August/September 1992, Page 45, 91

Still, What Price Israel?

Using Israel to Pander for the Jewish Vote Hasn't Changed Since 1948

By Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal

In the sordid bartering for Jewish votes and campaign donations that began this year in the Florida and New York primaries, Democratic Gov. William Clinton emerged not only as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, but also as the front-runner in pushing all the pro-Israel buttons he could reach, regardless of the consequences for the U.S.-sponsored Middle East peace process. Clinton described the U.S.-Israeli relationship as being at a new low because "our president and our secretary of state do not value it."

The Democratic candidate vowed to restore what he called "our proper relationship-we will deal with each other with respect, affection and conviction. There will never be the kind of questions we have about whether America can be counted on when the chips are down in the Middle East." And to further trash President George Bush with Jewish voters, Clinton added: "The settlement issue should be addressed in negotiations between the parties and not as American policy. . . The Arabs are the obstacle to peace."

The Competition Commences

This competition to absolve Israel and blame the Arabs for the Israeli-Palestinian dispute actually began before Palestine was partitioned. In May of 1948, the month Israel was born, it became a major issue when the Republicans held their national convention in Philadelphia. Israel had already been accorded de facto recognition by Democratic President Harry Truman. Afraid of exacerbating anger in the Arab world at the U.S. support six months earlier for the U.N. partition of Palestine, the draft Republican foreign policy plank merely extended greetings to the state of Israel but omitted support of Israel's boundary claims and of its admission into the United Nations.

The Zionists immediately went to work and within 24 hours corrected the situation. New York Gov. Thomas Dewey, the Republican candidate-to-be and an old hand at minority-group politics in New York, used his influence with John Foster Dulles and other architects of Republican foreign policy. The president of the Zionist Organization of America, Rabbi Abba Silver, went into conference with his close friend Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft, Dewey's rival for the nomination. Silver made clear that he would not deliver his scheduled invocation and would walk out on the Republican convention unless a pronounced pro-Israel commitment was inserted. The Resolutions Committee then rewrote the original Republican Palestine plank, making it perfectly suitable for even the most ardent Jewish nationalists.

The Democrats, for 16 triumphant years masters in the art of exploiting minority-group consciousness (Roosevelt and Truman had an assistant specifically assigned to this task), were from the start free of such Republican indecisiveness. The 1948 Democratic platform plank went way beyond the GOP promises and offered "financial aid" for Israel and the repeal of the U.S. arms embargo. The Truman administration did not intend to let the electorate forget just who, by twisting arms during the U.N. partition vote and then recognizing Israel without asking it to define its borders, had been the best friend of the "Jewish people."

During the campaign that followed, Dewey struggled to outbid Truman for "the Jewish vote." At the September session of the United Nations, the U.S. Secretary of State, Gen. George C. Marshall, had supported a compromise Palestine plan, proposed by Count Folke Bernadotte, who had been assassinated in Jerusalem by the Jewish extremist Stern Gang (led by Israel's former prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir) that very month. This plan would have altered the original partition proposal by giving the Negev area in southern Palestine to the Arabs.

John Foster Dulles, Governor Dewey's chief adviser on foreign policy, was a member of the U.S. delegation at the U.N. Spurred on by Governor Dewey, however, Dulles announced that he was not bound by Marshall's approval of the Bernadotte plan. The following week, candidate Dewey declared himself in favor of giving the Negev to Israel.

Picking up his election year theme from Rogers and Hammerstein's "I Can Do Anything Better Than You Can," a few days later President Truman declared that no change in the original U.N. partition plan should be made unless the change was acceptable to Israel.

Truman won the 1948 presidential election and, in 1949, Dulles lost a New York senatorial election to Gov. Herbert Lehman, partly because Lehman outpromised Dulles when it came to Israel. In 1952, therefore, although he was a leader in the National Council of Churches, which strongly advocated the internationalization of Jerusalem, Secretary of State-to-be Dulles went along with a Republican National Convention foreign policy plank which outdid any previous Democratic platform in its bid for the Jewish vote.

The Zionists immediately went to work and corrected the situation.

While the Republicans did not entirely follow the Zionist formula calling for the resettlement of the Arab refugees in neighboring Arab countries, the Republican platform failed to mention with even a single word the existence of hundreds of thousands of wretched Arab Palestinian refugees.

By contrast, the 1952 Democratic presidential nominee, Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, insisted on treating the parties equally. What aid was promised to Israel and its refugees was equally assured to the Arab states and the Palestinian refugees-a considerable toning down of past Democratic commitments to Zionism. Thanks to his overwhelming personal popularity, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower crushed Stevenson in that election, despite a last-minute avalanche of leaflets, dropped from planes over New York City, which read: "A vote for Ike is a vote for Nasser, Nixon and Dulles."

Since then, all presidential candidates of both parties have sought to outbid their rivals in promises to Israel. After they were elected president, Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Ronald Reagan went to additional ludicrous lengths to prove that their devotion to Israel was not just election year politics.

There are about six million Jewish Americans, constituting less than three percent of the U.S. population. They have such an inordinate power in the selection of the president partly because of our anachronistic Electoral College system. Some 75 percent of all American Jews are concentrated in 16 cities in only six states. Together these six states-California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio and Texas-have 184 electoral votes. It takes only 270 to elect the new president of the United States.

It is, therefore, not the size of the Jewish population that counts. What does count is location, the reputation of Jews for being a one-issue pro-Israel constituency, and their willingness to back up pro-Israel candidates, and to oppose their rivals, with hard work and generous campaign donations.

Democratic nominee William Clinton will win the bulk of Jewish community support in 1992, aided by Bush and Secretary of State James Baker's determination to deny U.S. loan guarantees to Israel unless it freezes Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

But the Republicans still hope to keep the votes of some of the 28 percent of Jews who are believed to have voted for Bush in 1988. That is why Vice President Dan Quayle courted Jewish voters at the April national convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, DC by addressing the audience as "Fellow Zionists," and endeavoring to portray himself as the guardian of Israeli interests in the administration. Quayle, who regularly attends a church in Virginia whose minister is an extreme Christian fundamentalist of the Falwell-Bakker-Swaggart variety, has been an all-out Israel supporter.

At the AIPAC conclave, the Veep tried to play down the Bush-Baker opposition to the $10 billion in loan guarantees by telling his audience: "We must defend the right of Americans to advocate their views and to speak out for the causes they support." He added: "One of my causes is the security and well-being of the people of Israel."

From 1948 to 1992, "plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose." The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Dr. Alfred M. Lilenthal served in the Middle East in World War II and has spent a lifetime since then educating Americans on Middle East realities. He is the author of What Price Israel?, There Goes the Middle East, The Other Side of the Coin, and his monumental The Zionist Connection.

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