As noted earlier, Israel’s preoccupation about not dealing with the PLO did not extend to prisoner exchanges. One large exchange at year’s end returned hundreds of PLO activists to the West Bank in a swap for several IDF soldiers. (Five years later, many of the returnees played an instrumental role in sustaining the Intifada.) Despite the heavy cost of the Lebanon war, the resiliency of Arab terror was underlined by the bombing of a Jerusalem city bus early in December.
The phoenix-like survivability of Yasir Arafat kept the Palestinian cause in the forefront. He had been ousted by the IDF from the PLO’s Beirut stronghold. “Civil war” and violent disintegration within Fatah and among other PLO factions threatened the survival of his movement. The PLO “state within a state” in Lebanon had collapsed. Syria further humiliated Arafat by expelling him along with 4,000 loyalists from Tripoli, Lebanon. With Arafat and the PLO out of the way the pacification of the West Bank (perhaps under the Village Leagues) could have proceeded apace.
Just as Arafat’s fortunes seemed to be at a nadir, Egyptian President Mubarak came to his literal and figurative rescue. Mubarak received Arafat in Cairo just two days after his flight from Lebanon. It was the first meeting between Arafat and an Egyptian leader since Sadat’s 1977 trip to Jerusalem. The pro-Israel community reacted to Arafat’s Cairo reception with chagrin. Berman telegrammed the White House arguing that “betting on Arafat is a grim mistake.” But State Department spokesman John Hughes saw the meeting as anything but a grim mistake: “We are hopeful that such talks will serve to persuade Mr. Arafat that peace negotiations within the framework of the President’s Initiative are the best means of achieving Palestinian goals.” Hughes added that: “We are not meeting with Mr. Arafat or the PLO.” U.S. policy, said the State Department spokesman, was “absolutely unchanged.” The President saw the Mubarak-Arafat meeting in similar terms: “I think that what President Mubarak is doing is talking to him (Arafat) about returning to where he was earlier, making contact with King Hussein and getting those peace negotiations, our peace proposal under way again. . . . (Mubarak) is simply trying to persuade others to change their thinking.” But Near East Report, an AIPAC aligned newsletter, editorialized: “The Mubarak move (and the Administration’s response to it) defy common sense. Yasir Arafat is finished. . . . The Arafat option is a fraud. . . . It prevents Palestinians committed to coexistence with Israel from coming forward while it suggests that the path of terror will eventually pay off.” Shamir, now the Israeli Prime Minister, agreed: “The American government is mistaken if it thinks the Arafat-Mubarak meeting increases the chances of advancing the Reagan initiative.” Arafat, for his part, suggested that he would work for the establishment of a Palestinian government in exile.
IV
Perceptual Framework
Although the mainstream American Jewish leadership believed that Arafat was still engaged in a total contest with Israel, they no longer viewed the overall conflict in zero-sum terms. And events of the previous year demonstrated that the Palestinian problem could not be circumvented. For some, the prospect of a Labor victory in the upcoming Israeli elections offered hope that a compromise with non-PLO Palestinian Arabs could be achieved.
But United States policy was to reform and sanitize the PLO. Once the Palestinian issue was perceptually acknowledged as being at the core of the conflict and once the Administration demonstrated its tenacity to make Arafat and the PLO at the core of the solution, the leadership could only react by holding the parameter. They would oppose bringing the PLO into the process until it met the conditions outlined in 1975 by the United States. That was as far as they could possibly go, given the political environment. There was a certain inconsistency in not challenging the Administration’s underlying premises. Thus through a process of cognitive dissonance, the leadership had to question its own assessment of Arafat and the PLO.
The political environment for the coming year was shaped by Egypt’s efforts to bring the PLO into the peace process. Presumably, despite its “cold peace” with Israel, Jewish leaders looked at Egypt’s championing of the PLO as a sign that the PLO’s mission was undergoing change. This was a message now common in the political system. The Council on Foreign Relations described the PLO as a multi-faceted IR actor. Moreover, Israel’s political defeat in Lebanon underscored that there could be no military solution to the Palestinian-Arab aspect of the conflict. But the coming year’s most influential environmental factor, as far as the American Jewish leadership was concerned, was electoral. Jewish leaders waited to see how the American and Israeli elections would play themselves out. Inconclusive Israeli elections led to a government of national “disunity” comprised of both Labor and Likud. In the U.S., President Reagan was reelected to a second term. The cast of influential actors now came to include Shimon Peres, the new Israeli Prime Minister, and Kenneth Bialkin, the new Chairman of the Presidents Conference.
The political environment also continued to be greatly influenced by how the prestige press covered the Arab-Israel conflict. The New York Times, for instance, had run a series of four articles which argued that Israeli society was riddled with anti-Arab racism and prejudice traceable, the implication was, to the Likud’s hardline stance. The importance and influence of the Times on the Jewish leadership cannot be overstated. The paper’s coverage was a pivotal factor in shaping and reinforcing a shift in Jewish attitudes toward the conflict.
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Following up on its diplomatic rescue of the PLO, Egypt launched a vigorous campaign to bring the movement into the U.S.-led peace process. Meanwhile, Israel’s efforts to extricate itself from Lebanon were greatly complicated by that country’s transformation into a suzerainty of Syria. The Presidents Conference found its agenda dominated by these two realities.
The establishment’s attitude toward the PLO can be gauged by its reaction to calls by PLO supporters, such as the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), for a U.S.-PLO dialogue and for an unconditional Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. The American Jewish Committee, which agreed that the Palestinian issue was crucial, nevertheless castigated the AFSC for espousing a PLO role. Political advocacy on behalf of the PLO cut across the American political and foreign policy spectrum. Supporters of the PLO were welcomed at various prestigious foreign policy forums. In February 1984, for instance, Dr. Christopher Giannou, a Canadian-born activist associated with the Palestine Red Crescent Society, was featured at a round-table discussion sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. Giannou had earlier publicly declared that for him, “the Palestinian cause was sacred” and its enemy was Israel.
Prospects for a Lebanese regime that was not hostile to the Jewish State crumbled under Syrian pressure in March of 1984 when Lebanon abrogated the May 17, 1983 Israel-Lebanon Agreement. Shultz acknowledged that Syrian-sponsored violence had been largely responsible for its collapse. Concurrently, he reiterated the U.S. position on talking to the PLO:
Conditions for any dialogue between the PLO and the United States have been very clearly stated many times. The PLO should recognize Resolution 242 and should state its recognition of the right of the State of Israel to exist and under those circumstances the U.S. will conduct discussions with the PLO.
The establishment’s continuing antipathy toward bringing the PLO into the peace process, despite pressures permeating the political environment, can be traced to the consensus on the issue within the Israeli polity. The Presidents Conference convenes annually in Jerusalem for meetings and consultations with Israeli leaders. In his address to their sessions Labor leader Shimon Peres criticized Mubarak for “putting his weight in favor of the PLO – a helpless organization and an obstacle in the way of peace.” He ridiculed the idea that Arafat had become a moderate as “nonsense.” Before Berman and Hellman embarked for a visit with Mubarak in Cairo, the Presidents Conference formally denounced the Egyptian initiative.
Still, the internal opposition criticized Berman for overstating the level of consensus within the establishment regarding the PLO. In a political suasion tactic of splitting the majority, Steven M. Cohen charged Berman with misrepresenting and distorting the views of the constituent agencies of the Presidents Conference. Under Berman, he charged, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has:
. . . fashioned a position on Israeli security matters which articulates the more hawkish features of American Jewish consensual thinking on the conflict. The Conference gives little or no voice to American Jews’ willingness to support many Israelis’ efforts to articulate policies based on flexibility and compromise. As such, the Conference’s expressed views stand at the hawkish end of the spectrum of American Jewish diverse opinions and, as a result, they verge on misrepresentation of American Jewry both to Israel and to important American policy makers.
Cohen’s thinking, as noted earlier, closely reflected the views of the American Jewish Committee for whom he conducted survey polling intended to discover “the depth of dissent.”
Mroz Mission
America’s clandestine “procedural” negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization became public in late February 1984 when The New York Times reported that private citizen and Middle East specialist, John Mroz, had been secretly negotiating with the PLO on behalf of the State Department. The talks, conducted with the knowledge of Haig and Veliotes, were undertaken at Arafat’s request and lasted 9 months ending in June 1982. The Times reported that Mroz held more than 50 meetings with Arafat and other PLO officials and furnished accounts of the sessions to Veliotes. Mroz was identified by the paper as a 35-year-old president of the East-West Security Foundation. Previously, Mroz had been director of Middle East Studies at the International Academy of Peace in New York. Veliotes had persuaded Haig that the PLO could be split away from the Soviet Union, thus making it easier to accelerate the Arab-Israel peace process. After receiving the president’s approval in California, the Mroz mission was authorized by Haig in August 1981. In the wake of the PLO’s expulsion from Lebanon, Shultz authorized Mroz to meet with Arafat in Tunis. However, Arafat refused to see him. Who leaked the story and what their motives were are unknown. But insinuation had political suasion value. The news inoculated against the “no talk” taboo (or, given the number of “accidental” or “unauthorized” publicly known contacts, one could view this latest report as a booster shot). The reaction of the various players is slightly curious. Officially, the State Department downplayed the report and reiterated the U.S. refusal to recognize or talk to the PLO until its previously stated conditions were met. Spokesman Alan Romberg refused to be drawn into a discussion of the Times report other than to say: “We have contact with a variety of people who claim to have contact with the PLO. . . . When asked what they should tell the PLO, they are told to repeat the U.S. conditions.” Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., Meir Rosenne, deprecated the report, telling a Zionist Organization of America audience: “I refuse to believe this is true.” Officially, he conveyed an Israeli Foreign Ministry protest to the State Department some days later. There is no record that the Presidents Conference protested the Mroz report.
The official Israeli attitude toward the PLO was unchanged. Responding to an Op-Ed essay by Harold Saunders, Rosenne made the zero-sum case in a letter to the editor: “The P.L.O. is not a national liberation movement but a terrorist gang whose intention to destroy Israel is stated with chilling clarity in its covenant and in countless declarations by all its leaders over many years. Contrary to Mr. Saunders, there is no division inside the P.L.O. on ultimate objectives. Internal differences revolve around tactics, not strategy.”
The strategy of the United States was to facilitate the entry of the Palestinians (perhaps the PLO under the right circumstances) into the peace process. Shultz told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Reagan Administration did not have indirect contacts with the PLO. But then he insinuated that it did, saying:
As I have looked at the record of those meetings, what was talked about in private was identical with what was talked about in public . . . if it proved anything, it was that the constant refrain we hear – that if only we would sit down with the PLO and talk with them everything would start falling into place – is simply not the case.
