Dole, Under Fire from Colleagues, Won’t Try to Rescind Jerusalem Bill

Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole (R-Kan.) on Thursday pulled back from his threat to have the Senate rescind a resolution recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, contending “the less said about the substance of that issue, the better.”

“It is too late to unscramble the egg of the Jerusalem issue. The damage is done,” Dole told a near-empty Senate chamber during a period of routine morning business.

While Dole was speaking, House Republican leaders held a news conference on the other side of the U.S. Capitol to take issue with some of the minority leader’s recent statements on aid to Israel, Jewish priorities and the status of Jerusalem, which, they said, are not mainstream views in the Republican Party.

In a letter Thursday, the Republican leaders criticized Dole for saying, among other things, that U.S. Jewish leaders had shown “selfishness” for refusing to “give one penny” of U.S. foreign aid to “anybody else” besides Israel.

“Such personal attacks send a negative message that does damage to our party,” wrote House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Reps. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), Vin Weber (R-Minn.) and Bill McCollum (R-Fla.).

At the news conference, Gingrich said he “respectfully disagrees” with Dole.

Weber said Dole made a “very serious gaffe” by implicitly questioning the loyalty of American Jews, whom he called “patriotic Americans who devote themselves to a variety of causes.” He said he presumes that Dole’s statement was “a slip of the tongue.”

DEALING IN ‘NONSENSE’

Dole did not comment on that criticism in his speech Thursday. Nor did he follow through on a statement made Sunday in Israel, in which he said he would speak on the Senate floor this week in favor of rescinding the resolution on Jerusalem.

The Senate adopted the resolution, sponsored by Sen. Daniel Moynihan (D-N.Y.), by voice vote on March 22. The House has yet to vote on a similar resolution, introduced by Rep. Eliot Engcl (D-N.Y.), which has more than 100 co-sponsors.

Dole told the Senate on Thursday that the resolution came up several times during the trip he and four Senate colleagues took last week to five Middle East countries.

“Egypt’s President (Hosni) Mubarak opened our meeting by raising the resolution,” he said. “Jordan’s King Hussein spent 20 to 30 minutes discussing it, and he gave me a letter on the subject.”

“If the Arab leaders were looking for an excuse to avoid the broader peace process issue, (the resolution) gave it to them on a silver platter,” Dole said.

“We call ourscives the greatest deliberative body in the world,” the senator continued. “When you travel around the world, you find that some people still think we are. They take what we do and say seriously.”

“And they despair, just as we should,” he continued later, when they sec that “what we really deal in is the nonsense of the Senate. I think we can do better. And I think we should start now,” he said.