From: Hank Roth <pnews@igc.apc.org>
Subject: Letter to Clinton re: Israel
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 06:36:36 GMT

<<< via P_news/p.news >>>
{From: THE WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS, December 1992}
A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT-ELECT FROM AN AMERICAN JEWISH SUPPORTER 
OF U.S. PRESSURE FOR LAND FOR PEACE. 

Dear President Clinton:
     
   Last November more than 80 percent of Jewish voters cast their 
ballots for you. I happily contributed to that lopsided figure 
but urge you not to be misled by it. Your unqualified support for 
Israel was not a deciding factor. Contrary to what some pro-
Israel lobbyists would have you believe, Jews are not single-
issue voters. We worry about jobs, health care, the environment, 
and personal and religious freedom. Like most other Americans we 
supported you for a variety of reasons.

   Many of us are traditional liberals, who were drawn by your 
pledge to bring Americans together and end the divisiveness of 
the Reagan and Bush administrations. We feared the Republican 
Party platform's promise of intrusion into our personal and 
religious lives and its narrow interpretation of "family values." 
We believed you and Mrs. Clinton would bring humanity back to the 
White house with your concern for the millions of Americans who 
suffer from inadequate health care, housing and education.

   We wanted an end to the kind of government that wages covert 
war in defiance of Congress and the Constitution, and that 
secretly arms dictators. We hoped that you would no longer regard 
the Mideast simply as a geopolitical arena and a lucrative market 
for U.S. arms. We hoped that your administration would make human 
rights a cornerstone of American foreign policy.

   In addition to sharing these concerns virtually all Jewish 
Americans want to see Israel survive as a secure and independent 
state, at peace with its neighbors. But here our unanimity ends. 
Our support for the state of Israel should not be interpreted as 
support for the policies of its government.

   Despite the claims of leading Jewish organiations, Jewish 
Americans are by no means united in their views on the Israeli 
government's continued occupation of neighboring territory and 
its treatment of the Palestinians. Too often the organizations 
that purport to speak for all Jews on these issues are less 
concerned with finding a just solution to the Middle East 
conflict than with security unconditional U.S. aid for whatever 
Israeli government happens to be in office. They represent only 
one segment of the Jewish community. I hope that as president you 
will listen to other voices as well.

   Last spring, for instance, while the American Israel Public 
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was lobbying strenuously for $10 
billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Israel without the requirement 
of a settlement freeze called for by President Bush, polls showed 
that more than 60 percent of Jewish Americans (and 57 percent of 
Israeli Jews) favored such a freeeze as a condition for the 
guarantees and nearly 70 percent approved the statement, "Israel 
should trade some land in the territories" in exchange for peace. 
Meanwhile, many of us were working through such organizations as 
the Jewish Peace Lobby, New Jewish Agenda, Friends of Yes Gvul, 
and the International Jewish Peace Union in support of moderate 
Israelis and Palestinians who believe that Israel's survival as a 
democracy depends on its withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza.

   Their fundamental premise, which I hope you will adopt as your 
own, is that ending the Middle East conflict is not a zero-sum 
game. There cannot be a winner and a loser, only winners or 
losers. Palestinians and Israelis must find a mutually acceptable 
way to live together in peace or they both may eventually perish. 
Moderates on both sides have long agreed that a peaceful future 
for Israelis and Palestinians requires a settlement that 
recognizes the Palestinians' right to an independent state and 
guarantees secure borders for both peoples.

   As president of the United States, you can play a crucial role 
in bringing about such a peace. The peace talks that began with 
such fanfare in Madrid a year and a half ago are at a standstill 
and will remain so without your intervention. The huge disparity 
in strength between the two sides makes it almost inevitable that 
Israel will refuse to grant concession to the Palestinians unless 
it is pressured to do so. Meanwhile, as negotiations produce no 
results and the hardships under occupation remain severe, more 
and more Palestinians are becoming disillusioned with the peace 
process. If the moderates fail and are supplanted by extremists 
there may soon be no one for Israel to negotiate with.

   The cruel irony of this situation is that the longer their 
hopes are deferred, the more difficult it becomes for the 
Palestinians to maintain unity. Hard-liners in Israel and the 
U.S. then point to the resulting dissension as evidence that the 
Palestinians are incapable of self-government.