Continuing American adherence to the disassociation model was evident from the President’s remarks to a UJA group in February. He said, “Friendship between Israel and the United States is closer and stronger than ever before. And I am intent to keep it that way.” But he also reiterated American opposition to Jewish settlements in the Administered Territories. And, at around the same time, Shultz wrote to Sen. Charles Percy opposing legislation that would move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He said such a move would “prejudge one of the key issues which must be freely negotiated between the parties. . . .” It is interesting to note that some political candidates still thought there was strong support within the Jewish community for retention of Judea and Samaria. Campaigning for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination, Gary Hart declared that the settlements were not obstacles to peace.
Peres Flexibility
The PLO remained anathema to the mainstream pro-Israel community largely because it continued to signal a message of total conflict. Abu Jihad, for example, declared that armed struggle would strike “against the forces of the occupation army in Gaza, Nablus, Jerusalem, or deep in the Israeli heart, in Tel Aviv and in the other occupied towns.” Simultaneously, Arafat continued to dance around the idea of recognizing Israel. Regardless of the PLO’s stance, the Israeli body politic was divided over prospects for Arab moderation. Labor was ready to talk with a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation if one would come forth. Other than PLO intentions, the party viewed the conflict largely in non-zero-sum terms. In early May, Peres declared that Camp David need not be the sole peace process channel. The signal was unmistakable: a Labor Government would be far more flexible on staking claims to Judea and Samaria.
The fabric of American Jewish pro-Israelism was being torn asunder. The contributory factors varied: Official U.S. criticism of Israel’s policies was unceasing. Negative media coverage persisted unabated. The Times continued to play a vanguard role in fostering American Jewish criticism of Israeli policies. Arthur Hertzberg, WJC vice-president, and an important voice of the internal opposition, was granted a platform by the Times to call on the Administration to pressure Israel into pulling out of the West Bank. “Washington can press Israeli leaders to pay the political price of dealing with this [the Palestinian] question. The fundamental truth about the Palestinian question and the continuing war between Jews and Arabs is that it can be settled only by American leadership. America cannot impose a settlement, but it can cajole the parties. . . .” The United Jewish Appeal found it necessary to remind wealthy contributors that disagreement with Israel’s policies should not be an excuse for withholding their support. Such challenges from within the American Jewish community needed and received legitimization from the Israeli Opposition which challenged the Camp David process of limited Palestinian-Arab autonomy.
Kenneth Bialkin
Julius Berman’s tenure as chairman of the Presidents Conference drew to a close. Berman was the only head of the Presidents Conference (in the post-1977 era) whose natural affinity was for the Likud line. Berman’s valedictory speech in June articulated what little consensus still prevailed within the Jewish establishment, namely, opposition to U.S.-PLO negotiations unless the well-known conditions were met. Summarizing Berman’s tenure, the Presidents Conference Annual Report seeks to put the best possible “spin” on the level of establishment consensus toward Israel:
The ability to achieve and express . . . consensus was emphasized by the outgoing Chairman as representing the underlying strength of the Presidents Conference. He acknowledged that it was “no secret” that members of the Presidents Conference held differing views on some issues, including those of the West Bank and Gaza. But these differences were far less important than the overriding commitment of the Conference members to Israel’s security. . . . “The Presidents Conference cannot take positions where there is no unity,” Mr. Berman observed.
. . . In a separate article (he wrote) . . . “Indeed, it is a well-known secret that the fastest way to get your op-ed article published in a daily newspaper or weekly news magazine is to criticize Israel or call for American pressure aimed at changing Israeli policies. . . .
Although there are differences of opinion among us with respect to settlement policies in the West Bank, the overwhelming majority of American Jews reject the idea that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are illegal . . . any possibility of establishing a Palestinian state must be foreclosed. . . .
I believe these sentiments represent the views of the organized Jewish community in America. . . .”
The newly elected Chairman, Kenneth Bialkin, was by no means “soft” on the PLO “talk” issue. But his election did herald an important change. In all likelihood, Bialkin was selected precisely because, on the Labor-Likud divide, the 54-year-old Harvard Law School graduate, whose ties were with the centrist Anti-Defamation League, was a neutral figure.
Arafat studiously portrayed himself, in the non-Arabic press, as someone seeking a diplomatic outcome. With the sponsorship of Egypt and tacit encouragement from the Reagan Administration, Arafat had been resurrected. He succeeded in reuniting many, though not all, PLO factions which had broken away in the aftermath of the Lebanon war. Under pressure from the Soviet Union, Algeria and South Yemen, the hard-line Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine rejoined the PLO. Only the Syrian sponsored forces of Abu Musa were now identified as “rejectionist.” By summer’s end, it appeared as if the PLO had agreed to allow Jordan to represent its interests in the peace process.
The U.S. commitment not to negotiate with the PLO drew fresh attention with the publication of a Foreign Affairs article by Alfred L. Atherton, Jr., the former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. Atherton wrote:
A further factor complicating the U.S. role in the peace process has been a 1975 Memorandum of Understanding with Israel, committing the United States not to recognize or negotiate with the PLO unless it accepted Resolution 242 and recognized Israel’s right to exist. This commitment was subsequently interpreted by successive American administrations as barring even exploratory discussions with the PLO. This was not the original intent. As a result, the United States has effectively been prevented from opening a dialogue with Palestinians who, however much one deplores the advocacy of terrorism and the hard-line position toward recognition of Israel by elements of the PLO, are widely recognized as a necessary element in any solution to the conflict. . . .
It has long been my personal view that such a dialogue would have been an opportunity to exploit the latent divisions within the PLO, between those who advocate terrorism and reject the very idea of peace with Israel, and those who are prepared to take a more pragmatic and less extreme approach.
Atherton’s underlying assessment that “elements” of the PLO were prepared to pursue a pragmatic non-zero-sum mission (as distinguished from a tactical bluff) was representative of current thinking in the U.S. foreign policy community. However, the American Jewish leadership – including those who opposed the Likud Government’s policies – continued to lobby against dialogue until the PLO explicitly accepted the long-standing American conditions.
Inconclusive elections in Israel led to the establishment, in September, of a government of national unity (more in name than in spirit). Labor leader Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir of Likud agreed to a rotating premiership. Peres would serve first for two years as Prime Minister with Shamir as Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin would serve the full four years as Defense Minister. Henceforth, as Lewis recalls, Washington would be dealing with “two Israeli governments.” Peres favored accommodating Jordan’s need for an international peace conference, but only as a ceremonial fig-leaf for bilateral talks.
It was also election season in the United States as former Vice President Walter Mondale sought to capture the White House from President Reagan. Mondale challenged the President for conducting “400 hours of so-called unofficial talks with Yasir Arafat and the PLO.” Both men campaigned on anti-PLO and pro-Israel positions. During a debate of the Vice Presidential candidates, George Bush stated that a “solution to the Palestine question” was important because it could contribute to a reduction in international terrorism. In a pre-election appearance at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Synagogue, Shultz declared: “When Libya and the PLO provide arms and training to the Communists in Central America, they are aiding Soviet-supported Cuban efforts to undermine our security. . . . The terrorists who assault Israel . . . are ideological enemies of the United States.” As it turned out, 70% of the Jewish vote went to Mondale. Still, Reagan did fairly well in politically and socially conservative Jewish districts.
Mixed Messages
Peres paid his first visit to the U.S. as prime minister in October seeking additional aid. As was customary, he also met with the Jewish leadership. But the “national unity government” played havoc with the Jewish leadership’s efforts to discern a consistent Israeli line on the peace process. American Jewish leaders who looked to Jerusalem for an understanding of Israeli concerns discovered that the Government was of two minds on most important issues, including: the substance of the Arab-Israel conflict; the question of Arab moderation; the disposition of the Administered Territories, and whether the PLO was capable of going through a political metamorphosis. Peres was quoted in the Labor Party newspaper Davar as saying he was “prepared to enter negotiations with King Hussein without any preconditions.” Regarding Likud opposition he said: “If Herut [the main faction of Likud] joins in, that is all right; and if it does not, that is tough luck.” He added that since his taking office no new settlements had been established.
After his re-election, Reagan expressed optimism that moderate Arab states would soon move to negotiate with Israel. The President pointed to a meeting between Representative Stephen Solarz, a staunchly pro-Israel Congressman, and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as indicative of the trend toward Arab moderation. The PLO itself, the President told an interviewer, was “now taking on the radical factions in their own midst that were pro-Syrian.” His liaison to the Jewish community, Marshall Breger, said the President’s second term would include no “surprises,” reminding an interviewer that Reagan had an “instinctive pro-Israel feeling.”
But Reagan’s optimism about PLO moderation seemed misplaced. At the PNC meeting held in Amman during November, the Palestinian Arabs again rejected U.N. Resolution 242 as a basis for peace. Moreover, they peppered their final statement with zero-sum rhetoric. The PNC called on “our countrymen in the occupied territory . . . from Galilee to Gaza . . . from Nablus to Jerusalem, from the Negev to al-Yarmuk,” to confront the U.S.-Zionist alliance. Disregarding the rhetoric, Jordan and Egypt issued a joint communique endorsing a role for the PLO in the peace process. A Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece by editor Robert L. Bartley argued it was now clear that “the Arab world is suddenly undergoing an outburst of moderation” with Arafat, “striking an alliance with Jordan and the moderates.” Indeed, Egypt reportedly conveyed to the U.S. Arafat’s conditions for recognizing Israel. Regardless of anything that was said in the hall, the perception of PLO moderation was bolstered because several of its constituent groups (Habash’s PFLP for instance) boycotted the Amman session.
Out of the limelight, the U.S. continued its discreet contacts with the PLO. An aide to Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy met with PLO Executive Committee member Fhad Kawasmeh (head of the occupied territories department). Earlier, Arafat authorized Palestinian-Arab Americans to negotiate with the Administration on his behalf.
Perceptually, the coming to power of Peres legitimized a chasm already present in the American Jewish-Israeli relationship. Peres brought good news and new possibilities. He confidently affirmed that there was a road which would lead to an accommodation with the Arabs – including the Palestinian Arabs. It would require abandoning Judea and Samaria if the right mix of conditions could be achieved. Thomas L. Friedman, the Times correspondent, reported that after 100 days in office, “Peres has come to represent . . . the so-called old liberal Israel.” Abba Eban remarked that “Peres’ tone is pragmatic and down to earth. He doesn’t brandish the Holocaust or appeal to biblical roots when making a point. The national style has changed.”
