have gotten involved in this discussion.

קולט אביטל: Is it 1938, 1936, 1934, 1932?

קולט אביטל: You know the truth is that that’s not the relevant question.

קולט אביטל: The relevant question is what lessons did we learn from that period that we apply today.

קולט אביטל: It is not true that this is 1938 because we have the State of Israel.

קולט אביטל: You have an IDF.

קולט אביטל: We have endangered Jewish communities that are being saved, the Jews of Yemen, , , , , .

קולט אביטל: Were written off Jewish history largely have been saved because we have the Jewish state, because we have an IDF and an Israeli airforce and because we also have another change in the diaspora communities that are not silent.

קולט אביטל: Abba Eban once said that in World War II Jews had influence in many places but power in none.

קולט אביטל: That’s not the case today.

קולט אביטל: We shouldn’t exaggerate it, on the other hand we shouldn’t deny it.

קולט אביטל: That Jews are able to affect our destiny in ways that we could not in the past.

קולט אביטל: Part of that or a large part of that is because we have a Jewish state but also, I think, because we have diaspora communities that are more willing to stand up and particularly, in a chauvinistic way, the American Jewish community because it is the one super power in the world and because it enables people to who care to have a voice, even if it is a proportionate voice.

קולט אביטל: To be able to have a say, minorities have the ability to have a say.

קולט אביטל: This relates very much to the core issues that I want to talk about in a minute.

קולט אביטל: We also have other assets.

קולט אביטל: We do have an American government that stands with  in an unprecedented way.

קולט אביטל: That pro-Israel legislation gets ninety percent of the House and the Senate, even motherhood doesn’t get ninety percent of the house any more.

קולט אביטל: It is probably the only issue where people are as united, where Congress is as consistently united as it is.

קולט אביטל: We have seventy percent support of the American people.

קולט אביטל: This is an all time high.

קולט אביטל: Sixty five percent support   versus the ten percent for the Palestinians.

קולט אביטל: All these numbers are really record high since the establishment of the state.

קולט אביטל: We gave tens of millions of Christians who are willing to stand with  in ways that sometimes even the Jewish  community is not willing to and that they lobby and they speak out and they are prepared to take a stand.

קולט אביטל: I think an important point of that is American Jewry.

קולט אביטל: The fact that American Jewry is not silent and is willing to speak up and utilizes the American system where lobbying is not a pejorative.

קולט אביטל: Lobbying is what American democracy demands of us, which means involvement.

קולט אביטל: It means that people can have a say that those care can have a disproportionate say.

קולט אביטל: It’s not a conspiracy.

קולט אביטל: It is not a manipulation of the system.

קולט אביטל: It is a …

קולט אביטל: that the American democracy which demands one thing of its citizens and that’s involvement.

קולט אביטל: The Europeans don’t have it.

קולט אביטל: No other country has a parallel system of lobbying, which has led to a lot of the distortions and misrepresentations that I want to talk about.

קולט אביטל: On the other hand we have to recognize that we do face an  implacable enemy with their extremist ideology not unlike the one we faced seventy years ago and R…

קולט אביטל: Rich and Bernard Lewis have done an extensive analysis where they parallel the two and show how these ideologies are shared, both the same nature and goals, which is to wipe out the Jewish state, the Jewish people, but also Bahais, Hindus, Christians, everybody and even Moslems who don’t agree with them.

קולט אביטל: And it is to engage in global war that rallies and exploits millions of people.

קולט אביטל: It also has state sponsors.

קולט אביטל: That does change the nature of the enemy that we confront.

קולט אביטל: We also a world where apathy and indifference still abound.

קולט אביטל: Look ,  as perfect examples of that.

קולט אביטל: Also the big lie still works when it comes to  and Jews.

קולט אביטל: The difference is that it took Hitler months and even years to spread the big lie, today it is spread in seconds with Al Jazeera and Al …

קולט אביטל: We saw what happened during the Lebanon War.

קולט אביטל: The 950 pictures that had to be taken out of the …

קולט אביטל: archives because they were distorted and faked.

קולט אביטל: The story about the ambulances that take pictures that ran in the New York Times and in media across the world.

קולט אביטל: More than fifty percent of the news accounts in  blamed  for plotting the war.

קולט אביטל: Eighty five percent of the BBC broadcasts the same thing.

קולט אביטל: The very fact that the American media also fell victim to a lot of the lies and distortions and misrepresentations.

קולט אביטל: The difference between the Islamists and the Nazis, the Nazis tried to hide their crimes, the Islamists advertise them.

קולט אביטל: But when we look at their goals and the dangers that we face, I  think, that while analogies are dangerous and not necessarily always relevant, certainly not in the detail, one has to look at – for the purpose that I said before, which is learning the lessons of our failures in the thirties and earlier and from the things that worked and what was successful in mobilizing people.

קולט אביטל: Hitler also used the intellectuals to justify his greatest ideology.

קולט אביטל: That is another lesson we have to learn in terms of how elements of the academy are being subverted today.

קולט אביטל: We see the same scapegoating, the resulting resurgence and anti-Semitism and the failure of governments to effectively root it out.

קולט אביטל: The difference is it is not state sponsored terrorism.

קולט אביטל: But when it takes the French government three weeks to admit that Kalimi was a victim of an anti-Semitic crime, or this young woman who was recently attacked.

קולט אביטל: It took them days to acknowledge.

קולט אביטל: We see a sixty percent increase according to recent reports in  and  and other countries of anti-Semitism that the chief rabbis of , ,  all gave warning that Jews shouldn’t wear obvious symbols.

קולט אביטל: The chief rabbi of  talked about this phenomenon of anti-Semitism, let alone the statistics that really do reflect a sharp increase in anti-Semitism.

קולט אביטל: And the fact is that the vast number of anti-Semitic attacks go unreported.

קולט אביטל: Those that are reported, the vast number, more than ninety percent go unprosecuted.

קולט אביטל: There are no arrests and there are no convictions.

קולט אביטל: There was an inter parliamentary committee in Britain of non-Jews that recently reported on the situation there, both in terms of the attack, but most importantly, I think, in terms of the failure of government to act against those who perpetrate these crimes.

קולט אביטל: One of these things, I hope the Global Forum here and others, will do is to really to create a worldwide registry of anti-Semitism to encourage people to report anti-Semitic attacks.

קולט אביטל: Police don’t want to report it because then they get involved in all sorts of hate crime laws, whether in , in  or elsewhere.

קולט אביטל: People are reluctant out of fear to report these incidents.

קולט אביטל: It is a mistake because if we don’t have the accurate documentation we can’t have an accurate response.

קולט אביטל: So I think that this is one of the agendas.

קולט אביטל: When Bernard Lewis recently gave an interview he said that he is more worried today than he was in 1941 – remember, he is          93 years old – about the outcome of the situation and went on to assess the conditions then and the conditions now.

קולט אביטל: I think it is comparable of many factors that come together.

קולט אביטל: You have the combination of traditional anti-Semitism, the new Islamist incitement and anti-Semitism, the anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism, anti-globalization – all come together to create this very dangerous cocktail.

