These are troubled times for the U.S. and Israel, two old friends whose national interests and immediate objectives in the Middle East increasingly appear at odds as the Persian Gulf crisis unfolds.
Once the closest of allies, they have seen strains in their relationship explode into bitterness and recriminations over the last two weeks and complicate President Bush`s alliance against Iraq`s Saddam Hussein.
Bush administration officials fear that Arab support has been undermined by the Israeli police killing of 20 Palestinians at Jerusalem`s Temple Mount on Oct. 8 and by the Israeli government`s defiant announcement it would continue to build Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem.
A frustrated Secretary of State James A. Baker III voiced a common view last week when he said the administration preferred ”that world attention be focused upon the rape of Kuwait.”
Israel, for its part, has reacted angrily to U.S. sponsorship of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the Jewish state for its handling of the disturbances that led to the Oct. 8 killings and calling for a UN investigation.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, whose mutual personal animosity with Bush has become an obstacle to better relations, accuses the U.S. of humiliating Israel and endangering its security to maintain its international front against Hussein.
”The driving force in the alliance fighting evil in the Middle East committed a grave mistake by trying to buy unity at the expense of humiliating and endangering the state of Israel,” Shamir said last week.
No one would suggest the U.S. and Israel are about to part ways. The spectacle of Israel passing out gas masks to protect its population against possible poison-gas attacks from Iraq was a haunting reminder of the Holocaust and the moral ties that its memory has helped forge between the U.S. and the Jewish state.
Both nations have high stakes in the outcome of the gulf standoff; for Israel, perhaps its survival. Over the last month, Baker repeatedly pledged privately and publicly that Washington remains committed to Israel`s security. He quietly told Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy in New York that the U.S. would respond forcefully to any Iraqi attack on Israel.
But even while top U.S. officials continue to acknowledge support for Israel`s plight as a small nation virtually surrounded by enemies, the recent tensions between them are the latest example of an increasingly rocky relationship.
”What we`ve been seeing in the last two weeks is another peak in the up- and-down pattern of tensions in the U.S.-Israeli relationship,” said one Middle Eastern diplomat in Washington. ”It has been aggravated further because it has touched on two traditional sources of friction: the status of Jerusalem and the issue of settlements, where we disagree.”
On Saturday, Israel faced the possibility of a new UN Security Council resolution deploring its refusal to receive a UN team to investigate the Oct. 8 Palestinian killings.
Israel offered to give UN Secretary General Xavier Perez de Cuellar the results of an official government inquiry into the slayings, but Perez de Cuellar said that would be insufficient. He decided not to send a UN team to Israel without the government`s support, but voiced hope the Jewish state would reconsider.
Bush administration officials fear the fallout from the incident and continuing Palestinian-Israeli violence may continue to play into Hussein`s hands.
After several months of relative quiet, the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the Israeli-occupied territories is again picking up steam. Violent uprisings left dozens of Palestinians injured last week in the Gaza Strip. Regardless of whether the new unrest is being inspired by Iraq and the Palestine Liberation Organization, as Israel asserts, the fact remains that more bloody clashes appear inevitable.
”This is the last thing we needed when we`re trying to keep all the Arabs together against Iraq and Hussein is painting himself as the champion of the Arabs against Israel,” said one administration official.
Complicating matters further last week was the reappearance of the emotionally charged issue of Jerusalem, the symbolic and spiritual core of the Middle East`s endless strife.
First, Shamir`s government refused to receive the UN mission investigating the killings because it insisted that would infringe on Israel`s sovereignty over Jerusalem.
Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 during the Six-Day War and declared an undivided Jerusalem its eternal capital. But the U.S. and most other nations reject Israel`s sovereignty over the entire city.
Later, in a widely publicized letter to Baker, Levy said his government would continue settling Jews in areas captured since the 1967 war, including East Jerusalem.
In public, the State Department said this did not contradict an Oct. 2 Israeli letter promising not to settle Soviet Jewish immigrants in any place occupied after the 1967 war. But in private, top U.S. officials were angry that Levy appeared to be backtracking.
