INCIDENTALLY THE U.N VOTE WAS RIGHT
Bethell, Thomas N.
INCIDENTALLY THE U.N VOTE WAS RIGHT by Thomas N. Bethell The big helicopter lifted heavily from the landing pad at Camp David on a dour Monday morning in March. Afew minutes later it came...
...But something's wrong here...
...His disavowal leaves the distinct impression that the resolution in its final form was sprung on him like some sort of rabbitpunch, the kind of thing that bosses are always worrying will happen when the underlings get carried away...
...That was his problem...
...After the flip-flop at the U.N., it would be harder to believe in Carter's commitment and easier for a cynical world to conclude that, after all, expediency was still the key concept in American diplomacy...
...vote on "Carter's Gang of Five"-Brzezinski, McHenry, Vance, Saunders, and Andrew Young, whom Koch seemed to believe was still part of the administration...
...Sounding yery much like an earlier-day Robert Strauss, New York state Democratic chairman Paul Fitzpatrick warned Truman that if the V.N...
...When Israel's agriculture minister, Ariel Sharon, explains to reporters that "as long as these settlements are built, a Palestinian state will not be established in this area," the darkest suspicions of the Arabs seem to be confirmed...
...Marshall is not politically minded," Richard L. Strout wrote in The New Republic...
...votehe just thought it would, and bolted, abandoning a promising diplomatic strategy at the first rumble of thunder from New York...
...Torn between conflicting advice, Truman plunged his administration into the kind of confusion that would be instantly recognizable today...
...the merits of the argument have long since been trapped in the diplomatic tar pits of pro-Arab and pro-Israeli factions, and none of the predecessor U.N...
...And it quoted, on the front page, the U.N.'s demand that Israel dismantle the settlements...
...That isn't worth the dubious military advantage of the settlements, Weizman said, but even while he was speaking, religious zealots belonging to the militant Gush Emunim movement were pressing ahead with unauthorized settlements, such as the one in Hebron, and the Begin government seemed uninclined to resist them...
...In the next breath, it quoted Israeli diplomats claiming that the vote "increases Israel's sense of isolation in the world community" and said Palestine Liberation Organization representative Zehdi L. Terzi was "obviously gratified" by the vote...
...The fledgling VnitedNations w~s grappling with a plan for the partition of Palestine, but in the wake of the Holocaust there was powerful support for the idea of a Jewish homeland, and nowhere was that support stronger than in New York...
...That was just about the last thing that Jimmy Carter-or anyone else-really needed...
...Docu-dramas by definition rely on fictional techniques to flesh out a situation where the bare facts are either too incomplete or too mundane to be the stuff of drama...
...By mid-day, Carter had settled on the rationale for disavowing the vote-"the failure to communicate" his understanding that all references to Jerusalem would be deleted from the U.N...
...Teddy Kennedy pulled some of his regular commercials off the airwaves over New York and substituted a new one in which he proclaimed "Never again...
...went so far as to suggest that the timing of the vote and the disavowal might somehow have been connected with the visit of Energy Secretary Charles Duncan to Saudi Arabia...
...Vance's perspective isn't hard to understand if you spend a little time looking into the ancestry of this particular U.N...
...Within the White House, closer to Truman, there were other men with other priorities...
...On May 13, 1948, at 6 p.m...
...Ii waS...
...Where is the line between selfdefense and provocation...
...Ben-Gurion, fierce though-he was, looked like everybody's favorite grandfather straight from Central Casting...
...With this kind of reporting, the opportunities for conspiracy-theorizing would strain the imagination of even an Edward Koch...
...He strode quickly to the Oval Qffice...
...His political advisers, Robert Strauss foremost among them, fear that the Jews of New York will rise up in wrath to smite the president mightily in the March 25 primary...
...There's only one word to describe what they do next: they panic...
...INCIDENTALLY THE U.N VOTE WAS RIGHT by Thomas N. Bethell The big helicopter lifted heavily from the landing pad at Camp David on a dour Monday morning in March...
...That phrase, reportedly the president's, will be used later to explain the "communications foul-up...
...Adjoining articles on the first page of the Times reported (1) no progress in the Iranian hostage situation and (2) the convening of a grand jury to inquire further into Ham Jordan's alleged use of cocaine...