קולט אביטל: We know in the Hagadda it says, בכל דור ודור עומדים עלינו לכלותנו – in every generation enemies arise that seek to destroy us.

קולט אביטל: It uses the present tense.

קולט אביטל: It doesn’t say, they rose to destroy them.

קולט אביטל: It says they arise to destroy us, to remind us that we have to be aware of the challenges in every generation.

קולט אביטל: One rabbi adds, is it really true that in every generation?

קולט אביטל: There must have been one generation where they didn’t have it.

קולט אביטל: He said, you have to look at the next paragraph in the Hagaddah, which is צא ולמד – where it talked about לבן  בקש לעקר את הכל.

קולט אביטל: That Lavan wanted to destroy everything, that Yaakov Avinu, that Jacob was living in relative good circumstances.

קולט אביטל: He built up big plots, he became wealthy.

קולט אביטל: He lived there a quiet life even though he had to work for each of us wives and had to stay another seven years, and another years, but he had a relatively good life.

קולט אביטל: He said, that’s the lesson, that because all of this time Lavan was really plotting against him.

קולט אביטל: That we should not be looking at periods of quiescence as necessary evidence that the dangers aren’t there.

קולט אביטל: Too often we look at that as an excuse not to act and not to face the reality.

קולט אביטל: Reality I want to talk about particularly today is what I think is happening in  with the poisoning of the elite against  and against Jews.

קולט אביטל: Seventy years ago the world said they wanted it Judenrein but the Nazis and others, their allies wanted the world Judenrein.

קולט אביטל: Today they said they want it Judenstadtrein.

קולט אביטל: That is not politically correct to say that you want to eliminate the Jews, but it is okay to say you want to eliminate the Jewish state.

קולט אביטל: I trace this to what happened at the Durban Conference in 1999 where we saw the blueprint laid out that is being implemented today.

קולט אביטל: It said then that they wanted to rid of the Zionist apartheid state in the twenty first century just as they got rid of the South African apartheid state in the twentieth century.

קולט אביטל: If you look at the lines and messages, the things that were drawn there you see how it translates, whether it is apartheid, isolation, divestment, demonization, delegitimization, silencing the supporters of .

קולט אביטל: All of these things were part of the blueprint that they laid out then.

קולט אביטל: We didn’t take it seriously enough in terms of the aftermath.

קולט אביטל: At the time of the conference of course everybody was excited.

קולט אביטל: But really one has to look at how it is being implemented, whether it’s on path…

קולט אביטל: once the academia is inside.

קולט אביטל: When we look at the British model, not the French model, but the British model, where we saw how the elitist society, academically, culturally, intellectually have been slowly poisoned against .

קולט אביטל: Today public opinion polls show support for  between fifteen and seventeen percent, never more than 19%.

קולט אביטל: We see the boycotts by the Union of Journalists by the other academic groups, the doctors now, all of them joining into these different kinds of attack, attempting to isolate .

קולט אביטל: When you talk about finding speakers on the campuses in   you know how difficult it is.

קולט אביטל: I was invited last week to do the Dohar debate which were held by BBC, held this time at the Oxford Union.

קולט אביטל: The theme was this house believes that the pro-Israel lobby has successfully squasheed criticism of .

קולט אביטל: Then they invited Norman Finkelstein to be on the other side.

קולט אביטל: Of course I refused to appear with him.

קולט אביטל: But the very fact that you start with that assumption.

קולט אביטל: Again, this is something that unites  and the diaspora community because the goal is the same.

קולט אביטל: They translate and you see the transformation of what the ultimate goal is, that you can’t attack Jews per se.

קולט אביטל: You attack the corporate entity that represents the Jewish people, which is the State of Israel.

קולט אביטל: This creates a common front for us that we have to address and utilize our resources more and more effectively because it is not just there.

קולט אביטל: I believe what is happening in  is what’s happening in the .

קולט אביטל: We see increasingly the poisoning of the elite in American society.

קולט אביטל: The United States Commission on Civil Rights had a special taskforce dealing with the campuses.

קולט אביטל: I brought – because people always question whether these things are legitimate and how they are translated.

קולט אביטל: They had the Commission on Civil Rights launch a special web site talking of trying to contribute to ending campus anti-Semitism because their finding was so harsh.

קולט אביטל: They talk about that anti-Semitic bigotry is no less morally deplorable when camouflaged as anti Israelism or anti-Zionism.

קולט אביטל: Substantial evidence suggests that many university departments of middle east studies provided one sided highly polemical academic presentations of summaries  with legitimate debate, rebate legitimate debates concerning .

קולט אביטל: It gives judgment of how to react to anti-Semitic incidents because of the concern that they found on the campuses.

קולט אביטל: I can tell you that when I travel around now, I appeared at the  recently, and students came up to me afterwards and started telling me the difficulties they encounter in the classroom.

קולט אביטל: But more shocking the next day when I got calls from two faculty members, tenured members, who told me that they are being forced out of their departments because they are too pro .

קולט אביטל: The same thing is happening on campuses across the  where you have the poisoning of the elite.

קולט אביטל: The reason it doesn’t become obviously, I believe, that this is like a cancer that operates quietly amongst this elitist society and only becomes visible when it is too late, when the damage has already been done.

קולט אביטל: When it starts to trickle down and impacts public opinion, public policy.

קולט אביטל: American’s support for  in the  is more than seventy percent today.

קולט אביטל: It is at an all time record high.

קולט אביטל: I think the biggest mistake we can make is to take it for granted.

קולט אביטל: One of the ways that we take it for granted is failing to take into account these developments.

קולט אביטל: When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published their paper six, eight months ago, the professor from Harvard and from the  of  – I am sure you are all familiar with it and I don’t have to go through it – but it was an 82 page creed against .

קולט אביטל: They could not get it published in an American magazine.

קולט אביטל: They went to six, or seven supposedly, and it wasn’t because the pro-Israel lobby squelched them.

קולט אביטל: We didn’t even know about it.

קולט אביטל: It was because it was …, it was of no value.

קולט אביטל: 41 pages of footnotes, not one of them an original one.

קולט אביטל: Every quote from an Israeli leader came from the hate web site.

קולט אביטל: Nobody serious would have judged this paper.

קולט אביטל: It was full of historical inaccuracies.

קולט אביטל: So they went to the London Review of Books which naturally published it.

קולט אביטל: It has a long history of publishing these anti-Israel things.

קולט אביטל: But now they got the largest contract ever given to a Harvard professor to publish a book in September.

קולט אביטל: They got $750,000 advance.

קולט אביטל: They couldn’t publish an article six months ago, or eight months ago, but today that one of the largest publishers has given them this huge advance to publish a book in .

קולט אביטל: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in the  is going to publish their book.

קולט אביטל: September – it’s going to be a 320 page diatribe against the Jewish people and one has to look at their speech – they are invited to campuses across the country.

קולט אביטל: What they say, their message has become more and more vile as they have appeared.

קולט אביטל: I know that a log of the organizations monitor them and see this activity.

קולט אביטל: But I think what’s important here is to take al the pictures of the puzzle and when you see them come together it becomes a much clearer picture.

קולט אביטל: Jimmy Carter’s nationwide tours should not be dismissed.

