Washington Report: Middle East Realities

...the SALT negotiations were in troubles of their own...

...And though the human rights challenges achieved no immediately positive results, they did serve to let Russian leaders, and much of the world, know that the new administration in Washington looks with jaundiced eye on human fights conditions in the USSR, whatever the definitions involved...

...The Zionists-Israelis could have been, should have been and may yet be, the best hope for a region in which malnutrition, infant death, disease and misery have been built in for centuries...

...WASHINGtTON REPORT MIDDLE EAST REALITIES Anwar Sadat of Egypt has come and gone, leaving in his wake the familiar speculations about how this country can "settle" the Arab-Israeli conflict now rapidly approaching the 29th anniversary of its formal existence...

...The best .thing about Sadat's recent visit was that, in addition to asking for the arms he had to ask for--and, it is much to be hoped, will not get--he also asked for economic assistance...

...Not only did the governing coalition lose seven major cities with a population of over 100,000 to the opposition (Saint-Etienne, Montpellier, Rennes, Nantes, Le Commonweal: 261...

...The line of the Canal and the Red Sea, for instance, are more obviously defensible---discernible, for that matter--than the present lines~ in the Sinai passes hit upon by negotiation following the Yom Kippur War...

...Carter's double-edged suggestions addressed itself precisely to those apparently mutually contradictory desires and was an ingenious attempt to keep both in balance...

...For their part, the Israelks, having fought a whole series of wars just to remain in existence, do not want .to yield the territories they took from the aggressors and from kvhich the aggressors in the past launched their various invasions...

...Still, we were happy to see Mr...

...They were more or less fixed by the cease-fire lines of the 1948-49 war, the Israelis having successfully held the invading Arab armies to those lines...

...emphases on deeds rather than words...

...Ultimately, of course, history is made by other things, too, especially the energy and ingenuity nations bring to the eternal task of feeding and housing themselves, extending what help they can to less fortunate neighbors...

...The domestic economy of Israel has presented, from the first, indeed for some generations prior to the formal foundation of the state, the first signs of hope for self-sufficiency in a region dismal and doomed by centuries of misery accepted with a perhaps edifying resignation to the will of God, but with no evident will to take action against misery, to ameliorate, to raise up, to improve...

...The gains were impressive, for the Left now controls 158 of the 221 towns with a population of over 30,000 inhabitants, wresting 55 from the hands of majority...

...The Zionists for generations before the state of Israel brought scientific agriculture, the foundation of any society, to the region that had invented it in the first place and then forgotten it...

...As against that possibility, the Arab states set out to destroy that sign of hope and have gone on for three decades now trying to destroy what they ought to emulate, take lessons from...

...Incidentally, the most interesting news about the Catfish Hunter of the Golden Age Club is that he is neither news nor interesting: a few weeks ago, the diplomatic advisor to Georgetown University led it be known that he would be walking on the campus at a certain time on a certain day, an ideal opportunity for diplomatic correspondents to get up to date on the true significance of all that has transpired since Henry himself transpired to the spires of Georgetown:nobody came...

...What is much more likely is that things will go on pretty much as they are for some years to come, with or without an occasional Arab invasion of Israel followed by a successful defense by Israel and some adjustment of the borders, probably minor, in favor of the successful defender...

...The scheme was denounced by one and all but it did show an immediate grasp of at least the psychological realities of the Middle East: the Arabs, having repeatedly taken the sword and perished by the sword, want at least the outward and visible signs of their folly erased...

...FRANK GETLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS CA THOLIC VOTE IN FRANCE The French electorate has shown, without a shadow of a doubt, that it is ready to flirt with "collectivism" rather than celebrate its golden wedding with immobilism...

...on the other, Israel would have defensible position beyond those borders...

...Thus, when people talk about the historic borders that must be returned to, they are talking about borders that existed for eight years, as compared to .the present actual borders which, give a little take a little here and there, have existed for ten...

...Those being the conditions that prevail, not a great deal is going to happen in the Middle East, barfing some suicidal attack by Syria, an attack no less unlikely than one by Egypt through the passes, since this time the attack would have to be up to the Golan Heights instead of the traditional launch down from those eminences...

