Key Senate Republicans are expressing serious concern over the course of the Carter Administration’s Middle East policy and its public elucidation by President Carter in recent weeks and by Vice President Walter F. Mondale in his June 17 San Francisco speech.
Sens. Jacob K. Javits of New York and Clifford Case of New Jersey, the senior Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, contend that Presidential references to a “homeland” for the Palestinians and Israel’s return to its 1967 borders with only “minor” adjustments, raise Arab expectations to unrealistic levels, feed Israel’s apprehensions and thereby undermine progress toward a peace settlement.
Javits and Case had an hour-long meeting with Carter and Mondale at the White House Friday, also attended by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the President’s National Security Affairs Advisor. Case released a statement afterwards and Javits described the meeting at a Capital Hill news conference.
A detailed elaboration of his views and criticism of the Carter policy is contained in a speech prepared for delivery on the Senate floor tomorrow, an advance copy of which was made available to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Similar criticisms were made a week ago by William E. Brock, the Republican National Chairman and a former Senator from Tennessee and Sen. Bob Packwood (R. Ore.) in a speech on the Senate floor.
SAYS DIFFERENCES REMAIN
Javits declined to describe to reporters the President’s responses to his and Case’s views. He stressed that the meeting was “friendly and constructive” and a “discussion, not a confrontation”. He said “we share the same objective” but “we did not reach agreements on how U.S. policy should be articulated”. Javits added that “differences remain on how to achieve a just and lasting peace.”
He said “The fundamental difference between us” is “raising Arab illusions beyond the realm of realization and contemporaneously raising Israeli fears that would compromise their security.” There-fore, according to Javits, “further specificity” by the Administration would be “counter-productive” and “what is needed now is concentrating on going to Geneva and negotiate without preconditions with the U.S. as mediator.”
Case said in his statement that he had “underscored” to the President “the importance for the United States to keep Israel strong and to help Israel’s economy as far as possible.” He said that in that connection he “raised a number of specific co-production requests made by Israel which have not yet cleared through the State Department and Defense Deportment despite the President’s commitment to do his best in this respect.”
WILL ISSUE A WARNING
Javits’ speech to the Senate tomorrow will be a warning to the Administration that “The Carter proposals will not succeed in their objective because they are unrealistic and fail to take account of certain key factors in the situation.” According to Javits, “Chances for Mideast peace may be lessened and the danger of war enhanced by a breakdown in the peace-seeking process through over-reaching.”
The President’s “persistent public advocacy” of Israeli withdrawal to its pre-June, 1967 borders and the establishment of a Palestinian “homeland or entity” before the convening of the Geneva conference “before there has been any meeting without preconditions between Israeli and Arab negotiators, even before Israel’s new government took office-can only continue to feed Arab illusions that President Carter will deliver to them what they have been unable to deliver to themselves by any other means, including the recurrent recourse to war,” Javits argues in his Senate speech.
He says further that the President’s advocacy of these proposals are “putting the Israelis in fear of their survival and thus hardening the terms they feel they must insist upon. This in turn, will make it harder for the Arabs to agree. This clash of frustrated Arab illusions and burgeoning Israeli fears, when compressed into the pressure cooker of a short-term ‘wrap-it-up’ Geneva conference, can only produce more, not less tensions and the danger of yet another Middle East war.”
Javits observes in his speech that “What had been hoped for as a move forward was a call upon all the parties to Geneva and all issues to be on the table for negotiation without preconditions and with the U.S. in a mediating role between the parties. Even Prime Minister Begin accepts this approach” and “the highest quality of decision can only be made by an Israel which does not feel pressed to the wall.”
ESPECIALLY HARD ON MONDALE
Javits’ prepared speech is especially hard on the Mondale speech which summarized the President’s views and was intended to allay fears in Israel and in pro-Israel circles here. Javits says that “The use of the term ‘homeland’ establishes at once a parallelism with the Jewish national home in Israel and exactly contradicts an association with Jordan.” In Javits’ view, such an association “neither assures control of policy nor even its own continuity. As a precedent there is Syria’s abrupt denunciation of its union with Egypt in the United Arab Republic.”
Finally, Javits is critical of the President for remaining “silent on other crucial aspects” of the Mideast problem — Jerusalem, Lebanon and the Golan Heights. “Does the return of Israel to ‘approximately’ the 1967 borders mean that Jerusalem is again to be a divided city — a Middle East Berlin with Israeli access again as difficult as in the years before 1967?”
Javits also asks whether Lebanon is “to remain territorially intact under Syrian hegemony, and is the PLO to continue to have the right to exist as a ‘state within a state’ there? These questions are crucial in themselves and related inextricably to the Golan Heights issue and the 1967 borders issue.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
