April 1990, Page 57

Publisher's Page

The Key to Middle East Peace

There are three constants about Israel: First, it is in a steady state of internal political turmoil and/or paralysis, except when it is actively at war with its neighbors. Second, it always attributes its internal instability and external wars to outside forces. Third, because these problems place an intolerable burden on its economy, it needs ever-increasing foreign aid.

During the turmoil and paralysis following the Israeli coalition government's refusal to implement US peace proposals, Israelis and their American apologists will insist upon three points: The turmoil is America's fault. The paralysis sets back progress toward peace. The burden of resettling Soviet Jews necessitates an increase in US economic assistance. The first two points are false. The third point is true. And therein lies the key to Middle East peace.

Impasse between the administration of George Bush and the government of Yitzhak Shamir was inevitable. The Reagan administration gave up trying to influence the Israelis in 1982, its second year in office. It also gave up on fiscal responsibility. US Middle East policy was to give Israel whatever it wanted, and thereby obtain domestic political backing for the Reagan administration from Israel's supporters in Congress and the media.

The Bush administration, which eventually has to pay the bills for the preceding eight years of fiscal irresponsibility, came into office looking for a way to solve the Middle East problem that has become an unending and unsustainable drain upon US economic, political and military resources. First, Bush rejected the Reagan administration's notion that the Israel-Palestinian problem was "intractable." Then Secretary of State James Baker III insisted Shamir was no longer welcome in the United States until he brought with him a plan to implement UN Security Council 242's formula of land-for-peace.

Shamir came with a plan, but he was never serious about it. His Likud Bloc embraces the Revisionist ideology of Vladimir Jabotinsky, a mystical mixture of racism, religion, and 1930s-style fascism predicated upon a "greater Israel" which, one day, would extend from the Nile to the Euphrates River. For the heir to this grandiose notion to give up the tiny, barren enclave which the US calls the West Bank and Shamir calls Judea and Samaria is politically impossible.

To keep the money coming, however, Shamir played along with Baker, bringing a West Bank and Gaza elections plan borrowed from the Labor Coalition's Yitzhak Rabin. He carefully excluded PLO participation, however, assuming that was something the Palestinians could not accept.

Coached by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and disregarding a cacophony of bad advice from his Tunis and Baghdad-based colleagues, Yasser Arafat also played along with Baker. He had spoken the "magic words" accepting Resolution 242, recognizing Israel, and renouncing terrorism. Now he swallowed humiliation after humiliation, ignored the attacks of Syrian and Libyan-based Palestinian rivals, and roundly denounced the colossally destructive terrorism launched from Iran in the name of Islam.

Baker persisted doggedly. If PLO underlings said no, he ignored them until Arafat said yes. When the Reagan-Shultz holdovers in his own State Department gave him bad advice, he ignored it.

Shamir insisted that Israel would only talk with Palestinians it individually approved. Baker assented, so long as one was from East Jerusalem (where virtually all of the Palestinian leadership resides), another was a deportee, and so long as the people of East Jerusalem participated in the elections resulting from the talks.

Painting Shamir Into a Corner

As the only US President in recent years with personal foreign policy experience and perhaps the smartest US secretary of state in this century together painted them into a corner, Israeli politicians ran through a timeworn bag of tricks, using their domestic disunity to delay the showdown.

Rabin was single-mindedly seeking to retrieve Labor Coalition leadership from Shimon Peres. Ariel Sharon, David Levy and Yitzhak Modai hoped to seize Likud leadership from Shamir. Nor were Rabin and Shamir loathe to reach across the aisle to cooperate with each other to keep rivals within their respective parties off balance. Meanwhile, on a moment's notice, all could move into a good cop (Labor) bad cop (Likud) routine when it came to shaking the US money tree.

Thus the off-again on-again threats to bring down the Coalition government, or give it one more chance, or give the US one more chance to give up.

