Re-elected Vargas will push fight against BDS

 

By Donald H. Harrison

CHULA VISTA, California – With a twinkle in his eye, Congressman Juan Vargas (D-California) says he has absolutely no objection if Israel is made to return to its 67 borders.  Just so long as the people demanding it are talking about the year 67, not the year 1967, he explained.  Israel is one of the few countries in the world that can claim both dates as belonging to its history, he added.

“If you want to go back to 67, that will probably take in Lebanon, parts of Syria, Jordan, and some portions of Egypt,” he said.  “I don’t think Israel wants to do that, and its neighbors wouldn’t either.”

Interviewed Thursday at his district office, the Democratic congressman said it makes him angry when people try to delegitimize Israel.  “It is one of the oldest countries in the world,” he said.  “All these lies cannot undo that, and BDS cannot do that.  The Jewish people have been there before 67, even before 67 BC (E).”

The congressman is co-author of legislation still pending before the House Rules Committee that “basically says if you are going to boycott, sanction or divest from Israel then you should have no business with the United States.  We shouldn’t deal with you.  You are boycotting, divesting and sanctioning an ally who is not at fault in any way there, and we shouldn’t have any business with you.”

He said the bill has been opposed by people who say that it would interfere with freedom of speech.  To the contrary, he said, people have the freedom to talk all they want; but once they put those words into action and boycott, divest or sanction Israel, such a law should take effect.  “I think that passes the constitutional test,” Vargas said.

Vargas co-authored the anti-BDS legislation with Republican Congressman Peter Roskam of Illinois, who lost his seat in Tuesday’s election to Democrat Sean Casten.  Because he and Roskam were friends, who worked together on various pro-Israel pieces of legislation, Roskam’s defeat took away a piece of the joy Vargas felt when his fellow Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives.  In his own race, Vargas received over 68 percent of the vote against his Republican challenger Juan Hidalgo Jr., to win a fourth two-year term.

When members of the current Congress return to Washington, Vargas said, the time might be right to push through the anti-BDS legislation.  If it can’t be done until the next session, then Vargas said he will try to find another principal co-author from the Republican ranks.  He said he believes Israel must remain a bipartisan concern of Congress, and inveighs against members of either party trying to make Israel a campaign issue.

“It cannot become a partisan issue,” he said.  “If it becomes a partisan issue that is a great danger to Israel.”  Primarily due to the influence of the Christian Right, Republicans have embraced the cause of Israel, “and I think that is great, and that is where we Democrats are.”   However, he noted, “now you have push-back from some liberal Democrats who are trying to make Israel the bad guy in the Middle East, which it is not, because it is the hero.  We have to fight very hard to make sure that some of those who are coming into Congress, and who are very anti-Israel, do not become the loudest voices on the issues.  Ours should be.  Let’s look at the facts.  Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East that believes in all the rights that we believe in.”

Elaborating, he told of debates he has had on college campuses with liberal students.  “We will hold hands and sing ‘amen’ to so many things like gay rights, of which I am 100 percent in favor, and women’s rights, the environment, and all these issues,” Vargas said. “And then we get to Israel and a lot of these kids say horrific things.  I say, ‘you know, it’s amazing to me that the conversation we just had about the issue of equality, where you can marry whomever you want, whether you are gay, lesbian, transgender—we could have the same conversation in Israel and no one would blink an eye.  You could go to Tel Aviv and see one of the biggest gay parades in the world.  If you did that anywhere else in the Middle East, they would kill you, they’d cut your tongue out, or your hand off, or put you in jail.  They would do all sorts of horrible things to you, and yet Israel is the nation you want to go after?  It is incomprehensible to me!”

He added: “I remember the first time I met with Shimon Peres in 1995; he said something that stuck with me.”  When asked about women’s rights, Peres responded, “A country that doesn’t give women full and complete rights is half a nation.”

I asked Vargas how he became so enamored with Israel.  He responded that much of it has to do with his own family history.  “My father, Tomas, came to San Diego in the late 1940s as an immigrant farm worker.  He was working as a bracero —  a temporary worker.  But if you got sponsored you could stay and he got sponsored by a man named Robert Mann,” who was Jewish and wanted to help immigrants settle in this country.  “So, he became my father’s sponsor.  Robert Mann was a great guy; he owned yachts and raced them … Tomas Vargas and Robert Mann were great friends.  He became almost a grandfather to us and we loved him.  He told us all about Israel.”

