Leading American supporters of Israel have been quick to embrace a controversial Israeli nationalist who is likely to play a major role in the new Israeli government in an effort to blunt any harm his rise might do to IsraelÂ’s image in the United States. Avigdor LiebermanÂ’s party took third in the parliamentary election earlier this month on a platform warning of threats from IsraeliÂ’s Arab minority. The success of his "Israel Is Our Home" party makes him a key player in forming a new government, but he has drawn denunciations from leading figures on the American and Israeli left, who warned that he could endanger a pillar of the U.S.-Israel relationship: the case that the countries share pluralistic, democratic values. Palestinian advocates, meanwhile, say LiebermanÂ’s popularity exposes an ugly face of IsraelÂ’s relationship with its own Arab citizens.
But Lieberman has mounted a charm offensive, downplaying the harsh stands — like a demand that Israeli citizens swear a “loyalty oath” — that many of his supporters found so appealing. This week, he published an op-ed in an American Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Week, claiming that his concept of “responsible citizenship” is actually no different from Great Britain’s.
A former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Danny Ayalon, has been trying to smooth and soften Lieberman’s profile with nervous American Jews. “Since there was no good answer by the Israeli left to the rise of Lieberman, they began all this name-calling — ‘fascist, racist, not democratic,’” said Ayalon, who served in Washington from 2002 to 2006.
On the stump during the election, Lieberman seemed to suggest that Israeli Arabs, many of whom tell pollsters they sympathize with Hamas, could be stripped of their citizenship. “Without loyalty, there can be no citizenship,” he said. Lieberman is also known for an undiplomatic tone: He has been quoted saying everyone from disloyal Israel Arabs to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak can “go to hell.”
But Ayalon said Lieberman’s words had been misinterpreted and that a loyalty oath would be required only for government positions. “Nothing is further from the truth," he said. "Nobody’s going to be kicked out of here or anything like that. Stripping citizenship is really something which is not a good idea and this is not what we would like to see."
Lieberman will visit the United States after Israel’s new governing coalition forms, Ayalon said, though he has already begun reaching out to American Jewish leaders. The party leader addressed a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations at a hotel in Jerusalem last week — a meeting at which he did not bring up the loyalty oath. He also met Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) in Jerusalem last week.
His allies make the case that he’s not really that conservative — he supports a two-state solution, though he would reach it in part by bargaining with Palestinian leaders using land that includes Israeli Arab populations — and that he’s avowedly secular. And American Jewish leaders, who had initially taken a standoffish posture amid fears that Avigdor Lieberman would damage the U.S.-Israel relationship, are now publicly making the case that he’s not so bad. “There is nothing in his speeches that indicates someone who would threaten the shared values that we have,” said Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “He’s a politician who got elected on a populist theme on the issue of loyalty, citizenship — it was more of a political theme to play on the issues of insecurity out there. He hasn’t suggested any specific legislation.”
“There a lot of exaggeration and hype about who he is,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents, who noted that Jews as well as Arabs would be bound by any proposed loyalty oath. “It’s really a much more nuanced picture than people have jumped on here in creating a straw man. The fact is he built a party, and he appeals to a significant portion of the population.”
“I don’t think it is a blot on Israeli democracy for an Israeli minister to say, ‘We have a real problem if 20 percent of our population is in fact not loyal to the state and wants the state to disappear,’” said Elliott Abrams, who was a National Security Council official under President George W. Bush. “It is not right to say that by raising this issue Lieberman somehow damages Israeli or puts himself out of polite company.”
Those voices and others are seeking to calm the waters after harsh attacks on Lieberman from the left. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, denounced Lieberman for running “an outrageous, abominable, hate-filled campaign, brimming with incitement that, if left unchecked, could lead Israel to the gates of hell.” He called on American Jewish leaders to denounce Lieberman. “If we are silent or speak the language of equivocation, we will weaken rather than strengthen Israel’s cause.” The group Peace Now has taken out ads in Jewish newspapers, asking, “Where is the outrage?”
“We’ve always been able to relate to Israel based on the principle of democracy, and the minority Arab population being given democratic rights,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, who heads another left-leaning group, J Street. “It’s very important that Israeli never go down that road of abandoning basic democratic values and principles.”
Palestinian advocates, meanwhile, see Lieberman as embodying Israel’s worst failings. “Lieberman's politics are truly odious, racist and incompatible with any notion of democracy and equality in a modern state,” said Ali Abunimah, a fellow at the Palestine Center in Washington. He added that “much of the anti-Arab racism he expresses publicly is deeply embedded in Israel's society, economy, and political system and tacitly endorsed by all the other major Zionist parties.”
Lieberman's and his American allies' efforts to clean up his image have met, so far, with mixed results. Top officials of the American Jewish Committee, which publishes the Jewish Week, felt obliged to publish a rebuttal to Lieberman's claims of moderation in his own op-ed.
LiebermanÂ’s impact on IsraelÂ’s image may largely depend on his role within the new government. While Ayalon said the foreign affairs ministry is likely, a lower-profile job could keep him out of the spotlight. Others argue that he could be a useful foil for Benjamin Netanyahu, allowing the new prime minister to better cast himself as a centrist.
Already, though, Lieberman has begun to audition for the foreign minister slot with his high-profile meeting with Sen. Lieberman in Jerusalem on Sunday. In a sign of continuing American skittishness, the senator, a congressional staffer said, kept his distance.
“It does not take any great leap of imagination to realize that Sen. Lieberman has very different views on many of these issues than Avigdor Lieberman,” said the staffer, who described the meeting on the condition of anonymity. “It was made very clear during their interaction that they don’t see eye to eye on many, many things.”