As Benjamin Netanyahu launched his winning campaign in 2009, he invited me to run with him for the Knesset again. I said no. He then offered me a position in his cabinet, if he returned to office as prime minister. I declined. After I also refused his kind offer to become Israel’s ambassador to the United States, he asked me what I was thinking. I said, “I was nine years in prison. Another nine years in politics balances nicely. I served in four governments and quit twice. I served in four prisons and never quit. Probably, something’s wrong with me in politics.”
“So, you don’t want any public post?” Bibi replied, sounding annoyed.
“Well, actually, would you support my candidacy for the chairmanship of the Jewish Agency?” I responded. “That position interests me.”
Netanyahu was stunned. Usually, heads of the Jewish Agency kept angling to become members of Knesset or ministers in the cabinet or ambassadors in Washington. I was hoping to live in reverse, again. Bibi wondered why. “Do you think there will be another million Jews moving here you can take credit for?” he asked sarcastically.
“I don’t know. I doubt it,” I replied. “But I can tell you this. You’re right. The number-one threat facing Israel is Iran. And you should invest as much effort as you do managing that threat. Still, we Jewish people face another threat: How do we avoid becoming two different peoples, split between Israel and the Diaspora? I have spent much of my life building bridges between them. I’ve also spent a lot of time working with the Jewish Agency, and fighting with it. I know how unique this organization’s position is, as a meeting place between the government and Diaspora. So,” I concluded, “while you work on containing Iran, I can work on improving Israel-Diaspora relations.”
The Jewish Agency? Many would consider it the last place to fix Israel-Diaspora relations. Critics dismissed it as a bureaucratic dinosaur that had had its moment of glory decades earlier, founding and populating the state. Now, they argued, it should become extinct.
In 1929, David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann helped establish the Jewish Agency to serve as the provincial government of the Jewish community in Palestine until a state was created. After 1948, the formal government of Israel gave the Jewish Agency the mandate to ingather the exiles, that most sacred of Zionist missions. Now known as the Jewish Agency for Israel, it became the Jewish people’s great miracle worker, collecting billions of dollars from all over the world to help settle millions of Jews in Israel.
The Hebrew word for immigration, aliyah, means ascent. Aliyah defined the Jewish Agency’s new task. The aura surrounding that word emphasized the modern Jew’s privilege, to move up to Israel after millennia of homelessness and hatred.
Like most Israeli organizations during the days of Ben-Gurionite Socialist Zionism, the Jewish Agency was hierarchical. It was centralized. It was turf oriented, always asserting monopolistic control over the aliyah and absorption process. It treated the people it helped paternalistically.
Today, we wince when we learn how the state of Israel imposed its ways on the newcomers, especially the 850,000 refugees from the Arab and Muslim worlds. Jewish Agency representatives dictated where they should live, what they would wear, and how they should earn a living. But the Sochnut, as the organization was called informally in Hebrew, also embodied the positive Zionist values of settling the land and ingathering the exiles, of being down-to-earth and ready to work.
“Before there was Hollandia [the fancy mattress company]—there was Mitat Sochnut—The Jewish Agency Bed,” one nostalgic Israeli website recalls. The Jewish Agency bed was clunky, eminently functional, and as lacking in style as every kibbutznik who manufactured it. It was the standard issue, one-size-fits-all metal frame with a thin mattress that Israel’s immigrants received at their Jewish Agency–run absorption centers. Today, when Israelis hear people singing the good old-fashioned, hopelessly naive Zionist folk songs, they call them shirei Sochnut, Jewish Agency songs, half-disdainfully and half-lovingly.
Over time, needs changed. It was no longer the 1930s and ’40s, when the Jewish Agency made the state, or the ’50s and ’60s, when it populated the state. By 2009, the Jewish Agency seemed like an aging war veteran still living off battles won long ago and increasingly forgotten. Israel’s commissars of Zionism pushed the aliyah orthodoxy so heavy-handedly that Diaspora Jews could trade stories about that “guilt-tripping Israeli tour guide,” asking in heavily accented English, “Why you no make aliyah?”
Some friends looked at me even more skeptically than Bibi did when they heard of my request. It was as if I had volunteered to captain the Titanic, after the ship hit the iceberg.
To them, the Jewish Agency conjured up images of charmless copycat offices along endless, narrowing, dimly lit corridors, with tea ladies wearing Soviet-style smocks moving glacially from underworked office drone to overqualified political appointee. Each office was simply furnished but occupied by self-important bureaucrats doing bits of busywork between ever longer coffee breaks, confident that their bullying employees’ union would protect their now irrelevant jobs.
Having worked closely with the Jewish Agency, and having fought its leadership periodically, I was familiar with all the complaints about its outdated, overstaffed, underperforming bureaucracy. Its reputation was even worse. The first time I addressed the agency’s board of governors was just weeks after my liberation. There was a lot of fanfare and warmth. A little too naively, but candidly, I told them what many had asked me when they heard I would be speaking to them: “Why isn’t the Jewish Agency closed yet?”
