WASHINGTON REPORT: Israel Back and Forth
Getlein, Frank
that European and Japanese producers were "exporting unemployment" and served notice on the administration that "if our friends can't find a way to help us, we will devise means to help...
...In spite of all this, President Carter struck a reasonably optimistic note at the meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank...
...Alternatively, we could easily enough plan and execute an air-sea-land invasion of the area that would surround Israel with American forces and thus guarantee that state's security against the surrounding Arab states...
...But the Joint Economic Committee of Congress was not willing to go along with Mr...
...Motivation aside, those considerations are being served by the flipfloppery and being served well...
...Beyond that political prudence, however, there are entirely legitimate considerations of statecraft that may well be the main motive of the flip-floppery...
...The impression is probably accurate: no one can be 28 October 1977:678 that self-contradictory, that consistently inconsistent, without knowing it and without doing it for the same very good reasons that impel the men in their flying machines and the treader of water: if the alternative is crashing to earth or sinking without a trace beneath the sullen seas, then staying where you are is a justifiable, even admirable, goal...
...it is even easier to be Saladin come again t h a n the anonymous agronomist most sorely needed in the Arab countries...
...But if disaster is to be avoided, such a development is essential...
...Administration budget policy, i t said, was "unadventuresome...
...No doubt such thoughts are not entirely absent from the mind of whoever is programming the flips and the flops that have composed the Carter administration's public utterances about the Middle East...
...Carter's optimistic self-estimate of U.S...
...By enabling the parties to maintain some kind of hope for negotiating victory, the Carter-Vance flip-flops are far from futile gestures...
...This reading can be interpreted simply as normal cynicism on the part of the administration, on the one hand preserving the Jewish support that is crucial to the survival of the Carter presidency beyond 1980, on the other maintaining the semblance of sympathy with the Arab states whose oil-rich members have done it before and could do it again with devastating effects on the future of Jimmy Carter...
...In a pessimistic report, the Joint Economic Committee attacked the Federal Reserve System for having "systematically obstructed recovery" since the 1974 recession...
...policies and accomplishments...
...Saying that international economic health depended on performance by individual nations, Mr...
...If the Israeli-Arab conflict is thus fated to smolder on for at least the rest of this century and probably a good deal longer one way or another, the best thing outsiders of good will can do is to contribute what they can to the avoidance of outright war, a possibility that seems better now than formerly, but by no means a probability...
...Flipping and flopping seems the best available action...
...It is always easier to be Bonnie Charlie than a crofter scratching a living from a hard land...
...Unilateral American military action thus out of the question, what can the country do...
...Youngstown is serious, but it is only a small portent of what might lie in the future...
...FRANK GETLEIN Commonweal: 679...
...If the circumstances can be changed, returned, perhaps, to status quo ante, well, who knows, it might be worth while to try the game again, especially if the alternative is seriously addressing monumental domestic problems of economics, social justice and human rights...
...All of these movements and countermovements recall the gesticulations of several of "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines," desperately trying to keep aloft by constant moving of planes, vanes, props and drops, alternatively those of a swimmer treading water, in both cases, those of one not really trying to get any place, more than happy to do all that running just to stay where he is...
...In return, the PLO will stop killing babies and unarmed athletes, highjaeking planes, taking hostages and similar techniques of its freedom fighting, the Arab states will happily recognize Israel's existence and formally give up their long, many times renewed effort to drive the hated Zionists into the sea...
...In short, there is little reason for any rosy optimism, either in this country or among our trading partners overseas...
...Off-hand, I can think of no truly available course of action by the administration that would serve the cause of peace in the Middle East anywhere near as well as it is served by the flip-flops...
...What Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon--insofar as there may be said to be a Lebanese state--have come to recognize is that they don't really have much chance to accomplish the old Nasserian dream of driving them into the sea: at least, under present circumstances...
...Without going into detail here, France's proposal would call for a higher degree of international cooperation than has yet been achieved...
...WASHINGTON REPORT ISRAEL BACK AND FORTH Taken at face value, the Carter administration's mugwumping, wiggle-waggle, weather-vane record of what are never quite policy statements on Israel, the Arab states, the Palestine Liberation Organization, a national "homeland" for the Palestinians, defensible borders for Israel and the "return" of "occupied" territories resembles nothing so much as the supreme embodiment in life of the political principle most economically created in art by the late Guy Kibbee playing a Corn Belt Pol: "Yes," Kibbee would drawl judiciously, laying a finger alongside his nose, raising his eyebrows thoughtfully, "and again, no...
