Carter and the Jews II. The 'Bad Mistake'

...In Washington, Jewish leaders were hurriedly called to an explanatory briefing-to, in fact, an apology The formula of the apology-simply a communications problem"-only augmented the pervasive murk Some reports had it that Ambassador Donald F McHenry, the permanent U S delegate to the UN, had spoken to the President directly the night before the vote Other reports contradicted this, claiming the President was ignorant of the Jerusalem clause, though he had indeed approved of the settlements rebuke In a span of only three days, the Administration had zigzagged in a way (and not for the first tune) that made it impossible, when all was said and done, to find out the whole truth about any part of what was said and what was done...

...It was a week before the New York primary, and Strauss was expected to come up with something plausible...

...Soon, however, Carter was being scorned by the very delegations he had sought to woo president terms antiisrael vote in un an error, read one of the most bemusing New York Times headlines in a long while In an "extraordinary," "elliptically-worded statement, " the story went on to say, Carter announced that the U S had made a mistake, it had never intended to cast a vote on the Jerusalem clause The then Secretary of State Cyrus R Vance said he would take the blame, and afterward threw out new ambiguities by affirming that the resolution did, in fact, reflect solid American policy...

...With Sadat and Begin about to arrive in Washington, separately, almost as if the man-to-man hug at Camp David had never occurred, Linowitz turned his attention to the autonomy talks But by the second week in May, long after Strauss' pleasant remorse over the President's "bad mistake," long after Linowitz's plea for shutting up, it was mournfully announced from a Tel Aw suburb that the autonomy talks had reached an irreconcilable impasse...

...The man who had backed away from a telephone conversation about Jewish attitudes and perspectives (with no inflammatory issue on the immediate horizon) found himself at the Harmonie Club in New York City-an enclave established by German Jews at a time when social clubs ostracized Jews He faced a large skeptical group within, Meier Kahane's enraged Jewish Defense League faction without, and a conflagration of resistance all around...

...In the meantime, Jewish voters in New York had risen up en masse, casting their ballots for Senator Kennedy to strike at Carter-giving the President a lesson m the meffectuality of sending Jews to silence Jews...

...Something much more serious was under way The UN's resolutions on Israel are habitual and always hostile They are an index of the Palestine Liberation Organization's success with Third World and oil-appeasement countries They reflect as well the UN's cynical obsession with Israel-hatred A recent display of this by the Security Council-from which the U S did abstain-condemned Israel's April raid into Lebanon, without mentioning its punitive nature (The PLO had earlier murdered a baby in its crib at Kibbutz Misgav Am and held small children as hostages ) No resolutions have been passed condemning the kidnapping of diplomats, for instance, though kidnapping is not subject to any definition of "controversial" and has no debatable historical or international dubieties No resolutions have been passed condemning the victimization of 4 5 million black African refugees from black African upheavals and oppressions The UN is notoriously selective in its condemnations, and Israel is invariably the first object of its selection...

...The intent of Security Council Resolution 465 was a dual one, deliberately made so by its framers It sought to rebuke Israel for supporting the principle of Jewish resettlement in the ancient Judean city of Hebron-a city with a continuous Jewish presence from antiquity until 1929, when Arabs massacred some of the Jewish population and drove out the rest-and also to reduce Jerusalem, including its incontestably Jewish neighborhoods, to the status of "settlements," the document's operative word But the shock at the Carter Administration's acquiescence in this enterprise was not caused by the resolution's gratuitous attack on Israel's immaculate stewardship of religious sites in Jerusalem, or even its questioning the legitimacy of Israel's capital...

...The first speaker he introduced was Sol Linowitz, another Carter-appointed Jewish emissary to the Jews, taking a breather from the autonomy talks Linowitz announced he would accept no questions and would not discuss the UN vote His concern, he said, was the urgency of the Palestinian negotiations, he hoped the Jewish community would not become so vociferous that its outcry would affect the outcome of the talks What was needed now was a moratorium on criticism of the President...

...When Strauss took the floor, according to many of the more than 100 people present at the Harmonie, he was controlled, easy, smooth, moderate, winning, earnest, wonderfully persuasive He willingly took questions, and with grace After he finished, there was a strong public impression that he had won over more than 60 per cent of his listeners to his thesis The vote was a "bad mistake," the Administration was really and truly sorry, the President deserved credit for owning up Then, having pacified the Jews of New York, or at least those important enough to have been invited to the Harmonie, Strauss returned to the campaign...

...What shocked American Jews about the March vote was that the President had in effect decided to endorse and share this mentality The Administration, it appeared, wished to join the great wave of PLO-inspired anti-Israel assaults in the UN, to ingratiate itself with the Moslem nations, regardless of the merits of the issues themselves-Context and content were fused And this wish, revealed in the heart of the Presidential campaign, two days before the Massachusetts primary, seemed, at the very least, to smack of a calculated oil trade-off As for the "Jewish vote," Washington's thinking appeared to derive from its putative position-of-strength Where else have the Jews got to go...

...Into this kettle of roil and confusion Robert Strauss, now the President's emissary to the Jewish vote, was suddenly hurled...

...The' Bad Mistake' All that was before the United States joined 14 other members of the United Nations' Security Council in a unanimous condemnation of Israel By the time of that vote last March 1, Strauss was well out of the Middle East business A more patient man, Sol Linowitz, had taken his place in the autonomy talks, and rather quietly For several months, with no breakthrough in sight, Linowitz nevertheless kept on sending out optimistic signals...