How the Congress ultimately will react to the Soviet Union’s still unverified accommodation towards a more humane policy on emigration will be more accurately assessed when it returns from its spring respite. Both branches were hurrying to complete legislative details and get home when the President first reported that the “Soviet leadership” had suspended the education tax on its citizens who wish to emigrate.
Nevertheless, there have been indications of some withdrawal by some major adherents from the Jackson Amendment as now constituted, although none of the 76 Senators or the 278 Representatives who are backing the legislation have flatly said on the record they were withdrawing from it. According to a newspaper report that has not been confirmed. Rep. Wilbur Mills (D.Ark.) who introduced legislation identical to the Jackson Amendment in the House, has “indicated” he will now support most favored nation benefits to the Soviet Union when the voting comes on the omnibus legislation that encompasses the Soviet-American trade agreement.
Mills, Chairman of the all-important Ways and Means Committee, was quoted as having said that he had promised Deputy Soviet Trade Minister Alkhimov when he was in Washington that he would favor MFN if the Soviet government withdrew the education tax. This he is reported as having said, has now been done by the Soviet government. However, Mills was not reported as saying that he was rejecting the Jackson Amendment. His office here said the Congressman is in Arkansas and no one is in authority to confirm or deny the newspaper account.
TAX TIED TO MIDDLE EAST
Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott, who was first to announce the President’s report to a group of Congressional leaders of the “suspension,” has since then said he is “in sympathy with a Jackson Amendment” but “specific wording of that amendment must be worked out cautiously.”
At the same time Scott outlined the Nixon Administration’s case against the Jackson Amendment. Saying he “would also support every effort to back the President so as not to create additional tension in the world,” Scott argued that “Soviet restraint is necessary in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and elsewhere through very wise negotiations.”
He warned not to “endanger the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreements” and to help “bring about a solution in the Middle East.” The two references to the Middle East were not lost on Capitol Hill observers. They pointed out that the Administration contention about global matters and Mideast tensions do not stem from the emigration issue and would still be there if there were no such issue.
Associates of Jackson and other Senators who are unmoved by the President’s position point out that the Soviet government has dealt in an oblique way with merely one facet of the restrictions on emigration. The education tax is seen as having been decreed merely as a bargaining device that the Kremlin had foreseen it could use when suitable with the U.S. government on trade matters. That the Kremlin published the decree after President Nixon had said he would use “quiet diplomacy” to effect Soviet policy changes is testimony that the Soviet government was staking out a cheap bargain for itself.
HEARING ON TRADE BILL DUE MAY 9
The “suspension” of the tax is not in any written form. It came as an “oral” communication from the “Soviet leadership.” The public record at the White House shows that. There is no indication who suspended it, who communicated it and what the formal Soviet position really is. In essence, those accepting the word of the Soviet “leadership” are seen as easily persuaded by certain developments where there is little or no substance to bear them out.
Sympathizers with Soviet Jewry put it this way: It is not the tax but the will on the part of the Soviet authorities that is important. If the ransom money had been paid, the Soviet government would have found 50 other excuses for not letting the Jews emigrate. The outrageous timing of the Soviet announcement of its tax decree showed that it has yet to demonstrate genuine good will.
Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D. Wis.) who opposes the Jackson Amendment because he regards it as encompassing too many nations, sees the matter in this light: He hopes that the suspension “really means that any citizen regardless of circumstance may be free to emigrate without bureaucratic and political interference from the Soviet Union,” and if this is not the fact “it may then be necessary for Congress to force the issue on the pending trade legislation.”
The next public act in the issue is due May 9 when the Ways and Means Committee opens hearings on the entire trade bill of which the emigration element is a relatively minor factor. It is not expected to receive much attention from the first witnesses–Treasury Secretary George Shultz, Secretary of State William P. Rogers, and White House Assistant Peter Flanagan, who is the leader in pushing Soviet-American trade.
What the questioning may bring forth is of course another matter. MFN doubtlessly will in the final count emerge as an important facet of the hearings and its treatment on record will be closely read by many in the Congress and in Moscow.
The New York Board of Rabbis in a letter to President Nixon declared that “we hope you will not grant most favored nation status to the Soviet government until it subscribes fully to the terms of the Jackson Amendment.” The letter to Nixon signed by Rabbis William Berkowitz and Harold H. Gordon, president and vice-president respectively of the NYBR, stated that “the New York Board of Rabbis is deeply concerned with the entire moral problem involved in granting most favored nation status to the Soviet Union.”
Mendel Kohansky, an Israeli theater critic and member of the World Executive of Theater Critics Association, has received a last-minute cable from the Yugoslavian organizing committee of the World Executive meeting scheduled to open in Novisad, Yugoslavia, that his visit to Yugoslavia at this time would be inopportune. The action of the Yugoslavians seemed to be in line with a recently adopted anti-Israeli policy demonstrated by their over-exaggerated panic which resulted in the Israeli table tennis team quitting the world championship games in Sarajevo two weeks ago.
The NBC-TV program “Meet the Press” featuring Golda Meir, Yigal Allon, and Abba Eban is to be filmed in Israel early next month. The program will be screened May 6.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
