c. 1997 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ He talks about God rather than territory, prayers rather than holy sites. Yitzhak Frankenthal’s religious message stands in stark opposition to the likes of religious fanatics such as Baruch Goldstein, Yigal Amir and now Noam Friedman, who have used violence in the name of Jewish sovereignty over West Bank and Gaza territory.

Frankenthal, the driving force behind Israel’s small religious peace movement, Oz Ve Shalom, has as much reason to hate Arabs as any of those young men. In 1994, his son, Arik, was kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian members of the Islamic group Hamas as he was hitchhiking home from his army base in the Negev.

Yet Frankenthal has transformed his personal tragedy into an unrelenting quest for peace. It is a quest that led him to develop a proposal for a territorial settlement between Israel and the Palestinians that is privately viewed by some leading political and military leaders here as one of the most significant partition plans yet to be placed on the public agenda.”For me, time is measured not in weeks or months but in days. It has been 907 days since Arik was killed,”says Frankenthal, whose tone conveys his utmost sense of urgency about finding a way out of the ugly conflict.”It’s a shame to lose more lives. Every day there isn’t a solution, there are more martyrs and victims on both sides,”he says.

A former businessman, Frankenthal and his family founded and developed some of the early brand names of the Israeli food industry _ including soya-based”Tivul”burgers that have became a staple in Israeli diets.

Now, Frankenthal hopes to launch a marketing campaign that would change Israeli political thinking in the 1990s in the same way he helped change eating habits in the 1970s and 1980s _ and transform the largely unknown Oz Ve Shalom (“Strength and Peace”) movement into a driving force in Israeli political life.”What we have to do is change political concepts, the norms of conduct that people grew up with _ much as we convinced Israelis to switch from eating meat to Tivul soya burgers,”he declares.

The centerpiece of his strategy is the map he developed for a proposed territorial division of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The plan would cede 93 percent of the West Bank to a new Palestinian state, while annexing only seven percent of the most populated Jewish areas to Israel, in irregular, but continuous blocs.

That seven percent of territory, however, contains a whopping 77 percent of the present 130,000-member West Bank and Gaza Jewish settler population _ or 91 percent if the 164,000 Jews living in formerly Arab areas of East Jerusalem are also included in the count.

Just 30,000 Jewish settlers _ about 5,000 families _ would live outside of the newly drawn Israeli territory, and would have to chose between membership in a Palestinian state or relocation to Israel, according to Frankenthal’s plan.

Conversely, not one West Bank Arab village would be included inside the proposed new Israeli border _ although a few hundred scattered homes would fall within the new line.

Frankenthal developed the map in 1995 after six months of consultations with scores of settlers, military people and politicians. During that period, he logged thousands of miles of travel around the West Bank and Gaza, lugging maps on a scale of 1 to 50,000 square meters across most of the hills and valleys that divide Israel and the West Bank.

Not only does the proposed border somehow manage to draw a logical, if highly irregular, border between the now intertwined Israeli and Palestinian areas on the West Bank, but it also creates a”defensible”line, along natural geographical barriers, he says.”This is a plan that is also sensible topographically,”says Frankenthal.”It’s based on the premise that our security shouldn’t be dependent on promises, but on a border with fences and even mines. There is a lot of hate between us and the Palestinians and therefore we must have a complete political separation. From that point, we can try to build a working relationship and neighborly relations.” Frankenthal’s plan has been positively received by a cross section of Israel’s liberal political and security establishment _ largely because it cedes the new Palestinian state most of the West Bank’s territory, while avoiding the politically explosive evacuation of most Jewish settlers.

The basic concept of an Israeli withdrawal from all but seven percent of the West Bank helped form the basis for a set of understandings on a permanent peace accord reached in 1995 between former Labor government minister Yossi Beilin and Arafat adviser Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) _ two key architects of the 1993 Oslo peace accords.”The whole idea of the 1993 Oslo agreement was to create the basis for a partition of the West Bank. Yet the question of how the partition would actually look was something that eluded the negotiators,”observes Jerusalem Post diplomatic correspondent David Makowsky.”So while Oslo created the principle, Yitzhak Frankenthal’s map created the design.” Now, as the government of Benjamin Netanyahu grapples with how to approach negotiations on future Israeli West Bank withdrawals after the deal on Hebron is concluded, there are signs that the ideas sketched by Beilin and Frankenthal are making an impact even in nationalist right-wing circles.”I’m willing … to consider evacuating two or three settlements … in order to guarantee that 80 percent of Jewish (West Bank) residents could remain in their homes, under Israeli sovereignty,”declared Avraham Stern, a leader of the right-wing National Religious Party, referring in general to the partition concept.

Frankenthal has designed a media campaign to take the plan _ and the message of the religious peace movement _ directly to the Israeli public. It is a campaign that he believes could revolutionize conventional thinking about the peace process.

In particular, he wants to harness Judaism’s traditional moral message to the peace train, and debunk what he calls the”paganistic worship”of West Bank land and”holy sites,”which he says has infected Jewish Orthodoxy today.”Jews today regard the campaign to retain control of Hebron, and the Cave of the Patriarchs, as a kind of religious service to God. They are even willing to kill for those symbols,”says Frankenthal. He referred to the attack last Wednesday (Jan. 1) by Noam Friedman in the city’s center, as well as to Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 massacre of Muslim worshipers in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, where tradition holds that the biblical figures Abraham and Sarah are buried.