V
Perceptual Framework
At Camp David, Begin displayed a readiness to offer the Arab residents of Gaza, Judea and Samaria local autonomy. His policy was not contingent upon a change in Palestinian-Arab intentions. It did not require Israelis or their American Jewish supporters to alter their calculations about long-term Arab objectives. Peres’ willingness to work toward a deal with Palestinian Arabs from both inside as well as outside the Territories (and indirectly with the PLO under the aegis of Jordan) was predicated on redefining the conflict in non-zero-sum terms. Indeed, the Peres approach partially codified a re-categorization of the conflict. The struggle was no longer total nor was there any doubt that, at its core, the dispute was between Israel and the Palestinians, not Israel and the Arab states. Ironically, the “Palestinization” of the conflict was further underscored after Israeli aircraft flew to Tunis to bomb the PLO headquarters.
Labor’s hold on the Prime Minister’s Office in the “unity” Government made life considerably easier (though hardly carefree) for the Jewish leadership, since they were no longer at constant odds with the Administration over the peace process. But Labor in power did raise psychological issues of political consequence. Elements in the community had become skillful at arguing Israel’s absolute military need to retain Gaza, Judea and Samaria. The America-Israel Public Affairs Committee often referred to a “secret study” conducted by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff which concluded: “From a strictly military point of view, Israel would require the retention of some captured territory in order to provide militarily defensible borders.” And, while “land for peace” and the “Allon Plan” were part of an earlier mantra, the prospect of actually turning over even parts of the West Bank to an Arab authority was worrisome. Still, through a process of cognitive dissonance they could reassure themselves that Peres surely knew more about West Bank security issues than they did.
Meanwhile, the Jewish leadership’s self-image called on them to continue to oppose the sale of U.S. weapons to Arab countries including Jordan as well as any change in U.S. policy toward the PLO.
Key environmental factors
The issue that dominated the year 1985 was a proposed international peace conference. How would a Palestinian-Arab delegation be comprised? What safeguards would prevent the conference from becoming a substitute for direct talks between the parties? How could Israel be sure that the other participants would not “gang up” on her? And how could all these obstacles be overcome without incurring a PLO veto? All the while, differences within the Labor-Likud coalition over the desirability and nature of a conference were exploited by all parties. Likud viewed an international conference as the death knell of the Camp David process.
To the consternation of Foreign Minister Shamir, the internal opposition now had an ally in Shimon Peres. They disregarded Shamir’s wishes and, with the tacit approval of Prime Minister Peres, engaged in diplomacy with Mubarak regarding Israeli security issues. The political backdrop also contained new hints of moderation from Arafat, as well as a terrorist outrage that captured world attention. IDF forces, meanwhile, were beginning their phased pull-out from most of Lebanon.
Two events having nothing to do with the PLO issue debilitated the leadership’s ability to influence the peace process. Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew who was an analyst with the Naval Investigative Service, was arrested and charged with spying for Israel. This re-opened the nightmarish issue of dual loyalty. Second, the community was traumatized over an internal rift on the “Who is a Jew?” issue.
Several actors gained prominence in the course of 1985. Peres replaced Shamir at center stage. Bialkin replaced Berman. In addition, Ted Mann and Henry Siegman presented the case for the internal opposition. This opposition was now directed at the Likud half of the government.
Israel gradually began to lose physical control over parts of the West Bank during this period. One of the unintended consequences of the Lebanon conflict was that it monopolized and drained Israel’s intelligence and security apparatus. The resources available for monitoring the Territories were curtailed. Moreover, Israeli intelligence suffered grievous losses as a result of car bombings in Lebanon. To complicate matters even further, hundreds of convicted terrorists were returned to Judea and Samaria in a prisoner exchange with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. All this was in addition to the psychological signals the Arab residents of the areas were receiving regarding Labor’s interest in a partial pull-out.
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Administration criticism of Israel’s West Bank policies was now largely aimed at hampering Likud and bolstering Labor. The rescue and re-settlement of Ethiopian Jews prompted the Administration to call on Israel not to settle the new arrivals on the West Bank. In Israel, meanwhile, the left accelerated its activities. Six left-wing activists met with Arafat in Tunis in February. Their return prompted a debate over whether they should be tried for endangering national security.
The prospect of an international conference dominated the peace process agenda. Utilizing political suasion, the United States was able to confine discussion to the nature of Palestinian representation at an international conference. This strategic choice selection made any Likud objections to the very idea of an international conference a non-sequitur.
Shamir was suspicious of Jordanian and PLO efforts to establish a joint delegation to the conference. Jordan and the PLO reached a breakthrough agreement on the make-up of a joint delegation in February. The King told Shultz that the PLO would be “out at the beginning and in at the end” if they accepted U.S. conditions for a dialogue. The Likud leader regarded these efforts as tactical machinations aimed at fostering contact between the PLO and the United States. Shamir complained that the Arabs were proposing an international conference to avoid direct bilateral talks. To allay some of Shamir’s concerns, Shultz offered written assurances that the U.S. would only talk to the PLO if it recognized Israel’s right to exist and accepted U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. The Israelis had also been told that the U.S. would insist on direct talks between Israel and the Arabs.
Allusions of Arab willingness to accept Israel’s existence continued to be part of the perceptual environment. Saudi King Fahd’s very presence at the White House, to hear Reagan announce: “The security of Israel and other nations in the region and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people can and should be addressed in direct negotiations,” was deemed to be a conciliatory gesture. But Saudi radio said the visit “denies the Zionist lobby the opportunity of pressuring the American President for the benefit of the Israeli enemy.”
The Arab camp continued to lobby the U.S. for PLO inclusion in the peace process. Mubarak told a National Press Club gathering in Washington, D.C. that Arafat “is a very moderate man,” that the PLO “has now chosen the peace option,” and that the recent Jordanian-PLO pact was “unequivocal and unambiguous. . . . The principles embodied in the agreement are derived from . . . 242 and the Reagan initiative. What counts is substance not form. The said agreement leads inevitably to direct negotiations.” Still, Arafat continued to articulate a strident message to Arabic-speaking audiences. In March he declared: “My aim is to establish our political state on our Palestinian soil. . . . Let everyone hear me. Our land is Palestine and Jerusalem is our capital.”
Peres’ support for an international conference was conditioned on the idea that a largely ceremonial session would pave the way to direct bilateral talks. Both Peres and Shamir opposed PLO inclusion at an international conference (though with different degrees of intensity). Shamir was convinced that the Jordanian-PLO pact was a Trojan Horse. But King Hussein reiterated that Jordan would not participate in peace talks without the PLO. Moreover, Egypt and Jordan jointly called upon the United States to meet with the PLO.
Peres reacted to the Jordanian-PLO diplomatic maneuvers by offering to meet with a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation so long as it did not include Palestinian Arabs who were PLO members. The Reagan Administration took a similar line: a joint delegation would be unacceptable if it included members of the PLO. Understandably, Arafat denounced the American stance as hypocritical. “They called for an agreement between Arafat and King Hussein. But when we signed it, they asked us for more.” He insisted that the PLO would not accept “any conditions or limitations” on who could be sent to an international peace conference to represent the Palestinian Arabs. Though Egypt and Jordan asserted that Arafat had accepted U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, Arafat refused to say so explicitly.
Problems with finding the right modalities for Palestinian representation did not alter the fact that the U.S. remained committed to a solution that involved an exchange of land for peace and bringing the Palestinian Arabs into the peace process. At the core, Shultz viewed “autonomy talks” over “self-rule” as “transition talks” to “emphasize that further changes and negotiations were to come.” State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb said that despite the findings of Meron Benvenisti’s West Bank Data Project regarding the large numbers of Jews already residing in Judea and Samaria, it was still not too late to turn the lands over to the Arabs as part of a peace agreement. In an effort to overcome the hurdle of Palestinian representation, Richard Murphy presented Jordan with a list of potential non-PLO Palestinian negotiators who would be acceptable to both the PLO and Israel. The list was said to be under study by the PLO Executive Committee meeting in Baghdad. Murphy then went on to Israel where he met with Peres and Shamir as well as Arab leaders in the Administered Territories.
The desire to bring the Palestinian Arabs into the peace process was tempered by Shultz’s genuine frustration with the PLO. At around the time when Murphy was in the Middle East, Shultz told the Annual AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington that: “Those who chased illusions of ‘armed struggle,’ those who engage in terrorism ... have only brought death to innocents and prolonged the suffering of the Palestinian people. Such methods have achieved nothing constructive, and never will.” But Arafat remained steadfast in rejecting Murphy’s idea of non-PLO Palestinian participation.
A derivative of the attention the Palestinian cause achieved was its new-found support within the American political system. This backing now came from outside the province of traditional supporters of the Arab cause. As the perceptual environment shifted, support for Arab rights was no longer equated with opposition to Israel’s existence. Groups of visiting Congressmen now routinely included a session with Arafat as part of their Middle East itinerary. House Majority Leader Jim Wright (D-Texas) told the National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA) that Israel and the Palestinians should mutually recognize each other.
Reflecting the perceptual environment, liberal Democrats, who had been staunch supporters of the Israeli line, now placed great emphasis on solving the Palestinian problem. By mid-1985 they took for granted that the Palestinian-Arab conundrum was at the core of the Arab-Israel conflict. It was now conservative Republicans who seemed more sensitive to Israeli concerns as articulated by the Likud. For instance, several conservative senators and congressmen signed on to a memorandum drafted by Americans For A Safe Israel (AFSI) and written on the stationery of Sen. Jessie Helms (R-N.C). Addressed to the President, the letter said:
We are disturbed by the apparent re-emergence of the doctrine of “exchanging territories for peace.” We believe that there are two key elements of equal importance to the permanent security of Israel. The first is the maintenance of defensible geo-strategic borders, and the second is the development of positive and trustworthy relations between Israel and her Arab neighbors. . . . We also suggest that Israel’s historical and legal claims to Judea and Samaria be considered in any peace proposal. Eliminating Israel in stages is a widespread concept in the Arab world. The current diplomatic activity among Arab states may be a sincere attempt to abandon that concept; such a change ought to be welcomed. On the other hand, the demand that Israel leave Judea and Samaria to Arab rule may only be a prelude to the step-by-step dismantlement of Israel.
