Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 1992, Page 28, 29, 30, 69

Two Personal Views of Election '92

A "Yellow Dog Democrat" for Strings on Aid to Israel

By Andrew I. Killgore

Growing up in Alabama in the 1930s, we were "yellow dog Democrats." We'd vote for a common yellow cur dog rather than vote for any Republican. Only Winston County, which hadn't seceded from the Union in 1861, voted Republican. But that was a good-humored local joke.

We were Democrats since the Civil War. Franklin D. Roosevelt cemented the bond when he promised to bring the South back into the Union by liberating us from poverty and ignorance. He did concrete things and he inspired hope. There was a way out of the poverty rut.

He brought electric power to Southern farms, including our own, and transformed rural life. He bested the damn-Yankee "Pittsburgh Plus," under which the South had to pay a fake Pittsburgh-to-the-South freight charge on manufactured goods produced in the South, even if they were purchased at the factory gate.

We were liberal Democrats, not religious. We believed in big government from Washington. At home we were saddled with white supremacy, racial segregation and "State's Rights," lauded by Alabama stand-patters as "our Southern way of life." We saw this as a subterfuge for perpetrating the very system that kept Alabama down. The only way of was to look to Washington.

We liked Roosevelt's winning political coalition of labor unions, Jews, Blacks and the then-solidly Democratic South. Most denounced but we praised Eleanor Roosevelt for inviting Blacks to the White House. We admired and sympathized with Jews in the 1930s, for they were white voices speaking out for equal rights, and they were being persecuted by Hitler in Europe.

The Democratic Party was our secular religion, the machinery with which we would vanquish evil. The liberal Southerners, as someone said, would thus lift a load of guilt from their shoulders for mistreating the Blacks for so long.

Over the years, the twin evils of white supremacy and racial segregation were banished, at least on a public policy level, with the help of the national Democratic Party. By this time I was an officer in the U.S. Foreign Service and away from the pull of Alabama. Still, out of deep affection for the party, I have never voted other than the straight Democratic ticket.

But 1992 will be different. This time I'm voting for George Bush-on the single issue of the Middle East. I believe he will settle the Arab-Israeli dispute, if he has another four years. And I believe that Bill Clinton has been so co-opted by the Israel lobby that he will not. Instead, we would face another decade or more of Middle Eastern war and grave damage to our interests.

I saw President Bush say no to the Israel lobby on Sept. 12, 1991.

I saw the true face of the State of Israel when I arrived in Jerusalem as U.S. consul in early 1957. Proud of my facility in the Arabic language after nearly two years of grueling study, I found Israelis at every level deeply suspicious of me. Why? Because I had studied that one particular language-Arabic.

Through the years I watched other "Arabists" try to avoid damage to their careers from Israel and its supporters in America. The most craven of these was one of our most distinguished diplomats, now retired. His technique? Pretending that he didn't know the language. He refused to say one word in Arabic. Not even "Hello" or "How are you?"

I have watched the Israel lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), so intimidate senators and congressmen that they dare not vote against the billions of dollars given to Israel every year, $5.7 billion in 1991 alone. I have seen an AIPAC that circulates secret enemies list to intimidate Americans, a neo-McCarthyism the more frightening because it's hidden from public view.

The Palestinians, of course, are the major victims of political Zionism and its Middle Eastern offspring, Israel. More than two million are in exile from their ancient homeland. But now Americans are becoming major victims. Our entire political system is under attack from secret pro-Israel political action committees, more than 100 deceptively named "stealth PACs" that grossly violate limits on contributions to political candidates.

I saw President Bush say no to the Israel lobby on Sept. 12, 1991. No to $10 billion in so-called housing loan guarantees until Israel stopped Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. For the first time ever, he had put some real strings on aid to Israel. Such strings promise peace. I was thrilled to see the 86 percent approval that the American people accorded the president for his courageous stand. And the AIPAC-rented Congress dared not defy the president when it saw how overwhelmingly the people stood with him.