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s impression of the organization was correct. The Jewish Agency remained frozen in its historic mission, defined as a success or a failure by how many immigrants settled in Israel in any given year.
Ignoring all the warning signs, I went ahead, because I also believed in this organization’s underappreciated and unique strengths. The staff was impressively professional, especially during national emergencies. When the Iron Curtain fell, Jewish Agency representatives had fanned out across the vast Soviet Union, which covered one-sixth of the globe. They mobilized hundreds of emissaries, initiated dozens of programs, and helped settle one million Russian immigrants. Through its board of governors and partnerships with the American Jewish Federation, the Jewish Agency then raised $1 billion in resettlement funds for Operation Exodus.
One of the agency’s secrets was its staffers’ idealism. From lay leaders on the board to secretaries and cleaning staff, everyone was united by a sense of shlichut, of mission, something I rarely found in my various government ministries. These Jewish Agency people focused every day on bringing Jews home to Israel.
Jewish Agency staffers also knew how to recruit, deploy, and manage shlichim (emissaries) all over the world very effectively, creating a living Jewish people network. This web of Israelis spreading across the globe brought a human touch to abstract ideas of the Jewish people and Israel, especially for the many Jews who had never visited the country. In 2003, after my visit to North American universities, I had recommended that we send these emissaries to campuses. Naturally, we turned to the Jewish Agency.
Most important to me at that critical transition moment in 2009, the Jewish Agency brought Diaspora Jews and Israelis together as no other institution could. The agency’s roundtable, its board of governors, offered a unique forum in the Jewish world, where representatives of Israel’s Zionist parties could engage with representatives of Diaspora communities, including the leaders of the Reform and Conservative movements. Intercommunal dialogues that were politically impossible to arrange in the Knesset or through the cabinet occurred regularly through the Jewish Agency.
I believed that, with its unique position uniting the Jewish people and Israel, the Jewish Agency could play a powerful role. We just had to tweak its mission, updating it to fit our changing Jewish world.
Even if the Jewish Agency was a flawed vessel, leading it would be the culmination of my ideological journey, which had started with the discovery of those two basic human desires: to belong and to be free. Professor Shira Wolosky Weiss and I described this vision of how to build identity and community in our 2008 book, Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy. By leading the Jewish Agency, I could implement these ideas with perhaps the most far-reaching identity tool kit in the Jewish world.
I worried about the Western drift away from tradition, community, and roots. I believed the underlying tensions in Israel-Diaspora relations reflected Israeli Jews’ and Diaspora Jews’ strained relationships to Judaism and Zionism more than some inherent hostility toward one another. In the Jewish community and beyond, I felt we needed a better sense of who we were before we could figure out how to better communicate with each other.
At the same time, Netanyahu’s comeback government was forming at a particularly fragile moment. The political situation seemed doomed to deteriorate. Barack Obama had been inaugurated in January 2009, just days after Israel finished Operation Cast Lead. It was another military operation in Gaza that united most Israelis but intensified divisions among American Jews.
During those three trying weeks, J Street, the new “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby intimately tied to the Obama administration, pronounced Israel’s actions “counterproductive” and a “disproportionate escalation.” Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism and a member of the Jewish Agency’s board of governors, responded in the left-leaning Forward newspaper. Identifying as a “dove,” he charged, “This time J Street got it very wrong.” Feeling caught between the extremes, like so many Jews in Israel and abroad, Rabbi Yoffie wrote poignantly, “If some Jewish hawks are devoid of sympathy for Palestinian suffering, not a few Jewish doves have demonstrated an utter lack of empathy for Israel’s predicament.”
Two months after Obama became president, Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister again. We all knew that this volatile prime minister–president relationship would strain Israel-Diaspora relations. For me, this only emphasized the Jewish Agency’s huge potential as the bridge between Israel and the Diaspora.
Netanyahu agreed and supported my candidacy. Two months later, I was elected chairman of the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental agency with a $350 million budget. To continue the momentum of so many of the projects I had begun back in the 1990s, I asked Vera Golovensky to serve as my senior adviser. We had first met when we worked together at the Jerusalem Report. Over the years, she served in many capacities as my valued adviser on Diaspora affairs.
I spent the next nine years working with others to change the course of this vast ocean liner by just a few degrees. This relatively small adjustment allowed some people to accuse me once again of committing high treason, this time against Zionism.
Sitting in my new office, which was David Ben-Gurion’s old command post, changed my perspective once again. Across from it, in Ben-Gurion Hall, I hosted representatives of Jewish communities from all over the world. In the corridor, a parade of portraits of Ben-Gurion and each of his successors greeted me. These paintings reminded me, day after day, to look at the Diaspora through Ben-Gurion’s eyes, at Israel through the Diaspora’s eyes, and at the way Israel and the Diaspora related through my various predecessors’ eyes.
Studying the history of the Jewish Agency, I realized that in this building the Israel-Diaspora relationship had evolved through three distinct stages. First, we negated one another, discounting the other community’s future. Next, we saved one another, convinced that each could not survive without the other. Rich Diaspora Jews saved Israel from physical destruction as Israel saved the Jewish people from disappearing.