...The Times...
...The alternative was grim...
...The country is struggling with a 140-percent inflation rate, up from 35 percent when Begin took office in 1977, and in that context, the settlements program is a huge economic drain for Israel...
...Clearly, the moderates in Israel need allies desperately, wherever they can find them, if they are to steer Israel on some sort of rational path toward stabilization of the Middle East...
...Peretz claimed that Saunders wanted to re-draft that resolution "in accord with Arab wishes," seemingly suggesting that the Assistant Secretary of State would not object to seeing Israel destroyed...
...but it didn't happen like that at all, as a review of the events leading up to the March 3 fiasco makes clear: • The sequence begins in 1978, after the Camp David negotiations...
...According to participants, they have long since explained their position to the White House, without a murmur of disagreement...
...But in 1978 he wasn't running for anything...
...There are different versions of their conversation, but there's general agreement that it went roughly like this: . Carter: "I never knew all those other references to Jerusalem were in there...
...McHenry, according to sources close both to him and to Mondale, talks about quitting, and Vance makes no secret of his anger and dismay...
...He shares his fears with Carter...
...New York Times columnist William Safire characterized Harold Saunders as a "pro-Arab aide" who was "delighted" by the U.N...
...But scattered within the text are half a dozen murky references to the status of Jerusalem...
...With this kind of diplomatic language, it's always possible for partisans of one or another point of view to find themselves mortally threatened by a comma, but ambiguity-layered from resolution to resolution over the years-protects diplomats of every persuasion from taking such threats entirely at face value...
...diplomatic corps down on McHenry's head...
...Settlements soon appear like locusts all over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip...
...On February lO of this year, ·after Israeli religious zealots have established an unauthorized settlement, within the Arab city of Hebron on the West Bank, the Begin government decides not to try to force them out but, instead, to reinforce them by building an Israeli "educational complex" within the city-an action which provokes a general strike by thli Arabs in the city and which Carter and Vance denounce as "provocative...
...By the end of the day, reports were coming in that a shift in voter sentiment was already under way, that the legendary Undecideds were deciding, that Jewish leaders were mobilizing, and that Ted Kennedy was preparing to demagogue the issue in a big way...
...Kennedy campaign workers in Queens spread the word that Carter was selling out Israel to appease the Arab oil countries...
...The sky didn't fall on Jimmy Carter after the U.N...
...once again, everyone's favorite definition of presidential charaCter...
...Foremost among them was presidential adviser Clark Clifford, whose eyes were fixed not on the long-term prospects of the Middle East but on the immediate and urgent need to corral the Jewish voters of New York...
...President, they were in all the drafts, all along...
...After all, the United States is a nation that responds conspicuously to advertising and public-relations campaigns, and it's hard to imagine anyone with much worse media presence than the chief of the PLO...
...Ask the average American man-in-the-street to associate a word with Arafat, and the answer snaps back: "Terrorism...
...He wants to know what the hell's going on...
...As for Moshe Dayan, Madison A venue on its best day could hardly have improved on that eyepatch...
...On February 29, Vance discusses the draft resolution at a breakfast meeting with Carter...
...resolutions has gone much beyond ambiguous soul-searching and hand-wringing...
...As of February 28, McHenry is still unable to persuade the other Security Council members to make the changes...
...But Clifford prevailed...
...As for McHenry, Strauss let it be known, none too subtly, that McHenry was keeping his job only because it was politically impossible to fire another black U.N...
...Some reports have McHenry continuing: "But of course I would have voted the way you told me...
...Pressed to Clarify the administration's position on Jerusalem, Vance said flat-out that the administration did indeed consider East Jerusalem to be "occupied territory," and had said so· before...
...settlements now being planned will cost upwards of $1.5 billion to build, and unless these costs are indirectly subsidized by the United States, as they have been in the past, the Israelis-a small nation of only 3.6 million people-simply can't afford them...
...The Gang of Five It's interesting to speculate on what might have happened if Jimmy Carter had decided to stand by the resolution...
...He hasn't been able to get the other members of the Security Council to go along with deleting the "dismantling" language-they are taking the view that of course Israel will someday have to dismantle at least some of the settlements as part of any reasonable peace plan-but he suggests he can take care of that in remarks following the vote, by explaining that the U.S...
