Associated with President Carter’s personal and public endorsement of the upcoming Cairo meeting were movements of major significance that clashed head on and ended in victory for the pro-Cairo protagonists.
One movement recalled the maneuvering 30 years ago by the anti-Israel forces within the U.S. foreign affairs establishment that sought to subvert President Truman’s goals of a Jewish State in Palestine. The other was the intense bipartisan demand in both houses of Congress for U.S. backing of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Premier Menachem Begin in terms that Carter himself later used.
As in the Truman era, opposition to a process welcomed by Israel centered in the State Department. Support for it came from sources within the White House in close touch with the realities of American public opinion which all major polls continually show favors Israel that is secure psychologically and physically.
ESTABLISHMENT FORCES ALARMED
Perhaps even more than his astounding visit to Jerusalem, Sadat’s call for a Cairo meeting of the parties to the Mideast conflict alarmed these establishment forces that sought with considerable success to compress Israel into an unprepared Geneva conference where it could be exposed to public buffeting and pressured into concessions on Arab terms.
As late as yesterday morning at a breakfast meeting sponsored by Foreign Policy magazine, key reporters heard a top British authority suggest peace could be attained only with all the Arab components being satisfied, a sly dig at the Cairo meeting that recalled British pressure in 1947 to have a trusteeship over Palestine rather than partition to give birth to Israel.
The raw edge of the Arabists showed itself in the fact that for four days Carter Administration spokesmen denied that the President had already made his decision for U.S. participation in Cairo. The expose came after the President’s news conference yesterday when the State Department disclosed through spokesman Hodding Carter that the U.S. had
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