Juan Vargas grew up as an observant Catholic. “Every Sunday I go to mass, and I studied to be a priest,” Vargas said.  The first reading in Catholic masses typically is from Hebrew Scriptures, known to Catholics as the Old Testament, and “maybe 50 percent of the time that reading is about Jerusalem,” said Vargas.  “So, I grew up knowing a lot about Israel and Jerusalem in particular because I was a church goer.  And then I joined the Jesuits and learned a heck of a lot more about Israel and the history of Judaism and Catholicism.  My interest and love grew deeper and deeper.  When I got involved in a lot of charitable actions, that’s when I met more people who were Jewish.  It just seems that when you are working on charities, you bump into people who are Jewish. They are always trying to fix the world and so they are involved in this.”

One Jewish friend he made was a fellow named Norm Eisen—not the same one who became President Obama’s ethics adviser.  This other Eisen came from a wealthy family and worked in the Bronx to help people in a neighborhood that was mostly African American and Latino.  In his spare time, Eisen was an art collector, who delighted in purchasing art that people who moved away from the neighborhood had sold to junk stores.  Knowledgeable collectors knew that some of the art was quite valuable, but the store owners priced such pieces no higher than, say, a Farah Fawcett poster.

“He bought for me this magnificent copper etching of a rabbi holding a Torah, and he said, ‘Juan, why don’t you take this into the seminary and put it up on the wall and see what people think?’  I said ‘that is a good idea’ and so I did.  Mother Mary was up on the wall there, and I took Mother Mary [to another room] and I put up the rabbi with the Torah to see what people would say.  My rector saw it, and he was a great guy …. He said, ‘That’s great; we want to be more ecumenical.’ … It belonged to me so when I left the Jesuits [having decided to marry Adrienne], I kept it, and when you walk into my house today, it is right there.”

Eisen’s family told Vargas of their many relatives who had been murdered in the Holocaust.  “It was very emotional to listen to those stories,” Vargas said.  “I couldn’t help but wonder if that had happened to Mr. Mann’s family.  I thought if ever I have a chance, I certainly would like to do something positive for Israel to make sure this doesn’t happen again, that we have a more humane world, and that the Jews are able to defend themselves.”

Eventually, Vargas’s life took him into politics.  He served on the San Diego City Council, and when Bob Filner gave up his congressional seat to run for mayor of San Diego (a position Filner won, then later resigned in a sexabuse scandal), Vargas ran successfully for Filner’s old congressional seat.

“I believe in a very strong Israel,” Vargas said. “Israel needs to be able to defend itself.  Israel is strong; it is not a weak country.  They fight hard to maintain their freedom and their ability to survive in a very hostile area, but there are some bigger threats for which they need  the United States to stand with them.  Frankly, they are the only true friend that we have in that area.”

Vargas said that he was the first Democrat to oppose the nuclear agreement with Iran that was fashioned by the Obama administration.  He said he received a lot of criticism from his Democratic colleagues for that stand, but still believes opposition was the correct path.

“A good deal in my opinion would have been to tighten down the sanctions on Iran until they had to make a choice, a fundamental choice, whether to have an economy that functions, or to have a nuclear program.  They couldn’t have both.  That was the fundamental choice we should have pushed Iran into.  But we didn’t do that, instead Iran got the best of us. We said we would lift all the sanctions having to do with nuclear power–not with all the other terrible things Iran was doing — and at the same time we allowed them to keep testing and experimenting with centrifuges to make them better and faster, to be able to enrich uranium better.  We allowed them to keep their heavy water reactor, which they changed a little bit, but they can change it back.  We allowed them to keep everything they had there; they didn’t destroy one centrifuge.  They were all warehoused.”

So, said Vargas, “Iran has the technology, they know how to build nuclear bombs. They don’t know how to miniaturize them yet; they’re trying now to learn how to put them on a warhead.  The Iran deal allow them to prevent inspectors from coming to facilities for 30 days and potentially longer than that.  To be frank, that is very problematic when you are dealing with issues of metallurgy and miniaturization of these weapons. … People think we can go in 30 days later and still have a radioactive signature.  That is true if you are dealing with radioactive material, but these other things, which are also very important, don’t leave a radioactive signature. So we could examine all we want but not find anything except a clean warehouse.

“Ultimately,” Vargas continued, “you had to take on faith that Iran was going down the path of peace and wasn’t going to develop a nuclear weapon.  I had no faith in that at all.  My opinion was that you had to take away the ability for them to make the bomb, which this deal did not do.  That is why I was against it.”

He said that President Trump “unfortunately does not have the world behind him to push the sanctions as we should. That is why it was so tragic that Obama didn’t do it, because he really had the world behind him to force the Iranians to get rid of that program.  It’s ridiculous for Iran to say that it needs nuclear energy.  Really, with all that oil, you don’t need nuclear energy, and you have all that sun for solar.  They are doing it for one purpose; they want the bomb, and we have to prevent it.”

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com