When, in late 1989, the US, with strong Israel lobby backing at home, set an annual ceiling of 40,000 Jewish immigrants to the US from the Soviet Union, diverting the flow of Soviet Jewry into Israel, Shamir thought he saw his opening. It would take a "big Israel" to absorb them, he slyly noted in a Jan. 14 speech. King Hussein of Jordan called Bush, a personal friend, and said this reiteration of Shamir's dedication to "greater Israel" could destabilize the entire Middle East. Bush and Baker began talking about measures to keep US aid to Israel from being used to settle Soviet Jewish immigrants into areas from which Israel must withdraw under Resolution 242.

Shamir got on the phone February 22 to tell the President that only between "one half and one percent" of the Soviet immigrants from 1989 had settled in the West Bank and Gaza. Bush's staff pointed out that if immigrants being settled into East Jerusalem, also seized from the Arabs in 1967, are included, the figure rises to 10 percent. And Israel had in place public housing plans that would put tens of thousands of Soviet Jews into Jerusalem in the next two or three years, and tax credits and mortgage subsidies that could have the same result in West Bank Jewish settlements.

On March 1, Baker told Congress that the Bush Administration would support an Israeli request for a $400 million housing loan guarantee to settle new Soviet immigrants, provided that Israel stopped expanding settlements. This was a significant departure from the previous condition that aid to Israel should not be spent "beyond the green line" in occupied Arab territory. That meaningless condition permitted Israel, while spending US economic aid in Israel, to free other funds for the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.

"Money is Fungible"

"Money, after all, is fungible," Baker said. "So when you provide housing subsidies, you have no assurance whatsoever that the housing guarantees provided will not supplant other money that is then used to support settlements in the occupied territories."

Two days later, in a press conference in Palm Springs, Bush declared: "My position is that the foreign policy of the United States says we do not believe that there should be new settlements in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem." Pressed by reporters, he insisted: "This is the position of the United States and I'm not going to change that position."

Shamir fired back: "There are no settlements in Jerusalem. It is part of Israel and will never be divided again ... Our policy is to bring as many Soviet Jewish immigrants to Jerusalem as soon as possible."

He also rolled up Israel's heaviest artillery, the American Jewish lobby. Chairman Seymour Reich of the Council of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations telephoned Bush from Israel, talked to him for 40 minutes, and then announced that Bush thought his remarks "may have been unfortunate" in casting doubt on Israel's assumption that its "annexation" of Jerusalem had removed that city from the negotiating table.

The administration responded immediately that Bush had "reiterated long-standing US policy that all parties avoid unilateral actions, including settlement activity." The US policy is that Jerusalem should not again be divided, but the city's final status remains to be determined in the peace settlement.

Bush made it clear that what he said in Palm Springs stands, and neither the US media nor Israeli defiance could budge him.

So it was the Israeli government that crumbled instead. Characteristically, Israel's apologists are faulting the Bush administration, rather than Israeli politicians who, instead of offering concessions for peace, depend upon an aggressive and lavishly funded US lobby to intimidate US presidents and corrupt US legislators.

The cards, however, are in American hands. Israel's inefficient economy can't absorb the involuntary Soviet immigrants without US assistance. It will lose most of them to western countries of it doesn't provide them with housing and jobs.

If the US withholds action on additional aid or loan guarantees to Israel until it receives ironclad assurances that the Israeli government will spend nothing more on Jewish settlements in occupied territories, expansion of the settlements will stop. And, if it cannot expand the settlements, there is no point in Israel expending the enormous resources required for the military occupation of those territories, which have been in open revolt for two and a half years.

Will the US Hold Firm?

In the past the Israel lobby has been able to muster strong congressional opposition to administration "reassessments" of US aid to Israel. Both the Ford and Carter administrations tried it, and both gave up.

Now, however, the President and his Secretary of State work closely together. Despite a media campaign orchestrated by the Israel lobby and aimed first at Governor John Sununu, Bush's Arab-American chief of staff, and now at Bush and Baker as well, Bush enjoys broad public support.

Baker, in managing successful presidential campaigns for both Bush and Reagan, has demonstrated sure political instincts. Neither he nor Bush wandered unknowingly into the present administration confrontation with Israel. Nor is it likely they would start a fight they didn't intend to finish.