...for that matter, those states and the other Arab states could very easily have helped ~o establish an independent Palestinian state on pretty much the teEritory now spoken of between the UN Partition Mandate and Israel's declaration of existence, the end of November, 1947 to the middle of May, 1948...

...Thus for a period of almost ten years, the Arab states could have peacefully established an independent Palestinian state...

...Hard to say, but certainly, given the record, no Israeli government can do the handback number and expect to remain in 29 April 1977:260 office very long...

...It is also perhaps time to place U.S...

...Carter put the USSR on the spot...

...Thus, when Sadat and others talk about an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, they are talking about an independent Palestinian state that was fully within the power of Jordan and Egypt to create all by themselves anytime they wanted to between 1949 and 1967...

...The borders remained that way until the Six-Day War in 1967...

...Carter made his points well...

...Those borders, which could have been between Israel and a Palestinian state were, in fact, between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon...

...But assuredly, if another invasion occurs and ks successfully repulsed and pushed back, not even Henry Kissinger resurrected from the political limbo he now gibbers in could induce the Israelis to do an encore on the Yom Kippur withdrawal...

...It can only be brought into being, however, by the primary parties concerned and probably only surreptitiously, without a great deal of public reference by anyone...

...The awful truth is that history is made largely by force and it is not repealed by the wishes of those whose efforts to make it by force have failed...

...And the fact that gravity is working the other way is why the Israelis will not hand back what they took from the invaders so the invaders can try the game again...

...Would the invaders try the game again...

...It can best do this by letting its conduct do the speaking for a while on the many broad issues of justice crying for attention...

...There is a vast difference between true morality and easy moralizing, and, so soon after Vietnam, the U.S...

...therefore, no Israeli government will do the handback number...

...The original borders of Israel were ordained by the United Nations in 1947...

...It is conceivable that some such "settlement" may eventually come into being...

...If the Egyptians again invade Israel, they can reasonably expect the new line to be back at the Canal-Red Sea, if not indeed the outskirts of Cairo...

...The Israelis did all those things...

...But perhaps now it is time to turn in other directions, where there can be more pragmatic hope for effecting concrete results-specifically to conditions at home, an.fl in allied and client states...

...In his prior suggestions, President Carter managed to go in opposite directions at once, which is probably the only sensible way for an outsider to approach the problem: on the one hand, the borders prior to the SixDay War would be reestablished...

...This consideration more than any other is presumably responsible for the quiet on the Sinai front...

...They really have made the desert bloom, and the Middle East has an awful lot of desert that needs to bloom if the people are ever to live productive, rewarding lives...

...The second ballot of the municipal elections, held on March 20th, confirmed the sweeping victory of the combined Socialist and Communist forces...

...Gravity's working the other way...

...is advised to shun all semblances of hypocrisy...

...Quite obviously, as it turned out, the Carter human rights challenges to the USSR did not undercut the SALT talks as much as Russian leaders at one point wanted the world to believe they did...

...It is in this aspect of history that the .tragedy of the Arab assaults on Israel comes into the highest relief...

...the filled-out borders of Israel are those signs...

...On .the contrary, the absence of such establishment, indeed of any smallest gesture toward such establishment, by the Arab states then in control of those parts of what had been British Palestine, suggests that had the Arab states succeeded in 1948-49 in their avowed aim of driving the Jews into the sea, the states themselves--Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq--would simply have divided the spoils, more or less amicably, and allowed the Palestinians to continue living under foreign occupation as they had from time immemorial: Ottoman Turks, Brits, Byzantines, Romans, Greeks, Babylonians, even the Crusaders from time to time...

...Some would debate that this practicality obtained in the Carter-USSR instance, if for no other reason than the different meanings human rights have in the two societies...

...This is true of the Middle East no less than of Middle Europe, where Germany, having lost at force lost, too, whole states and principalities taken by the victims as insurance against future German attacks...

...That they did not suggests powerfully that the existence of such a state was never the be-all and end-all of Arab policy it is now purported to be...