I have seen Yitzhak Shamir and his Likud ideologues ousted from power in Israel, to be replaced by a more flexible Labor regime under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. I have seen a somewhat less appallingly arrogant AIPAC. But now that other bastion of the lobby in this country, the media, is relentlessly seeking the defeat of Bush out of obeisance to its foreign master, Israel.

I know this combination can be defeated if the American people understand.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. This article represents his personal views, and not those of the American Educational Trust.

A One-Issue Voter For Middle East Peace

By Richard H. Curtiss

It's not cool, but I've become a one-issue voter. The issue is Middle East peace. There are millions like me, but almost all of them seem to be on the other side of the question. They have more than 100 weekly newspapers all over the U.S. going all out to praise their candidate, and bash mine. People like me have only this sometime monthly.

Whichever side of the Mideast question we're on, we one-issue voters show the same symptoms. After making up our minds about which candidates we like on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, we find we can rationalize our other disagreements with them.

My feelings developed when I went to serve my country in the Middle East. From day one, I hated what I discovered about the domestic motivations for U.S. policies there. I also know exactly when these feelings became strong enough to turn me into a one-issue voter. My first three presidential ballots were cast for Republicans. My next three were for Democrats. But, after voting twice for his Democratic opponents, in 1972 I voted for Richard Nixon.

I did it because I thought a second-term Republican would be sure to solve the Arab-Israeli problem, which increasingly was undermining everything the U.S. was trying to do in the world, getting a lot of my friends killed in the Middle East, and poisoning U.S. domestic politics.

In voting for that second-term Republican, however, I didn't reckon on Henry Kissinger becoming his secretary of state and Nixon replacing the "Rogers Plan" for a comprehensive Middle East peace with Kissinger's Mideast diplomatic "step-by-step" to nowhere. Nor did I count on the Watergate break-in, the relentless investigation of which I increasingly began to suspect had something to do with thwarting Nixon's plan to press Middle East leaders for a settlement during his second term.

I've been like that ever since. In my presence friends and colleagues argue heatedly over "hot-button" issues, like this year's life vs. choice, environment vs. jobs, "guns kill people" vs. "people kill people," federal aid to private schools, increasing taxes on the rich, reducing capital gains taxes, energy conservation, the line item veto, and, of course, the character issue.

I have strong opinions on all of these things, but my mind keeps going back to whether the candidate really believes Israel is a strategic ally instead of an albatross around American necks. Does he really believe the people whose land is being stolen are "terrorists" and what Americans have "shared values" with the people doing the stealing? And, most of all, would the candidate make a pact with the devil, Israel's Washington lobby, in order to get Israel's friends in the media to support his candidacy and savage his opponent?

In my heart I know it's not my opinions on the hot button issues but the answers to the latter questions that determine how I vote. I live just inside the Capital Beltway, work practically in its geographic center, and do most of my socializing with people who have some personal tie to the Middle East. So I often hear comments like "I disagree with George Bush on practically every issue but the Middle East, so what am I going to do?" I know what I will do.

Since the infamous meeting in Kennebunkport, a lot of people have said to me, "Well, now that Bush has sold out too, there's no one at all I can vote for." Sometimes I think it's with real regret. Sometimes, I suspect, it's with relief.

I understand them all. It's hard for someone who tries to do the right thing by everyone, everywhere, to support a candidate who uses "liberal" as an epithet, who lets a snake-oil salesman like Pat Robertson speak at his convention, and who pretends to welcome reconciliation with an American nativist like Patrick Buchanan.

My smart alecky answer is: "So you're going to vote for slick Willie?" The response, invariably, is, "I didn't say that."

What I really want to ask them is, "How do you know Bush sold out?" How do you know what he promised Rabin? How do you know what Rabin promised him?

The Israel lobby thinks that after the election, Bush will go right back to linking aid to Israel to Israeli performance at the peace table. The lobby's weekly newspapers are full of exhortations to its members of Congress to fix their legislation so that if Israel reneges on its promises, Bush can't renege on the loan guarantees. No one, it seems, is a bit worried about Bill Clinton putting strings on aid to Israel.

"How do you know Bush sold out?"