קולט אביטל: The fact that he uses the word apartheid goes back to what I said about the …

קולט אביטל: relatedness.

קולט אביטל: It is not  because there is one central source directing all of this.

קולט אביטל: You usually have a con…

קולט אביטל: of many factors coming together.

קולט אביטל: I could give you dozens of examples.

קולט אביטל: Jimmy Carter appeared two weeks ago at the .

קולט אביטל: Six thousand people came to hear him.

קולט אביטל: He said, I chose this of the hundred invitations I now have from campuses because you have an early primary, can influence who the president will be.

קולט אביטל: It is time not to elect a knee jerk supporter of .

קולט אביטל: I was last week at a speech in .

קולט אביטל: On my way to  for the JPTT I was in the airport early and I went to the bookstore.

קולט אביטל: The three books most prominently displayed were Noam Chansky, Creed against  and two Jimmy Carter books.

קולט אביטל: The one on apartheid in .

קולט אביטל: But I looked at the old ones and the same anti-Israel stuff appeared.

קולט אביטל: Michael Oren told me that he went back and read the last ten books that Jimmy Carter wrote and they all have this anti-Israel stuff that is just now concentrated.

קולט אביטל: And because he couldn’t publish it before.

קולט אביטל: People wouldn’t have tolerated it.

קולט אביטל: Today it has become palatable.

קולט אביטל: What was marginally acceptable on the fringes is today increasingly acceptable in the mainstream.

קולט אביטל: When Barbara …

קולט אביטל: wrote the piece about the dinner party she attended in  and the French ambassador made a comment about , that your little country – but that’s true.

קולט אביטל: People were shocked, but not the elite.

קולט אביטל: I can tell you I get calls almost every day from people telling me of occurrences not only on campuses but in board rooms, at elite  gatherings, at social events, the fact that the Foreign Policy Association could hold a conference a world without .

קולט אביטל: It would have been unthinkable a year ago.

קולט אביטל: They did a survey that showed that more than sixty percent of the foreign policy elite that they addressed think that Jews have too much power and the Jewish lobby has too much influence in all of the other …

קולט אביטל: By the way, interestingly, the students of these people did not share those views.

קולט אביטל: But the foreign policy elite did.

קולט אביטל: I think that Jimmy Carter being invited to campuses across the country and said he only use apartheid to stir debate.

קולט אביטל: In the middle page 189 that it’s not apartheid, then he said, yes, it is.

קולט אביטל: Now he has gotten to the point where it is apartheid.

קולט אביטל: It is    worse than apartheid.

קולט אביטל: It’s an apartheid plot, it’s an apartheid this and apartheid that.

קולט אביטל: But the fact is that he gets invited to campuses and he said I wanted to stir debate but he won’t debate.

קולט אביטל: He refuses to debate anybody and insists all the questions have to be submitted in advance.

קולט אביטל: Because he knows, he couldn’t justify his assertions and his contentions.

קולט אביטל: As we see, unfortunately, in the American elitists, so many of these distortions and which is why, looking back at history is so important.

קולט אביטל: It’s not that criticism of  makes one an anti-Semite.

קולט אביטל: Clearly, you can criticize  legitimately on a lot of grounds and not be an anti-Semite, or everybody in this building would be anti-Semites if that were the case.

קולט אביטל: But there is a difference between holding  even to a higher standard than to a double standard and the devious legitimization is demonization.

קולט אביטל: This campaign’s purpose is to silence the supporters of .

קולט אביטל: They created successfully a dilemma for us.

קולט אביטל: That if you speak out, they say you see the Zionists squelch any criticism.

קולט אביטל: If you don’t speak out they say everybody agrees with us.

קולט אביטל: I can tell you, and I talked to my colleagues about it, it worked.

קולט אביטל: It does have an intimidating influence.

קולט אביטל: You saw the New York Times write a piece about the American Jewish Committee publications.

קולט אביטל: Totally unjustified.

קולט אביטל: Would they write a front page story over a perfectly legitimate assessment and analysis other than to try and squelch the point of view that if you don’t adopt the extremist view of  you are outside the fold.

קולט אביטל: I can tell you, academics tell you, every campus I visit about the occurrences that takes place there.

קולט אביטל: When Ridder is writing a book about how the Jews are not only blamed for the  war, which is generally accepted, and you see …

קולט אביטל: …

קולט אביטל: and Wesley Clark talked about the  money people being responsible for it.

קולט אביטל: These are all code words.

קולט אביטל: Each one in and of itself is not so significant, but when you put it all together and begin to look at the cumulative effect that this has, that’s why it doesn’t appear so obvious.

קולט אביטל: Because it’s not a massive assault.

קולט אביטל: It’s not French anti-Semitism that we have – street demonstrations and they attack a synagogue.

קולט אביטל: This is something that’s more pernicious, I believe, and in the long term more dangerous.

קולט אביטל: The outcome of this battle is going to be for generations.

קולט אביטל: That the poisoning of the elite is not something that you are going to turn around.

קולט אביטל: That the next generation that is being trained is going to one that will not accept the views that their parents and the grandparents had and the broad support that we have enjoyed.

קולט אביטל: Look at the New York Times ads that have run, that are so outrageous.

קולט אביטל: They would not write in this way on any other ethnic group or state.

קולט אביטל: They are sponsored by the Council of National Interest, traditionally anti-Israel and I would even say an anti-Semitic group lead by Findley and McCarthy.

קולט אביטל: The depictions of Jews in those cartoons are horrific, they are Goebbels like and yet the New York Times has now run six full page ads like in the weekend review section.

קולט אביטל: …

קולט אביטל: it is because we also have allowed that to raise the bar on what we are prepared to tolerate.

קולט אביטל: If it is a mistake that we have to be able to respond and thank god we have organizations that do work on this.

קולט אביטל: The answer when there is a serious event like in  or the LA airport.

קולט אביטל: You know they now call it sudden jehobs syndrome.

קולט אביטל: It is always an isolated individual.

קולט אביטל: It is not connected to anything until later on.

קולט אביטל: We always find that there is a connection to something.

קולט אביטל: In prison, in , in some training of some Imam that influenced them.

קולט אביטל: Jews were killed.

קולט אביטל: A Jew was killed in .

קולט אביטל: A Jew was killed in , a Jew was called in .

קולט אביטל: It is not irrelevant incidents.

קולט אביטל: All of these are reflected of what I think is this growing problem.

קולט אביטל: I think we are going to face a real challenge frankly with the AIPAC trial that’s coming up.

קולט אביטל: It is a disgrace that two loyal Americans are being put on trial for doing nothing different than thousands of reporters do every day.

קולט אביטל: The American government invested millions of dollars for seven years following these people, trying to wait till they could get something and that gets the thinnest piece of a charge, not even substantiated.

קולט אביטל: You remember original it was espionage and spying and all those words which they now dropped.

קולט אביטל: All those words are dropped.

קולט אביטל: The judge keeps excoriating the prosecution, if you read the comments that have been made.

קולט אביטל: I hope, god willing, they will be released.

קולט אביטל: But you can be sure that this is going to become a circus for the anti-Israel people to show that the American government has to prosecute Americans about what they were doing.

