Brock Charges Carter is Moving Toward Conerontation with Israel

The Republican National Committee has disclosed that its chairman, former Sen. William Brock, had expressed “deep concern” to President Carter over the Administration’s diplomacy in the Arab-Israeli dispute. “This appears to be a deliberate move towards confrontation with Israel,” Brock wrote in a lengthy letter dated Dec. 21, following the Administration’s support of Egypt’s demands to alter the U.S. treaty draft that Israel had accepted.

When the White House was asked for comment following the letter’s disclosure a month after it was issued, a spokesman said a response would be made “at some point.” The text of Brock’s letter was made available to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The timing of the disclosure appeared to coincide with Egypt’s continued public insistence on its demands for changes in the draft treaty and the United States attempts to persuade Israel to meet them.

Brock’s letter said that the Administration’s course “can only undercut” U.S. interests in the Middle East. “Israel has been and should continue to be America’s strongest and most reliable ally in the region,” he wrote.

“I state what has been for decades an obvious tenet of American policy but recent actions suggest that current policy is based on a sharply differing perception — one which devalues Israel’s importance to our nation.”

Deploring “the presentation of American dictates” to Israel, in an apparent reference to Carter’s support of the Egyptian proposals, Brock wrote that “Israel is not negotiating a treaty. It is negotiating its very survival.” After calling on Carter to “return to the forebearance, patience and good sense which characterized your exceptional achievement at Camp David in September, Brock stated.

“The patently unfair and counter-productive portrayal of Israel as the obstacle to a peace treaty when it is they (Israel) who have accepted the proposed agreements, while Egypt has attempted to change its terms, threatens everything which so many people here and in Egypt and Israel have labored so long to build.”