In the face of overwhelming odds, the American Jewish right was in no position to redirect the peace process. AFSI remained a peripheral player on the margins of Jewish organizational life. It had decided not to apply for Presidents Conference membership, describing itself as a pro-Israel but not Jewish organization. With all its structural limitations, until the early 1990s, AFSI was virtually the only organized voice of the American Jewish right.
The Israelis were united against bringing the PLO into the peace process. To bridge the chasm over PLO participation at an international conference, American policy-makers turned to the Palestine National Council (PNC) as an alternative to the PLO. Theoretically, one could be a member of the PNC but not of the PLO. In practice, the relationship between the PNC and the PLO was symbiotic. It was the PNC Charter (revised in July 1968) which called for the destruction of Israel. But the approach was consistent with the Administration’s strategy of facilitating entry and participation of the Palestinians into the peace process. Even if the PNC issue could be resolved, the Arafat-Hussein pact made no reference to direct bilateral negotiations. Officially, the U.S. denied that playing the PNC card was a way around its commitment not to negotiate with the PLO.
Jewish Community Acquiescent
The response of the organized Jewish community to these events reveals both paralysis and acquiescence. Several of the more powerful groups associated with the Presidents Conference were irresolute about how to proceed. The AIPAC-aligned Near East Report editorialized: “Jerusalem has accepted a liberal interpretation of who is and who is not a PLO member and therefore unacceptable for negotiations. It does not oppose U.S. dealings with Palestinians (even Palestine National Council members) if they do not support the PLO charter’s goal of eliminating Israel. . . .” In fact, Jerusalem was skeptical of the PNC scheme. Shamir’s position was that Palestinian-Arab negotiators “should not be members of the PLO, either officially, unofficially, or clandestinely, and they should not receive orders from the PLO.” There were those in the Jewish community who believed allowing the PNC scenario to play itself out might illuminate whether there were indeed moderate elements within the Palestinian movement prepared to negotiate with Israel. But it quickly became clear that despite their corrosive personal and party differences, Peres and Shamir both, at this stage at least, opposed the drift in U.S. policy regarding the PNC and an international conference. Like Shamir, Peres saw Jordan’s call for an international conference as “nothing more than a device to evade direct negotiations with Israel.”
The Presidents Conference was apparently unable to formulate a consensus position on the PNC alternative. The Jewish right was incensed with the failure of the Jewish leadership to respond publicly and forcefully to the prospect of an international conference with PNC participation. In mid-May they organized a protest rally outside the New York offices of the PLO. Several hundred demonstrators mostly associated with Americans For a Safe Israel (AFSI) and the Jewish Defense Organization (a Jewish Defense League splinter group) participated.
But now Peres began to waver in his objections to PNC participation. Consequently, Israel no longer had a unified foreign policy position. The U.S. reiterated its willingness to meet with non-PLO PNC members in early June. Peres responded that he too was willing to meet a non-PLO Jordanian-Palestinian delegation and would not “search the mind” of each delegate regarding his sentiments toward the PLO. The State Department did stress that even if the PLO said the requisite “magic words” it would not dictate with whom the Israelis should negotiate.
With the U.S. apparently backpedaling from its “no talk” with the PLO policy, Congress passed legislation codifying the 1975 Memorandum of Understanding. The legislation banned negotiations by American officials with the PLO, “so long as [it] does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, does not accept Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, and does not renounce the use of terrorism.”
Peres and the U.S. Jewish leadership were concerned about the pressure Israel was coming under to bring the PLO into the peace process. But they were also fearful about the long-term consequences of appearing intransigent. With Reagan’s tacit encouragement, King Hussein used a visit to Washington, in early June, to press the case for PLO participation. Bialkin’s response was to telegram the President – not about the Administration’s support for the Hussein-Arafat alliance – but urging the U.S. not to sell advanced weapons to Jordan. Israeli Ambassador Meir Rosenne told a Jewish audience in New York that the PLO and the PNC were one and the same. Defense Minster Rabin cautioned a National Press Club gathering in Washington that: “The PLO represents a philosophy and policy contradictory to the very existence of Israel.” Plainly, the Israelis believed that once a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation was stitched together, U.S.-PLO talks would follow naturally in its wake.
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Reagan offhandedly tied American support for Israel to the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 by Lebanese Shi’ite Arabs: “We seem to be a target also, I’m quite sure, because of our friendship and support of Israel.” Insinuating that the cost of U.S. support for Israel, especially an intransigent Israel, was excessive can be interpreted as a form of political suasion intended to capitalize on a crisis so as to extract concessions. If the American people were confused as to where to direct their wrath, columnist Richard Cohen of the Washington Post made it explicit: “The hijacking of TWA Flight 847 . . . can be traced to the establishment of the first Jewish settlements on the inhospitable dunes of what was later to become Tel Aviv.” The terrorists demanded the release of 700 prisoners being held in Israel in exchange for the safe release of the passengers. The incident generated reports, which the Presidents Conference denied, that the Administration had pressured the Jewish leaders to intervene with the Israelis.
Despite reaffirmation by American policy-makers throughout the early summer that they were set to use the PNC, as distinguished from the PLO, as a vehicle for Palestinian participation at an international conference, the Presidents Conference took no public position. Peres’ earlier hints about not delving too deeply into the past associations of potential delegates likely contributed to the leadership’s inertia. Confusing matters further, Peres joined Shamir in reiterating Israeli opposition to negotiating with PLO members. In mid-July, Shultz received a list of names reportedly submitted indirectly by the PLO for U.S. (and presumably Israeli) consideration. Peres initially rejected the list, then reversed himself and accepted two of the names. Obviously, this made any criticism of the Administration by the Presidents Conference impolitic.
Peres and Shamir, separately, lobbied Shultz on the composition of the joint delegation and sent conflicting messages as to how far Israel was willing to go to accommodate Jordan (which in turn was trying to oblige the PLO). Shultz dispatched Murphy to meet with members of the proposed Jordanian Palestinian-Arab delegation. But the August meeting never came off because King Hussein was adamant that an international conference, not direct bilateral talks, should follow any such meeting. At the same time most of the seven Palestinians on the list were openly identified with the PLO and Reagan insisted that the U.S. adhere to its “no talk” policy.
On the surface Labor and Likud were in agreement about excluding the PLO. They even cooperated on a Knesset bill explicitly barring contacts between Israeli citizens and the PLO. In practice, the parties were deeply divided. Though Labor was skeptical of PLO assertions of moderation, Peres stood ready to meet with pro-PLO Palestinian-Arabs who were not publicly tied to the PLO. He might criticize Arafat for “a double policy. Talk peace in Jordan, kill people in Israel.” But Peres hoped Arafat would not make the same mistake of Haj Amin al-Husseini (the Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1940s) who led the Palestinian Arabs away from coexistence. Likud’s stance was of a different order entirely. Shamir’s assessment was that the PLO was merely engaging in tactical maneuvers and that its incontrovertible raison d’etre remained “to wipe Israel from the map.” This cleavage obviously made consensus within the American Jewish leadership unachievable.
Israeli-PLO Contacts
The distinction between Israel’s willingness to deal with the PLO on such issues as the release of POWs while rejecting diplomatic contacts was sketched out earlier. In September 1985, a story circulated that Israel may have been on the verge of contacts with the PLO which straddled the functional-diplomatic divide. The account alleged that several years earlier Arie Marinski, a senior aide to Defense Minster Moshe Arens, planned to invite Issam Sartawi to Jerusalem for face-to-face talks on a prisoner exchange. The symbolic importance of having Sartawi visit Jerusalem for the talks, which could more easily have been conducted elsewhere, is readily apparent.
Shultz continued to signal the PLO that it could be part of the peace process if only it moved away from violence and met U.S. conditions. He repeatedly met with Hussein to see if some arrangement could be worked out, with or without the PLO, for Palestinian representation. On September 30th, he took the King to see the President:
The session was bizarre. The king again urged that the process go forward and said that if the PLO would not meet the U.S. conditions and thus could not participate, he would go forward without the PLO. Instantly, Jordanian Prime Minister Zaid Rifai raised a host of objections. I could see that there was no coherent Jordanian position and that there would not be one. We got nowhere.
Publicly, Reagan praised the King for “moving steadily and courageously forward in the search for peace.” During 1985, lack of coherence was not limited to the Arab side. Conflicting signals from Jerusalem and policy variations within the Jewish leadership contributed to ennui at the Presidents Conference. Opposition to the State Department’s focus on the Palestinian Arabs and the “land for peace” formula coalesced outside the Presidents Conference, mostly around Americans For A Safe Israel (AFSI).
Internal Opposition
With the Presidents Conference split on how to deal with the peace process, Likud critics took the political suasion initiative. NJCRAC’s Ted Mann and Henry Siegman of the AJCongress traveled to Cairo for talks with Mubarak. Shamir viewed the meeting as an effort by some Jewish groups to manipulate the direction of the peace process. Mann and Siegman were well known, at the Presidents Conference, for their criticism of the Likud line. Shamir’s wariness of the Jewish leaders was matched by his mistrust of Egypt. Mubarak had long been lobbying for PLO partnership in the peace process and his wooing of American Jewish leaders exasperated Shamir. But Peres, who likely gave tacit endorsement for the Cairo meeting, said nothing. The Presidents Conference had little choice but to ignore events in Cairo altogether. The only consensus it could muster was opposition to a newly proposed sale of arms to Jordan. Several days later, Mubarak assured Reagan that the PLO had already implicitly met American conditions for a dialogue and would go even further once negotiations started.
Tunis Raid
Peres was engaged in a political suasion game of his own as circumstances presented themselves. Earlier, he said he would not “search the minds” of prospective PLO-aligned peace conference delegates. He tacitly went along with Egypt’s efforts to co-opt the PLO into the peace process. But he could demonstrate toughness as well. In retaliation for the murder of three Israelis on a yacht in Cyprus and a steep increase in attacks in the Administered Territories, IAF jets raided the Tunis operations headquarters of the PLO, killing 30 to 50 terrorists and staff. Peres declared that the PLO would not be allowed to carry out terrorist attacks while talking about peace. The U.S. termed the raid “legitimate” and called for an end to the cycle of violence. A day later it called the attack “understandable.” The U.S. had encouraged Tunisia to accept some PLO personnel evacuated from Beirut in 1982. But it was not anticipated that the PLO would set up a headquarters for “terrorist operations.” Shultz recalls: “I wanted in some way to reach out to Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba and his government. When the inevitable resolution came up in the Security Council denouncing Israel, though having no practical effect, I was among those who recommended . . . that the United States abstain rather than veto the resolution.” Predictably, the Presidents Conference protested the United States abstention. Later, as a sign of even-handedness, the U.S., together with several Western allies, lobbied successfully to prevent Arafat from visiting the U.N. But American signals toward the PLO continued to be muddled. That same month, the Palestine Liberation Front, a PLO faction led by Abul Abbas, hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achielo Lauro. Reagan expressed the hope that the PLO itself would bring the hijackers to justice. Arafat, meantime, disassociated himself from the hijacking though his staff was able to help resolve it.
