Sen. Bob Dole: Groveling Tall

"This is a feel-good bill. This legislation actually does nothing to impede kidnapping, assault, murder and bombing...Speech—in particular the dissemination of politically-oriented information, including propaganda—is not and cannot and should not be made a crime...Sens. Kennedy, Simon, Levin, and Metzenbaum should be standing up on the Senate floor defending the First Amendment. Instead, to their discredit, they are co-sponsoring this bill. It should be defeated."

—Washington Post, May 26, 1987

The greatest single problem in getting Arabs and Israelis to negotiate a compromise land-for-peace agreement is the fact that every fourth year everything goes on hold while Americans conduct a Presidential election. In the Middle East, however, things don't stay neatly on dead center. When the momentum toward peace stops, the slide toward the next war begins. The wrong people on both sides understand this very well. The Oct. 29, 1956 Israeli attack on Egypt, with French and British connivance, was timed to jump off just a few days before US Presidential elections. The theory was that, although Dwight Eisenhower would oppose it, he would wait until he was safely re-elected before he told Israel to stop. By that time Israel would be in firm possession of the Sinai (and the West Bank if it could tempt Jordan to join the fighting), and the British and French would have taken back the Suez Canal from Egypt. Instead, Eisenhower warned British Prime Minister Anthony Eden "I don't give a darn about the election," sent the US Sixth Fleet right through the British Mediterranean Fleet, and the tri-partite invasion ended. Unfortunately, however, ever since the Eisenhower era, when extremists on either side have counted on US elections to stop momentum toward peace, they've been right.

Men of peace, on the other hand, could never believe that not only presidential candidates but even incumbent US presidents would put aside serious talk about the Middle East for at least one year out of every four, even though this meant more bloodshed for Arabs, Israelis, and Americans as well. Anwar Sadat, for instance, decided in 1971 that the US held "all the cards" for Middle East peace. To get things started, he unilaterally kicked out thousands of Soviet military advisers in Egypt and then waited for an elated Henry Kissinger or Richard Nixon to call. He just wouldn't believe that Americans facing elections only call Arabs nasty names. Predictably, Sadat's overtures were ignored, even after Nixon was re-elected in 1972. It took the 1973 Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack on Israel to get America's undivided attention. That war, however, forced the US to bail out Israel with the greatest air and sea arms lift in human history, brought the world very close to a US-Soviet nuclear confrontation, and triggered the Arab political oil embargo. That accelerated a zoom in the price of oil, from about $3 to $15 a barrel (and eventually to $40 a barrel under the impact of the Iranian revolution), which in turn damaged the economies of the industrialized countries, including the United States, and nearly destroyed the economies of the developing countries. All because an incumbent US President so feared the Israel lobby that he wouldn't talk seriously during an election year with an Arab leader, even when the leader was Anwar Sadat and the subject was peace.

Nor, it seems, is the US or the world to be spared between now and November 1988, although with a little badly-needed bi-partisanship the whole matter of US Mideast policy could be removed from the 1988 campaign. After all, every US President, Republican or Democrat, since 1967 is on record in support of UN Security Council Resolution 242's land-for-peace swap. Every living ex-President has also said the time will come when we have to talk to Yasir Arafat's PLO. And in Israel the foreign minister, Shimon Peres, is right now telling the prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, it's time to sit down and talk peace with Arab neighbors. It would be both reasonable and statesmanlike for every 1988 Presidential hopeful to agree that a peace, based upon UN Security Council Resolution 242, which satisfies the longings of both Israelis and Palestinians for homelands of their own, is the best, and only, guarantee for the security of both peoples.

Instead, two Republican presidential candidates, Senator Bob Dole and Representative Jack Kemp, with me-toos from past, present, and future Democratic candidates, have already jumped aboard a made-in-Zion, Arab-bashing bill to close the two PLO offices in the United States. Although most Americans are beginning to realize that the Palestinians have a case, there is as yet no constituency for the PLO. Cracking down on it sounds great to yahoos who think Yasir Arafat's people hijack US aircraft and shoot Americans. The people who kill Americans in European airports, however, answer to Abu Nidal, who walked out of the PLO years ago and has been trying to kill Arafat ever since. The people who hijack our airplanes are Lebanese Shiites, some funded by the Ayatollah Khomeini himself, others by the Syrians with whom they have ganged up to push Arafat out of Lebanon. The only message the congressmen are sending overseas, therefore, is that the US, like Abu Nidal, the Shiites, and the Syrians, wants to beat up on Arafat's PLO just when it is teetering on the brink of joining the "peace process" we support.

The reason Israeli extremists and their US lobby are so opposed to the PLO is that in their scenario for US public consumption, Israel calls for peace and no Palestinian answers. If Arafat publicly agrees to sit down and talk peace with the Israelis on the basis of Resolution 242, Americans might realize for the first time that Israeli leaders are telling their own voters that they won't sit at the table with him. If the Israelis do, they know they will have to give back the West Bank, which Israel's present prime minister and his Likud bloc refuse to do. So Israelis who don't want to negotiate peace with the Arabs are working hand-in-glove with Arab extremists who don't want to negotiate peace with Israel. The campaign by Israel's US lobby against the PLO offices, therefore, supports the extremists, not the moderates, in both Israel and the Arab world.

Henry Kissinger promised the Israelis in 1973 that American officials wouldn't speak to the PLO until Yasir Arafat agreed to negotiate on the basis of Resolution 242. The two existing PLO offices in the US are, therefore, bit players in the process that may, soon, result in Arafat's doing just that in exchange for a US guarantee of Palestinian self-determination. The Washington office's function is information.

