Amen, James Baker

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Two members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, one a Democrat, the other a Republican, met in a hallway and circled each other conversationally before one said, 'Amen!' 'Amen, Jim Baker!' said the other."

—Richard Reeves, United Press Syndicate, May 25, 1989

Conflicting signals over his Middle East policy began even before George Bush took the oath of office. His appointment of James Baker III, the single most effective member of the Reagan administration and a long-time Bush loyalist, as secretary of state indicated that the State Department would assume the lead in carrying out an activist Bush foreign policy.

Then both Bush and Baker put into key positions appointees associated with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger or with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, both closely identified with Israel's agenda, which opposes American Middle East activism. Arab leaders feared this presaged US activism anywhere but in the Middle East, which needs it most.

Since then, if administration public statements and votes in the UN seemed excessively solicitous of Israel, administration actions have been more balanced. Bush and Baker resisted a major Israeli campaign to end the USPLO dialogue. When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir wanted to visit Washington, Baker made clear in tough exchanges with hard-line Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Arens that Shamir would be welcome only if he brought with him ideas to break his stalemate with the Palestinians.

Then, when Shamir produced a vague plan for elections in the occupied territories, Bush seized upon it as if it were written on golden tablets, even though it avoided the questions Shamir had been asked to address. Since the administration treats it as a serious document, however, it became one. Now, if Israel does not fill in details, the Bush administration will.

Baker described what the US wants to see in any election plan in an April 27 letter he sent to Arens, details of which have appeared in Israeli media. Baker wrote that "the more open the approach to the elections is—particularly concerning who can vote, run and be elected and what can be said," the greater its chances of acceptance.

"A creative solution must be found to enable the participation of Palestinians who do not currently reside in the West Bank and Gaza Strip," Baker wrote. "it is imperative to find a way to enable the inhabitants of East Jerusalem to take part in the elections.”

This injected some symmetry into US policies. Even before Bush took office, Yasser Arafat had met US conditions for a dialogue by accepting UN Security Council Resolution 242's land-for-peace formula, renouncing terrorism, and recognizing Israel's right to exist. He complained that the US seemed to be looking for new concessions from the Palestinians, rather than insisting that Israel make the same pledges.

It was in this context that James Baker made his May 22 speech at the national convention of Israel's principal US lobbying organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He called upon Israel to accept 242, forswear annexation, stop settlement activity, allow Palestinian schools to reopen, "reach out to the Palestinians as neighbors who deserve political rights," and "lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel."

Baker also called upon Palestinians to convince Israelis of their peaceful intentions, and he called upon the Arab states to stop boycotting Israel, and challenging Israeli membership in international organizations.

All that was new in Baker's speech was its clarity and the fact that it was delivered before a militant Zionist organization whose members would have preferred to be flattered and patronized by George Shultz.

Neither the timing nor the venue was accidental. Arab League chiefs of state were about to meet in Casablanca, where they would hear Syria's Hafez Al Asad and Libya's Muammar Qaddafi charge that Arafat's concessions for peace had given away bargaining chips and elicited nothing in return. Baker's speech cut the ground out from under the two Arab hard-liners. The other 19 Arab League member states endorsed Arafat's embrace of a two-state solution.

In the US, media reaction to Baker's speech was remarkably positive. In Congress, there was an audible sigh of relief. Both Republicans and Democrats are starting to hear from their constituents on the subject of $3 billion in annual aid to an Israel that clearly is misusing it. It didn't take AIPAC lobbyists long to counterattack, however. It came in a letter to Baker, signed by 92 senators, expressing support for the Israeli peace initiative. In anoblique reference to the Baker speech the lobby did not dare attack frontally, the letter suggestedthat in dealing with Israeli proposals, "the United States must be fully supportive, both in fact and in appearance."

Asked why he had signed the letter, and another before it seeking to set new conditions for US dialogue with the PLO, one senator airily dismissed the matter. "These letters don't mean a thing. They satisfy AIPAC, and giving in on things like this makes it easier to stand up to them when it counts." Not everyone is so dismissive. In a Washington, DC, interview on the day the letter was made public, Prof. Israel Shahak, chairman of Israel's Human and Civil Rights League, said: "This letter by 92 senators means that the majority of the left in Israel will be paralyzed for some time." In Israel, unfortunately, those paralyzed leftists are the only peacemakers. As the middle-of the-road Labor coalition disintegrates, its principal representative in the Israeli cabinet, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, carries out the hard-line policies of Israel's Prime Minister Shamir. Together, last April 1, they launched a policy of unprecedented brutality. In May their troops and Jewish West Bank settlers killed 38 Palestinians and wounded 3,000, according to Dr. Shahak.

