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WORLD JEWISH CONGRESS
INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC AND
SOCIAL COMMISSION
LUNCHEON, NOVEMBER 3, 1978
THE PIERRE, GRAND BALLROOM

STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK 10314 - 761-3838

DR. HENRY A. KISSINGER: Well Baron

De Rothschild, ladies and gentlemen. I was put in
a rather difficult position by the preceding speaker
because coming from a less aristocratic tradition,
you will never catch me admitting that I do not
deserve everything that has been said about me.
(Laughter). In fact, I went through a panicky moment
when Phil said that I don't need an introduction.
(Laughter). I need it. My father has 32 scrapbooks
to prove it. (Laughter).

And I have written 3,000 papers so
far of an objective account of my conduct in office
in which I allow both who are successes and failures,
I have not yet had to use the footnote that is set
aside for failures. (Laughter).

Now to speak to a group like this
is challenging enough. To follow Abba Eban is some-
thing I would not have undertaken had I known what I
was confronting. If a man from Mars had come to our
discussions when we were both in office, and had been
asked to pick who is the American Secretary of State,

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(Laughter) I know what his answer would have been.
And I used to be faced with an insuperable task of
keeping up with the extraordinary sentence structure
while maintaining some grip on the substance that
(laughter) we were negotiating.

But then I realized that if there's
one thing that Jewish history teaches one, it is to
accept ones' destiny. And in our first conversation
Eban said to me what I thought was a joke. Remember
we Israeli's consider objectivity 100 percent agree-
ment with our point of view. (laughter). Unfortun-
ately, it wasn't a joke. (Laughter).

So that in my negotiations with Eban,
really the only thing open for negotiations was the
rate at which I would surrender. And when I know in
this group and other Jewish groups that used to call
on me from time to time, there existed the myth that
these poor, defenseless, helpless people in Israel
needed protection. I can assure you the only issue
for policy consideration in Jerusalem was how to main-
tain enough of my vanity so that I could sign the
document they had drafted. (Laughter).

But to speak seriously, I am proud
to speak to this group and particularly am I glad
that my former colleague Abba Eban is here because

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INTERNATIONAL RECORDING GUILD - STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK 10314 - 761-3838

we went through many complex and profound experi-
ences together. He will remember the weeks of the
war when he was here and the survival of the state
of Israel was in the balance. Afterwards many non-
participants wrote fanciful accounts of who did what
and when. And many participants also wrote fanciful
accounts.

But I know with whom we negotiated
when the air lift was an issue and when the survival
of the State of Israel and the future prospects of
peace alike hung in the balance.

Then when we had negotiated in Moscow
the agreement that brought about a cease-fire. It
was Eban who brought me at the airport, at Bedurian
Airport when I flew there from Moscow. And I don't
think any of us who were in Israel that day will ever
forget the exhaustion, and the physical as well as
spiritual necessity for peace that we all experienced
that day.

Again, afterwards, many great tales
were told about what might or might not have been
possible. But I believe that those who went through
those two weeks and through those last days experienced
that the limit had been reached and could not come
away from those days except with a determination that

INTERNATIONAL RECORDING GUILD — STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK 10314 — 761-3838

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everything must be done to end the armistices and
to move to its peace.

So I dare say it is perhaps for
Aubrey and myself a very specially poignant occasion that five years after these events we should be meeting here to discuss the formation of a commission that is addressed to the challenges of peace in the Middle East. And that we should have moved from arguing or considering the immediate problems of survival to the long-term problems of both survival and construction.

Reface a series of issues. Some of them new and quite unprecedented.

The first is how to bring to a conclusion the negotiating process that has been started. This respect to the negotiations between Egypt and Israel I do not think much needs to be said. They will be concluded within the very near future. They will create their own reality. They will mark both a political and a spiritual change in the sense that two peoples who have thought of each other only in terms of hostility will now at least have an opportunity to address together some tasks of construction.

