Betraying Our Friends

In this issue you'll find an article about King Hussein's lukewarm reaction to the U.S. desire that he negotiate peace with Israel as representative of his own country and of the Palestinians. He may be remembering what happened when President Anwar Sadat traveled to Jerusalem in search of peace. Israeli Prime Minister Begin did not reciprocate by halting his West Bank settlement activity, but we urged Sadat to ignore that and sign a treaty with Israel anyway. Other Arabs cautioned Sadat that the Camp David agreements could be an Israeli ruse to get the Egyptian army out of the Arab camp without making any concessions on a Palestinian homeland.

However, we Americans persuaded Sadat to put his faith in U.S. assurances that we wouldn't let that happen.

He did. May he rest in peace.

Now King Hussein keeps asking what if, after the Arabs entrust him as their sole negotiator, the Israelis won't come to the negotiating table or, if they do, again won't negotiate seriously about the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Trust us, we say.

Could you Americans just provide one small demonstration of your intestinal fortitude, Hussein asks, like holding up aid to Israel until it stops "creating facts" on West Bank lands?

Trust us, we say. Like Sadat did.

The plain fact is that, for domestic political reasons, we have provided Israel with staggering and ever-increasing amounts of aid, whether or not Israel undermined our other friends in the world. By doing so we betrayed Sadat, one of the best friends the U.S. ever had.

As we persist, we are betraying King Hussein, one of the oldest friends we have in the Arab world, and the other well-disposed, moderate Arab leaders who send their children to American universities, sell us their oil, buy American goods, and lend us quiet political and economic support throughout the world.

Ultimately, if they are all swept away by the radicalism unleashed by our stubborn refusal to change our blind support of Israel, we will find we have betrayed still one other group. That is the decent segment of the Israeli population. They are the Israelis who would conclude a just peace with the Arabs based upon U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 and who would share the land of Palestine with the Palestinians.

They, too, see the consequences of their government's intransigence. But they are made voiceless in their own land by mindless U.S. support of the Israeli religious and nationalist zealots who paralyze Israel's ability to act rationally and humanely to stem the rising tide of radicalism that threatens to engulf them all—Arab and Jewish moderates alike.

—RC

Betraying Ourselves

Michael Saba's new book, The Armageddon Network, reviewed in this issue, may shed some light on the seeming inability of the U.S. to get its Middle East act together. Mr. Saba seeks to lift the curtain on what he calls "dual loyalists" in government. These are Americans who think they can always find a U.S. course of action that will also benefit Israel. It is fallacious, however, to believe that anyone can serve two masters faithfully, without ultimately betraying one of them.

The tale Saba unfolds is sadly reminiscent of the saga of Alger Hiss, which helped bring on the bad chapter in our history called "McCarthyism." The Alger Hiss affair began during the great depression, when many American intellectuals turned to communism. A few went further and began actively supporting the Soviet Union.

On the eve of World War II, however, as Joseph Stalin allied the U.S.S.R. with Hitler's Germany, some of these communists dropped out of the party. One, a writer named Whittaker Chambers, had acted as a courier transferring classified U.S. government information to the Soviet Union. He tried to persuade those who had supplied him with information to drop out with him. When they did not, he went to the Department of Justice in 1939 with their names. Although he went back to the government several times with the information, he was ignored.

Meanwhile, Alger Hiss, one of the names on Chambers's list, was rising rapidly in the Department of State. He organized the Dumbarton Oaks world monetary conference, the U.S. side of the Yalta conference with the U.S.S.R., and the meeting at San Francisco which produced the U.N. Charter.

In 1948, Chambers's report came to the attentionof a young Congressman, Richard Nixon. Although the statute of limitations had expired on the original acts of espionage, Nixon pounced on Hiss's denials under oath that he had ever known Chambers or turned over to him classified information. Hiss was convicted of perjury.

The American public was stunned to learn that a man who had provided classified information to the Soviet Union had ended up a senior advisor to the U.S. delegation at Yalta. After that, Americans were ready to believe anything that demagogues like the late Senator Joseph McCarthy told them about people who ran their governments or their schools.

That was McCarthyism, and that we don't need again. That's why Michael Saba's book makes such unpleasant reading. It is carefully documented, however, and it also make sense. Perhaps it helps explain why the U.S. has supported, as in the case of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, or conceived, as in the case of the Rogers Plan or the Reagan Plan, balanced proposals to solve the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, and then undermined its own political policy with its military and economic assistance programs.

—RC