Israeli Housing Minister Ariel Sharon met here Wednesday with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, despite an attempt by the White House and State Department to prevent the session from taking place.
They did succeed, however, in preventing Kemp from hosting Sharon at his HUD office. The meeting was held instead at the Israeli Embassy.
At issue was Sharon’s opposition to U.S. proposals to advance the Middle East peace process and his insistence on forging ahead with new settlements in the administered territories, which the Bush administration considers an obstacle to peace.
Kemp had invited Sharon, his Israeli counterpart, to meet with him during his current visit to the United States, where he is addressing various Jewish groups.
Secretary of State James Baker heard about the planned meeting while on his Middle East tour last week, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said Wednesday.
She said Baker sent a “heads up” message to the White House saying that for a member of Bush’s Cabinet “to receive Minister Sharon, who was publicly opposing the president’s policy regarding Middle East peace, would not be the appropriate thing to do at this time.”
“That was the end of his involvement” in the matter, Tutwiler maintained. But the White House apparently suggested to Kemp that he not see Sharon in his office.
Baker has been annoyed by Sharon’s vigorous support for Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Just before the secretary arrived in Israel, members of the militant Gush Emunim moved mobile homes into two new locations in the West Bank, in a move seen as a direct slap at Baker.
The secretary denounced the buildup during a news conference in Damascus, Syria.
During a news conference at the National Press Club on Wednesday, after his meeting with Kemp, Sharon said neither he nor anyone in the government knew in advance that the settlers’ mobile homes would be set up overnight.
But he said the “policy of building Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza is not a personal plan or initiative,” but rather the policy of the Israeli government.
Sharon said he was not upset by Baker’s failure to meet with him on his three visits to Israel in the last seven weeks. He said the prime minister is the one who speaks for the government of Israel with foreign leaders.
The meeting with Kemp dealt with the issue of Soviet Jewish immigration and absorption, Sharon said. He noted that Kemp, a former Republican congressman from New York, had long been a supporter of Soviet Jewish emigration rights.
Sharon reiterated that Israeli policy is not to direct Soviet Jews to the West Bank, and he said that fewer than 1 percent of them had settled there.
NO NEED FOR ‘PREACHING’ ON PEACE
He said there are 150 Jewish settlements in the West Bank and that they were built on the hills to provide security for Israel. He said for that reason, no matter what solution is eventually reached, Israel will never give up the settlements.
They are not an obstacle to peace, he maintained. “If Israel feels secure, Israel will be willing to take more daring steps for peace.”
But Sharon suggested the present effort at peace is the wrong way of going about it. He said the United States should be able to persuade Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which it saved in the Persian Gulf War, to sign a peace accord with Israel.
Sharon maintained that despite his reputation as a hawk, he wants peace, because as a veteran of Israel’s wars who had been wounded twice, he understands the horrors of war.
“Jews do not need any preaching for peace,” the housing minister declared Monday at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, where he spoke at a lecture series sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.
Israel is “a nation of people with very high moral values, and we understand peace better than any nation around the world,” he said.
But during his National Press Club news conference here, Sharon said Israel must worry about its security because, as Americans might say, “we live in a high-crime neighborhood.”
(JTA correspondent Tom Tugend in Los Angeles contributed to this report.)
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