Vice President George Bush told Jewish supporters of President Reagan that newly sworn-in-Premier Shimon Peres’ call on King Hussein of Jordan for peace talks without preconditions is “a good sign.”
“I hope that progress can be made,” Bush said to more than 200 Jews attending a luncheon sponsored by the Greater Washington Jewish Coalition for Reagan-Bush at the Four Seasons Hotel last Friday.
Finding a path to real peace for Israel and its neighbors has long been a central objective of American policy,” the Vice President stressed. He said that Reagan’s September 1, 1982 peace initiative “must go forward” to achieve “the day when the Israeli people can live within secure and recognized boundaries, at peace with their neighbors, and when all the peoples of the region can live together free from terro.”
As he did in a speech to the national Jewish coalition during the Republican National Convention in Dallas last month, Bush noted Friday that former Premier Yitzhak Shamir, now Israel’s Deputy Premier, said in a Time magazine interview, “Relations with the United States are better than ever before.”
However, Bush conceded that the United States and Israel do have differences, such as the effort to move the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. “We are worried about that for a lot of reasons,” he said. But he stressed that these are “honest differences” between “friends and allies.”
PREDICTS MORE JEWS WILL VOTE GOP TICKET
Bush predicted that the Republican ticket is “going to do better than the 40 percent of the Jewish vote we got last time.” A similar prediction was made both by Richard Fox of Philadelphia, chairman of the National Jewish Coalition, and Joseph Gildenhorn, chairman of the Greater Washington group.
Fox noted that Jewish Democrats from the wing of the party headed by the late Sen. Henry Jackson of Washington feel the Democratic party “has moved away from them and are joining us in large numbers.”
In his speech, Bush reiterated that the Administration “stands against the obscene anti-Semitism that has infected United Nations debate## stressed that “I cannot imagine any realistic circumstances under which this President would entertain the notion of the United States voting for UN resolutions condemning Israel”; and that “if Israel is ever voted out of the UN, the United States will walk out with it.”
Bush said he was repeating the last statement “over and over so that every country up there gets the message.”
The Vice President said a “fundamental halimark” of United States foreign policy is that the U.S. will never “recognize or negotiate” with the Palestine Liberation Organization as long as the PLO “refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to accept Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.”
Bush stressed the close relationship that has developed between the U.S. and Israel and noted in particular the effort now going on to create a United States-Israel free trade area. “We believe this will be a major step toward helping our friend in that part of the world and in the same context, helping ourselves,” he said.
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.
