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with Jordan, the agreement of Saudia to allow small groups of pilgrims
to Mecca." That most Arabs are Moslem (about ten percent of Israel's
minorities are Christian Arabs), that the Druze have their own religion,
that the former don't serve in the army while the latter do, makes for
yet more intersecting conflicts. Although Arabic is the second official
language, Hebrew dominates; although Israeli law recognizes separate
religious jurisdictions, restrictions internal to the major and minor
denominations of Arabs, Christians, and Jews tend to subvert these laws
as well as the workability of the multiparty system. And the cross-cutting
of personal and cultural values, of political interests, and of contradictory
interpretations of history, has engendered stereotyping. Each group al–
ways can find yet another antecedent or "right" to prove its own claims
- the wars of 1973, 1967, 1948, the Balfour Declaration, the Turkish
rule, and, as a last resort, the Bible.
On the second morning we went to observe integration in action, at
an "absorption center" in Ramot - an Israeli community of around forry
thousand people that has taken in about five thousand Russian im–
migrants. We sat in on Hebrew classes taught by volunteers to people
whose ages ranged from twenty to seventy. And because we knew that
the Russians' collective votes might determine the direction of the next
Israeli government, we wanted to know what party they were going to
support. With humor and a great deal of zeal, four Russian women and
three men, one of whom was a political candidate for the Knesset, de–
fended support of the Likud, the Labor Party, and one or another of the
new parties founded by their brethren. Others contended that, as new–
comers, they ought to learn about democracy before voting at all. What
could be more democratic than this discussion, we came away marvelling,
and what a fantastic effort on the part of the Israelis who are
"absorbing" highly trained individuals into menial occupations - "for the
time being," as some of them asserted.
The ethno-political dilemmas are different in Russia, Galina
Starovoitova, Boris Yeltsin's advisor on ethnic relations, reported. She
relied heavily on Russian history as she informed us, for instance, that
"with the breakup of the empire" there are twelve million Russians in
Ukraine, five million Ukrainians in Russia; that
homo sovietieus
is not an
invention of the Western media but a reality; that Russia has eighty-eight
districts including thirty-one republics whose citizens have innumerable
and different statuses; that some people are without statehood; and that,
therefore, it was a miracle to have signed a federal treaty at all. History is
present, Starovoitova stated emphatically. And just as emphatically, she
asserted that minority rights will be respected and, therefore , at least two
thirds of the Russian people will have to decide on these rights by refer–
endum. Taking off her official hat, however, she wondered who will