In the earlier letter, which helped secure $400 million in U.S. loan guarantees for new housing, Levy promised that no American funds would be used to settle any Jews outside the so-called Green Line, which defined Israel`s pre- and post-1967 borders.
Baker told a Senate panel last week that Israel cannot use the U.S. money to settle Soviet Jews in East Jerusalem. In ”every aid agreement we`ve ever negotiated with Israel, we both agree . . . that the use of U.S. funds will be restricted to the geographic areas which were subject to the government of Israel`s administration prior to June 5, 1967,” Baker said.
But Israel does not consider East Jerusalem as occupied territory or outside the Green Line.
It apparently plans to use the U.S. loan guarantee to build housing for about 15,000 Soviet Jews in the Arab sector of the city.
”The Israeli government`s behavior toward the United States over the last two weeks appears based on a delusion,” New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote. ”That is the belief that Israel can deceive the American government, provoke it, injure its interests-and still get uncritical American support for whatever Israel wants.”
In turn, many of Israel`s politically influential American supporters are dismayed at what they see as a naive U.S. reliance on undependable and dictatorial Arab partners in the international coalition against Iraq. Of particular concern is the recent U.S. embrace of Syria, long an implacable enemy of Israel.
The American Jewish Congress blistered the Bush administration, accusing it of ”caving in to the political needs of our new-found Arab allies” in a display of ”blatant political expediency.”
Michael Kotzin, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council in Chicago, said there is widespread concern among many U.S. Jews about the depth of the Bush administration`s ”sympathetic understanding” of Israel.
”There is a lot of concern and disquiet that the Bush administration may allow maintaining a coalition with a lot of the Arab states to take precedence over the strong U.S. relationship with Israel and the commitment to Israel`s security,” Kotzin said.
Some American supporters of Israel fear the U.S. may have to repay its Arab allies aligned against Iraq by pressuring the Jewish state to make concessions to Palestinians once the Iraq crisis passes. But the PLO support for Iraq has deepened Israeli hostility toward the organization and left the Israelis and Palestinians further apart than ever.
Many of Israel`s supporters were angered by the recent news that the U.S. planned to sell Saudi Arabia more than $20 billion in sophisticated weapons, the biggest arms sale in history. Israel worries that the Saudi royal family someday could be overthrown by radical military officers who might then train those weapons on the Jewish state.
To reassure Israel, the administration put together an emergency package of $114 million worth of air-defense batteries and combat helicopters in addition to Israel`s annual $1.8 billion in U.S. military aid. It also is accelerating delivery of $100 million in munitions to be stockpiled in Israel. That has not been enough to mollify some of Israel`s supporters on Capitol Hill. One prominent pro-Israel lobbyist said many American Jews see Bush and Baker heading up the most ”anti-Israel” administration in memory.
But some experts argue that the collapse of world communism and the advent of less-threatening Soviet foreign policies have eroded Israel`s value to the U.S. as a regional bulwark against radical, pro-Soviet Arab regimes.
Even before the gulf crisis, Bush and Baker believed the U.S. should be more evenhanded in its Middle East policy. Both are convinced that Shamir worked to sabotage American efforts earlier this year to implement Israel`s own plan to revive the Middle East peace process. And they are determined, whether Israel likes it or not, to push anew for direct Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations after the gulf crisis is over.
”Quite frankly, I have no problem with that,” said Rabbi Alvin Sugarman of Atlanta, a reform rabbi who promotes Arab-Israeli dialogue. ”Time is running out for a peaceful solution. Somehow it needs to get through to the present Israeli leadership that enough is enough already. But not just to the Israelis, also to the Palestinian leadership. For God`s sake, how much more blood is going to be shed?”
For now, Bush would like Israel to quietly recede to the sidelines. Official U.S. and Israeli policy rejects a link between a solution to the gulf crisis and settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. But in fact, both sides already have helped link them in deed.
Bush has linked them by promising to refocus efforts to achieve an Arab-Israeli peace after the Iraq crisis ends. And Israel, even some of its supporters fear, has helped shine an unwanted world spotlight back on the Holy Land`s endless struggle between Arab and Jew.