קולט אביטל: We have, I think, to look back.

קולט אביטל: The reason why we should look back in the thirties is not because we dwell on the zoros of the past.

קולט אביטל: If Jews look back in order to look forward, Jews look back to learn the lessons to spare future generations those trials and tribulations.

קולט אביטל: That’s why the word for history is sefira, not really history.

קולט אביטל: Sefira is not a static process where you remember in advance like Napoleon’s , or the American Revolution.

קולט אביטל: Sefira is a dynamic process where you try to assess all the factors that led to something and all the things that derive from it.

קולט אביטל: The Jews can’t look at history by isolating a particular event because you lose the perspective.

קולט אביטל: It is one of the problems that western democracies and the governments that they have is that they have this.

קולט אביטל: They lose perspective.

קולט אביטל: They don’t have a content in which to view things.

קולט אביטל: The sefira enables us to look through the chaos and perceive the dangers.

קולט אביטל: That’s why the Europeans are making the same mistakes of following the policy of appeasement and accommodation which only leads to greater problems.

קולט אביטל: Winston Churchill said if peace means feeding the alligator in the hope they’ll eat you last.

קולט אביטל: is being – this is not our subject today  - so it is for another time.

קולט אביטל: But we in terms of  have to take this new reality.

קולט אביטל: I think it requires of us then to look together at what steps can be taken and how we can -  which is why I started off by proposing  that this be a joint and common effort.

קולט אביטל: Because today the distinction between , the Jewish state and the Jewish people is nil.

קולט אביטל: It is just a cover.

קולט אביטל: We know that those who want to destroy Jews and are anti-Israel, the study shows that it links very quickly into anti-Semitism.

קולט אביטל: I also think that we have to look much more at  which, I think, is going to become a real challenge for us in the coming years and will again require all of us to be involved.

קולט אביטל: The joint task for us to look at steps that we can take, how we get into the electronic media.

קולט אביטל: How do we begin to get into the twenty first century in dealing with it.

קולט אביטל: We  complain about the propaganda we face and how the big lie spreads because they have Al Jazeera and Al …

קולט אביטל: We have nothing.

קולט אביטל: We do not have one station in  under Jewish auspices.

קולט אביטל: We don’t have the capacity to go to the two places where the people are, which is at the end of the compute  screen and the end of the television screen.

קולט אביטל: We have to look at our kids much more.

קולט אביטל: Again, this is a common responsibility of  and the diaspora communities.

קולט אביטל: We  have ignored our children and younger and younger children.

קולט אביטל: In , for instance, we have done much more on the campus but we neglected high school students and even younger ones.

קולט אביטל: Think of all the five and six year olds who viewed the Lebanon War on television because it was broadcast every day live into their homes.

קולט אביטל: They have no context to understand it if parents don’t sit down and talk to them about it.

קולט אביטל: I brought a group of psychologists together and asked them, what do we do?

קולט אביטל: You know what they told me, come back in ten years and I’ll show you.

קולט אביטל: Because these are lasting images and we do not do anything to go after – A new study just  showed, from Harvard, that kids at four years old already begin to formulate their images and perceptions.

קולט אביטל: We ought to be preparing material for kids, four, six, seven years old.

קולט אביטל: We started the  for high school students, a weekly e-mail publication.

קולט אביטל: I got dozens and dozens of letters from teachers in elementary schools begging us to do the same thing  for younger children because they don’t have the material.

קולט אביטל: The truth is that our studies show that on high schools the attitudes are worse than in the campuses, that the differences between Jewish and non-Jewish have almost disappeared, even kids who go to Jewish day schools.

קולט אביטל: They don’t  know.

קולט אביטל: They don’t know how to answer.

קולט אביטל: They are not being taught because we don’t have teachers who are qualified to teach.

קולט אביטל: We found with the , people weren’t using it and when we started going to schools and asking why   they said because the teachers don’t know enough to teach it.

קולט אביטל: So we had to prepare a second web site to train teachers the week before on the issues that were going to be covered.

קולט אביטל: So I think we have a lot of responsibilities.

קולט אביטל: I think ’s sixtieth  anniversary gives us the unique opportunity for us to mobilize all the resources to celebrate .

קולט אביטל: Unfortunately the celebrations of Jerusalem Forty in the diaspora are weak and minimal.

קולט אביטל: It is a tragedy.

קולט אביטל: But we can’t pass up.

קולט אביטל: We still have a year to do more on that, but we should use ’s sixtieth a chance to mobilize all our resources that face off against the challenges confronting us.

קולט אביטל: COLLETTE AVITAL:		Thank you.

קולט אביטל: That was not very good news and I admit that, at least from perceptions, I was unaware of some of what you have been saying here today.

קולט אביטל: It is trickled from time to time in conferences which at the time were convened by Minister Sharansky, I think I heard some reports.

קולט אביטל: If you put all the pictures together and I am sure that you  have more knowledge than we have, then the question becomes not only whether we should put together a task force but I think we have to think of a strategy, of a common strategy, which in a way should also be addressing the positive side.

קולט אביטל: In other words, if my memory serves me right, during my stay in  one of the things which we  tried to do together, a taskforce, to try to see how we teach Judaism, how we teach  in schools at every level, both Jewish and non-Jewish.

קולט אביטל: So the question is how is the negative images which they get.

קולט אביטל: What do we feed the younger generation.

קולט אביטל: I think that should also be part of our strategy.

קולט אביטל: In any event I think your remarks have triggered a lot of interest and responses so I would say, who has asked to speak, first of all, member of Knesset Marina Solodkin, then Morris Silka, Anat Hoffman, Oded Aran, and then Eran Lehrman.

קולט אביטל: MARINA SOLODKIN:		First of all we thank you, Collett, for this important meeting and you Malcolm because it was very important to hear from you what is happening in the  and  and to listen to your point of view.

קולט אביטל: I don’t accept everything.

קולט אביטל: I came from the diaspora, fighting the diaspora.

קולט אביטל: We have seen much more which was  ever …

קולט אביטל: in all these senses.

קולט אביטל: I tell you when you are speaking about the academic debate, we are not poison.

קולט אביטל: They are ready to be poisoned.

קולט אביטל: It is very, very deep.

קולט אביטל: They are open to poisoning.

קולט אביטל: For that we have an answer for the diaspora Jewry.

קולט אביטל: It is better to fight from one place, not from every place in the world.

קולט אביטל: I tell you, as you remember the thirties, mostly the elites were ready in the thirties to be partners of Hitler.

קולט אביטל: That is nothing new.

קולט אביטל: I very much appreciated former prime minister Sharon who was not speaking about the elite.

קולט אביטל: He said that from the thirties we have to take the example of  fighting Russians.

קולט אביטל: Being very small but being victorious at the end.

קולט אביטל: I watched what you said in the  because we had the reports in the Jerusalem Post about your elections on this topic.

קולט אביטל: I have a question for you.

קולט אביטל: Would an organized protest against Jimmy Carter, who was the trigger for the Islamist revolution not to be punished in the seventies in .

קולט אביטל: I remember very well the crisis in  of the seventies and how  he was impotent to deal with it.

קולט אביטל: Being one of the fathers of the defeat.