...The status of Jerusalem has been an unresolved issue since the earliest days of the U.N., and none of the U.N.'s various commissions has figured out what to do about it, beyond echoing early recommendations that the city be internationalized under tripartite Christian, Jewish, and Moslem administration...
...The Diplomatic Stuff To the casual reader, the explosive U.N...
...on record and disavow the vote later...
...Within Israel there is intense opposition to Begin's policy, even among those who see the need for some settlements...
...Doyle Dane Sadat Maybe the problem is Vasser Arafat...
...the motto of the militant Jewish Defense League...
...New York...
...vote, and New Repub/icpublisher Martin Peretz, writing in The Washington Star, said Saunders had been struggling for years to rewrite U.N...
...will have to abstain unless McHenry can deal with "the Jerusalem stuff...
...The Post played the story under a sixcolumn- wide headline: THE DAY CYRUS VANCE PULLED THE RUG FROM UNDER CARTER Vance decarpetated Carter, according to the Post account, by testifying candidly to Congress a few days before the New York vote...
...got the text from the Associated Press wire, and promptly threatened mass resignation...
...And that's the final, sad irony of Jimmy Carter's headlong retreat...
...McHenry, registering surprise: "Mr...
...Two years previously, an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry had written that "Jew shall not dominate Arab, and Arab shall not dominate Jew" in palestin.e, but this noble hope was rapidly fading...
...What in the world did thar mean...
...Bob Strauss has been phoning all morning," Mondale said...
...doesn't officially agree that Israel has in fact restricted religious freedom, McHenry is instructed to try to get that paragraph deleted-otherwise, the U.S...
...The magazine didn't explain what it was about this maneuver that Machiavelli would have applauded...
...by crafty Arabs, and if you can persuade yourself to see it that way, you may well be able to take the next step-which is to persuade yourself that the president was indeed ill-served by his advisers and did the right thing by disavowing the vote...
...Vance tells McHenry to try to delay the vote while he checks with Carter...
...delegate to the U.N., has been summoned from New York, and Secretary of State Vance hurries back from a mid-day speech in Chicago...
...vote in 1980 seemed to follow in the same spirit...
...It was worse-much worse...
...Thus for the United States the pursuit of peace between Arabs and Israelis becomes, more than ever, a matter of both altruistic and selfish priority...
...The Middle East was soon engulfed in the first of three Arab-Israeli wars, and the U.S...
...But three months later, the Israelis begin building again...
...These admonitions seem straightforward enough, and they are generally in line with what Jimmy Carter has been saying about the subject since 1977, although Carter has never explicitly called for the dismantling of settlements...
...General Assembly, American delegates continued working on the Palestine...
...His gaffes are memorable: after waiting ten years for provisional recognition at the U.N., who elso would appear at the rostrum of the General Assembly carrying a gun...
...Carter, for his part, seemed to go out of his way to walk into the drafting session in Mondale's office and confront McHenry in front of the other participants...
...In the past, the U.S...
...He didn't tell them about pinning the mistake on Vance...
...But a source close to McHenry says he didn't say that last line at all...
...There was widespread agreement that the Republican challenger, New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey, would roll over Truman with nary a backward glance...
...the Jewish voters of New York, Connecticut, and Florida did not...
...I'm not sure he gave the New York primary a moment's thought...
...Whether by misjudgment, mismanagement, or irresponsibility," Kennedy said, "the Carter administration has managed to jeopardize the security of Israel...
...Carter's Middle East policy is governed solely by oil," Queens coordinator Fran Bennick opined...
...McHenry, returning from a trip to the Middle East, meets with Vance, Assistant Secretary of State Harold Saunders, and other administration officials to figure out what kind of resolution language the U.S...
...a matter of record and since it was clearly more inflammatory to have taken a.position one day only to abandon it a couple of days later...
...The way things were "left to the parties" in 1967 and 1973...
...At the V.N...
...In a moment of remarkable candor, he told a group of foreign service officers: "I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism...
...At 6: II p.m., White House press secretary Charles Ross called reporters into his office and read them a two~paragraph statement recognizing Israel...
...Since the U.S...
