Just because Avraham Burg isn’t the speaker of the Knesset anymore doesn’t mean he has nothing to say.
The 50-year-old resigned a safe Labor Party seat eight months ago, a highly unusual step for a politician without a financial scandal or blue dress lurking in his closet.
No, Burg deserted Labor because he feels Labor has deserted Israel.
“You need two pillars to support the roof of democracy. The first is the government, and if the government succeeds, it should be elected and re-elected. But if it fails, there needs to be somebody there to offer an alternative. But if the alternative joins the government and they both fail, that’s inviting despair to walk right in,” said Burg in a telephone interview from his home in the village of Natas, outside Jerusalem.
“Labor is betraying its mission by joining Sharon’s government to go along with his policies. The alternative of Labor was always negotiation, reciprocity, doing it together with the Palestinians. Today they are our enemies, tomorrow our partners. When you do something unilaterally, you are arrogant. And this, I will say, George Bush-style of talking down to the Palestinians and not seriously considering them as partners, I consider a severe mistake.”
Burg, who will keynote the New Israel Fund’s Guardian of Democracy Dinner on Monday, May 16, at San Francisco’s City Hall, had more choice words for the president. He compared Bush’s relationship with Israel to overly indulgent parenting (parenting metaphors come naturally for Burg, a father of six with four children currently serving in Israel’s armed forces).
“Many times I’m asked, ‘Avraham, what’s a good president for Israel?’ And for years I’d say I don’t want to answer. It’s your problem, it’s your president. But now I want to answer. The president in the White House is the president of the world. And I simply do not believe a good president is the one who does everything that Israel wants,” he explained.
“One of [Bush’s] severe mistakes is to think Israel is a little America away from home, and whatever he recommends to be done in Tora Bora should be done 200 meters away from our homes in Ramallah. You do not have to live with Afghanistan one day after, but we have to live with it this afternoon.”
Since leaving government, Burg has been working with a company that invests in Israel’s old economy (i.e. anything but computers), writing a best-selling political manifesto and running marathons. (“In Israel, nobody runs more than one meter at a time,” he said. “It is part of the short-sightedness of Israeli politics.”)
In his worldview, the coming conflict is not one of Christians and Jews versus Muslims or the First World versus the Third World. It’s of democracy versus theocracy, and democrats and theocrats come in all religious stripes. He sees the coming fight as a “coalition of some of us and them versus some of us and them.”
Burg, who has deep Bay Area ties with the New Israel Fund and other charitable groups, said he is depressed over what he sees as a polarization among American Jews. Simply put, Israel is an important issue, but it’s not the only one.
“It is an awful, strategic, historical mistake to limit American Jewry into single-issue Jewry. The result of it is today’s FBI and AIPAC” scandal, he said.
Regarding the pro-Israel lobby, he continued, “For many years, my feeling that what AIPAC is doing, being more Israeli than Israel, is a problem. It’s a problem for Israel and a problem for American Jewry. I don’t like it. [American Jews] are right at the heart of the most powerful superpower ever. And you are not there only for [Israel]. You are there for the rest of the world as well.”
Burg knows he can’t please everybody with his views — “some will fully agree and some will hate my guts” — but he’s OK with that.
But a politician never reveals all. When queried if he was considering an imminent return to elected office, he laughed and replied, “Let’s keep that for the next interview.”
Avraham Burg will speak at the NIF’s Guardian of Democracy Dinner on Monday, May 16, at San Francisco’s City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place. Cocktails are at 6 p.m. Tickets: $250. Information: (415) 543-5055 or [email protected].