Perhaps Senator Dole and Representative Kemp and, on the Democratic side, Senators Kennedy, Simon, Levin, and Metzenbaum, think frank talk between Americans and Palestinians is dangerous in Washington. And perhaps they are unaware that the other "PLO office" they seek to close in New York is in fact the PLO Observer Mission to United Nations headquarters there. If we are serious about wanting to have the UN headquarters in New York and not Moscow, we'd best stop playing domestic politics with it.

Of course all these would-be candidates know that American hearts and minds are not imperiled by hearing an occasional dissent from the conventional media wisdom. So why do they sponsor a mischievous bill like this? Well, for starters, because Israel's lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has just proclaimed at its annual convention in Washington that closing PLO offices is at the top of its 1987 agenda.

Candidates know that if they proclaim that Israel's security is at least on a par with America's in their hearts, very big bucks may be forthcoming from some Jewish contributors for whom Israel's security is far more important than America's. Never mind that these potential donors are extremists to a man—supporting the very elements that are making Israel into a militaristic waste-land from which educated Jews are fleeing in droves. Apparently the only important thing, in an election year, to the Congressional sponsors of such a know-nothing bill is that it pleases people with the kind of money that buys lots of television time.

Teddy Kennedy (D-MA) is a liberal who never saw a refugee for whom he didn't feel compassion—unless the refugee happened to be one of four million homeless Palestinians. As for Paul Simon (D-IL), it was Israel's lobby that promised, and delivered, campaign dollars if he would leave his safe seat in the House to run against Senator Charles Percy (R-IL). The lobby's biggest gun, California real estate tycoon Michael Goland, spent more than a million dollars of his own money to help Simon defeat Percy, along with some $150,000 from pro-Israel political action committees. (PACs) and untold sums in individual contributions. You might say that Simon is still paying off campaign debts to those who helped buy him his Senate seat in 1984. In the same campaign, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) received at least $140,063 from 54 pro-Israel PACs, about 35 percent of his campaign total; and Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH) received $35,000.

Jack Kemp, who has developed groveling to a fine art, told the National Jewish Coalition he would choose as his secretary of state Jeane Kirkpatrick, the lady Bud McFarlane feared would call him "some kind of commie" if he recommended bailing out of the Iranscam. Kemp, who may have played too much football without a helmet, also told his Jewish audience he would get rid of all the State Department Arabists. These are foreign service officers bright enough to learn the language of countries in which they serve. Kemp may suffer from brain envy.

So much for hypocrites and slow learners. What about Bob Dole (R-KS), who never blinks as he stares down the television reporters and who really socks it to Teddy on their daily radio show? Dole represents a state where there is virtually no Jewish vote and whose farmers and small manufacturers badly need cheap oil and receptive Middle East markets.

There must, therefore, be some mistake, one Kansan speaking for a lot of other small businessmen like himself said on a recent visit to a Dole associate. If the Senator is so desperate for Jewish campaign donations, the businessman suggested, he would be happy to pass the hat one more time. No, the Dole person said, the Senator is pretty well funded. He's just trying to show wealthy pro-Israel donors that they don't need to support Jack Kemp's campaign, which is strapped for money. If Senator Dole is just as accommodating, they may sit on their wallets the next time Kemp passes the hat.

That may help explain Middle East statements by all candidates from now until after November 1988. Never mind that what the Washington Post describes as a "feel good" bill for Americans will make our friends abroad feel bad. Our European allies look at groveling by candidates for American Jewish contributions as irresponsible, and the resulting abdication of US Middle East leadership to Israel as unbelievable. In the Far East, because they're still trying to get the hang of how democracy works, they're examining ours minutely. Now that the Japanese think they understand who pays the piper and who dances to his tunes in the biggest democracy of all, a hot item on their newsstands is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Nice going, American friends of Israeli extremists. You made the Japanese anti-Semitic even before they got to know you.

We've always thought of Bob Dole as a stand-tall guy. That right arm he carries so stiffly was shattered by 30-caliber bullets when, as a young lieutenant, he led a charge against German machine guns in Italy 43 years ago. We thought hard about that before we started this article, and decided to call his office to hear for ourselves what his spokespeople had to say.

"Off the record we know the reasons," we said, "but on the record, how do you explain the Senator's sponsorship of this bill at this time?"

"The Senator has always taken a firm stand against terrorism," a spokesperson said.

"Terrorism is not the issue," we pointed out. "How, on the record, do you explain introducing this bill at the very moment when pro-peace Arabs, Americans, and Israelis are seeking to convince Yasir Arafat and the PLO to agree to negotiate on the basis of Resolution 242?"

"We think the Senator's been very courageous on the Middle East," we were told. "He agreed to speak to an Arab-American group and you wouldn't believe the flack he's taken for that."

We would believe it, of course. The same sleaze balls who would deny his right to speak to ethnic groups they don't like harass us regularly. We'd like to believe an American who once charged German machine guns would now tell his critics he'll speak wherever and whenever he pleases, and if they have a problem with the first amendment to the US Constitution they can go live in Israel or South Africa where such rights are restricted to members of the chosen people or the master race, respectively.

If Senator Dole instead continues to knuckle under, should we blame the lobby or its victim? Clearly Americans need a leader more like the young lieutenant than the old flack dodger if we are ever to walk tall again. To find him, we'd better look carefully for a candidate who would rather be right than be President, and then work like the dickens to help that candidate be both.—Richard Curtiss

Richard Curtiss, chief editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, is author of A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute.