My Father and Jimmy Carter

I have two political heroes – one was President of the United States; the other, my dad. Together they taught me to be true to my moral compass and to stand up in the public arena for what I believe.

In the week just ended, I both marked the 40^th yahrzeit (anniversary) of my father’s passing and was honored to attend former President Jimmy Carter’s deeply moving funeral in Washington.

My heroes make an odd couple. One, a Southern Baptist peanut farmer from rural Georgia; the other, one of the first Jewish children born in Tel Aviv who went on to run guns and immigrants into Palestine illegally before, during and after World War II.

What they share is deep moral courage, a commitment to their core values and the willingness to enter the public arena to fight for what they believed. Where they diverged was on the path forward for Israel, Palestine and the Middle East.

My father was an early leader in the Irgun, the pre-state Jewish right-wing underground. Some will recognize it as the group led by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, one of the signatories of Carter-led Camp David Accords. Begin’s political heir is Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father and mine, it happens, were colleagues and friends.

My father commanded the Jerusalem branch of the Irgun’s youth movement, led the group’s illegal immigration work out of Vienna, ran boats down the Danube for Jews escaping the Nazi threat and negotiated personally with Adolf Eichmann over the price of each departing Jew.

In 1939, he came to the States where, with a small group of 20-something Palestinian Jews, he raised awareness and money for Jewish emigration from Europe and for a Jewish army. His and the Irgun’s politics were, to put it mildly, not aligned with the 1940’s American Jewish establishment. American Jewish leaders regarded the group as militant rabble rousers who risked deepening antisemitism by drawing the US into a war it did not want to fight.

This amazing group – colloquially called the Bergson Group after its leader Peter Bergson – was harassed by the Jewish establishment and by the US government, which pursued them with FBI investigations and immigration challenges, ultimately leading to my father being drafted into the US army. (If you don’t know about the Group – take a moment to learn. Its tactics – full-page ads in the newspapers, DC lobbying, Broadway pageants with Hollywood actors, marches on Washington by rabbis – were decades ahead of their time, many of them groundbreaking.)

My father stayed in the States for the second half of his life, becoming active in American politics. He voted Democratic because of his deep commitment to fairness and equality. He maintained, however, his hard-right views when it came to Israel.

He wrote a book, a regular column and had a weekly radio show. And he had a loyal following of younger, right-wing Jewish Americans who to this day still honor his memory (some of them from their West Bank settlements).

In 1976, I spent a high school summer volunteering for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign. My father was all in for Carter as well since the Republican Party had been pressing Israel for concessions following the 1967 and 1973 wars. All was peaceful on the Ben-Ami home front.

Then, President Carter negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt. My father’s old friend Begin had concluded that, for the sake of the children and grandchildren of coming generations, Israel should exchange the Sinai for lasting peace with Egypt.

To put it mildly, my father didn’t see it that way. He maintained that Israel needed to control as much land as possible to protect the state. The Camp David Accords frayed not only my father’s relationship with Begin but turned him against President Carter. In 1980, my father asked me to take the Carter-Mondale poster off my wall, and he set up a group that I believe he called “The Committee to Defeat the President.”

I opted to spend the summer of 1980 working for John Anderson, a moderate Republican running as an independent, who ended up with 6.6 percent of the vote. Carter went on to lead the greatest post-presidency ever, working for peace abroad. And I had managed to maintain peace at home.

My father passed away just four years later. We never had the chance to engage substantively on issues of Israel, Palestine and the best path to ensure Israel’s security and maintain its democratic and Jewish character. I can presume he would not share the views that I hold today, developed from my own experience living in Israel in the 90s.

Many children of Irgun leaders have passed through Israeli politics over the decades: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and Dan Meridor, to name a few whose fathers were colleagues of my dad’s. Many of us in this generation have come to see that Israel’s future depends on resolving the conflict with the Palestinians – diplomatically; many probably had the difficult conversations with their parents that I never had with my father.

I have come to see a comprehensive regional agreement, that I call the 23-state solution, as the best path forward. Former Prime Minister Olmert is still actively promoting his vision of Israeli-Palestinian peace that he nearly achieved during his time in office.

From time to time, it comes to my attention that somewhere in the abyss of social media, in books or in right-of-center outlets, some who knew my father attack me personally for ‘betraying’ my father, certain that he is “spinning in his grave” because of my politics. These attacks can get unnecessarily personal, recently even accusing me of neglecting my father’s grave on the Mount of Olives – a place of enormous personal importance to me, which I in fact visit regularly and proudly.

I believe strongly - along with 90 percent of Jewish Americans - that you can criticize the policies and actions of Israel's government and still be pro-Israel. That's in fact the fourth principle of my take on “What it really means to be pro-Israel today."

Jimmy Carter and my dad may not have agreed on much when it comes to Israel and Palestine. But I like to think they shared a belief that being a patriot for any country does not require agreeing with that country’s government.

In fact, a major lesson I draw from their lives is precisely the opposite: disagreeing with those in power, fighting for change and causing, in John Lewis’s words, “good trouble” may well be the greatest possible demonstration of patriotism.