קולט אביטל: A defeatist in the highest sense of the free world before the world of the militant and radical Islam I have not seen the proper offensive of the Jewish people.

קולט אביטל: My last remark will be of course we in  are facing many dangers.

קולט אביטל: We are not so feared.

קולט אביטל: But the danger is because there is a question of country, people, IDF and the hand of god and many – I see where we are mistaken, we had a very important post of minister of diaspora affairs and we lost this post in this government.

קולט אביטל: I do think that cooperation and finding the new coalition …

קולט אביטל: because I don’t understand how American Jewry is voting.

קולט אביטל: Campuses have political power.

קולט אביטל: You are voting for the political color who seems to be very far from the Jewish world and Jewish affairs.

קולט אביטל: Thank you.

קולט אביטל: MORRIS SILKA:		Collette, thank you very, very much and sir, we thank you for real information and your presentation.

קולט אביטל: I agree hundred percent what you just said.

קולט אביטל: I am lucky that I had the opportunity that every year I do travel for three months each year to the .

קולט אביטל: I came back at the end of March after three months visiting close to about fifty six communities all over the  in the three months.

קולט אביטל: I had the opportunity to be in  and  and other places.

קולט אביטל: I told the students over there and I was on the same platform with Daniel Falk in  when the demonstration took over over there.

קולט אביטל: He could not actually open his mouth because of so many Moslems who appeared and attended the meeting.

קולט אביטל: What I am trying to say is that my concern is that students and the youngsters which I had the opportunity to speak to them.

קולט אביטל: I think that we are not doing enough.

קולט אביטל: From the point of view what I said that I had the opportunity of travelling every year and I see the differences from the sixties uphill today.

קולט אביטל: What is taking place.

קולט אביטל: In some Jewish communities the debate if they will raise the Israeli flag on Yom HaAtzmaut or they don’t raise the Israeli flag on Yom HaAtzmaut, things that I think in the last few years I did not see like in the last year.

קולט אביטל: Many things are actually changing.

קולט אביטל: The question is what we are doing.

קולט אביטל: We are going backwards especially when it comes from the students’ point of view compared to the seventies and definitely among the high school students.

קולט אביטל: I am very, very much concerned.

קולט אביטל: What I am saying is that for example regarding what you mentioned the Carter book, by the way,    he is using Goebbel’s tactics.

קולט אביטל: He is talking about Ezer Weizmann in his book quite a few times, that he is a friend, he is a brother, whatever it is.

קולט אביטל: On the other hand what he is actually attacking, and that’s the way to do it, because you squeeze certain types of things.

קולט אביטל: What I am saying is, that my concern is the students.

קולט אביטל: My concern is the high school kids, what we are doing and how we are going to push.

קולט אביטל: Because certain things are …

קולט אביטל: Bernard Lewis said that from the eighties and before that and others as well.

קולט אביטל: So the question is, what we are doing to the students and what we are doing to the high school kids.

קולט אביטל: ANAT HOFFMAN:		I am Anat Hoffman.

קולט אביטל: I run the    of the Reform Movement here in .

קולט אביטל: Sometimes our enemies are the glue that keeps reminds us of our common denominator.

קולט אביטל: I applaud you for saying in the world arena and supporting us and speaking for .

קולט אביטל: But I want to have you address not the enemies from outside, but the enemies from within.

קולט אביטל: Today Yom Yerushalayim is a very appropriate day to talk about pluralism.

קולט אביטל: In fact, the    in Hebrew is called HaMerkaz lePluralism Yehudit and as ex city councilor in this town, I must tell you that just as we are losing  because of its intolerance and its portrait –  ten percent of  – we might lose  to this intolerance.

קולט אביטל: I want you to address the issues of religious tolerance in .

קולט אביטל: It says, לעולם מתפלל אדם בבית שיש בו חלונות – we should always pray in a house that has windows so we could look outside.

קולט אביטל: Look outside in this country.

קולט אביטל: A chief rabbi, this is a …

קולט אביטל: Shoah, blames the reform Jews for the Shoah.

קולט אביטל: He says it is no coincidence that the Shoah started in  and so did the reform movement.

קולט אביטל: This should rock the Jewish world.

קולט אביטל: The fact that women can get arrested for wearing a talit reading Torah and praying out loud at the women’s side of the Western Wall.

קולט אביטל: The fact agunot and mesoravot get are rising in Batei HaDin haRabbanim.

קולט אביטל: The fact that the reform and conservative movements are not recognized in .

קולט אביטל: The fact that you are talking about lecturers not given tenure and not being advanced in the universities.

קולט אביטל: Look what happens with Bar Ilan.

קולט אביטל: If you are a secular lecturer you have got a problem in getting tenure.

קולט אביטל: That is a government supported private university, just like the one  you were outraged at.

קולט אביטל: Or the  of  right on top of a Muslim cemetery in the heart of  and the incitement against minorities that comes from a religious perspective by chief rabbis, neighborhood rabbis, city rabbis.

קולט אביטל: I believe nothing is too wonderful to be true.

קולט אביטל: I believe that  could be a wonderful place and I want to suggest to you that when I talk to youngsters in  and I am an old hand in American summer camps.

קולט אביטל: I have a stand up comedy act about social action in .

קולט אביטל: I find that we can have an inoculation of that, if we talk to youngsters about our own wars.

קולט אביטל: You can love  through dealing with its wars.

קולט אביטל: At least with reform as the server of youngsters, when I share with them some of the issues we are fighting for they get involved, they get engaged.

קולט אביטל: I’d like us to think about tikun   around together here inside  as the joint effort.

קולט אביטל: I’d like to hear your comments on that.

קולט אביטל: ODED ARAN:		I think this was a very important beginning of a debate.

קולט אביטל: I think this debate should have been taken today together or in conjunction with the Foreign Affairs Committee because the issues that we are discussing are very much …

קולט אביטל: But I certainly commend you for taking the initiative to hold this discussion.

קולט אביטל: I fully agree with the threats, the dangers.

קולט אביטל: Some of them are existential to the State of Israel and indeed to world Jewry.

קולט אביטל: But I a bit worried because this is an agenda which is basically defensive which is basically in response to threats.

קולט אביטל: It is not a positive agenda and it’s not a proactive agenda.

קולט אביטל: Yes, we do need to respond to Ahmadinejad, whether it is on the nuclear issue or the anti-Semitic issue.

קולט אביטל: We do need to respond to Carter.

קולט אביטל: By the way, to the best of my knowledge, the only one who responded to him are Jews.

קולט אביטל: This is something which should worry us more than Carter himself, or the book that he published.

קולט אביטל: Where are all our friends in the , if we are the only ones to respond to this.

קולט אביטל: Which brings me to the other issue.

קולט אביטל: That is that we do need to create coalition.

קולט אביטל: Of course it’s our responsibility to stand up for these issues and defend ourselves as Jews, as Israelis, as the Jewish people.

קולט אביטל: But we can’t do it if we honor the political coalitions that are necessary and that is something which goes beyond what we need to do with the young generation, Jewish or not.

קולט אביטל: We do have, I think, allies both in the .

קולט אביטל: You referred to one group, but they are not the only ones.

