BUSH SHOWS HIS HAND: STANCE ON ISRAELI HOUSING GUARANTEES COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE, BODES ILL FOR THE FUTURE

(Washington, D.C.): President Bush has
reportedly begun to consider alternatives
to his ill-advised decision announced
last week postponing U.S. government
guarantees for Israeli construction of
housing for homeless Soviet Jews. There
are a number of powerful reasons why U.S.
interests would be well served by a
decision to abandon any effort to tie
such humanitarian assistance to a
cessation of construction of new
settlements in the “occupied”
territories.

Anti-Humanitarian:
First, the President’s 4 September
announcement signaled an indifference to
the plight of these innocent refugees,
whose freedom from Soviet oppression has
long been an explicit objective of
American policy. This is as
repugnant to Americans as it is
distressing to those in Israel already
deeply suspicious about the Bush
Administration’s commitment to the
well-being of its ally’s citizenry
— and, indeed, for the State of Israel
itself.

More Pro-Arab than the
Arabs: Second, this decision
represents a position properly described
by William Safire as “more pro-Arab
than the Arabs'” with respect to the
conditions under which an international
peace conference could be convened.
Unfortunately, this would not be
the first time that the leading Western
power has acted in a way that actually impedes
constructive negotiations between Arabs
and Jews by insisting that Israel concede
more than its enemies were demanding.

For example, in 1948-49, the British
demanded that Israel relinquish to
Transjordan part of the Negev awarded to
the Jewish state under the 1947 U.N.
Partition Plan. At the time, the United
Kingdom was motivated by the desire to
relocate bases it would shortly lose in
Egypt to the Negev. Accordingly, the
British pressed Abdullah, their
hand-picked potentate in Transjordan, to
require land in the Negev as the price
for peace with Israel. Even though
Abdullah demurred, saying “We have
enough desert,” the U.K. was
adamant. American policy in the region at
the time by and large followed Britain’s
lead (much as contemporary U.S. policy
toward Europe is driven by German
decisions) and consequently helped to
terminate a possible opportunity for a
settlement between Israel and
Transjordan.

Repudiation of Camp David:
Third, in addition to being simply
counterproductive to a constructive
dialogue, the Bush stance on
Israeli credit guarantees is inconsistent
with longstanding U.S. commitments.
After all, in the 1977 Camp David
accords, the president of the United
States pledged to seek a resolution of
the ultimate status of the territories through
direct negotiation among the parties.

That commitment was a crucial part of
the Camp David bargain: Israel has claims
to the West Bank and made clear that it
would present those claims at the
negotiating table.

The Camp David accords — in
contrast to the approach preferred by
President Bush — correctly viewed the
“occupied” territories as a symptom
of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not its
root cause. If the Arabs made
peace with Israel and if the Jewish
state’s borders were recognized by all
the nations in the region, there
would simply be no settlements issue.
The truth of the matter is that the Arab
states not only contend the Jews have no
right to live in the West Bank. They —
with the exception of Egypt — also have
yet to acknowledge that the Jews are
entitled to have a state anywhere
in Palestine. In this context, any
assertion that Israel has no right
to settle in the “occupied”
territories undermines the legitimacy of
the Jewish state altogether.

Bush’s Bottom Line —
Israel Out of the Territories:
Fourth, by his effort to euchre the
Israeli request for housing guarantees
into substantive concessions before a
formal Mideast peace conference gets
underway, President Bush has
telegraphed unmistakably the sole outcome
he is likely to accept — and work
towards — in whatever “peace
process” ensues: the dismantling of
Israel’s control over these strategically
vital regions, come what may.
If, as it appears to be, this is an idee
fixe for President Bush, the United
States cannot be realistically viewed as
an honest broker and Israel would be
ill-advised to enter into negotiations
under American sponsorship.

In short, far from removing a possible
obstacle to an effective “peace
process,” the President’s initiative
raises serious questions about the
desirability and utility of that process.
Accordingly, the Center for
Security Policy believes that the Bush
Administration should immediately rescind
its objection to congressional approval
of the Israeli request for loan
guarantees associated with housing for
Soviet immigrants. In the event
the Administration continues to decline
to do so, the Center feels the Congress
should — in view of humanitarian,
strategic and diplomatic considerations
— nonetheless authorize these
guarantees.

The only sort of conditions
that might usefully be applied to these
guarantees are the same ones that should
govern counterpart taxpayer assistance
under consideration for the former Soviet
Union: a stipulation that
progress be made toward the sort of
de-socializing and other structural
economic reforms that both Israel and, to
a far greater degree, the successors to
the USSR need to undertake to put their
economies on a sound footing and to
minimize their future requirements for
such assistance.

Attached
is a copy of a trenchant editorial
from today’s editions of the Wall
Street Journal condemning the Bush
strategy of using housing guarantees as
diplomatic leverage on Israel and
implicitly, at least, making the case for
arrangements whereby such guarantees will
serve to stimulate, rather than retard,
needed economic reform in the Jewish
state.