...The Israelis have absolutely no reason to believe that the Arab states, still less the PLO, have changed in the least from their long-standing and often proclaimed determinat.;:.:: ~& destroy the state of Israel...
...I t isn't going to happen, folks, and the sooner we all realize that, the more prepared we shall be for the media shock that will erupt when it doesn't happen at Geneva or anywhere else...
...Further, it was dubious about the prospects for cutting inflation, fighting unemployment and achieving Mr...
...Protectionist sentiment is running high in Congress, particularly in the congressional steel caucus consisting of 120 representatives and 25 senators...
...The lamb lies down with the lion, giving up what defensive weapons the lamb has acquired because it is now confident of the lion's good intentions...
...France is urging the world's industrialized nations to adopt a system it calls "organized free trade" for problem-plagued industries such as steel, shipbuilding, textiles and aircraft...
...For its part, the lion will undertake to respect the lamb's right to exist and everything will be hunky-dory in this best of all possible Middle Easts...
...that European and Japanese producers were "exporting unemployment" and served notice on the administration that "if our friends can't find a way to help us, we will devise means to help ourselves...
...Only we can't, really...
...Ian Paisley elsewhere in the world...
...Only we can't do that either, because there is the oil weapon, to eliminate which opens prospects Vietnamese in scale and duration...
...He was, however, indirectly critical of other nations, pointing out that the slowing pace of economic activity abroad was a key factor in the large trading deficit of the United Statesma deficit that promotes layoffs and continued unemployment...
...If you take all those self-contradictory administration statements of the last several months as meaning something positive, not just treading water, the positive something they can most likely mean is a kind of vision of a Geneva meeting as painted by the American primitive Edward Hicks in his Peaceable Kingdom series...
...The extended time has enabled little dramas to develop of petition and reassurance, recriminations in legislative halls, at airports, on the lawn of the Executive Mansion, followed ineluctably by understanding, forgiveness and reconciliation in time for the evening news...
...The conversion of the PLO even to that kind of minimum acceptance of the hardest of reality has about as much chance as the analogous conversion to the acceptance of reality on the part of the IRA-Provos and the Rev...
...Once this fact is fully and finally recognized, we can begin the really hard task: the creation on the regional, national and international levels of social and political machinery really adequate to deal with these complex problems----a development thCt will call for social planning and political intervention in economic life and a willingness to undertake international cooperation on a scale hitherto unknown in this country...
...This country could, for example, occupy Isr=:.i and compel it to recognize the "legitimate demands" and so on of the Palestinians for their homeland in the Gaza, strip, the West Bank and half of Jerusalem...
...It was a masterful non-answer and the administration has been masterfully playing it for months now...
...For one thing, the Israelis would fight and on the record of the last several decades, fighting is something they do better than we do...
...Consider...
...The reason it isn't going to happen is very simple...
...Economic growth next year would fall into a 4 to 4V2 percent range rather than the 6 percent growth President Carter cited, it estimated...
...Life being so much less tidy than art, the Carterites have never achieved, never come close, really, to the artistic compression that enabled Kibbee to wrap it in four words and five seconds...
...President Carter and Secretary Vance, solo or in tandem, sometimes assisted by smaller cheeses in the State Department, or independent powers in Senate or House, even New York's mayoral contest, have never gotten the time from Kibbee's Yes to his No much under twenty-four hours, more often running to several days, sometimes a couple of weeks...
...Translated: Israel will "return" to Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon the pieces of land it gained fighting off invasions by Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon over the years and in addition allow to be created some sort of Palestinian state in what remains of the original Israel, a state inescapably to be dominated by the fearless baby-killers of the PLO...
...And whatever the merits or demerits of this particular plan, it illustrates what is perhaps the main bright spot in the whole picture, the growing recognition of the dimensions of economic problems, the recognition that they involve social and political consequences far beyond mere dollars and cents impact, and indeed that their ramifications are national and international as well as local...
...A latterday Hicks may even paint in Secretary Vance, togged out as William Penn making his famous treaty with the Indians which, as we all know, has resulted in Pennsylvania, as both colony and state, maintaining perfect equality between Quakers and Indians...
...Carter told the assembled bankers that the United States would achieve its goal of 6 percent growth this year and was committed to a "vigorous" activity in 1978...
...Carter's 1981 goal of a balanced budget...
...Clearly a disastrous return to high protectionist trade walls in this country is not out of the question...
Vol. 104 • October 1977 • No. 22
