Dore Gold, a Visionary Israeli Diplomat Ahead of His Time, Is Dead at 71

News of the death today of Israel’s former envoy at the United Nations, Dore Gold, 71, marks the passing of one of the most remarkable representatives of the Jewish state. When I first met Gold it was the summer of 1993. I was in Israel on an Anti-Defamation League-sponsored trip for college newspaper editors.One of the first meetings our group had after our arrival was in our hotel conference room with Gold, who at the time held no government office. He came prepared with maps — contour maps showing elevations — to illuminate the dangers for Israel of withdrawing from Judea and Samaria. In a war, Iraqi tanks could rapidly roll through Jordan into those high areas of the West Bank, control Ben Gurion Airport, and cut Israel’s narrow waist in half.A few months later, Prime Minister Rabin and PLO chairman, Yasser Arafat, shook hands at the White House as part of the Oslo peace process in which Israel gradually ceded some authority in the West Bank and Gaza to Palestinian control. At the time, it appeared to be a decisive defeat for Gold and his allies on the Israeli right, who were skeptical of the security risks of such an agreement. Yet events of the subsequent three decades demonstrated Gold to have had the clearer view of the situation.The Israeli public, which narrowly supported Rabin in the mid-1990s, has since shifted to a stance closer to that of Gold — skeptical of Palestinian statehood, insistent that Israel have defensible borders.When, between 1997 and 1999, Gold was Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, I was managing editor of the Forward. At least one Sunday morning, I visited Gold at his ambassadorial apartment just off Fifth Avenue with a notebook and a tape recorder to capture for the readers of the Forward the points he wanted to convey. He did that, with impressive clarity and directness, while we both took occasional sips from cups and saucers that were part of a set of china decorated with Israel’s state emblem, a menorah surrounded by olive branches.Gold took the diplomatic assignment seriously enough that when we went over the transcript of our tape-recorded interview, he pressed to include every last point he considered important. The substance from Gold stayed remarkably consistent over the years, regardless of whether the prime minister he was serving was Ariel Sharon or Benjamin Netanyahu. The August 2, 2005, New York Sun reported, under the headline, “Former Ambassador Warns of Pressure On Israeli Borders,” that “Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Dore Gold, is launching a campaign to stress Israel’s need for ‘defensible borders’ as part of any settlement with the Palestinian Arabs. Mr. Gold pressed his case in recent days in appearances on American television and in meetings with Bush administration officials and members of Congress.”That campaign was undertaken not by the government of Israel but by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a research institute headed by Mr. Gold. “Mr. Gold,” the dispatch said, “is warning that pressure is already building on Israel to withdraw to a 1949 armistice line that Israeli diplomat Abba Eban dubbed ‘Auschwitz borders.’” It said Gold’s report “calls for Israeli control of the border of the West Bank along the Jordan Valley. It also calls for shifting Israel’s boundary eastward ‘so that militarily vital territory does not end up under Palestinian control.’ And it calls for ‘broadening the narrow corridor connecting Jerusalem with Tel Aviv’ and for establishing a ‘defensive perimeter’ around Jerusalem.”“In a visit to The New York Sun over the weekend,” the dispatch noted, “Mr. Gold pointed to maps showing how Israeli population centers and Ben-Gurion International Airport would be vulnerable to conventional or terrorist attack if Israel returned to the 1949 borders.” Gold stressed that, rather than being at odds with Rabin’s vision, his approach was consistent with it.“Is this the Dore Gold plan? No, it’s the Yitzhak Rabin plan,” Gold said. The report, “Defensible Borders for a Lasting Peace,” has a picture of Rabin on the back cover along with a quote from Rabin’s last address to the Israeli parliament. Rabin said, “The border of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six-Day War.” Rabin also said that Israel must retain “a united Jerusalem” and that “the security border of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.”In a 2014 interview with Mosaic, Gold traced the roots of the concept to Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon: “As commander of the pre-state Palmah, Allon was one of the architects of Israel’s national-security doctrine, and had also been a mentor of Yitzhak Rabin. His essential point was, and is, simple enough: Israel must retain certain territories on the West Bank for its security.”I last saw Gold, who grew up in Hartford, Connecticut and educated at Columbia and Northfield Mount Hermon, in 2017 during a visit to Jerusalem. His high-ceilinged office at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs was in a beautiful landmark house now known as Beit Milken. Prominent on the wall was a photograph not of any Israeli politician or Zionist historical figure but of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian leader whose visit to Israel in 1977 led to the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. It’s a reminder that for all the attention to Israel’s internal politics, it takes two sides to make peace. Until then and even afterward, Israel’s security — and America’s, too — will require public servants with Gold’s energy, communications skill, and analytic power.

Dore Gold, a Visionary Israeli Diplomat Ahead of His Time, Is Dead at 71

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