Peres continued to explore ways of accommodating a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation while opposing PLO participation. At a U.N. speech, he recommended that direct talks “be initiated with the support of an international forum.” Even as Likud ministers back in Jerusalem were denouncing Peres for making the speech without consulting the Cabinet, the Reagan Administration called Peres’ proposals “statesmanlike, thoughtful and forward-looking.” Hussein rejected the Peres overtures. But the King did call on the PLO to abandon its terrorist activities, saying terrorist attacks had been “terrible setbacks” in his efforts to include the PLO in the peace process. And, he reiterated that Arafat had to be part of any Middle East peace talks.
Labor-PLO Moving Closer
Without explicitly giving the Americans what they wanted, Arafat plainly tried to accommodate U.S. demands that he publicly renounce terrorism and accept Israel’s right to exist. In November 1985, with Mubarak at his side, Arafat condemned “All outside operations and all forms of terrorism.” But he said the PLO retained the right “to fight against Israeli occupation in all possible ways.” The State Department, understandably, found this commitment “inadequate” in meeting U.S. policy requirements for direct talks with the PLO.
By year’s end, it had become fairly well established that the Labor-Likud “marriage” was dysfunctional. Labor was now embracing an almost identical stance toward the PLO as the Americans. Peres was ready to settle for a temporary state of nonbelligerency with Jordan as an interim step; peace talks under international auspices; a Soviet role in the process; and the participation of PLO-aligned representatives whose ties to the movement would not be scrutinized. But Peres may have gone even further. Israel Radio reported that Peres had consented to allowing the United States to drop the criterion that the PLO accept Israel’s right to exist. He said Israel did not need the PLO’s approval for its existence. Observers pointed to the State Department’s most recent statement on the PLO, which listed three requirements: (1) acceptance of U.N. Security Resolutions 242 and 338; (2) abandonment of terrorism; and (3) readiness to negotiate with Israel. This apparent change in U.S. policy seemed to presage direct U.S.-PLO contacts. The United States responded to these hints, in its usual way, by denying a shift in policy. But clearly, something was afoot. Some days later, Peres expressed appreciation of Egyptian efforts to pressure the PLO into renouncing terrorism. Mubarak’s message to the Americans remained constant: “Like it or not” the PLO represents the Palestinians and should, therefore, be invited to participate in the peace process. Somewhat paradoxically, it was Shultz who criticized European countries for legitimizing the PLO before it formally changed its policies.
This was the political backdrop when a 75-member delegation from the Presidents Conference visited Israel early in December. But their focus was not on hints of a shift in U.S. or Labor policy. Much of their attention was directed at internal communal discord over the “Who is a Jew?” issue. Assistant Secretary of State Murphy was also in Israel, this time successfully meeting with nine Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza in fruitless pursuit of Palestinian-Arab participation in the peace process. The State Department downplayed Murphy’s meeting. There was no apparent reaction from the visiting Presidents Conference delegation regarding possible PLO connections of the nine. Upon his return to New York, at the end of the year, Bialkin simply made a broad plea for an end to the scourge of terrorism.
Dual-Loyalty and Jewish Insecurity
The arrest (and subsequent conviction) of Jonathan Jay Pollard, a Jewish navy counterintelligence analyst, and his wife Ann Henderson Pollard, on November 21, 1985 on charges of spying for Israel had profound consequences for Diaspora-Israel relations. Details of the case are provided by Emanuel A. Winston:
Pollard . . . had obtained and transferred to Israel such information as Arab troop movements; data on Libyan air defenses enabling Israel to bomb the PLO headquarters in Tunis; information and performance analysis of Soviet deliveries of military equipment to Arab client states; status of nuclear weapons being developed by Pakistan with funding from Arab states; location of Syrian and Iraqi poison gas facilities and sources of that equipment in West Germany, etc. (Pollard was motivated by ideological reasons, but later agreed to accept payment from the Israelis.). . .
The affair opened a virtual Pandora’s box. The possibility that as many as 40 Americans were suspected of spying for Israel over the years was rehashed in the media. Rumors of a wider conspiracy also continued to receive press attention. For many in the Jewish establishment, the Pollard case was, in the words of the AJCommittee’s Hyman Bookbinder, a “watershed event.” Jill Amy Higer, who studied the dual loyalty issue, writes:
Bookbinder feels the Pollard case raised some of the most critical questions first posed when Zionism was born regarding the relationship between a Diaspora Jew and an Israeli Jew.” “Up until Pollard we haven’t been compelled much to address this question,” writes Bookbinder. “We had some differences between us and Israel, but never before a situation where we were required to make a decision between loyalty to Israel and to America.” According to Bookbinder, the most disturbing aspect was Pollard’s insistence that he did it because he was a Jew and a friend of Israel and therefore it was somehow incumbent upon him to steal documents. In essence, he says, what Pollard’s defense suggests is that “if you are a Jew and a Zionist and a friend of Israel, it is incumbent upon you to do these anti-American kinds of things.” Moreover, Bookbinder feels this “logic” has caused many American Jewish leaders, who previously refrained from publicly dissenting on issues pertaining to Israel, to join in criticism. . . . With some hindsight, it appears that the Pollard affair may have had more of an effect on the relationship between the Diaspora and Israel than on the relationship between the Israeli and United States governments. Indeed, perhaps more than any incident in the past decade, the Pollard case served as a disturbing reminder of the endemic potential for tension between the American Jewish community and the State of Israel. Most seriously, the Pollard case once again raised the dual-loyalty specter.
In a poll taken in 1987, 54% of Jews and 34% of non-Jews said the Pollard spy case and Israeli involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal would cause anti-Semitism to increase in the United States. Commenting on these feelings of insecurity, Shlomo Avineri, former director-general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and a Laborite, wrote:
In the Pollard case . . . a degree of nervousness, insecurity and even cringing on the part of the American Jewish community which runs counter to the conventional wisdom of American Jewry feeling free, secure and unmolested in an open and pluralistic society . . . we see some senior American Jewish leaders falling over each other in condemning Pollard and distancing themselves – and the Jewish community – from him. . . .
They would also have liked to distance themselves from being guardians of the 1975 “no talk” commitment. They were psychologically drained from the AWACS battle, Andrew Young Affair, Lebanon War and now the Pollard scandal. Jewish leaders sought to avoid confrontation with the Administration as best as they could. With a divided Israeli government sending equivocal often conflicting signals about PLO intentions and the future of the West Bank, the Presidents Conference was relegated to a static defense of the 1975 pledge.
VI
The Year of the non-PLO Palestinians
Perceptual Framework
Disraeli’s adage that “The secret of success is constancy of purpose” could hardly be attributed to the American Jewish leadership. But it very much describes PLO objectives during 1986. Their singular purpose was to block efforts aimed at circumventing the organization. Still, the PLO was not able to parlay worldwide support for the Palestinians into a place at the negotiating table.
For the Jewish leadership, the categorization of the conflict was now well established as non-zero-sum and rooted solidly in the struggle between the Palestinians and Israelis. The community remained indirectly influenced by the activities of the Israeli left which continued their periodic contacts with the PLO.
Self-Image
The Jewish leadership viewed its role as providing earnest support for Labor’s goals. Not since mid-1977 did they feel this comfortable championing the pro-Israel cause. With Peres’ ascendancy as prime minister they had renewed hope for improving Israel’s image and their own standing in the political system. The perception that most of the mainstream leadership held of the PLO was unchanged. Since it seemed that PLO intransigence was blocking progress toward conflict resolution, they embraced Peres’ maxim: “The PLO without a solution or a solution without the PLO.”
The political environment was dominated by persistent American efforts to demonstrate empathy toward the Palestinian-Arab cause, while maintaining a carrot-and-stick approach toward the PLO. “The Palestinian problem is more than a refugee problem,” the State Department typically declared, “there should be no confusion between Resolution 242 and the legitimate rights of the Palestinians.” In this context the leadership’s consistent goal was not to endorse, in broad strokes, the emphasis on the Palestinian angle. With a wink and nod from Labor they now positively supported the American approach. Peres endorsed a scheme for unilateral autonomy; Eban warned that the Administered Territories would become another Lebanon; and “secret” diplomacy between Labor and Jordan continued. None of this went far enough as far as the peace camp was concerned. Outside the Presidents Conference, left-wing activists engaged in an influential drive on behalf of PLO inclusion in the peace process regardless of whether it met U.S. conditions for a dialogue. From the opposite end of the Jewish political spectrum other considerably less influential activists lobbied against the American Jewish leadership’s shift toward Labor.
For the most part the central cast of characters remained the same. The most noteworthy change was that Morris Abram, whose philosophical ties were with the AJCommittee, became Presidents Conference chair. Also, Yehuda Hellman, the influential Presidents Conference executive director, died. A magazine, Tikkun, established itself as a wellspring for peace-camp and outside elite criticism of the leadership’s cautious embrace of the Palestinian cause. Tikkun advocated a direct PLO role in the peace process.
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Following the line established by Peres, the Presidents Conference pursued meetings with U.S.-based foreign ambassadors to protest their countries’ embrace of the PLO. Overall, there was an essential harmony between the Presidents Conference stance and the position of the Administration. Early in the year, Reagan reiterated that the United States wanted a solution to the Palestinian problem but would not negotiate with the PLO. With no evident complaint from the Jewish leadership, the Administration, however, sought to refashion the PLO; to entice it into making the necessary concessions so that direct U.S.-PLO negotiations could commence.
It was precisely this willingness to embrace the non-zero-sum analysis that angered the American Jewish right. Opposition to Palestinian-Arab claims to Judea and Samaria, the idea of Palestinian centrality and the Administration’s disassociation policy, prompted Americans For A Safe Israel into launching a petition drive demanding that PLO officials be ousted from the United States.
Jordan’s announcement that Arafat had frustrated King Hussein’s efforts to bring the PLO into the peace process was received in Israel with relief. Despite his ostensible flexibility Prime Minister Peres articulated, in stark terms, the choice Israel was offering the Palestinians: “The PLO without a solution or a solution without the PLO.” Peres also chided the Americans for their efforts to coax the PLO toward the peace process as a “total failure.” He suggested that Israel might now go ahead with a “unilateral autonomy” scheme, but this was opposed by both Defense Minister Rabin and Foreign Minister Shamir of Likud.
