Saunders Places Israel Last on List of Six Factors That Comprise Current U.S. Thinking on the Middle

A State Department official today listed six factors that comprise the current U.S. “perceptions” toward the Middle East of which the Israeli factor ranked “last but not least.” According to Harold H. Saunders, the Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, the U.S. must take into account “terrorism,” the “support around the world for Palestinian nationalism” and Israel’s position on the “world scene” when considering the Arab-Israeli conflict.

But Saunders, addressing a panel discussion at the first national Young Leadership Council of the United Jewish Appeal at the Shoreham-American a Hotel, indicated priority for five other factors.

He listed these, in order, as the possibility of an “accidental confrontation” between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the Middle East; the fact that the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the Middle East; the fact that the U.S. gets 20 percent of its oil supply from the area; the oil revenues and capital holdings in the region which can have a “sharp impact” on “the global economic order”; the fact that Saudi Arabia and Algeria are “organizers of the poorer nations” and the possibility that the Middle East conflict could breed another oil embargo.

SHIFT IN U.S. PERCEPTIONS

Saunders, who had been director of the State Department’s Intelligence and Research Division for the past two years, acknowledged that there has been a shift in U.S. perceptions on the Middle East during the last 15 years but that it “does not have to work against the interests of any nation.” He said that 15 years ago the Middle East was “important but not vital” and there was a need to prevent Soviet dominance there. In the 1970s, he said, the region was “more nearly vital to our interests” because of the oil requirements of the U.S. and its friends and the needs of Israel.

“Today, the perceptions are quite different,” Saunders said, growing out of the “changed circumstances” since the mid-70s, the “major shift of many Arabs” toward the West in the last few years and the fact that the Middle East is one of the most rapidly growing markets in the world, which is being felt in America by Americans and “not only governmentally.” He characterized an Arab-Israeli peace as “crucial” in the “hard calculus” of American interests in the area. He stressed that the U.S. role is that of “a catalyst, not an imposer” of a peace settlement.

The panel was also addressed by Rita Hauser, an international lawyer and former U.S. representative to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, who characterized Sounders’ presentation as “a perfectly good academic summary of current U.S. policy going astray.” Hauser said American policy in the Middle East should be for peace in the area without the Soviet Union’s intrusion. “That was true in 1945 and remains true today,” she said.

ISRAEL TERMED ISLAND OF STABILITY

Sen. Edward Brooke (R.Mass.) last night described Israel as “an island of stability in the sea of chaos” in the Middle East and “no U.S. policy can be effective without that stability.”

The Senate’s only Black member stressed that U.S. “fundamental commitment to Israel is a test of our own values” and that what appears to be “a firm basis of relationship today” with Arab nations “may disappear in the vortex of Arab politics tomorrow.”

Taking issue with the Carter Administration’s move to sell “sophisticated lethal weapons” to Saudi Arabia, Brooke said,” such a decision is not in our interest and should come, if at all, when there is a settlement” in the Middle East.

Attacking the concept of a Palestinian state, Brooke said such a state “would be a dagger pointed at the heart of Israel” and Israeli Premier Menachem Begin “has rightly rejected the idea of a West Bank-Gaza Palestinian state.” He added, “We have become painfully aware” that the Carter Administration is engaged “in pressuring tactics” to achieve a settlement in the Mideast.

WARNS OF ‘PEACE OF THE GRAVEYARD’

Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz, addressing another session of the conference, described the Mideast settlement proposals by Egypt and Jordan as “pre-made prescriptions of take it or leave it” and warned that their peace terms “would be the peace of the graveyard” for Israel.

The approximately 1000 business and professional men and women from across the country attending the three-day meeting applauded Dinitz when he stressed that “Israel cannot give a state for a state visit.” The state visit referred to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s trip last November to Jerusalem.

Dinitz was also applauded when he asked, in an allusion to Jordan’s seizure of the West Bank in 1947 when Palestine was being partitioned, is “non-acquisition of territory by force applicable to 1947 and afterwards?” He also defended Israeli settlements in the occupied areas as “legal, moral and right because they are there to protect Israeli lives.” Dinitz stated that the settlements issue was being used by Sadat as “a complete diversion” to achieve his terms “not by accommodation but imposition with the help of the United States.”