The War Against Israel in America

Richard Baehr in today’s American Thinker has published Part II of his important new article:  “The War Against Israel in America.”  Part I was published on March 21 (and is discussed at the end of this prior JCI post).  The two articles are essential reading.

Baehr rebuts the arguments the increasingly vocal Anti-Israel Lobby is making in the pages of major American media and argues that if the “Israel Lobby” is successful, it is not primarily because of AIPAC but because “the pro-Israel case is an easy one to make, and already widely understood and accepted:”

Americans see the hypocrisy among those who back the Palestinians and yet whitewash their behavior, and who focus only on Israel‘s imperfections.  For all its faults (there are no perfect nations), Israel is admired by many Americans for its resolve, its military toughness and sacrifices, its economic and technological achievements in agriculture, desalinization, computer science, and medicine, all shared with countries around the world, its friendship and strategic partnership with America . . . and most of all for its western culture, democratic values, first amendment type freedoms, and respect for minorities.  Where in the Arab world are any of these seen? 

Baehr is particularly good on rebutting the Anti-Israel Lobby’s common misconception that UN Resolutions 242 and 338, the foundational principles of the international community, require a complete withdrawal from the West Bank.  In fact, that position was explicitly rejected during the lengthy consideration of Resolution 242 in 1967, which Baehr recounts in considerable detail.

Let me add a historical footnote to Baehr’s summary.  Thirteen years after Resolution 242 was adopted, Jimmy Carter (natch) — in a fit of pique at Menachem Begin — allowed the U.S. to vote on March 1, 1980 in favor of a non-binding U.N. resolution that repeatedly (six times) referred to Jerusalem as “occupied territory.”  It marked the first time, according to the New York Times, that the U.S. had voted against Israel on a major issue. 

In the uproar that ensued (and that ultimately cost Carter the March 25, 1980 New York presidential primary), the administration distributed a 1967 speech by U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg and told the press it indicated he had supported the concept that Jerusalem was occupied Arab territory.  On March 12, 1980, the New York Times printed a letter from Goldberg that he submitted “to set the record straight”:

. . .  The facts are that I never described Jerusalem as occupied territory. . . .  Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem, and this omission was deliberate. . . .  In a number of speeches at the UN in 1960, I repeatedly stated that the armistice lines fixed after 1948 were intended to be temporary.  This, of course, was particularly true of Jerusalem.  At no time in these many speeches did I refer to East Jerusalem as occupied territory. . . . I made it clear that the status of Jerusalem should be negotiable and that the armistice lines dividing Jerusalem were no longer viable.  In other words, Jerusalem was not to be divided again.

When George Ball, my immediate successor, visited Amman on July 16, 1967, he quoted King Hussein as having said he personally recognized that there must be flexibility on the question of Jerusalem and that there could be no return to the pre-June 1967 status.  This statement is in the reporting telegram of Ball’s visit to King Hussein.

Carter’s action not only was a grievous gratuitous insult to an American ally, but started a process whose deleterious effects are apparent today — by encouraging Arab grievances to be aired in the UN as a more hospitable forum than the process Resolution 242 envisioned. 

In Carter’s recent book, he provides a disingenuous description of Resolution 242 and includes seven documents as appendices.  He omits George W. Bush’s landmark speech of June 24, 2002, the Quartet’s Roadmap, and the formal April 14, 2004 exchange of letters between the U.S. and Israel that set forth the Gaza disengagement deal.  But he includes the infamous 1980 resolution.  Baehr’s articles are an important antidote to this misinformation.