Ball Warns That Without Decisive U.S. Initiative in Mideast Catastrophic Consequences Loom

George W. Ball, who served as U.S. Undersecretary of State from 1961-1966 and Ambassador to the United Nations in 1968, has warned that without “a decisive American initiative” that will set forth the framework, if not the details, of a peace settlement, the Middle East impasse will not be broken and the Geneva Conference will “disintegrate” with catastrophic consequences for all nations in the Middle East and probably for the entire world.

Ball stated his views in a lengthy article titled “How To Save Israel In Spite Of Herself” published in the April edition of Foreign Affairs Quarterly. “The question,” he wrote, “is no longer whether the United States should contribute to assuring Israel’s survival and prosperity; that goes without saying. It is rather how we Americans, in approaching the problems of the Middle East, can best fulfill our responsibilities, not only to Israel and to ourselves, but also to peoples all over the world whose well-being could be seriously endangered by further conflict” in the Middle East.

Ball envisioned an American initiative grounded in Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. He stated his belief that the final settlement must contain Israeli withdrawal from the Arab territories it captured in 1967 in exchange for full recognition and normal relations with its neighbors. He saw the creation of a West Bank Palestinian state and a negotiated solution of the conflict over Jerusalem as essentials of a final settlement.

Ball viewed the Geneva Conference as the most likely instrumentality for achieving a full peace settlement. He warned, however, that “The parties will never come anywhere near agreement by the traditional processes of diplomatic haggling unless the United States first defines the terms of that agreement, relates them to established international principles, and makes clear that America’s continued involvement in the area depends upon acceptance by both sides of the terms its prescribes.”

According to Ball “assertive United States diplomacy” is required because “The relatively impotent governments in the key Arab countries and in Israel will never by themselves be able to devise a compromise solution” and because “there is by no means a unanimous desire for peace on either the Arab or Israeli side.”

DIFFICULTIES U.S. FACES

The former diplomat acknowledged the serious domestic political difficulties the U.S. government would face if it took initiatives that were unpalatable to many on both sides of the Middle East conflict. “Because many articulate Americans are passionately committed to Israel, the slightest challenge to any aspect of current Israeli policy is likely to provoke a shrill ad hominem response,” he wrote.

“To suggest that America should take a stronger and more assertive line in the search for Middle East peace is to risk being attacked as a servant of either Arab interests or of the oil companies, or being denounced as anti-Israel, or, by a careless confusion of language, even condemned as anti-Semitic.”

Nevertheless, he asserted. “Our President must take the political heat from powerful and articulate pro-Israel domestic groups. It means that as a nation we must be prepared to accept abuse and blame from both sides, permitting local politicians to save their own skins by attacking American arrogance and imperialism.”

ISRAEL’S REQUIREMENTS STATED

Ball acknowledged that “For her own security, Israel can accept nothing less than an unequivocal Arab commitment to peace and full recognition together with adequate safeguards; yet in view of the primacy of the issue in Arab politics, leaders of the key Arab nations can give no such commitments without the assurance of an Israeli withdrawal from the territories she seized in 1967.”

In that connection, Ball wrote. “Our country must make crystal clear to the more moderate Arab states–Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt and Jordan–that it will use its leverage in the search for peace but not unless those states make clear their acceptance of Israel’s sovereignty. At the same time, Israel must be made to understand that a continuance of the present stalemate is more dangerous than the concessions required for peace.”

The writer was critical of “some” Israeli politicians who “wish to avoid any negotiation in the wistful hope that Israel will be able to hang on permanently to the territories she seized in 1967, consolidating her hold by establishing permanent settlements — or as it is cynically put, ‘creating new facts’ ” and other politicians “who shun a negotiation that would require them to take unpopular decisions.”

U.S., ISRAELI STAKES

According to Ball. “The national decision Americans must make is quite clear: It is not whether we should try to force an unpalatable peace on the Israeli people, but rather how much longer we should continue to pour assistance into Israel to support policies that impede progress toward peace and thus accentuate the possibility of war, with all the dangers that holds not only for Israel but for the United States and the other industrialized democracies of Western Europe and Japan. . .

“The unhappy dilemma of Israel is that, so long as she refuses to give up the territorial gains from her 1967 conquest and thus prevents possible progress toward peace, she must continue to remain a ward of the United States. With her economy already overstretched, Israel could not maintain anything like her present level of military capability without the continued infusion of something approaching $2 billion a year from the American treasury, to say nothing of the generosity of the American Jewish community under provisions in the American tax laws and regulations that facilitate such contributions,” Ball wrote.

He rejected the argument by some Israelis that only Israelis are competent to judge what they require for their own security. The premise is faulty, he said “since it assumes that the Arab-Israeli conflict is merely a parochial affair engaging the interests of only the direct participants–as though, in other words–the area were hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world.”

REJECTS GUNBOAT PEACE

Ball denied that he was “proposing to impose peace with gunboats” He wrote “What I am proposing is not that the United States lay down arbitrary terms of peace but that it insist that both sides carry out the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 (affirmed in Resolution 338) which so far neither side has been willing to do.”

His formula included explicit recognition of Israel as a sovereign Jewish State by her neighbors; freedom of navigation for Israeli ships through all international waterways, secured by a continued Israeli presence at Sharm el-Sheikh at the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba; demilitarization of the Golan Heights after Israeli withdrawal; buffer zones policed by neutral forces; the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank with an Arab commitment to discourage acts of violence or terrorism against Israel.

“The principal powers supporting the proposal the United States. Great Britain, France and, one may hope, the Soviet Union — would guarantee to both sides the inviolability of the boundaries as finally determined.” Ball wrote. “In addition, we should seek agreement with the guaranteeing powers to limit the flow of arms to both sides.”

With respect to the administrative control of Jerusalem, “a subject which both sides wrap in abstractions such as sovereignty and contend is non-negotiable,” Ball saw “many possible solutions ranging from internationalization to a condominium, to various Vatican and cantonal-type solutions; yet I see no way in which the parties can ever by themselves agree to select one or another unless the United States first incorporates a specific proposal in a plan that is part of an entire package,” he wrote. Ball is currently a partner in Lehman Brothers in New York.