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Epiphany at Beit Jala
The diplomatic effort in 1975 was aimed at achieving a small Israeli withdrawal in the Sinai peninsula. It was to be only a limited pullback from territory that no nation, including the United States, believed Israel had any right to keep under military occupation. President Anwar Sadat already had proved his desire for a deal when he had abandoned his previous pledges to link Palestinian rights to the talks and was asking only for the return of Egyptian land. In the circumstances, I thought there should be no problem for Washington to formulate a fair agreement and then nudge both sides to sign. Instead, Israel acted as though it was being asked to surrender its own sovereign territory, demanding extravagant concessions not only from Egypt but from the United States. As a result, Washington labored away at various proposals to soften Israel's position. In early February the Secretary of State himself flew into the region to personally present a U.S. withdrawal plan to the two sides. This was my first exposure to Kissinger in action. He swept into a conference hall at the King David Hotel, where he and his entourage had taken over a floor or two of suites and rooms, and looked quizzically at the 30 or 40 local and foreign reporters awaiting him. After a perplexed moment, he said with some exasperation: "Where is my press corps?" He refused to start the press conference until the 10 to 15 reporters assigned to him fulltime arrived. It did not take a reporter to understand why Kissinger was getting the best press of any recent secretary of state. He and "his" press corps were a symbiosis, each feeding off of each other. Kissinger was a master at manipulating his press corps. His favorites were rewarded with front-page quality leaks, endorsements of their books and a sense of having participated in shaping the nation's foreign policy. Those who occasionally strayed from the Kissinger line were punished by being ignored and cut off from inside tips. After Kissinger's press corps arrived the Secretary of State revealed his strategy. He was giving both governments three weeks to consider the latest U.S. plan, then he would return to start another of his famous shuttles between Cairo and Jerusalem. The shuttle began on March 8. By March 24—no small amount of time for a secretary of state to devote to one problem in a world of problems—Kissinger admitted failure. He left little doubt that the failure was due to Israel's intransigence and flew home amid mutual recriminations between Tel Aviv and Washington. The extent of Israel's ability to resist U.S. advice was my first great eye-opener in Israel. I had had little appreciation of the astounding depth and strength of Zionism's influence in Washington. I was stunned that a country completely beholden to the United States could thumb its nose at Washington. I remember sitting down during this period with one of Kissinger's exhausted aides late at night in a deserted bar and asking him why Washington simply didn't tell Israel it either would compromise or lose U.S. aid. In return, I received a short lecture on the relationship between the White House and Congress. His message, boiled down from its diplomatic niceties, was that Zionist influence in Washington was so great that it was impossible to do anything involving Israel against Zionists' wishes. I expressed some mild skepticism, but the diplomat was firm. Believe me, he said, when it comes to Israel even the slightest problem can be resolved only by the President. I frankly thought that the diplomat was exaggerating, drunk or a closet antisemite. I certainly did not believe that the President of the United States had to offer a handkerchief every time tiny Israel sneezed. I began changing my mind when on the same day that Kissinger's shuttle failed, President Ford announced a major "reassessment" of U.S. Middle East policy. It was a White House effort to rein in Israel. To add to its impact, scheduled visits to Washington by Israeli leaders, including Defense Minister Shimon Peres, to discuss the Israeli request for more than $2.5 billion in aid, were postponed, talks on supplying F-15s to Israel were suspended and the delivery of Lance ground-to-ground missiles was delayed. But once again, astonishing to me, these moves had no effect on Israel. Quite the reverse. The government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin defiantly refused compromise while the President, instead of being hailed for his political courage, found himself under attack as being anti-Israel and even antisemitic. The attacks were ferocious enough that he felt he had to hold several meetings with Jewish Americans to deny the charge, a show of weakness that did not go unnoticed in Israel. Nor did Israel soften its stance through the weeks and months that Washington pretended to reassess its policy. In the end, the great reassessment crashed like Kissinger's shuttle. It came about with an amazing display of power by Israel and its American supporters. On May 21, 76 Senators sent a letter to President Ford urging that Washington be "responsive to Israel's urgent economic and military needs." The letter was a major triumph for the Israeli lobby to force the Administration to abandon its reassessment. While Ford kept his silence at the time, he later confided in his autobiography that the letter "really bugged me" because "there was no doubt in my mind that it was inspired by Israel." In fact, later research revealed the letter was drafted in part by Israel's U.S. lobby AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.
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