American efforts to cajole the PLO into changing its position had largely been the work of Special Envoy Wat Cluverius, who held meetings in Jerusalem with Hanna Seniora and Faez Abu Rahma. They, in turn, reported to Arafat. The United States had conditionally invited the PLO to participate in the peace process if it accepted U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. The PLO was also expected to forswear terrorism and agree to negotiate with Israel. This invitation was later clarified to include the proviso that Israel’s agreement would be needed before the PLO could participate in an international conference.
Even as the Administration proceeded with its efforts to bring Arafat to the peace table, some in the organized Jewish leadership were fruitlessly lobbying the Justice Department to indict the PLO leader on murder charges. Notwithstanding Jordan’s frustration with Arafat or the desire of Labor and the American Jewish leadership to find alternatives to the PLO, the U.S. courted PLO participation The State Department declared that, “The Palestinian problem is more than a refugee problem . . . there should be no confusion between Resolution 242 and the legitimate rights of the Palestinians.” Some Arabs saw the remark as linking the Palestinian-Arab cause with 242. The phrase “legitimate rights” is often interpreted by the Arab side as synonymous with the establishment of a Palestinian state though both the U.S. and Israel reject that inference. Other unofficial messages reinforced the perception that the PLO was a potentially suitable partner in the peace process.
Sanitizing the PLO’s image sometimes involved besmirching Israel’s. In March, one State Department official asserted that both the PLO and Israel were guilty of terrorism. Earlier, scholarly journals associated with the Palestinian-Arab cause had developed the idea of “state terrorism” to counter criticism of terror group violence. Still, American frustration with the PLO, publicly articulated, was now a regular feature of Administration policy. State Department spokesman Charles Redman complained that the PLO was responsible for the breakdown in the peace process even as, in Jerusalem, Murphy was holding meetings with PLO-aligned Arabs. There was a sense of frustration that, with Shamir set to take over the “unity” government for two years, time was running out on bringing the PLO into the peace process. According to Shultz, this frustration was shared by at least some in the pro-Israel community.
One of Israel’s most powerful and most articulate friends in Congress telephoned me. His words revealed the agonies that this moment brought forward. “It’s a critical moment,” he said. “The door will slam soon, and when it does, Israel is doomed. There are two years of the Likud ahead, and there’s no turning back. Israel either stops being a Jewish state or stops being a democracy – and either is a catastrophe.” The congressman said he hated the PLO but that we should tell King Hussein that if the PLO accepted the conditions, we would be ready to see them at the international conference. “The king can’t move without them,” he said. He urged that I give the PLO something on the self-determination issue by agreeing to the words within the framework of the PLO-Jordanian February 11, 1985, accord. “If I said this publicly, I’d have to resign,” he said.
U.S. policy remained remarkably consistent insofar as the West Bank was concerned: Israel was epected to give up the land. What would happen afterwards was less clear. The popular wisdom in 1986 was that, if some variation of a Jordanian-Palestinian solution could not be found, the area could come under Palestinian “functional autonomy.” This was the Peres-favored approach.
Disassociation, it will be recalled, required a strong U.S. commitment to Israel on non-West Bank security issues. Reagan’s assurances to Jewish leaders that the United States would not sell weapons to Arab countries that could threaten Israel’s security, should be seen as part of the disassociation framework. At the White House in March he told the Presidents Conference that Israel was “that lonely outpost of democracy in the Middle East.”
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Notwithstanding his public stance, rumors circulated that Peres was exploring the possibility of contacts with the PLO. Some tied a Peres visit to Germany with Uri Avnery’s use of a German passport to enter Jordan for talks with PLO elements. Regardless of its veracity, the report must have left the U.S. Jewish leadership hesitant and uncertain. The non-zero-sum message permeated the political environment. Elsewhere, for example, a group of Palestinan Arabs said they would begin resisting the Israeli presence in the West Bank with a Gandhi-like campaign of non-violence. Then there was the suggestion by Morocco’s King Hassan that the Arabs select “someone” to meet with Israel (an overture Peres accepted).
There is a symbiotic relationship between Israeli and American Jewish public opinion on Arab-Israel security issues. But in the final analysis, only Israeli opinion can make a particular course of action kosher. If Israelis opposed retention of the Territories it made it that much easier and legitimate for American Jews to do so. Thus another influential signal was sent to American Jewry when Peace Now activists and West Bank Arabs rallied together in Hebron against retention of the Territories. That Peace Now and Labor now shared a close relationship was equally significant.
Eban’s Transformation
Within Labor there was, as has been noted, much negative talk about the PLO, out of frustration with its refusal to join the peace process more than anything else. “Peace without the PLO or the PLO without peace,” Peres had warned the Palestinian Arabs. But having determined that Israel would one day cede control over the land (in a form to be decided), the Arabs shrewdly took a wait-and-see approach.
The message that Israel would be best served by abandoning Gaza, Judea and Samaria was one that still had to be marketed to American Jewish audiences. They had been inculcated with the belief that secure and defensible borders were synonymous with retention of the Territories. Still, if Abba Eban, one of Israel’s leading statesmen and a popular figure with American Jewry, could change his mind so could most American Jews. Eban made the case that, given the large Arab population in the Territories, Israel could not afford to retain them. He stopped short of advocating talks with the PLO because the group had yet to publicly abandon its stand opposing Israel’s existence. Still, Eban told a gathering of major UJA contributors that the Areas could become another Lebanon. For many American Jews, Eban was the “voice of Israel.” His embrace of the non-zero-sum analysis, as well as his championing of the Palestinian cause, lent stature and legitimacy to the message. Eban’s shifting views are a microcosm of how changing perceptions can affect fundamental positions. This is illustrated by Robert St. John’s description of Eban’s meeting with LBJ on the eve of the Six Day War:
Eban opened by saying that Israel had never before had a moment like this. The country was in a state of anxious expectancy. He had come to discuss the question of the blockade, but meanwhile an even graver situation had arisen – the reports from Jerusalem – “a total assault on Israel’s existence.”
Gradually, but especially in the post-Lebanon era, Eban’s appraisal of the nature of the struggle altered dramatically. He wrote: “To be or not to be is not Israel’s question. How and what to be is the question. The existence of statehood was never the whole of the Zionist ambition.” In 1982 Eban, the affluent Stanley Sheinbaum of Los Angeles, and others established the International Center for Peace in the Middle East (ICPME). Embittered by the loss of his Knesset seat in 1988, Eban moved to a New York hotel and spends his time writing and lecturing in the United States. In Personal Witness published in 1992, after the opening of the Israel-Arab talks in Madrid, Eban wrote:
Sovereignty must be both respected and transcended. I suggest a community arrangement on the European or Benelux model under which Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians could each enjoy independence in agreed territorial spheres. . . . A Palestine state that could do exactly as it liked would arouse serious reservations in all sectors of Israeli opinion. But a Palestine self-governing entity, perhaps confederated with Jordan, that would accept community constraints and a coordinated security policy would pose a lesser threat than Israel faces in the present volcanic situation. The idea that national freedom is indispensable for Bosnia Herzegovina while military rule is reasonable for the Palestinian people defies all logic. Since 1967 the issue has always been how to reconcile Israeli security with Palestinian freedom. This cannot be achieved without an integrative process in the relations between the peoples that inhabit the Land of Israel.
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Peres worked feverishly, using “quiet diplomacy” with Hussein in an attempt to achieve a territorial accommodation for the West Bank. He dispatched Minister without Portfolio Ezer Weizmann, known for his “dovish” views, to meet with U.S. officials. These sessions were conducted without the presence of the Likud-appointed Israeli ambassador. All this in anticipation of October when the rotation deal called for Shamir to become prime minister and Peres foreign minister.
Yehuda Hellman
On May 18, the Presidents Conference suffered a major loss with the death of its top professional, Yehuda Hellman, at 66 years of age. Hellman had been with the Presidents Conference for 25 years serving as the group’s executive vice president.
In June 1986, Morris Abram was elected to head the Presidents Conference, replacing Bialkin. A former President of the AJCommittee and chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, the 68-year-old Abram had held a number of prestigious communal positions. Concurrently, the Presidents Conference replaced Hellman with Malcolm Hoenlein, the founding Executive Director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York (the main umbrella group for local New York Jewish organizations). Some weeks later Abram and Hoenlein flew to Israel for meetings with top government officials.
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The Administration maintained its carrot-and-stick approach toward the PLO. Shultz made it clear that Arafat “should not come to the United States” to try to attend the U.N. Security Council debate set for late June.
Between Bad and Worse
The publication in Israel of Yehoshafat Harkabi’s influential Israel’s Fateful Hour presented supporters of territorial withdrawal, in both Israel and the United States where an English edition was brought out in 1988, with a cogent line of argument. A former chief of military intelligence, Harkabi began calling for the abandonment of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, in his words “the Zionism of acreage,” in 1982. In Israel’s Fateful Hour, Harkabi made an all-encompassing argument that crystallized the dangers of retaining Gaza and the West Bank. The subsequent English edition invited American Jewish criticism of Likud policies:
Israel must withdraw from the occupied territories with their growing Arab population. . . . The settlement of the conflict cannot be by symmetrical compromises, with both parties offering commensurate concessions, because the situation is asymmetrical: Israel dominates areas thickly inhabited by Palestinians. . . . Israel will inevitably have to negotiate with the PLO. There is no hope of a local Arab leadership distancing itself from the PLO. . . . By describing the PLO as a basically terrorist organization we criminalize it and thus, unwittingly, criminalize the whole Palestinian community. . . .
Jews in the West, particularly in the United States, should participate in this debate. They should not be squeamish and discouraged by the fear that the arguments they air may help their enemies or those of Israel. The choice facing them, as well as Israel, is not between good and bad, but between bad and worse. Criticizing Israeli policies may be helping the enemies of Israel and Jews in general, but refraining from criticism and allowing Israel to maintain its wrong policy is incomparably worse. . . .
I am frequently asked how and why my position has changed. My answer is that mostly it came as a result of changes in the situations and positions of the Arab states and of the Palestinian people and their leaders, rather than of any changes in my outlook. . . .
Jews, especially in the United States, are disposed to liberalism. When liberal public opinion is critical of Israel they experience a cognitive dissonance, and this gnaws at their Jewish identity. The future of the reputation of the Jewish people throughout the world now depends on Israel’s good name and international stature. More than any other state, Israel is a hostage to world public opinion. Israelis must remember this. We Israelis must be careful lest we become not a source of pride for Jews but a distressing burden. . . .