קולט אביטל: We do have potential members or partners in .

קולט אביטל: There is anti-Semitism in Europe, all  is not anti-Semitic.

קולט אביטל: I think that the new leaders, even in western Europe, are natural allies that we need to have a dialogue with them on these issues.

קולט אביטל: Certainly this is the case in eastern Europe.

קולט אביטל: I am afraid that we don’t have a dialogue.

קולט אביטל: We have a some sort of sporadic discussion, but not a strategic discussion.

קולט אביטל: The strategic diaspora,  a partnership between the diaspora and  is absolutely necessary.

קולט אביטל: I think the sixtieth anniversary should be the launching pad for a new partnership between the two parts of the Jewish people, and for a positive strategy.

קולט אביטל: I am not going to refer to what Anat said, although this may be part of it, but there are wider issues which we need resurface in the partnership between  and the diaspora to create a positive agenda.

קולט אביטל: We cannot just say there is an Iranian threat, or there is an anti-Semitic threat or is a neo-…

קולט אביטל: in the .

קולט אביטל: We need to create a positive agenda.

קולט אביטל: Take the more high ground on certain issues.

קולט אביטל: is one of them, but it could be other issues.

קולט אביטל: I will stop at that.

קולט אביטל: ERAN LEHRMAN:		Collette, first of all I would say I am commending you for taking this mission.

קולט אביטל: It should, I believe, be constantly on the minds, on the agenda of this House.

קולט אביטל: It is only too rare in this House that questions relating to  diaspora relations are put on the table.

קולט אביטל: I am going to go very quickly through the five points.

קולט אביטל: Let us be very frank.

קולט אביטל: Malcolm, you have made a point about the friendship of the Bush administration towards .

קולט אביטל: We are all profoundly grateful for many things.

קולט אביטל: We have also to recognize the Bush administration has had a powerful dividing effect on western elite.

קולט אביטל: We end up sometimes, I think even in the case of Walt and Mearsheimer, the we …

קולט אביטל: by a brush that was meant for an internal debate either in the  or beyond.

קולט אביטל: It certainly would be on the borders of the .

קולט אביטל: We have to start putting together a strategy that addresses 2009 and beyond.

קולט אביטל: In this respect my second point is, as has already been said, we do have friends.

קולט אביטל: In the United States certainly we            have to remember that it so happens by accidents of history that the Jews vote as the old sociological observation by …

קולט אביטל: …

קולט אביטל: …

קולט אביטל: live like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans.

קולט אביטל: We have to also celebrate what happens on the other side of the roster.

קולט אביטל: Sociologically, economically they belong to the upper crust, but they continue to vote as if they are persecuted for minority.

קולט אביטל: We have to celebrate the fact that the chair of the House - the International Relations Committee - is a holocaust survivor, two key sub-committee members are people who are our friends and as they say in good modern American, unsere.

קולט אביטל: But we have friends also beyond these votes.

קולט אביטל: I want to mention just two aspects.

קולט אביטל: Recently when I spoke in  at a conference on anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism two organizations in recent years made very powerful statements against anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism.

קולט אביטל: One was actually a British organization.

קולט אביטל: Signatories of the  Manifesto.

קולט אביטל: The other one was the Catholic church, which is officially committed to anti-Zionism being defined as a form of anti-Semitism in the  statement.

קולט אביטל: I could go on.

קולט אביטל: So we do have friends.

קולט אביטל: What you don’t always have is a strategy of how to unify in working with conflicts.

קולט אביטל: In practical terms and here I come to budgetary items.

קולט אביטל: There are two things that must do to let American Jews who no longer feel they have to carry the burden uphill.

קולט אביטל: One is to increase the effort, scope and budget for hasbara.

קולט אביטל: People don’t always understand that the first casualties from the Israeli decision to put such meager amounts and capacities into hasbara are the Jewish people out there who feel that they are in an isolated outpost and nobody is coming up with the ammunition.

קולט אביטל: So they have to go down and shlepp it up themselves to a fighting position.

קולט אביטל: is not doing enough.

קולט אביטל: COLLETTE AVITAL:

קולט אביטל: Probably Menachem Begin would have reacted faster.

קולט אביטל: AVINOAM BAR-JOSEPH: I’ll try to be very brief.

קולט אביטל: My points were well taken by Oded and Eran.

קולט אביטל: I think I’ll just try to stress a couple things.

קולט אביטל: The entire demographics in the , the Spanic and Asian communities were growing and a lot of efforts were made to build better coalitions with them.

קולט אביטל: To take more advantage today on the perception that the Judeo-Christian base for American civilization … is a huge achievement of the Jewish community.

קולט אביטל: BORIS LOREN: … I really don’t want to repeat.

קולט אביטל: The only thing I do want to repeat is a thank you to both Malcolm and Collette for having this discussion.

קולט אביטל: I think that basically if you look at the struggle going on and divide it into three different pieces, we are lacking in all three.

קולט אביטל: That’s tactics, leadership and finance – tactics and strategy.

קולט אביטל: I don’t obviously blame the people who are holding up the weight, Malcolm and others who are in that fight, but if you compare to what’s happening across the Jewish community in and the , rabbis don’t come out forward in public, not orthodox, not conservatives and not reform.

קולט אביטל: Israeli leaders, political, military and otherwise do not when they go to the forget going specifically to address various audiences.

קולט אביטל: They do not address audiences.

קולט אביטל: They do not meet the people.

קולט אביטל: They do not have any kind of a mission or any kind of a priority for developing the kind of connections we have.

קולט אביטל: The last point I wanted to make is, if you look at the successful struggles that we have had, things like Soviet Jewry, restitution, and to some extent even anti-Semitism, they all were a strategy of coming forward.

קולט אביטל: Not of trying to build the fences around our immediate Jewish neighborhoods in the hope that no one is going to come in.

קולט אביטל: They went out.

קולט אביטל: Something like the Jackson Vanik Amendment created an entire direction that never stopped.

קולט אביטל: The fact that Jews were always in the streets and others, where we grabbed them all high ground and fought.

קולט אביטל: Even on the issues that we have talked about today, we are talking about how not to have our position crumble.

קולט אביטל: I think we have to go way beyond that into an aggressive mode, but we need the tools to be able to do.

קולט אביטל: COLLETTE AVITAL: I should actually respond very quickly.

קולט אביטל: Oded, you are right.

קולט אביטל: The Foreign Affairs and Security Committee should have also been, but you have here two people, Prof.

קולט אביטל: …, who belongs to the subcommittee on foreign affairs.

קולט אביטל: We’ll definitely take this up with the chairperson of our committee, Amira Dotan, and we’ll try to work together some kind of a joint meeting where you may be able to come and present these plans.

קולט אביטל: I think it’s a good opportunity to see how we can help you put it through including.

קולט אביטל: We had a very important discussion yesterday at a professional level in the ministry with Ken Jacobsen about a very specific problem that he senses in the United States right now and that is that we cannot, it is his feeling, that we cannot get the general public to listen to us about Iran, not because our arguments are not right, not because they don’t agree with our arguments, but because of emotional tiredness and weariness given the war in Iraq and the results of that war.