Washington columnist James David Besser, writing in The Jewish Week of Queens, NY on Sept. 3, quotes "a leading pro-Israel activist" as saying: "The key here is to make the legislation as airtight as possible. Thanks to politics, we have a window of opportunity; we have to take full advantage of it to make sure George Bush and Jim Baker do not revert to their earlier policies."

Warns Rep. Ben Cardin (D-MD), a House activist for the Israel lobby, "The president wants considerable discretion on when to release the loan guarantees. And we don't want to give it."

And, in the Washington Jewish Week of Sept. 3, Samuel Schachter warns, "After all that, the loan guarantees will still hang over Israel's head like a Sword of Damocles because Bush has attached a condition that allows him to suspend the guarantees at any time, at his discretion—meaning if Rabin doesn't make enough concessions to satisfy the Arabs and the State Department, the loan guarantees will be wielded anew as a weapon of U.S. pressure."

Clearly, for the "pro-Israel activists," it's "us against them," and Bush leads "them." But, in following him, how do I know Bush won't cave in?

I don't. I know that if he took the issue directly to the people today, he might get an even higher response than the 86 percent support he got when he froze the loan guarantees, and Israel's lobbyists, in their tracks on Sept. 12, 1991.

But this year, for reasons of his own, he's doing things differently. Maybe it's just a craven desire to get the unfriendly media off his back. But maybe, after his policies derailed the most self-destructive government in Israeli history, he really thinks grateful pro-Israel American Jews will support his approach to peace in the Middle East. I think he's wrong, but so far he's been right.

George Bush stopped Israel's headlong rush to national suicide under Yitzhak Shamir. There's hardly a Jewish supporter of Israel in the United States who wouldn't admit that, in the privacy of his own home. There are dishearteningly few, however, who will admit it in public. The exceptions I've seen, so far, are a small group called the Jewish Peace Lobby and the liberal West Coast Jewish magazine Tikkun.

If American Jews think it through, they'll realize that if Bill Clinton and congressional friends of Israel give it the guarantees unconditionally, Israel will toss aside Yitzhak Rabin in no time and resume its march toward "greater Israel"—and national suicide. Why not? It's a lot more pleasant, while you're stealing someone's land, to be told it really was yours all along.

And Bill Clinton has said he won't like the loan guarantees to the peace process. The conventional wisdom is that it doesn't matter: Each new administration builds on the Middle East accomplishments of its predecessor. The problem with that is, it's just not true.

"Transfer" and "Ethnic Cleansing"

Ronald Reagan's administration did not build on the Mideast accomplishments of Nixon, Ford and Carter. And, a couple of years from now, with Israel getting unconditionally all the aid it needs, there literally would be no land left for Palestinians, and probably no more Palestinians living in Palestine. Remember Ariel Sharon and "transfer"? It's the same thing as Serbian "ethnic cleansing," and the Serbs did it to two-thirds of Bosnia in only half a year.

Nor will there be any more Palestinian moderates like those presently negotiating in Washington, DC. There will instead be additional millions of Palestinian refugees. We'll be calling them "fundamentalists," and they will be stirring up the whole world, particularly the Islamic one-fifth of it, against Bill Clinton's United States.

Instead of two flags flying in the Holy Land within five years, which is where Bush and Secretary of State Jim Baker are leading us, under Clinton's policy of delinking foreign aid and peace, only an Israeli flag would fly there-for a while. But, 25, 50 or 100 years from now, a Palestinian, or Islamic, flag will be flying over Jerusalem-and over Tel Aviv as well. That's because Arabs outnumber Jews in the world by better than 10 to 1, and by then the Arabs will be 10 times stronger; and because Muslims, who outnumber Jews in the world by 60 to 1, will be 60 times stronger. If Israelis show no mercy to either now, why should they show Israelis, and their backers, any mercy then?

That's the difference between Bush's policy, which treats Israelis like adults who must act responsibly, and Clinton's policy, which would just treat Israelis. For a one-issue voter like me, it's an easy call.