...he was still too upset, this source says, and moreover he suspected that the public upbraiding was contrived-almost as though Carter was trying to make a record, speaking for the benefit of a stenographer or a tape recorder...
...Jerusalem issue, with the understanding-conveyed to them by Marshall-that Washington would be patient...
...There is heated discussion...
...a sign of growing sensitivity to the plight of the Palestinian Arabs...
...On Friday night, Vance calls Carter and discusses the resolution with him...
...The Israelis have been doing that number for years...
...Afew minutes later it came clattering out of the pewter clouds over Washington and settled swiftly to the south lawn of the White House...
...members should refrain from giving Israel any aid used specifically to support the settlements...
...Harry Truman's main problem In the spring of 1948 was that nobody gave him a chance of winning the election in November...
...Later, in his own magazine, Peretz rumbled that the new resolution was "carefully drafted to undermine the Camp David agreements" and was an effort "to transform American policy without a public debate and as a piece of diplomatic legerdemain...
...Ronald Reagan told a 1978 Bonds for Israel dinner in Chicago that "the present administration in Washington is dead wrong when it says Israel's West Bank settlements are 'illegal.' " Asked if he stood by that position in 1980, he said he did...
...In mid-afternoon on February 29, McHenry calls the State Department with the good news that he has been able to get the key paragraph on Jerusalem deleted from the draft...
...It wouldn't have been hard, after all, to put out a statement giving his interpretation of the ambiguous references to Jerusalem...
...B.ut nothing happened to McHenry or Vance or anyone else...
...Throwing his unequivocal support to Israel, Truman picked up the necessary votes in New York...
...Jack Anderson quickly got into the ring with a column claiming "sources with access to the Oval Office" were concerned that "advocates of the Arab cause surround the president...
...Vice President Mondale· was already there, visibly distressed at being the bearer of bad news again...
...That point has certainly penetrated the Jewish popUlation of the United States, which is far from monolithic in its opinions on Middle East issues, but it doesn't seem to have penetrated the president's campaign headquarters...
...resolution seems almost stunningly innocuous...
...To Vance and McHenry, the Jerusalem references are more of the same...
...This struck a number of congressmen as absurd, since the V. S. position was already...
...Israel claims they're necessary for her security, and some may be...
...In fact, the 1980 flap at the V.N...
...resolution "that might 'distract' from the Middle East negotiations...
...Newsweek surmised that the administration had made "an incautious attempt to push the Israelis too hard on the settlements question" and quoted an unnamed "Israeli official" as saying that the vote for the resolution "amounts to a repudiation of the Camp David agreements...
...Strauss did not wait to see if these reports were true (some were, some weren't) before clamoring for the undivided attention of the White House on Monday morning...
...Well, Vance said, Carter was worried that leaving in the references to Jerusalem might be inflammatory...
...The facts here speak well for themselves, with troubling overtones that reach beyond political melodrama, beyond the immediate embarrassment of another diplomatic debacle for the United States...
...after 30 years of living on the edge of war-and three instances of slipping over the edge into the cauldron itself-Israel is understandably nervous about being caught by surprise, and the best way to avoid surprise, is to build settlements next to the people you don't trust...
...interested in dealing with his own political reality...
...Left to the parties...
...resolution-and Strauss, leaking word to friendly reporters that the disavowal would be forthcoming, made a point of telling them that his man, unlike someone like, say, Teddy, or, say, Nixon, was quick to acknowledge a mistake...
...After some confusion in the Security Council over the delay, the vote is rescheduled for Saturday morning...
...Cy Vance, meet the ghost of George Catlett Marshall...
...The Times didn't explain what this "fail-safe" system was and didn't identify its source for the idea that there was such a system-but the reader was left with the clear impression that everything would have been okay if only Cy had cleared the vote with Zbig instead of going directly to Jimmy...
...perhaps distracted itself, didn't get around to printing the actual text of the resolution until five days after the vote...
...Even the traditional argument for the settlements-they're necessary for security- has begun to unravel, to the point where Defense Minister Ezer Weizman told The Jerusalem Post in March that Israeli soldiers for the first time are suffering a crisis of morale brought on by the stigma of being occupation forces-subjugating people with whom they feel they have no real quarrel...
...If anything, that view was even more entrenched by 1948;' Truman was acutely...
