One of Richard Holbrooke’s most significant intellectual contributions to American diplomacy was an address he gave on June 4, 2007, entitled “The Principles of Peacemaking,” at a conference on “Israel’s Right to Secure Borders” held by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
He noted that “every word of [Resolution 242] is significant” and that:
Likewise, an analysis of the original meaning of the resolution, as opposed to its inadvertent or intentional misconstructions by certain people, is essential...the misconception that the resolution calls for full withdrawal from all territories...Holbrooke contrasted it with the Saudi/Arab “peace initiative,” which had a fundamental flaw:
[T]he Saudi peace proposal … often referred to as a conciliatory proposal by the Saudis, mentions Resolution 242, mistakenly claiming that it calls for withdrawal from all occupied territories — it uses the phrase “full withdrawal from all Arab territories.” More importantly, it sets up a sequence that is in direct contradiction to Resolution 242, demanding Israeli compliance with all demands before offering Israel anything, including normal relations… Holbrooke recalled Secretary of State Shultz’s 1988 statement that “Israel will never negotiate from, or return to, the lines of partition or to the 1967 borders,” Secretary of State Christopher’s 1997 letter endorsing Israel’s right to “defensible borders,” the April 2004 Bush letter that repeated that commitment, and the unanimous congressional endorsement of the Bush letter. He concluded that the basis for a lasting peace was a correct interpretation of Resolution 242.
...[but] Hillary Clinton...in her December 10 speech at the Saban Center, there was no reference to Resolution 242 — or “defensible borders,” or the Christopher or Bush letters, or even the Roadmap (which sets forth Resolution 242 as the basis for Phase III final-status negotiations). Instead, Clinton praised the “vision” of the Arab Peace Initiative, which she called a “landmark proposal” containing a “basic bargain”: peace between Israel and her neighbors “will bring recognition and normalization from all the Arab states.”
By the way,
Holbrooke's parents were assimilated Jews who considered themselves atheists. His father, Dan, was born in Warsaw of Russian-Jewish parents and in the 1930s came to the U.S. His mother was a German refugee who lived in Argentina before moving to the U.S.And this:
Holbrooke's own interest in Judaism was spawned when his third wife, author and journalist Kati Marton discovered that her parents were Hungarian Jews who had hidden their identity. Marton was raised a Roman Catholic.
Holbrooke's mother, whose Jewish family fled Hamburg in 1933 for Buenos Aires before coming to New York, took him to Quaker meetings on Sundays. "I was an atheist, his father was an atheist," says his mother, a potter now married to a sculptor. "We never thought of giving Richard a Jewish upbringing. The Quaker meetings seemed interesting."
Holbrooke's father, a brilliant doctor born of Russian Jewish parents in Warsaw, died of cancer. There is a faded black-and-white photograph of the gangly teen-ager holding his father's hand in the Scarsdale woods that seems to capture a closeness abruptly shattered. His father changed his name to Holbrooke when he arrived in the United States in the 1930's. Such, however, is the family's loss of contact with its roots that his original name is unknown.
"He was my father," Holbrooke says, when asked how the abrupt death affected him. "He was my father. What can I say? I leave the psychoanalysis to others."
His marriage to Marton, however, has led him to look more closely at his past. She was born into a family of Hungarian Jews but raised to believe she was a Roman Catholic. Only in researching a book did she learn that one of her maternal grandparents had died in Auschwitz. This shared experience is clearly important to them. She and Holbrooke are not religious, but there appears to be some nascent sense of Jewish identity, or at least sensibility, that binds them. They visited Budapest's main synagogue together. She talks of "just melting into each other as we watched 'Schindler's List.' "
Fritz Stern, a professor of history at Columbia University, is an old friend of Holbrooke's. "I think you have to see there was a deliberate mystification of the child," he says. "He grew up believing one thing -- he was another. And now, at times he has this endearing and infuriating childishness. It's interesting."
His mother, Trudy Kearl, says: "I never imagined that Dick might think about his roots. Oh, my God, I never thought of that. I do not believe in the roots business. But perhaps, he is on a sentimental journey. And why not?"
Holbrooke notes that his maternal grandfather, Samuel Moos, a German Jew, fought for the Germans during World War I. When, in 1993, Holbrooke became Ambassador to Germany after failing to get the job he wanted as Deputy Secretary of State, he placed a photograph in his Bonn office of his grandfather wearing the Prussian spiked helmet and an Iron Cross.
"People would ask me, why that picture?" Holbrooke says, his blue eyes twinkling with apparent amusement behind his Calvin Klein glasses. "I would say, it is simply a historical truth. My grandfather fought for the Kaiser against the Western Allies and later fled Germany. It is an event so complex you could weave a novel around it. If I was a novelist, which I would have loved to be, I would make that photograph a centerpiece. I used to tell the Germans, 'If it had not been for your history, perhaps I would be Germany's Ambassador to the United States today.' "
But Holbrooke is not the German envoy to Washington or a novelist. He is a Jew intrigued by the incongruity of his grandfather's wearing the military uniform of the state that would herd Jews into gas chambers. He says he knew exactly who he was. "I never made any bones about it. I knew what my background was. Those who thought I was not Jewish enough were having their own problems."
There were such people. Perhaps the issue was not really Holbrooke's Jewishness. It was his apparent willingness, at times, to bend the truth to suit his purposes and rush forward headlong with an unexamined life. Thus, the now-notorious 50th birthday party at the "21" Club in Manhattan, where the names Holbrooke constantly dropped all showed up to roast him. "The story that Holbrooke is only half Jewish," Gelb said at the party, "is only half true." Such gibes were all well meant. They also cut close to the bone.
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