If I may make a few comments, I would
however, say two things. It is perhaps not totally

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unfair to say that many Israelis and Jews operate on the principle that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. And I, for example, see no overwhelming political necessity that every Israeli busline establish a terminal in Cairo. I think of course, it is important that contact starts with Egypt and Israel. I think of course, it is important also that these contacts be developed in a manner that is compatible with the perception of itself of Egypt which is still a Moslem country and still related to other Arab countries.
And I would strongly urge that within Israel and within the Jewish communities around the world some mechanism be established which lets the many brilliant approaches that are being generated by every original Jewish thinker a number that exceeds the total Jewish population. (Laughter).

I believe if we are going to move into a genuine period of increasing cooperation, that there be some priorities established, that there be some focal points created and that the dialogue be conducted in a manner that is compatible with the self-respect and the image of themselves of all the parties lest this fragile plan be destroyed at its very beginning. And I don't think that this commission was designed for that purpose. But either this commission or some other

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STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK 10314 -

group should do this for the Jewish community at
large. And within Israel, it is also imperative
that some priorities be established of the kind of
cooperation that is possible and that is not pos-
sible.

Second, there is in Israel among
the people that has never known peace in all of its
existence a perhaps romantic notion about what peace
is. There's a tendency to forget that almost all
wars in history have started between people that were
at peace. It was a peculiarity of the Middle East
that the wars have started between countries that were
already at war. And, therefore, one should not believe
that a peace treaty is the end of history. Or the
end of any political conflict. Or that one can rest
on that for all eternity. It needs the most careful
and thoughtful nurturing.

I'll come back to that in a minute.

Now in the exhilaration about the
agreement with Egypt, it is not always fully faced
that there is also an agreement about the West Bank.

I will not engage in an exegesis of its meaning. I
do not think there's any overwhelming imperative con-
stantly to give answers to questions that have not
yet been asked. However, as Aubrey has said this

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morning, on any interpretation of the meaning of his
agreement, it will inevitably reduce Israeli control
over the future destiny of the West Bank and as it
has been written, I see no reference to any changes in
the 67 frontiers to which this would apply.

There are two imperatives in this
process. The first is that Israeliis become clear
among themselves just what it is they think they have
agreed to and what the historical process is that
will have been generated. And the second is that
some private understanding be reached between the
United States and Israel as to where this historical
process is going to go. I say private because I think
it is dangerous for Israel and dangerous for the Jewish
communities to conduct all of these diplomacies as a
series of public confrontations of unilateral statements
on either side which are then tapered over.

In the previous periods we often had
disagreements. But I believe I'm correct in saying
that we always worked out a strategic agreement with
a government in Jerusalem about where we were going
and what we were trying to do. This did not always
insure that we agreed on all the tactics, but at least
philosophically when we were engaging in the disengaging
agreements, while sometimes the terms became controversial

INTERNATIONAL RECORDING GUILD - STATEN ISLAND. NEW YORK 10314 - 761-3838

the strategy was clear. It is very dangerous to
permit a series of crises to develop and to try to
resolve them under the impact of headlines, even if
it has worked once. Conditions are not the same on
the West Bank as in the Sinai.

I am basically optimistic that some-
thing can be worked out, especially if we keep in mind
that in the Middle East it is sometimes easier to do
something than to talk about it. That some relation-
ship has to be found between the legalistic calmudic
tradition of Jewish negotiators and the epic poetry
tradition of Arab approaches to these problems, on a
number of occasions it has proved possible to work out
practical arrangements. In 1975, there was a great de-
bate about uninterrupted access to the Albuto Base
oil fields at a time when before any of us knew that
there was only one road and that the topography was
such that no other could be built. Finally, in dispair,
I proposed that both Israel and Egypt use the same road
on alternate days. I only thought it would get me through
two weeks while I thought of something better. (Laughter).
It turned out that this was the formula that both enthusi-
astically accepted. Whose sovereignty controls this
road? Nobody has ever determined and nobody has ever
asked.

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So I think that in the future of the
West Bank, some attention might be given to this ap-
proach of defacto arrangement.

But I'd like to make also beyond the
immediate a few observations about the problems of
peace.

