Since it is much easier to raise funds by pulling at the heart strings, the Jewish Diaspora establishment persists in treating Israel as the poor and less capable relative, largely ignoring the great talents and ability, even the relative success, that many Israelis exhibit. In a two-year course the Jewish Agency holds for promising young Diaspora leaders, all they see and learn about is welfare Israel, with almost no acquaintance with Israel’s productive side. Lack of full and proper information about Israel has not only limited American Jews’ ability to defend Israel in the international arena. It has also caused a serious misapprehension of Israel’s internal problems and what must be done to solve them.

The American people, thank God, are not likely to be bamboozled by their intellectuals, and thank God again, Israel is defended by good fundamentalist Christians. Still, one must not underestimate the potential danger that an erosion in Israel’s moral position poses for Israel and for the American Jewish community. This danger must be met by mounting a massive educational effort.

Without American Jewish support, Israel could probably not have been created. The tougher question is whether American Jewish assistance helped Israel become a self-sustaining productive society, or whether it helped to grossly inflate its welfare-oriented public sector.

It is this sector that is perhaps the greatest impediment to Israel’s economic viability. One could also ask whether the stress on charity and fund-raising that overshadows all other American Jewish communal activities has not negatively affected Israel-Diaspora relations.

Adaptation to gentile rule enabled Jews to preserve their nationhood without a land for a long while. But with the advent of populist democracies, politically powerless Jews became so tempting a target that disaster was inevitable. Although Zionism “tried to develop a ‘new Jew’,”Harvard Prof. Ruth Weiss argued last week (in the second annual Bernstein Memorial Lecture), there were still left in Israel vestiges of the ‘old Jew’ ” who was habitually politically accommodating ”. It prevents Israel, she believes, from trying “to convince its neighbors and the world that it expects their accommodation to the needs of the Jews.”