קולט אביטל: It is on this point where I want to take a slight issue with some of the other people who made comments here.

קולט אביטל: I would like to suggest that perhaps at this moment we have to be casting our net not quite as wide as you and some of the other speakers suggested, but that we have to be in our strategic thinking, certainly narrow.

קולט אביטל: We have to think very, very hard how in the coming years, coming one, two, three, four years, how we get the general public in the and Europe to be able to hear us on our concerns vis-a-vis .

קולט אביטל: I think what happened to the Israeli song at Eurovision, it may not have been a great song, but one thing is certain that the European public was not able to hear it.

קולט אביטל: They don’t want to hear it.

קולט אביטל: That song said something I think in an artistic – it expressed something true, very true about how the Israeli public feels and it has to – In fact the song, they didn’t like it, it was too political.

קולט אביטל: They don’t understand why we want to mess Eurovision with existential issues, shows the kind of problems that we are facing I think not only but everywhere.

קולט אביטל: AVINOAM BAR-JOSEPH: There is one thing that we missed here.

קולט אביטל: That is coordination and cooperation between all the Jewish bodies and organizations which is really very important if we want to move forward.

קולט אביטל: I think that strategy and narrow don’t go together.

קולט אביטל: You need to see the broad picture and to look forward not only you need stages but you need to look forward to a longer period of time.

קולט אביטל: I just want to thank you both for having us here and organizing the meeting.

קולט אביטל: I would like to turn to you to ask you if you think and if you have some kind of a team that already thinks strategically and how we can come into that into the thinking and how it can be useful to you and certainly I maintain my invitation and we’ll do that in some kind of a joint session.

קולט אביטל: We have talked about Carter’s role in , but frankly there is no audience for it.

קולט אביטל: Nobody gives a damn about what happened in 1979 and what Carter did or didn’t do then.

קולט אביטל: Carter has this image which is very hard to challenge.

קולט אביטל: What we have to do is purely on a factual basis answer him, yes, there are demonstrations where he appears.

קולט אביטל: Are they effective?

קולט אביטל: Generally no.

קולט אביטל: The problem is that he has the imprimatur of former president of the .

קולט אביטל: That is a powerful logo to carry with you.

קולט אביטל: As I said, it creates a dilemma for us about how you respond to win the audiences.

קולט אביטל: You have to think about the target audience, not just about yourselves, that we can feel good about – you know, during Soviet Jewry, throwing a brick through a window was the easiest thing in the world to do.

קולט אביטל: The question is did you win people and did you free Soviet Jews with that?

קולט אביטל: I see the Jewish community -

קולט אביטל: M.

קולט אביטל: HOENLEIN: I still have the scars to prove it.

קולט אביטל: Even when you talk about …, the Jewish community with the exception of a few, did not endorse … in the beginning and we had to fight a lot of resistance till we got our community to back .

קולט אביטל: I can tell you in many of the discussions was – he could not comprehend why the Jewish community wasn’t there.

קולט אביטל: For all of us who are on different parts of this frontline – you know, Disraeli once said there is no faith more ghastly than a stupid Jew.

קולט אביטל: He meant Jews who don’t get it.

קולט אביטל: Jews who don’t understand the world as it is.

קולט אביטל: We don’t have the luxury of trying to deal in a world that is not reality.

קולט אביטל: thought it could.

קולט אביטל: For many years we reacted to events.

קולט אביטל: We weren’t proactive.

קולט אביטל: We didn’t anticipate.

קולט אביטל: We always waited till we needed a huge coalition, etc.

קולט אביטל: , etc.

קולט אביטל: Now even can’t do it.

קולט אביטל: Achdus, failing to recognize the importance, and frankly here the Israeli media has a responsibility, where they always focus on the differences.

קולט אביטל: There is very little education about the diaspora’s role.

קולט אביטל: The schools don’t teach it.

קולט אביטל: The kids don’t know.

קולט אביטל: The people don’t know about it.

קולט אביטל: There really is a lack.

קולט אביטל: I encountered it here several times.

קולט אביטל: When we had two hundred thousand people in , where all the organizations played such a key role, people here didn’t even know about it.

קולט אביטל: What was the purpose of doing it, to show solidarity with the people of .

קולט אביטל: In it was on the front pages of the newspapers.

קולט אביטל: Here in some papers it hardly made a couple of paragraphs.

קולט אביטל: There is something wrong with that picture.

קולט אביטל: We live in a really strange world.

קולט אביטל: We talked about singing Hatikva.

קולט אביטל: It isn’t even a debate any more, because they don’t do it.

קולט אביטל: There is no Jewish organization in that starts a meeting singing Hatikva any more.

קולט אביטל: Christians do it.

קולט אביטל: I went to a couple of these events.

קולט אביטל: It’s amazing.

קולט אביטל: They sing there.

קולט אביטל: And more importantly, they know the words.

קולט אביטל: You go to a Jewish audience and see how many people know the words of Hatikva today – the original words.

קולט אביטל: M.

קולט אביטל: HOENLEIN: At how many meetings during the year do they sing Hatikva.

קולט אביטל: I am just saying that it is a principle that today – when I was growing up every meeting started with the Star Spangled Banner and Hatikva.

קולט אביטל: They don’t sing the Star Spangled Banner either, which is a statement about the condition.

קולט אביטל: I want to talk about Bush, about Eran said about President Bush.

קולט אביטל: You are quite right.

קולט אביטל: In a degree, the more pro he is, the more of a liability sometimes it is.

קולט אביטל: It does create a divisiveness.

קולט אביטל: But Walt and Meadesheimer did not.

קולט אביטל: This was before the reaction.

קולט אביטל: Walt and Meadesheimer were not motivated because of the Bush factor.

קולט אביטל: But you are right about the balance on this and many people, especially in Europe and others, because he is … for Israel, so they hate Bush so much that it becomes an issue we have to learn to finance and prepare for 2009.

קולט אביטל: I am not particularly concerned.

קולט אביטל: You know when people were yelling off the democrats, the Congress, how legislation changed, I said there is no evidence to back that charge.

קולט אביטל: We have a strong support in the democratic party as we have in the republican party.

קולט אביטל: You see the votes in Congress.

קולט אביטל: Did any transformation take place because the democrats took control?

קולט אביטל: The answer is no.

קולט אביטל: But you are absolutely right that the question of how we carried that … You don’t reject a president who is pro just because people criticize him.

קולט אביטל: On the other hand we have to I think sometimes be more sophisticated in the way we approach these issues and understanding how we become the lever because it is easier to attack Jews in Israel than it is in the United States.

קולט אביטל: I don’t mean physical attacks in this case.

קולט אביטל: Hasbara, it has to be a joint front.

קולט אביטל: I don’t think it is the responsibility of to fund our efforts.

קולט אביטל: I think diaspora communities have to do much more to make it a priority.

קולט אביטל: This is our battle front.

קולט אביטל: We don’t send our kids to be on the front line.

קולט אביטל: Our front line is the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people or Canadian citizens, or European citizens.

קולט אביטל: We frankly have to do much more.

קולט אביטל: We brought together at the Conference of the Presidents, together with some other organizations represented there, the top PR political strategists, advertising agency presidents, major publishers and lock them in a room, honestly, for three hours.