What Frankenthal calls today’s”caves-and-stones”approach to Judaism has been financed for decades by state-financed religious and educational institutions and bankrolled by wealthy Jews from abroad. What’s needed, he contends, is a well-financed counter attack on the very religious turf where the battle for Israeli hearts and minds is being waged.”Imagine television spots with religious people wearing yarmulkas talking about how the religious commandment to `love your neighbor as yourself’ applies to the Palestinians,”he says.”Imagine 30-second radio spots that said something like: `Hello, I’m Tzion Mrani, an observant Jew. I pray three times a day _ to God, not to rocks, caves or graves.”Hebron wasn’t in our hands for 2,000 years, and even so, it was ours spiritually. To make peace, a Palestinian state has to be established. Only this way will we be able to save lives _ the most important Jewish commandment.'” The scripts, slogans and message are all ready, he says sitting in the tiny basement office of the Oz Ve Shalom peace movement, leafing through a sheaf of papers with messages measured in seconds of air time and sound bites.”What we don’t have is the funding.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

Indeed, until now, Jews from abroad who play such an important role in bankrolling and influencing local political battles, have largely ignored the contribution a religious group could make to Israel’s peace movement.

Dovish-minded American Jews, from millionaire moguls to Hollywood stars, have preferred to throw their support behind larger groups like Peace Now _ even though that organization is perceived by many Israelis as yuppie, elitist and devoid of Jewish cultural identity.

On the other side of the spectrum, wealthy Orthodox Jews in the United States, Australia and Europe, have over the past decade quietly bankrolled massive purchases of West Bank and East Jerusalem land and property, and then put it at the disposal of Jewish settlers.”The Israeli right has recruited tens of millions of dollars among wealthy Jews from abroad,”laments Frankenthal.”If we could recruit less than $10 million we could change the whole way of thinking here.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Whether or not Frankenthal succeeds, a public campaign to put forth Judaism’s”universal”moral message would in itself be revolutionary, says Yaron Ezrachi, a political scientist and author of a soon-to-be published book on Israeli politics and culture,”Rubber Bullets, Power and Conscience in Modern Israel.””Secular people like myself have been waiting for a long time for this,”says Ezrachi.”Israeli Jews like myself have seen the rich layers of meaning and possibilities in the Jewish texts enlisted by the fanatic religious right in a way that are one-dimensional. The wealth of our spiritual culture has been poisoned.”Particularly in the atmosphere of increasing violence by the religious right and their tendency to ostracize anyone who disagrees with them, a campaign such as Frankenthal’s is a remarkable act, which if successful, could be very significant.” A religious peace message, Ezrachi adds, could speak to the tradition-minded poor and middle-class Israelis who were largely responsible for Benjamin Netanyahu’s election. They are people who are not necessarily against a territorial compromise with the Palestinians per se, but they suspect the Israeli secular left because of what it represents.”Peace Now has the image of being anti-religious,”observes Ezrachi.”A group that can bring together a commitment to Judaism and a commitment to peace could reconstitute the constituency of moderate religious Jews …” (BEGIN SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM)

Indeed, Frankenthal has a whole arsenal of initiatives planned to appeal to middle-of-the-road religious Israelis. He talks about sending buses with religious, dovish speakers or left-leaning reserve military officers to speak in poor towns that lose funding for education and social services when West Bank development is bolstered.

He wants to distribute a politically moderate commentary on the weekly Bible portion read in Israel’s 10,000 synagogues every week. Today, such synagogue reading material, distributed free by religious groups, is often stacked with the views of right-wing _ and even xenophobic _ rabbis.

(END SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM)

If Frankenthal is one of the few Israelis to weld religion with political moderation and a sense of how to market the concept to the Israeli public _ then a painful fate has qualified him for the role.

Son of a religious German Jew who escaped Hitler’s Germany in 1936, Frankenthal grew up in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bnai Brak with a concept of Orthodox Judaism that emphasized observance of religious commandments governing behavior toward others above virtually everything else.”There is no mitzvah, or commandment, that an observant Jew must perform that violates the rights of others,”contends the broad-shouldered Frankenthal, whose office is adorned only with maps and a picture of his fallen son.”Even on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a man receives absolution for his sins against God. But for sins against other people, we still have to ask directly,”he says.

In 1983, Frankenthal was introduced to Israel’s large, but largely invisible community of”bereaved”families _ relatives of former soldiers and terror victims _ when he married the widow of a brigadier general who had been killed during the 1982 Lebanon war.

The memory of the man was not buried, and Arik, Frankenthal’s son from his first marriage, aspired to serve in the same army tank battalion as the fallen hero. But in July 1994, while in basic training, Arik was kidnapped and killed by two members of the radical Islamic Hamas organization who were disguised as Orthodox Jews. Arik’s body was found dumped by the side of the road near the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Frankenthal soon formed a group of bereaved families who supported the peace process, combing through years of newspaper clippings to identify and locate victims.”Until then, it was generally believed that terror victims were against the peace process,”said Frankenthal.

In August 1994, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin visited Frankenthal’s house in a farm village near Jerusalem. They spoke for an hour and a half.

It was the beginning of many subsequent meetings. Rabin invited Frankenthal to Oslo, where Rabin shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat.

Frakenthal showed Rabin the map he had developed, shortly before the prime minister was assassinated. Conversely, it was the prime minister’s murder that convinced Frankenthal that he should try to launch a full-scale peace campaign.

Despite the strange intersection of fortune and tragedy that has brought him to his present stance, Frankenthal dismisses out of hand the notion that he has any”mission”or any insights into the divine.”I believe everything is directed by God, and there are no coincidences in the world. But I don’t like missions and messianism,”he says.”When a man thinks that he has a direct connection to God and knows what’s happening behind the screen, he is, in the name of God, willing to carry out the worst crimes, including murder, and to our sorrow that’s what happened in the assassination of Rabin _ and in Hebron. “The same thing will happen again and again until the rabbis who are educating our youth explain to the religious public that Judaism is not opposed to democracy, and serving God is an issue first and foremost of observing commandments, not of preserving sovereignty over one section of land.”

MJP END FLETCHER