Israel faces a moment of truth, a fateful hour. My main message is this: let us think about our situation seriously. In Israel and in the Diaspora we need debate on the issues I have raised. I do not come to impose a line but only to propose one for consideration.
Tikkun
Tikkun magazine, founded in June 1986, answered Harkabi’s challenge. While virtually every Jewish periodical was of a liberal bent, Tikkun’s mission was unique. It was founded to challenge Jewish neoconservatives because, coincidentally, they served as the intellectual base for Likud policies in the United States. Journalist and political historian E.J. Dionne explains: “Neoconservatism represented the defection of an important and highly articulate group of liberals to the other side. Precisely because they knew liberalism from the inside, the neoconservatives were often more effective than the old conservatives at explaining what was wrong with the liberal creed.” The Public Interest was one of the most important neoconservative publications in the U.S. However, Tikkun’s grievance against the “neo-cons” was not rooted in the public policy arena but in the hills of Samaria and Judea. Toward that end, Tikkun set its sights on the other “neo-con” flagship publication and made its raison d’etre to be “an alternative to Commentary because Commentary was the spokesperson for the view that liberal politics were out of step and disloyal to the Jewish world.” Tikkun challenged Commentary’s realpolitik with unreconstructed liberal utopianism. Promotional material for the magazine explained: “Tikkun is a Hebrew word meaning: to heal, repair and transform the world.”
The glossy bimonthly magazine spanned divisions connecting a number of Jewish political camps: peace activists, elements of the internal opposition and some elements of the outside elite. Many of the people involved with the New Jewish Agenda and other groups favoring PLO participation in the peace process began to coalesce around Tikkun. The Tikkun coalition even included former opponents of the peace camp, people like Arthur Hertzberg, Albert Vorspan and Leonard Fein, who in earlier years had been critical of Breira (a precursor to the New Jewish Agenda and Tikkun ideology). Now, these players constituted the outside elite or (in Vorspan’s case) internal opposition and found common cause with other Jewish critics of Israeli policies. Tikkun challenged the Presidents Conference to openly criticize Israel’s policies. Its editor charged that Presidents Conference organizations “don’t even understand how out of touch they are because they surround themselves with people just like themselves. They have made their religion the religion of blind support for Israel.” Tikkun wrote: “Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza [is] immoral and stupid.” Most importantly, the coalition built around Tikkun gave the peace camp a desperately sought-after sense of legitimacy. The “silencing” of Breira and the New Jewish Agenda because of their radical views was gradually ending.
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Political Clout
In the wake of the Pollard affair, U.S. investigators began probing separate allegations that Israel sought to purloin American cluster-bomb technology. Perhaps it was a sense that the Jewish community was under psychological siege that motivated Abram’s enigmatic allegations that “lower echelons” in the Administration were seeking to weaken the de-factor alliance between Israel and the United States.
Abram’s overall assessment of the political clout of the Presidents Conference was generally positive, though he was candid about its limitations:
The Presidents Conference is a collection of elected heads of American Jewish organizations. It takes its direction from them and tries to express the will and opinions of this community. The American Jewish community is a vital functioning of American democracy and it has a certain influence – as it should have – upon American policy makers. It is not pretentious enough to say it’s a shaper of policy, but it adds its influence to elements that shape policy. It does it openly, as others do in a free society. The Presidents Conference has some influence, for instance, in shaping of the ultimate arms-package to Saudi Arabia recently. But we were not the sole shapers of the policy. There were scores of senators and congressmen who joined believing that certain weapons, such as the Stinger missiles, should not be sold to the Saudis out of fear that they might end up in the hands of terrorists.
Palestinian Aspirations
The well-entrenched policy of offering vague-sounding symbolic statements intended to assuage unease within the pro-Israel community while maintaining an overall strategy aimed at satisfying Arab aspirations for Israeli withdrawal from the territories captured in the 1967 Six Day War was maintained. In early August, for instance, Vice President Bush said that he did not want to see Jerusalem divided. Actually, the U.S. consistently opposed Israeli sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem (including pre-1967 West Jerusalem) in the absence of Arab acquiescence. During his visit to Jerusalem Bush met privately with Palestinian Arabs. He reiterated long-standing U.S. conditions for bringing the PLO into the negotiating process. Bush said that “negotiations must take into account the security needs of Israel, the security needs of all other states in the region and the aspirations of the Palestinian people.” Bush was not alone. Dovish elements within the Labor Party led by Secretary General Uzi Baram were also calling for Palestinian self-determination. Peres was slightly more circumspect but his goal was to turn over administrative control of Judea and Samaria to Arab authority.
Labor elements and American policy emphasized the Palestinian issue, while using the Jordanian option to circumvent an intransigent PLO. Israel and Jordan were supposedly working together to diminish PLO influence in the West Bank. Meanwhile, U.S. officials were, for the first time, funneling $4.5 million in aid for West Bank Arabs through Jordan. Jordan’s own see-saw relationship with the PLO was on the upswing. King Hussein allowed some of the 25 PLO offices he had ordered closed only weeks earlier to resume operations. Peres made it clear that he could be persuaded to attend an international conference with (non-PLO) Palestinian participation, adding that this did not imply acceptance of Palestinian statehood. Shamir, due to become Prime Minister in a matter of weeks, emphasized his opposition to an international conference. Naturally, in this atmosphere, the Presidents Conference had no interest in challenging the direction of the U.S.-led peace process.
Arafat announced, somewhat disingenuously, that Israel need not turn over the West Bank and Gaza directly to the PLO. He recommended that Israel relinquish the area to the U.N. which would then presumably hand it over to the PLO. Arafat explained his tactics to an Arab-language publication: “Sometimes we deem it necessary to intensify our military action and on other occasions we might deem it necessary to intensify our media campaigns, political action, or diplomatic efforts according to the circumstances and the stages of our struggle.”
That despite concerted American efforts to woo the PLO into the peace process, Arafat continued to insinuate a zero-sum approach to the conflict, continued to frustrate the Administration. As a confidence building measure, the Carter Administration decided in 1978 to allow the PLO to maintain its Palestine Information office (PIO) in Washington, D.C. The PIO was funded by the PLO in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. In early October 1986 Edwin Meese, Counselor to the President, told the Presidents Conference that the Justice Department was “probing” the situation. Ultimately, the State Department concluded that keeping the PLO office open did not conflict with the country’s opposition to terror or its official policy regarding contacts with the PLO. The intelligence community reportedly urged the Justice Department to allow the office to remain open rather than go underground. A State Department spokesman explained that in any event: “The PLO is an umbrella organization which includes some terrorists and some organizations that foster terrorism, but also includes the Palestinian version of the Red Cross and a bar association.” In the American analysis the PLO revealed both “violent” and “diplomatic” elements. So, for instance, after a PLO attack against IDF soldiers and their families attending a ceremony outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem (the father of one of the soldiers was killed and 69 others were injured), the State Department criticized: “All those elements in and out of the PLO who have asserted responsibility.”
Intellectuals on the Israeli left did not share U.S. and Labor Party reservations about open dealings with the PLO. Arafat’s refusal to formally embrace a non-zero-sum stance was written off as a self-imposed and inconsequential stumbling block. A delegation of Leftists traveled to Bucharest, in November, for a symposium which included members of the PLO. Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu’s efforts to orchestrate “a larger political context” did not succeed. Nevertheless, the brief session further bolstered the perception that the struggle had entered a radically new phase. The sense that times were changing was further underscored when two PLO supporters appeared on Israel television to condemn the stabbing of an Israeli civilian.
Insecurity
American Jewish insecurity made it that much more unlikely that U.S. policy on the Palestinian Arabs would be challenged. Labor Party and State Department policies appeared, at any rate, to be in sync. And the leadership was in no position to do anything but swallow its doubts about Palestinian intentions. American Jews had their own problems. If their self-confidence had been shaken in 1985 by the Pollard affair, 1986 left the community reeling not only from the Iran-Contra affair but also from the Ivan Boesky humiliation. As the American Jewish Year Book explains: “Another concern was potential anti-Semitism. Earlier in 1986 New York City had been rocked by political scandals involving Jewish officeholders. There was fear that Boesky’s downfall, by attracting even more attention to Jewish dishonesty in the metropolis, might provide potent ammunition to bigots, especially in the South and West, who were predisposed against big cities, Jews, and Wall Street.”
Ending With Disassociation
At year’s end, the U.S. abstained as the U.N. Security Council condemned Israel for its handling of a new outbreak of West Bank violence. Defense Minister Rabin complained that media depictions of the violence were skewed ignoring the fact that the PLO had incited the violence. But the United States was not interested in the origins of this latest cycle of violence. For American policy makers the only possible solution remained Israeli withdrawal.
VII
Perceptual Framework
Nothing much changed with regard to the categorization of the conflict during 1987. The perception of the struggle remained well-entrenched along non-zero-sum parameters. Belief that the conflict was communal driven was widely embraced.
The Presidents Conference, under Abram’s leadership, was reticent in its public statements on the Palestinian issue. No doubt many in the Presidents Conference hoped Peres would somehow find a modus vivendi with the Palestinians regardless of Likud objections. Others, such as the Anti-Defamation League, wanted to leave the entire matter to the Israelis themselves. The dominant American Jewish-PLO milestone was a meeting held between Arafat and a peace camp delegation (comprised of Jerome Segal and several New Jewish Agenda activists) in Tunis.
An alternative Jewish self-image had begun to emerge. Outside the Presidents Conference, the peace camp took a proactive stance. They too actively supported Labor’s flexible approach to the peace process. But they felt Labor was not going far enough. Segal’s Arafat meeting was intended to pave the way for Israel-PLO talks by breaking down psychological barriers and “de-demonizing” Arafat. Even beyond the peace camp there was a sense that Arab intentions were truly changing. Where there is smoke there is fire. The sheer number of hints of Arab moderation was encouraging.
Despite their keen interest in facing up to Palestinian aspirations, the internal opposition, mimicking Labor, was by no means ready to embrace the PLO. In this they had an ostensible ally in Shultz.
Also, with Labor’s tacit endorsement, the internal opposition became increasingly outspoken. The conflict had robbed Israel of its splendor, they complained. At year’s end, when the Intifada erupted, their hope was that the crisis atmosphere would force Israel to pull out of Gaza, Samaria and Judea.
