America Abroad

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.