Palestinians under occupation number at most 1.7 million. Americans number 245 million. That's 144 to 1. To understand the impact of such Palestinian casualties, consider 5,472 Americans killed and 432,000 injured in one month. That's worse than average monthly US casualties in Vietnam, Korea or World War II. It's comparable only to the casualties suffered by both sides together in America's Civil War.

These victims, however, aren't soldiers. They are children being shot down with American-supplied bullets.Theyare women who have become special targets of the new Shamir-Rabin crackdown. Now, when Israeli soldiers enter a house they deliberately separate the men and women. Then, out of sight but within the hearing of the men, they beat the women, sexually molesting them in the process, and commenting loudly about what they are doing. A man may not be harmed if he does not struggle to rescue his wife, sister or daughter. If he does, however, he too is beaten, sometimes to death.

Dr. Shahak calls this policy of "near rape" a bankrupt Israeli final solution designed to so humiliate the Palestinians that it will destroy their will to resist. Others might interpret it as an attempt to goad Palestinians into giving up the Gandhian road of passive resistance and resuming bloody "armed struggle. " This would enable Israeli forces to cry "terrorism," and shoot them down.

Anything, like the letter from 92 senators, that encourages continuation of this for even a day cannot be dismissed as something that "doesn't matter." On the contrary, it's time for all Americans to draw the line.

The Bush administration has done so twice. In April, Secretary Baker warned Foreign Minister Arens that if Israel established new settlements: "Our reaction would not be limited to the United Nations, and there is no knowing how Congress would react." The Bush administration has also warned that further deportations of West Bank and Gaza leaders, the very people with whom Israelis supposedly want to negotiate, will be interpreted by the US as Israeli bad faith. New settlements have stopped. Deportations have stopped.

Congress could easily draw its own line. Representative Howard Nielsen (R-UT) is one member who really knows something about the Middle East. He taught at the American University of Beirut. On May 17 he introduced legislation calling for Israel to let West Bank schools reopen, warning that "as we prepare to vote on a new $3 billion aid package to Israel in the coming weeks, it is time to let Israel know ... we believe establishing a more normal educational environment on the West Bank would be an important step toward creating a climate which is more conducive to peace in the region.

If other members of Congress could just for one moment forget their pursuit of AIPAC-directed money and vote to curtail aid to Israel, perhaps only by the amount it spends on illegal Jewish settlements, the repression would stop, instantly. American apologists for Israel who maintain that pressure only makes Israeli leaders more unreasonable have been wrong for 40 years.

It's also time for US peace activists to draw a line. Some multi-issue liberal groups like New Jewish Agenda have not hesitated to call for a halt in aid to the contras or sanctions against apartheid but fear their members "aren't ready" to support reducing aid to Israel. Perhaps it is time for Jewish peace activists who do not consider hand-wringing an adequate substitute for action to go it alone.

"When my countrymen say that Arabs 'only understand force,' we really are speaking about ourselves," Dr. Shahak warned in his Washington interview. Israel will continue "its system of computerized slavery that is worse than South Africa, until it is forced to stop," he said. "in my opinion any conference which doesn't spend at least half its time discussing measures to stop such horrors is a waste of time."

His words are also a challenge to Christian activists. One who is speaking out is Episcopal Bishop John T. Walker, who led 85 Episcopalians from the national capital area through the halls of Congress June 7.

"We have been studying ... and praying about it for a long time," he said. "Now is the time for action. If we support democracy in China and Poland, then we must support democracy for the Palestinians."

Members of his group carried a resolution adopted overwhelmingly at the national Episcopal Church's General Convention last July, the Lambeth Conference of worldwide Anglican bishops the following month, and by the Washington Episcopal Diocese last January. It supports Israel's right to exist within "recognized and secure borders" and "affirms the right of Palestinians to self-determination, including the choice of their own representatives and the establishment of their own state."

Bearing this in mind, a group led by Canon Charles Martin of the National Cathedral received an encouraging reception when they expressed support for the Baker speech and a Palestinian state.

"Well, this is welcome," said Senator John Chafee (R-RI), one of only eight senators who did not sign the June 8 letter. "You are the first group in my memory since I came to the Senate to talk about the Middle East without representing the official position of Israel."

Amen, Secretary Baker, Professor Shahak, Bishop Walker, Canon Martin and Senator Chafee. May your tribe increase.