The cognitive consistency to which much of the Presidents Conference affiliated Jewish leadership adhered held that Israel’s survival, while vitally important, was less and less in doubt. What they doubted was whether Israel would continue to embody liberal values. Increasingly, they worried aloud that the Jewish State would become a semi-theocratic garrison state. Far from harming Israel, they told themselves, their criticism of its West Bank policies was helping to save it. This cognitive dissonance was fed by the divisions within the Israeli polity.
With Labor backing, the Presidents Conference held fast to the consistent goal of supporting the direction of the U.S. led peace process. In this they were opposed by the peace camp which was lobbying for unconditional PLO inclusion. The leadership, however, steadfastly opposed U.S. talks with the PLO until it met the 1975 conditions. Opposition from the Jewish right, though nettling, came almost exclusively from outside the Presidents Conferrence.
Environmental factors
The progressive shift in perceptions can be attributed to a variety of factors. Arab states expressed a willingness to enter into indirect talks with Israel through an international conference; Labor Party luminaries, such as Abba Eban, began a dialogue with PLO-aligned Arabs in Israel giving impetus to similar efforts by others in Israel and abroad; even Likud figures engaged in talks with PLO-aligned Arabs. In this context, it became ever more untenable to hold the PLO in the odium of past years or to argue that the rules of the game had not changed.
The Israeli government was bitterly fragmented, with Labor and Likud factions sending conflicting signals. Plainly, the Israelis were unable to articulate a consensus position on the Palestinian issue and this greatly affected the American Jewish leadership. It certainly left the consensus-dependent Presidents Conference immobilized and opened the door to further fragmentation. A number of leading constituent groups within the Presidents Conference openly split with Shamir and were supporting Peres’ initiatives aimed at bringing about an international conference. Peres argued that a conference would serve as a stepping stone for direct talks with the Palestinians. If Peres did not seem overly concerned about the nature of that representation (though he paid lip service to excluding the PLO), then why should the Jewish leadership? They shared Peres’ confidence that if the agenda and modalities could be controlled, the risk of a Palestinian-Arab state emerging from the talks would be reasonable.
The political agenda had been set. The tough stance taken by the United States against unconditional PLO participation, combined with Labor’s embrace of Palestinian centrality, pre-empted the Presidents Conference from lobbying on the issue. Another Jordanian-PLO rapprochement during the year made a mockery of the idea that the PLO could be excluded from peace-making scenarios.
Several unfamiliar actors, whose activities will be explored in the pages to follow, came to prominence in 1987. They included: Jerome Segal, Charlie Biton and Moshe Amirav. Others, including Ted Mann, Uri Avneri, and Alexander Schindler, reprised their roles.
International Conference
America’s peace process strategy remained the same: to facilitate the entry and participation of the Palestinian Arabs (perhaps the PLO) into a conflict resolution framework. The mission was to bring about an end to the Arab-Israel conflict. As Shultz tells it, he began to crystallize in his own mind what an ultimate solution would look like:
By early 1987, I had become more convinced than ever that the most promising way to approach the Palestinian-Israel conflict lay in some form of shared, overlapping, or interwoven sovereignties across Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan. . . . So, with this endgame in mind, I felt the idea was to figure out what interim steps would best get the parties there. . . . The process would start with an international conference, as King Hussein insisted. That was a way to give the king the legitimacy taken from him by the Arab decision at Rabat that gave the PLO the role of representing the Palestinians. . . .
This approach was anathema to Likud and its splintered advocates in the United States. Shultz was determined to circumvent Shamir and work with Peres. In this he had the tacit support of the Jewish leadership. Once the details were in place, Shamir would come under withering pressure to acquiesce. With Peres abandoning Israel’s long-standing demand for direct negotiations, Shamir’s stance appeared petulant and intransigent. Meantime, former President Carter visited the region and announced that both Syria and Jordan were ready to discuss peace with Israel within the framework of an international peace conference. In Israel, Carter scolded those who wanted to retain Judea and Samaria.
Under Peres’ leadership, the Israeli Foreign Ministry sought to interest the United States in providing economic aid to the West Bank in order to promote non-PLO elements. But the idea that, once the Palestinian cause was embraced as the crux of the Arab-Israel conflict, you could then address the problem while bypassing the PLO was self-delusion. The political culture of the region simply did not allow it. The Egyptians recognized this and continued to champion PLO participation. The Jordanians, who had expelled the PLO leadership when the Arafat-Hussein talks collapsed, rehabilitated their ties with the PLO. Jordan and the PLO consulted on how to spend $9.5 million, in mostly Saudi money, earmarked for the Administered Territories.
Within the American political system, support for Reagan Administration Middle East policies was generally high. However, Senator Robert Dole (R-Kan.), contemplating a race for the White House in 1988, called on the Administration to close the PLO offices in the capital: “It’s outrageous that this terrorist organization – which is out to destroy the State of Israel – can operate freely here.” On the whole, championing Israel’s cause resulted in serious political costs to the Jewish establishment. Earlier in the year, for instance, Jewish-Catholic relations were strained by Archbishop of New York John Cardinal O’Connor’s refusal to meet with Israeli leaders while on a visit to Jerusalem. The Pollard issue would not go away. Jonathan Pollard was sentenced to life in prison in March. Meanwhile, a U.S. federal grand jury indicted an Israeli colonel, Aviem Sella, for “running” Pollard.
In March, a Presidents Conference delegation returned from a visit to Israel with, in the words of a press statement, “a deeper understanding of Israel’s actions and motives concerning a number of vexing issues.” What the leaders may have understood better than before was that not only were Israelis profoundly divided, Labor’s approach to an international conference was an example of how it was making strategic choices intended to force choices. Laborite Abba Eban joined Hanna Seniora, a pro-PLO Palestinian, in issuing a call for an international conference. Meanwhile, Peres explored the concept with Soviet and Palestinian-Arab observers at the Socialist International meeting in Rome. Still, Peres was not yet ready to make the leap to unconditional PLO participation. He and Shamir appeared to be united against a PNC/PLO role. Egypt’s request that Israel allow 52 members of the PNC to attend a council meeting in Algiers was, therefore, promptly rejected.
Many in the labyrinth that is the PLO feared that perception of moderation might become a self-fulfilling prophesy. On April 18, the PNC met in Algeria to discuss PLO-Jordanian cooperation on joint representation. Opponents successfully challenged Arafat’s tactics of having the PLO take a back seat while Jordan ostensibly represented Palestinian interests. Ultimately, the PLO Executive Committee renounced the 1985 agreement with Jordan on pursuing a joint diplomatic effort. Internal harmony (Abu Nidal was rumored to have attended) came at the expense of PLO moderation. State Department disappointment was palpable. While in no way diminishing Palestinian centrality, the State Department would not yield on conditions for PLO participation. Murphy cautioned that the peace process should not be hostage to the PLO’s internal politics.
All this followed a secret meeting in London (behind Shamir’s back) between Peres and King Hussein (Shultz’s representative Wat Cluverius was in London as a facilitator). Shultz relates what Peres aide Yossi Beilin told him about the session:
The two had agreed . . . that the Secretary-General of the United Nations would invite the permanent members of the Security Council . . . and the parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict to negotiate . . . based on . . . 242 and 338. . . . The conference would invite the participants to form geographical, bilateral committees to negotiate the issues between them. . . . Palestinian issues would be dealt with in the committee of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation and an Israeli delegation; participation in the conference would be based on the parties’ acceptance of 242 and 338 and the renunciation of violence and terrorism. . . . Hussein had taken a tough line on the PLO. He said the PLO would fall into line when it saw the process going forward without it. . . .
On April 20, Peres finally told Shamir about the secret London meeting. Shamir aide Eli Rubinstein later explained to Shultz that in Shamir’s view, if the U.N. was involved the PLO would be involved. “This international conference has become a passion. He is utterly against it.”
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In the U.S. Congress, meantime, Representative Jack Kemp (R-NY) led an effort to close the PLO offices in the United States under the federal anti-racketeering law (RICCO). These offices were the PLO Information Office in Washington, officially registered with the Department of Justice, and its New York U.N. Observer Mission opened as a result of U.N. General Assembly’s Resolution 3237 inviting the PLO to participate in U.N. activities.
Shultz also took a tough line toward the PLO. In a fiery address before the Annual Policy Conference of AIPAC, in May, he ruled out PLO participation in the peace process:
Shultz: So you have to look for people who are qualified and ready, so let’s ask a few questions. Is the PLO qualified?
Audience: No.
Shultz: Hell, no! Let’s try that on for size. PLO?
Audience: Hell, no!
Shultz: You got it! Look at what they’ve just done. Their alliance involves the most violent and radical elements around, and they just put it together again. They showed once again that they don’t want peace; they want the destruction of Israel, so they’re not qualified.
Palestinians? Certainly. They have to be part of peacemaking. There are Palestinians who know that the only answer is through a non- violent and responsible approach to direct negotiations for peace and justice. We have to continue to find them, help them, and support them.
Shultz skillfully blended an anti-PLO message around a pro-Palestinian theme. Against Shamir’s wishes, the United States would continue to “explore the feasibility of a Mideast conference.” Taking a page from Peres, with whom he met privately at the AIPAC Conference, Shultz explained that the international conference was the framework, but “the name of the game is direct, face-to-face negotiations.”
The cleavages within the “unity” government influenced the actions of American Jewish leaders. Their sympathies lay squarely with Peres and Shultz. The American Jewish Committee commissioned another Steven M. Cohen survey and found, not surprisingly, that American Jews were now more willing to criticize the Shamir Government. Moreover, the emergence of a legitimate internal opposition was now a fait accompli. Thus criticism of Israeli policies among Presidents Conference leaders became commonplace. Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Director of the Presidents Conference, suggested that this willingness to side with Labor over Likud represented “a maturation of the relationship.” This maturation was exemplified in various spheres. David Arnow, who broke with UJA to establish the New Israel Fund, said that like many Israelis, he found the Jewish State to be a “very complicated, very divided, very troubled place.” For Rabbi Wolf Kelman, a leader of the Conservative wing of Judaism, the ennui resulted from Israel having been “de-charismatized.” Kelman said: “It didn’t happen overnight. It’s a process that’s been happening since the Yom Kippur War. I would date it to that period, in 1973 and ’74, when Golda Meir’s omnipotent Israel collapsed.”
These statements must be understood in the context of what was happening on the ground. While hardly a day since 1967 passed in absolute peace, by mid-1987 smoldering violence, rioting and unrest became increasingly common in the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem and in the Territories. This violence reinforced the view among Israel’s American Jewish critics that the occupation had to end.
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