The problem is exacerbated because neither the U.S. nor Israel 
will talk to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the only 
organization that can legitimately claim to speak for the 
Palestinians). (In an election at Bir Zeit University last fall 
that was seen as an indication of popular sentiment on the West 
Bank, PLO supporters overwhelmingly defeated Islamic 
fundamentalist.) By re-establishing contact with the PLO you 
would not only help speed up the negotiating process but send a 
signal that the U.S. intendes to act, at long last, as an 
evenhanded arbiter in that process.

   U.S. recognition of the PLO would also help to end Israel's 
interference in the choice of Palestinian negotiators--a 
privilege that is unprecedented in the history of internaitonal 
peace negotiations and has caused unnecessary delays and 
disruption. Last fall, for instance, the Israeli delgation walked 
out of international talks on refugees because they objected to 
the Palestinian representative, Dr. Muhammad Hallaj. He is a 
distinguished political scientist who has lectured and taught at 
major American universities since receiving his Ph.D at the 
University of Florida in 1956. The Israelis objected to him 
because, like Dr. Edward Said, who holds an endowed chair at 
Columbia, Hallaj was a member of the Palestine National Council. 
The episode cast serious doubt on Israel's sincerity in 
negotiating the refugee issue.

   As an impartial facilitator of peace talks, you will be in a 
position not only to discourage such delaying tactics but also to 
help end the violence that continues to plague the occupied 
territories. You can help persuade Palestinian and Lebanese 
militants that peace talsk will bring an eventual end to the 
occupation, but only if Israel can be assured of secure borders. 
At the same time you can pressure Israel to stop torturing 
Palestinian prisoners, disband the roving death squads, end the 
bombing of southern Lebanaon, and release the thousands of 
political prisoners now being held in preventive detention. These 
abuses serve only to increase bitterness and make reconciliation 
harder to achieve.

   Amnesty Internatinal and other human rights groups have fully 
documented Israeli human rights violations. Yet the U.S. 
continues to send Israel nearly $6 billion a year in aid. There 
seems little reason why American taxpayers should be asked to 
subsidize a government that sactions torture, whether it is in 
Israel or any other country. I count on your administration to 
give more than just lip service to human rights.

   In becoming president of the world's one remaining superpower 
you have taken on what seem to be unsolvable problems, both at 
home and abroad. Settling the Middle East conflict is not one of 
them. If you will ignore the chorus of negative voices and 
consider the basic issue--the need to achieve a just compromise 
between two peoples who claim the same land--there is a solution. 
The Palestinians, through the PLO, have agreed to give up their 
claim to all the land that was once Palestine and in which, until 
1947, they were the majority population. They are now willing to 
settle for a state of their own in 22 percent of that land, East 
Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

   Palestinian aspirations for a nation of their own are not hard 
fo rme, as an American and as a Jews, to understand. The Jewish 
refugees who fled to Palestine to escape the Holocaust had the 
same aspirations. So did Americans in 1776.

   Last Nov. 2, the day before your elections, the Palestinian 
delegation's spokeswomen, Hanan Ashrawi, began a talk at Stanford 
University by jokingly apologizing to the audience for diverting 
it from the campaign. She then paused and added wistfully: "I 
envy you. What you take for granted every four years is all we 
are struggling for--the right to hold free elctions, to choose 
our government."

   She make it clear that although the Palestinians did not 
insist on a particular timetable, they would never settle for 
anything less. If peaceful negotiations fail, she warned, 
extremist voilence will become uncontrollable. 

   Exactly a year earlier, in November 1991, an Israeli reserve 
officer expressed a similar message in a letter to THE NEW YORK 
TIMES. AFter referring to the "devastating effect" on Israeli 
democracy of the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, 
Shalom Lappin warned that "By incorporating a disenfranchised and 
hostile population into our country we are creating a basis for 
permanent and insoluble communal conflict." He concluded that 
"only a solution that will end our contorl of the territories 
will achieve the genuine peace that is our best hope for 
security."

   It seems clear, Mr. Clinton, that the Palestinians' desire for 
self-determination and the Israelis' concern for peace and 
security are not incompatible. With the courage to be evenhanded, 
your administration can reconcile these goals and help to achieve 
them. Millions of Jewish Americans will support your efforts.

              Sincerely,
              Rachelle Marshall
              Standord, Ca

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[All typos are mine--HR]