March 1990, Page 57

Publishers' Page

Peace and Palestine: Inching Inexorably Forward

"In the minds of top Bush administration officials, a Palestinian state is no longer a question of 'if,' but 'when.’"

—Columnists Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, Washington Post Feb. 11, 1990

Two events were expected on the day the quotation above appeared in US newspapers. One was a meeting between Secretary of State James Baker III and foreign ministers of Egypt and Israel to discuss direct Israeli-Palestinian talks. The other was a terrorist strike against Americans in Western Europe in commemoration of the 11th anniversary of the late Ayatollah Khomeini's regime in Tehran.

Since neither occurred on schedule, it was a retreat and an advance for Middle East peace. The foreign ministers didn't meet because nine Israeli tourists in Egypt were killed in an earlier terrorist attack, probably carried out by Iranian-funded Palestinian terrorists of Ahmad Jibril's Damascus-based PFLP-GC. It provided a reason to postpone the showdown meeting between Israel's intransigent Yitzhak Shamir and the even more intransigent members of his Likud Bloc, which, when held Feb. 12, led to Ariel Sharon's resignation.

The terrorist act played into the hands of Israeli extremists, who, sooner or later, will bring down the Israeli government before they will let it talk to any Palestinians about land for peace. Unfortunately there probably will be other delaying terrorist strikes. The Israeli and Iranian extremists, consciously or unconsciously, support each other by creating delays.

Khomeini's successors need unending warfare and external threats to justify continuation of the tyranny they have imposed upon their countrymen. Shamir and his Likud ally, Moshe Arens, and rivals, Ariel Sharon, David Levy and Yitzhak Modai, need unending warfare and external threats to justify keeping Israel heavily militarized and to use its military to "cleanse" the occupied territories and Israel proper of their original Palestinian inhabitants.

Vivid examples of how the Israelis would work are provided by Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. No sooner did he hear of the bus attack than he falsely blamed it on Yasser Arafat's PLO. Netanyahu also has criticized the Israel coalition government for not seizing the opportunity, when world attention was fixed on Beijing's Tianamen Square, to expel thousands of Palestinians from the Israeli-occupied West Bank into Jordan.

Whatever the setbacks, however, the world is in a political warming cycle. Tyranny in the name of socialism has collapsed in Eastern Europe. Can Israeli and Iranian tyranny in the name of religion continue?

White apartheid in South Africa is crumbling. Can "Jewish" apartheid in Israel survive? Third World nations are scrambling to ground their regimes on some sort of legitimacy, based upon traditional institutions and on popular participation rather than the whim of the leader who has the tanks and aircraft. Can Israel, whose hodgepodge of religious and political compromises has set secular and religious Jews at each other's throats, and turned every Muslim and Christian hand against the entire Jewish ruling class, survive as, literally, a colonial-settler regime in a politically evolving Third World?

Other Pluses and Minuses

Look at other pluses and minuses. Israeli extremists have based their appeal to the electorate on the Israeli perception that, no matter how extreme their country's policies, American Jewry will secure US taxpayer funding to implement them.

The next program to be funded is housing for an expected influx of Soviet Jews. Israel's press is filled with reports of rampant Soviet anti-Semitism and imminent "pogroms" in Moscow and Leningrad, reminiscent of the tactics used in the past to panic major Jewish immigration into Israel from Yemen, Morocco and Iraq.

But, as Soviet Jews pour in, only because no more than 40,000 per year can go to the United States, Israeli Jews continue to pour out. The New York Times reported on that same Feb. 11 that 12,923 Soviet Jews entered Israel in 1989, but that the Israeli government's own figures reveal that 15,000 Israeli Jews emigrated. Correspondent Joel Brinkley estimates that "many thousands" of additional Jews also left Israel on tourist visas, but will never return.

No matter how Israel's immigration figures increase, they are offset by its Jewish emigration, which is known to total well over 600,000 to date, leaving a Jewish population in Israel of no more than 3,500,000. Unless extraordinarily attractive facilities are prepared for the new Soviet immigrants, most of them will be among the Israeli emigrants of next year, or the year after.

And how would such facilities be funded? The only recourse is the American taxpayer.

Yet Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole has just proposed a five percent cut in Israel's $3 billion in annual economic and military aid, already 25 percent of America's worldwide total. Dole probably was told he was taking a big political risk in making such a proposal. Instead, he says the response from the public, and from his congressional colleagues, was 95 percent supportive.