In the present third stage, even amid growing tensions, both communities have realized that we need one another. Diaspora Jews have started turning to Israel to inspire young Jews in their identity-building quests, while Israeli Jews trust Diaspora Jews as the most reliable allies in the fight against the delegitimization of Israel. My mission was to see how the Jewish Agency could solidify this sense of mutual interdependence, then to try building a healthier dialogue between Israel and the Diaspora.
In the first stage, Zionists were desperate to build a Jewish homeland. They expected the Diaspora to disappear, either through assimilation or annihilation, as Theodor Herzl put it. Most Jews dismissed Zionism as the marginal movement it was back then. Even those who admired the halutzim (the pioneers) had a hard time taking their state-building talk seriously.
The great movements of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewry resisted Zionism. The Yiddish-speaking Bundists believed in building a socialist future with their fellow workers of the world, not creating a sectarian Jewish state in the Middle East. Most Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews believed in building up traditional religious practice, wherever they lived. Most Reform Jews believed in a Western European or American future, given that they defined Judaism as a religion that was constantly evolving. Even the American Conservative movement, which ideologically was the most pro-Zionist and peoplehood oriented, produced few immigrants. Most American Jews resented the suggestion that they had any home other than their promised land, the goldene medina, America.
During these pre-state days, even as many of its leaders negated the Diaspora ideologically, the Jewish Agency was the key practical bridge linking the Jews of Palestine with world Jewry. In the 1930s, the Jewish Agency sent emissaries to different communities all over the world, especially Europe, many of them through the Zionist youth movements. The movements could be socialist like Hashomer Hatzair and Habonim, revisionist like Betar, or religious like Bnei Akiva. It didn’t matter. They all broadcast the same Zionist message about establishing a Jewish state for the Jewish people in the Jewish homeland, Eretz Yisrael. Warning about the growing dangers, the representatives urged the local Jews to come to Palestine. Most European Jews ignored this appeal, then paid for it with their lives.
The emissaries also helped organize aliyah for those who wanted to ascend. Sometimes they practiced in mock kibbutzim, called hachshara, in Romania, Poland, and Morocco, but never made it to Palestine. Sometimes they were fleeing persecution and sometimes they were survivors. Sometimes immigration was legal and sometimes illegal. The British policy in administering Palestine changed, but the Jewish Agency emissaries were always there, ready to help.
The emissaries’ warnings proved prophetic. The Holocaust showed how vulnerable stateless Jews were. This realization turned most Jews into Zionists, broadening the definition to mean “supporter of the Jewish state” not just “current or future citizen.” Most Eastern European Bundists had been murdered. The Orthodox and Conservative movements in America supported Israel enthusiastically, but with moral support and money, not mass immigration. Reform Jews Zionized, accepting peoplehood and the need for a state. The ultra-Orthodox still resisted theologically but adjusted pragmatically to the growing realities.
Supporting Zionism became as Jewish as being bar or bat mitzvahed, especially after Israel’s establishment in 1948. With a now functioning formal government in the country, the Jewish Agency advanced the next key Zionist mission: ingathering the exiles. Beyond working with immigrants before and after their arrival, the Jewish Agency channeled world Jewry’s generosity in this essential nation-building project. While rolling up their sleeves, opening up their wallets, and trying to solve the many problems facing the state, Jews in Israel and the Diaspora sidestepped whatever ideological divides might emerge regarding who should live where.
Remembering American Jewry’s failure to save European Jews during the Holocaust, Diaspora Jews vowed, “Never again.” They were ready to muster whatever financial and political power was needed to save Israelis, the poor and weak but inspiring new members of their Jewish family. Israelis also remembered European Jews’ failure to save themselves during the Holocaust. When Israelis said “never again,” they understood that the only way to save the Jewish people was by building their state. This dynamic shaped the second stage in Israel-Diaspora relations of saving one another.
Both groups of saviors met and worked remarkably well together within the Jewish Agency’s board of governors. By the time I started attending the board meetings during my absorption activism in the late 1980s, the ideological passions on both sides had cooled. Still, you could always sense the clashing crystal balls just under the surface. Most Israelis involved were heavy-duty Zionists, certain the Diaspora was doomed. Therefore, all Jews should make aliyah, while those who didn’t should donate as much money to Israel as possible before assimilating fully. Most of the Americans involved were lite Zionists. Although devoted to saving Israel, they knew aliyah was not an option for them, and better not be for their kids.
Despite being rooted in mutual condescension, this relationship produced excellent results. The national institutions were cursed with convoluted bureaucratic structures. The approach to immigrants was often too paternalistic. Nevertheless, working together, this mix of politicians, organizational professionals, and volunteers settled millions of people while raising billions of dollars to build Israel.
I saw this mix of competing motives and focused cooperation in the two last waves of Israel’s aliyah of rescue, the immigration of one million Jews from the former Soviet Union and of one hundred thousand Jews from Ethiopia.