קולט אביטל: I said no one is leaving.

קולט אביטל: At two you come up with a way that we can begin to address it.

קולט אביטל: They came up with very creative ideas.

קולט אביטל: I said I am not going to reconvene until we have some funding that we can begin the process.

קולט אביטל: We are going to begin.

קולט אביטל: It’s not going to be ….

קולט אביטל: … independent operation.

קולט אביטל: We are going to bring the best minds together to create a war room, to be able to begin, not to rely on to do it, but to do our part so we can come back to and say, now look what we did.

קולט אביטל: Now you have to live up to your obligation.

קולט אביטל: It shows hasbara is better, the spokesmen for are much better.

קולט אביטל: There are other things that are better than they give credit for.

קולט אביטל: The problem is that you can’t do what Nasrallah did.

קולט אביטל: You can’t control who gets access to what.

קולט אביטל: So you are already at a disadvantage.

קולט אביטל: Democracies generally are at a disadvantage when it comes to the hasbara battle.

קולט אביטל: On June tenth there are going to be rallies in .

קולט אביטל: They have ads already, the fortieth anniversary.

קולט אביטל: How many events do we have celebrating the fortieth anniversary.

קולט אביטל: Who cares about .

קולט אביטל: You know, people don’t want to celebrate occupation and conquest and military wars.

קולט אביטל: But there is something much bigger to celebrate.

קולט אביטל: Why do we have demonstration that will take place, but we don’t know what the demonstration’s for.

קולט אביטל: There is a failure on the part and we are all responsible.

קולט אביטל: I am not putting blame on anybody.

קולט אביטל: When you talk about we have made the case about .

קולט אביטל: People are tired.

קולט אביטל: There is a lot of legitimacy to Ken’s argument about people are weary.

קולט אביטל: They are weary of the rut.

קולט אביטל: They don’t want to see us driven in war and the first thing they are looking for is to say, like Scott Ritter’s new book and many others, that the Jews are driving us into a war in .

קולט אביטל: The way to fight is, to build coalitions talking about the human rights violations there, where Bahai, Moslems and Christians are being massacred and killed and arrested and nobody in the world says a damn thing.

קולט אביטל: There are hundreds of executions.

קולט אביטל: I went to Jacques Chirac, Yoske Fisher, Colin Power, Condee Rice, President Bush – I gave them lists of hundreds of executions, kids sixteen and seventeen years old being sentenced to death.

קולט אביטל: I said you want to build support against .

קולט אביטל: This is the way to do it.

קולט אביטל: Make the human rights agenda.

קולט אביטל: Put it forth.

קולט אביטל: How can people be against it and not speak out on it.

קולט אביטל: Not to take our particular agenda.

קולט אביטל: Number two, this should not be a Jewish effort.

קולט אביטל: All the things we do should be in coalitions and behind names.

קולט אביטל: We created a thing called the A… Coalition for Justice.

קולט אביטל: Off the record, is it a fiction, of course.

קולט אביטל: But at least all the rallies we do are not seen as Jewish rallies.

קולט אביטל: We put Christians up front, religious leaders of all kinds because this is the way we will build broader support.

קולט אביטל: It can’t be seen as a Jewish thing because they are against Bahais, Moslems, Christians, Moslems that don’t agree with them, anybody.

קולט אביטל: By making it and because we are not sophisticated sometimes in our responses and because people just want to appear on cameras got to think about how this is placed out on the Iran issue in particular and remembering that we have twenty five thousand potential hostages inside the country.

קולט אביטל: I mentioned about coalition building because I believe completely.

קולט אביטל: I also think that we have failed on the Mashav front that the diaspora community should be partnering with and making Mashav much stronger, working with them.

קולט אביטל: I think a committee did it.

קולט אביטל: Others have done it.

קולט אביטל: Ruth Messinger should be working with Mashav so gets credit.

קולט אביטל: We can make our dollars go much further yet.

קולט אביטל: All of us should be doing more to use this and to have be seen for all the good that it does, which it gets very little credit.

קולט אביטל: You are absolutely right about identifying the young Kilpatricks and Moynihans but we also have to get the young Rotrigueses and the young Parises and others and young blacks and reach out to every aspect, the Asian American community which is growing in importance.

קולט אביטל: Other communities and dealing with them also with the Moslem community in .

קולט אביטל: Not to lump them all together.

קולט אביטל: This is not mono… The only capitals in Europe where you can walk with a yarmulka are Kardistan, Azerbejan, and Uzbekestan, you can walk with a yarmulka and not have any danger in those places.

קולט אביטל: You can’t do it in Paris and many others.

קולט אביטל: One of the things that perhaps we can do together is create opportunities and if I may say to educate also members of the Knesset about these issues.

קולט אביטל: Because I find that when we talk about it they are taken aback.

קולט אביטל: They say, you know, we don’t know any of this.

קולט אביטל: We don’t here it.

קולט אביטל: You certainly don’t read it in the press.

קולט אביטל: They said if it’s not a scandal we are not interested.

קולט אביטל: We, as a community, can’t afford today to squander the resources and we have to learn how to maximize it.

קולט אביטל: The way you do that is by bringing everybody together and creating an atmosphere of respect where differences will be tolerated.

קולט אביטל: Where we show that we will not tolerate intolerance.

קולט אביטל: There has to be zero level of intolerance within our community for those who try to divide it, those who seek to exploit and to say that we put aside the political agenda.

קולט אביטל: We are not interested in the political agenda in this country.

קולט אביטל: It is not for us to choose the prime minister or how he long he stays.

קולט אביטל: Our job, especially now, is to stand and support the people of Israel, to take pride in the fact that you have a democratic process that holds people to account and to show that most other countries in the world don’t have it.

קולט אביטל: We can’t get caught in this downward spiral of defeatism.

קולט אביטל: COLLETTE AVITAL: Thank you very much Malcolm.

קולט אביטל: I should say first that this was your visit for us was a short notice, but very good news.

קולט אביטל: The reason why I am saying this is because we didn’t manage with the busy agenda in the Knesset to organize a larger audience.

קולט אביטל: So take it as an aperitif, take it as a first course if you want.

קולט אביטל: What I really intend to do is to take up your challenge.

קולט אביטל: We have to communicate and see when you are next and I am definitely working a lot with the Institute that Avinoam represents here.

קולט אביטל: We’ll try to think perhaps after all these various problems that we are all facing during the month of May and June to start doing something serious at the beginning of July.

קולט אביטל: Maybe to take advantage of meeting and then get everybody together around the table and perhaps until then if you come back to us you come back already with some kind of a paper, strategic plan that we can all discuss and adopt.

קולט אביטל: I think you have some thoughts.

קולט אביטל: On the basis of that I think we pull together more Israelis.

קולט אביטל: Maybe more MKs.

קולט אביטל: Maybe what we will do is to use a Sunday to do a sort of a study day here and come up with some action plan.

קולט אביטל: MORRIS SILKA:

קולט אביטל: I would like just to say that we did not discuss the eight hundred thousand Israelis who are in the .

קולט אביטל: I do think that we should take advantage of that and maybe some time to say one or two things.