Their congressional ally is Senator Robert Dole. There also are other members of Congress fed up with Israel lobby blackmail. Behind these indications of an ebbing of the pro-Israel tide in Congress is a sea change in American public opinion.

A New Public Opinion Climate

The signs have been visible for a decade. The higher the educational, professional or income levels of Americans, the more skeptical they are about Israel. Now the normal "trickle down" of these "elite" attitudes is being accelerated by the Palestinian intifada.

The new public opinion climate is as perceptible as the first warm winds of spring. History demonstrates that if a president holds fast on a major foreign policy issue, the American people will support him. So, albeit slowly and cautiously, will Congress. When that happens, if the Palestinians don't renege on Arafat's concessions, Israel will, in the words of Resolution 242, "withdraw from territories seized in the recent (1967) conflict." And the Arab states, in turn, will acknowledge Israel's "right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries, free from threats or acts of force."

US support for an undivided Jerusalem never implied exclusive Israeli control of a city sacred to a billion Christians, nearly a billion Muslims, and 16 million Jews. The original UN partition plan envisaged an international authority to ensure the rights of all of Jerusalem's Muslim, Christian and Jewish inhabitants.

The reasoning then, as now, was simple. In a city of supreme importance to the world wide adherents of all three monotheistic faiths, no other solution is acceptable. There is nothing in this to prevent an undivided Jerusalem from serving as the capital of Israel, or a Palestinian state, or both, and its bi-national municipal government from serving as guarantor of access to all of the Holy places within its boundaries.

Those who say the showdown over Jerusalem will postpone peace are the same interested parties who say that external pressure on Israel only makes its leaders more intransigent. History proves otherwise. If the Likud-Labor coalition is replaced by another inflexible government, the US must hold to its insistence on no new aid until Israel stops colonizing the occupied territories. An inflexible Israeli government will fall, because Israel must have the aid. It may take only one Israeli election. It may take more. With each, however, peace will draw nearer. When Israeli voters conclude they cannot keep both Arab territory and American aid, they will give up the territory. And there will be peace.

AET: Still Hanging In There

There's no space to describe our emotions at the outpouring of support that pulled AET back from the brink in the first quarter of 1990. Names of early voices in the 1990 AET angels' choir are in this issue. But there was a flood of smaller donations as well from self-described "whistlers,'' "throat clearers" and other good Samaritans. Thanks, everyone, we really needed that.

Stealth PACs Donations

Another way to help is by donating copies of AET's new book, Stealth PACs. Americans who read this book will never be the same—and neither will Congress. Stealth PACs lists what every candidate for Congress has received from more than 100 deceptively named pro-Israel PACs over the past 14 years, and why. It costs $7.95 plus $2 postage for one, or $9.95 plus $2.50 postage for two. For larger shipments, figure the cost at $9.95 per pair and 50 cents postage for each copy after the first. They come from the printer in boxes of 52. AET has a challenge grant which enables it to mail the book to media addresses only for a donation of $2.50 per address, with no additional charge for postage. If we send books to the donor's address, however, we must charge the full rate.

Washington Report Donations

A tried, true and popular way to support AET is through donations at $5 each of Washington Report subscriptions to opinion molders. These are libraries, clergy, media, members of Congress and their staffs, educators and elected officials. At the end of 12 months, AET contacts recipients about renewing on their own. Particularly in the case of libraries, a very high percentage do so.

Make a Difference This Month

Appropriate actions this month would be letters to the president and secretary of state asking them to freeze aid to Israel until the Israeli government pledges not to support Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and to stop violating Palestinian human rights. The same letter would be appropriate for your representative in Congress. Before writing the same letter to your two senators, however, check the list on Page 53 of this issue listing 27 senators who had the courage not to sign a letter asking the President not to cut aid to Israel. If you're pleased that they didn't sign the letter, tell them so. If they signed the letter, tell them how that affects your voting plans. You can...

Make a Difference, This Month.