Was there fierce opposition from the other side of the Senate aisle? Not exactly.

"No foreign country has earned the right to our money or resources," Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd (D-WV) told the Wall Street Journal. "And no foreign country can assume it has an American entitlement program.

"Some countries, certainly the largest of our historic aid recipients, can probably take cuts substantially larger than five percent," Byrd added. "Somewhere between 10 and 20 percent would be more realistic. I'm not singling out any nation. I'm saying no one, including Israel, is exempt."

One senator willing to try to exempt Israel is Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI). According to syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak (see page 34 in this issue), Inouye is going to try to sneak between $500 million and $1 billion through Congress in addition to the $3 billion in annual direct visible aid to Israel. Inouye has done it before. Bills he has pushed through previously save Israel (and cost the US) more every year than all of the direct giving to Israel by American Jews.

If Inouye succeeds, it will convince Israeli voters to stick with extremist leaders who can get all the funding they need through Congress. If, on the other hand, Congress should ban further aid to Israel if it continues West Bank Jewish settlements, peace will follow as inevitably as spring follows winter. If Israel can't get the funds to colonize the West Bank, there is no point continuing the struggle to hold it.

All that is obstructing the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations desired by the Bush administration is Shamir's insistence that Israel approve Palestinian interlocutors who are not PLO. The demand is absurd on its face, since if the PLO is the government of Palestine, only the PLO can enforce whatever agreement is reached.

However, it is an article of faith in Israel that, whether the American public likes Israel or not, the Israel lobby will ensure that the American taxpayer supports Israel.

A poll commissioned by the Israel-Diaspora Institute of Tel Aviv, and conducted by Steven M. Cohen of the City University of New York, however, revealed in February that 74 percent of officials of major Jewish religious and philanthropic agencies throughout the US approve of private discussions envelopes or let them use our pages to solicit between Israel and PLO officials who are funds for their own projects if we're in such considered "moderates," and 59 percent agree that Israel should "offer the Palestinians the prospect of a demilitarized state in 15 years."

So much for Likud plans to colonize the West Bank. It's a warming trend for Palestinians and peace.

So Much For Peace-Now Survival

A discussion of prospects for peace is a good prelude to a discussion of prospects for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. We sent out distress signals at the end of 1989. The response from readers was generous and heartening and we didn't go under, but we're still barely hanging on.

Readers pointed out that our circulation is growing, they read quotations attributed to us in the national press, hear our opinions and statistics quoted on national television, and see our periodicals and books in public libraries. Why, then, did we go broke?

We were asked even more searching questions about AET's sharing of its facilities to provide a jump start to such new groups as the Council for the National Interest, the Jewish Committee on Middle East Peace, and, as described in this issue, Act on Conscience for Israel/Palestine. Why do we send out their fundraising material in our desperate need ourselves?

Fair questions and, in retrospect, we probably made serious errors. But we believe there can be a Middle East peace in the first Bush term, and that Congress is the key. These new named groups are directing their efforts at the choke point—aid to Israel. If strings are put on it, Israel will come to its senses. If there are no strings, there will be no peace and momentum will resume toward war.

We can provide facts but we can't lobby Congress directly. Those groups can. We think we would not be keeping faith with our own purposes if we didn't help them start. However, our mailing lists never left our own hands. And by the end of this month there will be no overlaps between the AET executive board and any other group. They deserve your help. So do we. We're determined, with every bit of help our supporters can spare, to hang on ourselves through this election year. After that, who knows? If there's peace in the Middle East, who cares?

Stealth PAC Challenge

Yet another reason we're broke is our book, Stealth PACs: How Israel's American Lobby Took Control of US Foreign Policy. For reasons we can't fathom, we couldn't raise a nickel of advance help. So we published this product of six years of expensive research from existing funds. Maryland publisher Ralph Hostetter has issued a media challenge that can put 10,000 copies in the hands of media personnel this spring. Please refer to the insert in this magazine and lend a hand.

We Also Need Hired Help

We don't have the budget, but we do need a full-time office manager. The job itself is 100 percent administrative. It might be possible to divide it into two half-time rather than one full-time position. If you're interested, call Janet McMahon.

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