Other One-Issue Voters

Who are some of the other potential one-issue voters? American Jewish demographers say their community normally splits its vote, with 70 percent going to Democrats and 30 percent going to Republicans. After President Bush's Sept. 12, 1991 press conference, however, some commentators in U.S. Jewish weeklies predicted angry Jews would give 90 percent of their votes to the Democratic candidate in 1992. Many are saying Kennebunkport won't change that.

From even before the primaries, Bill Clinton was the Israel lobby's anointed candidate, just as was Albert Gore in 1988. The lobby wavered briefly on Clinton last spring only because many of its activists feared a candidate widely regarded as a philanderer, draft dodger and panderer to special interests was unelectable. Having no one else whom they felt they could control, however, they set out not only to staff his campaign and improve his image, but to destroy, through a co-opted media, his opponent.

How is it that the media already has forgotten that it was none other than Hillary Clinton who only three months ago publicly invited the press to investigate rumors that George Bush also had a Jennifer, spelled with a J instead of a G? When Newsweek's Eleanor Clift smirkingly picked up on the suggestion on the "McLaughlin Group," her colleague and fellow Democrat Jack Germond said angrily that she knew as well as he did that that rumor had been investigated from top to bottom and there wasn't a shred of truth to it. It seems there's honor among mainstream media jackals, even at the height of a feeding frenzy.

But not much. What would the media have done to Barbara Bush if, instead of speaking for so many Americans when she said the abortion issue shouldn't be in any party's platform, she had pointed a finger at Bill Clinton and shouted: Philanderer!

So is the lesson that it's okay for the media to call a candidate a philanderer if you know he really isn't, but it's not okay to call him one if you know he really is? Or is it that America not only has a lot of one-issue voters on the Middle East, but also a lot of one-issue journalists on the same subject?

The media now confesses that it's been throwing hard balls at Bush, and soft balls to Clinton. The reason, the media trendsetters solemnly assure their public, is the widespread concern over the economy. No one makes the Israel lobby connection. It's no cooler to be a one-issue journalist than it is to be a one-issue voter.

I think the American people are reasonable enough to expect some economic dislocation as the economy retools for serious peace after 50 straight years of virtually uninterrupted hot and cold war. I think the press is ganging up on Bush mostly because of Sept. 12, 1991 and the fear that if he has a second term he'll finish what he started that day-imposing a Middle East peace everyone can live with-Israelis, Palestinians and Americans alike.

Proof, If Needed

There's proof, if it's needed. Israel lobby-inspired journalists ganged up to try to prevent a second term for Jerry Ford in 1976 and for Jimmy Carter in 1980 because they would have done the same thing Bush will do if he's re-elected. The media did not gang up on Ronald Reagan's second-term campaign, because he was the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history.

Are there one-issue voters for peace and justice in the Middle East? I think overseas Americans intuitively shy away from things that will give America a bad name overseas. Their spokespersons say there are four million of them, and I've seen estimates that their absentee ballots will be about 80 percent for Bush.

Are they a special interest? Sure. They're interested in increasing U.S. exports, cooperation between the U.S. and foreign governments, and creating environments where anti-Americanism is a thing of the past. Most Americans can live with that.

There are another couple of million former overseas Americans, including the writer. Few would disagree with much of what I've said about the U.S. and the Middle East. Whether it will influence their presidential voting, I have no idea.

Muslim Americans also are a mystery, in more ways than one. First, no one knows how many there are. Estimates range from 2 to 12 million. My own estimate is 6 million, and if 90 percent of them voted as a block, they would cancel out a 90 percent block vote by an American Jewish community of about the same number, which is concentrated in many of the same areas.

Will American Muslims vote as a block? That's the second mystery. Judging by the articles written by three of their leaders for the August/September issue of this magazine, some won't vote at all. It's a pity.

What about Arab Americans? We are printing statements by leaders of three Arab-American organizations in this issue. My gut feeling is that a lot of the foreign-born Arab Americans are brooding over Iraq, and wondering why the new world order seemed to start and stop with repelling its invasion of Kuwait.

For them, I can only say that Bill Clinton says he would have voted to empower the president to do what he had to do, but wishes the president had given sanctions more time. It was exactly this writer's position, in these pages, and in testimony at the time to the Gonzalez committee of the House of Representatives. And it was wrong.

