NEW YORK — The “road map” toward Israeli-Palestinian peace has just gotten off the ground — but it’s taking Jewish groups on divergent courses.
In the latest sign of the ferment the plan is causing in the Jewish community, several leaders of the national Jewish federation system endorsed it in a letter to congressional leaders on April 29.
The action apparently came in response to letters expressing concern with aspects of the plan that were sent by many members of Congress to President Bush on April 30 in an effort backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the main pro-Israel lobby.
The April 29 letter from 14 philanthropists illustrates the extent to which the road map has pressed Jewish buttons. Many of the signatories are philanthropists who do not commonly enter the political fray and are current or former activists in the federation system, an institution that is deliberately nonpartisan.
The formal presentation of the road map on April 30 intensified the split in the Jewish community about the plan’s merits and flaws, and the extent to which Jews should present a unified front on the issue.
The road map calls for a “final and comprehensive settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by 2005,” which will include “an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace and security with Israel.”
The plan calls for the Palestinian Authority to dismantle terrorist groups, clearly accept Israel’s right to exist and enact a clean, functioning democracy, among other steps.
Israel, in turn, must end its settlement enterprises in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, withdraw from most of the territories and commit itself to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Left-leaning groups like Americans for Peace Now have sent letters to Congress supporting the road map, while mainstream ones have expressed concerns.
Meanwhile, the hawkish Zionist Organization of America has launched a grassroots campaign urging activists to write letters to President Bush opposing the road map.
“Bush’s ‘road map’ plan will lead to the creation of a Palestinian Arab terrorist state,” the group’s action alert reads.
The tension surrounding the road map was highlighted at a general meeting of the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations on April 30.
Chairman Mortimer Zuckerman — who recently penned a broadside against the road map in U.S. News and World Report, which he publishes — cited the plan’s perceived pitfalls, such as its failure to demand tangible results from the Palestinian Authority, according to participants at the closed-door session.
And Ronald Lauder, a past Presidents Conference chairman, encouraged a unified Jewish stance on the issue, but did not specify the position.
In response, Seymour Reich, another past chairman of the Presidents Conference, praised the road map’s positive potential and urged respect for the diversity of Jewish opinion on the issue.
For his part, James Tisch, chairman of the board of the United Jewish Communities federation umbrella and the man elected last week as the Presidents Conference’s next chairman, distanced himself from the federation leaders’ recent letter to Congress supporting the plan.
“That letter does not reflect in any way UJC policy,” said Tisch. He faced off against one of its signatories, Alan Solomont, chairman of Boston’s Jewish federation, in a CNN interview April 30 about Jewish debate over the road map.