I think we owe it to ourselves to ad-
mit that peace will present a profound psychological,
political, and even spiritual challenge to a country
that has sustained itself for all of its existence by
the heroic myths of isolation and mixed enemies. It
is a new world when Israel becomes one of several
Middle East states and not the focal point of all of
the diplomacy. It requires a major adjustment of
thought processes. And I would suspect (TAPE CHANGED)
but the Jewish communities outside of Israel will also
have to adjust their thinking and their operating pro-
cedures. They have been geared to dealing with a
series of crises and confrontations of exacting spe-
cific promises and definable amounts of assistance.
But the problems of peace do not lend themselves to
being segmented into these individual items. It is
much more difficult, if not impossible, to create
under those conditions an agreement that can become
a permanent guideline for extended periods of time as

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was the case in previous periods. So once again,
I'm glad that this commission exists, presumably to
deal with precisely some of these long-term issues.

Third, now that peace is approaching
at least in some of its manifestations, Israelis and
Jews all over the world have to ask themselves much
more seriously than before not only about the condi-
tions of the survival of Israel, but about the condi-
tions of stability and progress in the whole area.
We have seen Soviet attempts to use individual Arab
countries as a base of radicalization of the area.
But we have seen something even more fundamental. A
dual process where the development, where the concepts
of development that the West has introduced all over
the world in the name of economics are producing poli-
tical dislocations to which the originators of the con-
cepts have been unable to give answers. And these
political dislocations may be quite unrelated to the
Arab-Israeli disputes, and yet have the profoundest
consequences upon it.

We see today an era that the shah is
caught between those who think he has moved too rapidly
and between others who think he has not moved rapidly
enough. And I'm frank to say that I believe that abstract
human rights slogans by the United States are accellerating

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this progress or this process. Anybody who has had
to conduct Middle East diplomacy knows that a pro-
western stable Iran is absolutely essential for a
peaceful Middle East. If Iran should become a neutral-
ist country, the whole pattern of relationships would
fundamentally change and the prospects of peace that
make us all so hopeful today would be fundamentally
altered and, therefore, a group such as this cannot
concern itself only with Israel because this turmoil
will affect the stability and the survival of all the
countries in which we're interested.

And when this is combined with the
geopolitical thrust which can be spelled in such names
as Afghanistan, South Yeamen, Ethiopia designed to
produce a sense of impotence on the part of the
**madridgy** and of irrelevance by the United States,
then we can see a situation where not because the peace
agreements are unsatisfactory, but because domestic
evolutions have gone out of control, we could see a
total radicalization of the Middle East and a loss of
all that has been achieved. And the obsession with
whether a particular statement by a particular leader
was abrasive or not or well-chosen for that occasion
is relatively trivial compared to these fundamental
historical forces that are at work there.

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INTERNATIONAL RECORDING GUILD — STATEN ISLAND. NEW YORK 10314 — 761-3838

It is, therefore, essential that we understand the geopolitical challenges and the developmental challenges whose political consequences we have totally neglected in a materialistic obsession with a belief that economic development is an end in itself and does not produce political and philosophical dislocations of the profoundest nature. And it is in this sense where paradoxically Israel could make a tremendous contribution. Because it has gone through a process of economic development. It has solved to a considerable extent the question of political legitimacy, though you could not prove it from all of the debates in the __________. But it could operate on a scale more compatible with that of its neighbors than the United States which thinks any experiment can be tried once. And no assistant professor is worth his salt unless his theory has been inflicted in some foreign country (Laughter). At least somewhere in the world. And even in the geopolitical sense. What it used to be -- a concern only with the immediate dividing lines could over a period of time involve an understanding of the fundamental equalibrium on which the peace of the world and the peace of the Middle East depends.

I have spoken to you frankly about some of my concerns. In a moment that otherwise lends

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itself to euphoria. I want to stress, however, that these are good problems to have. Five years ago when Aubrey and I met at Benturian Airport, we would not have considered it possible that within a few short years, one would be meeting here in New York to discuss the challenges of peace in the Middle East.

What I have described can be grave but it also is solvable. And whether it is solved or not is largely within our control. And I am glad that my old friend Phil who was such a wise counselor when I was in office and has remained such a good friend has had the vision to put this congress behind this project. And that Baron De Rothschild has assumed its leadership because these two men are a guarantee of its success.

Thank you very much. (Applause).