If war plus sanctions still haven't gotten Saddam Hussain out of Iraq, it seems unlikely that sanctions alone would have gotten his forces out of Kuwait. As for why the whole world rushed to defend Kuwait by beating up on Iraq, but no one is rushing to defend the Palestinians by beating up on Israel, one reason is the very subject we're discussing here. There's no political downside to beating up on Arabs and no political benefit in protecting them-unless American Muslims and Arab Americans show up to hand out grades on election day.

So will Arab Americans cancel out some of that block voting by friends of Israel? I doubt that how the U.S. treats the ancestral homelands is as compelling an issue for most Arab Americans as the individual allegiances they've already built up with the two parties. That's healthy. Blending into the mainstream is what America's all about.

But what would happen if, because of what's being done in those ancestral homelands, some of the U.S. rich and powerful don't let Arab Americans into the mainstream? What would happen, for example, if Arab Americans were practically locked out of a Democratic convention?

Or if a Republican president appointed a distinguished Arab American ex-governor as his chief of staff? And if from day one the media flooded that governor's state with private investigators, seeking any scrap of information to discredit him, and finally managed to convince the public that, even though that Arab American's financial affairs were clean as a hound's tooth, he was so arrogant, aggressive, and uppity that the president should ask him to resign?

If Arab Americans think that nothing like that could happen in present-day America, they shouldn't give their ethnicity a though when they vote. But I think they're going to be locked out of the American system until Israel's dispute with the Arabs is solved over there, and no one has any incentive to keep them out of power over here.

I think the groups I've described can cancel out a lot of the votes I know will be cast for Clinton solely because of his pandering to the Israel lobby. To be frank, I think if George Bush is pushed into a corner, he'll do what he has to to get elected. If Israel doesn't freeze the settlements, or tries to makes some easy deals with Arab countries that freeze out the Palestinians, he should pull back not just on the loan guarantees but on all aid to Israel, and go on television to tell the American people why.

Americans are woefully uninformed, but they can distinguish between fair and foul, and they care. Television enables a president to go right to the public, without a media filter. When the media erects a blockade, as happened June 4 when the networks refused to carry a presidential speech on a balanced budget amendment, the president can go to C-SPAN and some independent outlets. I hope he will, if he has to.

A Personal Interest

I'm using this space in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, to speak for myself, and not for the American Educational Trust. It's only fair to admit I have a very personal interest in this election. Only a couple of months ago we were planning the transition of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, which came into being with strident criticism of the Reagan administration's Middle East policies, into a more laid-back intermediary between Middle Easterners and Americans.

Now, with a Clinton victory a possibility, I have visions of civil disobedience, a taxpayers' revolt against aid to Israel, picketing the State Department and White House again, and picketing the Israeli Embassy and being arrested for it, again. None of this is nearly so appealing to me now as it was a decade ago when we founded AET.

There are other things. Suits against AIPAC to which the publisher and I have been a party have been called that organization's "biggest nightmare." We're told its defense may have cost that organization $1 million in legal fees. AIPAC's general counsel is David Ifshin, Clinton's first campaign director and now general counsel to the Clinton campaign. He would be a Clinton administration's attorney general if he wants to be. I'm not at all sure he would be grateful for the legal fees we helped him earn from AIPAC. He might only remember the nightmare.

In my nightmares, I envision Israel-first Rep. Stephen Solarz as Clinton's secretary of state. This summer, while vacationing with all the children and grandchildren, I overheard my wife telling a couple of them one evening, when she thought I was out of earshot, that if Bill Clinton is elected and carries out his promise to separate aid to Israel from the peace process, it means everything we've all worked so hard to build at the American Educational Trust for the past 10 years will be swept away.

"Would you start over?" one asked.

"I don't know," she replied, and her voice caught. "We were pretty old even then!"

We were, and at my age, it isn't prudent to plan too far ahead . But I am making plans for election day on November 3. I know exactly what I'll do then. 

Richard Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. This article represents his personal views, and not those of the American Educational Trust.