...It sounds imprecise, but to Vance and McHenry it means the paragraph they have been wrestling with...
...Afterward, according to a friend, "McHenry felt pretty good about what he'd done...
...But, in the end, the disavowal statement is written as ordered...
...Colorful expressions also made their way into the media coverage of the U.N...
...Mistakes we make now will be with usfor a long time to come...
...New York City'S irrepressible Jewish mayor, Edward Koch, returned from a tour of China in the midst of the furor and promptly blamed the U.N...
...Yet, on March I, the U.S...
...His toothy grin seems to reek of insincerity, and it seems hi~hly probable that his breath is overpowenng...
...Congressmen were mostly muted in their criticism of Vance...
...bears such an uncanny resemblance to a similar and even more dramatic situation that took place in the saine forum more than 30 years ago-a noisy fiasco with echoes still audible today-that it's worth a brief flashback, to put this year's events in true perspective...
...It doesn't mean the miscellaneous obscure references to Jerusalem scattered elsewhere through the text-the "boilerplate" references, as Vance will describe them later...
...The buck stops where...
...voted in favor of a resolution that did precisely that...
...Menachem Begin talks about his grandchildren, too, but his settlements policy is too controversial to lend itself to some facile public-relations solution...
...Carter, Vance, and the others at the meeting (Hamilton Jordan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Hedley Donovan) agree that the U.S...
...After all, Andrew Young lost his job for meeting privately with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization against official policy, and this was surely as serious a brouhaha as that...
...Don't be hasty...
...doesn't think this is "practical...
...No evidence was provided to support the inference that people sympathetic to the Palestinian Arabs are automatically antiIsrael...
...On Monday, March 3, coming back from his weekend retreat in the Maryland countryside, President Carter finds himself suddenly neck-deep in controversy over Saturday's vote at the U.N...
...in terms of dom(!stic politics, that isn't the key point...
...Resolution 242, which indirectly acknowledges the right of Israel to exist...
...3) U.N...
...last year, the United States abstained...
...The Americans at the U.N...
...Ask not on whose desk the buck stops," one of the participants says later...
...an obstacle to the successful outcome of the current negotiations...
...The U.N...
...He called for the resignation of Cyrus Vance...
...He says the Jews are in an uproar-completely out of control...
...In the Middle East, the dying British Empire had abandoned all hope of finding a solution to the Palestine crisis, and had announced that its mandate...
...But he didn't wait very long...
...The article quoted McHenry saying that the settlements are "illegal under internationallaw...
...It contains, in addition to the mildly troublesome reference to the dismantling of existing settlements, a paragraph castigating the Israelis for failing to "respect and guarantee religious freedoms and practices in Jerusalem and other holy places in the occupied Arab territories...
...Nobody should be allowed to belittle the other realities-the pogroms, the Holocaust, the suppression of Russian Jews, the dark traces of anti-Semitism that still trickle through so many minds in so many places-but the fact remains that Israel's history as a modern nation has been the stuff of wonderful public relations...
...plan went into effeGt "it would be useless for the Democrats to nominate a state ticket for the [1946] election...
...A draft resolution-similar to several others adopted over the years by both the Security Council and the General Assembly-is already in circulation...
...It's only five paragraphs long, but the task force in Mondale's office fusses with it for several hours, trying to get the wording rightambiguous enough, they hope, to confuse reporters and mollify the voters of New York without bringing the entire U.N...
...Mondale says he isn't sure-he's been out of town himself, campaigning over the weekend in Wisconsin-but when he gets things pieced together (after a breakfast meeting with the Israeli ambassador), he decides Strauss is right...
...Ambassador Warren Austin reportedly locked himself in his hotel room, too mortified to face his colleagues...
...In short order, Donald McHenry, chief U.S...
...They weren't so kind to Carter, invoking...
...Strauss reportedly thought about calling Carter immediately, remembered the president was at Camp David trying to rest, and decided to wait...
...Strauss has in fact been phoning Mondale, demanding to know what the hell's going on...
...The Camp David agreements require Israel and Egypt to work out a plan for Palestinian autonomy by the end of May 1980...
...That's not the case with the Great Communications Foul-Up of 1980...
...He is not trying to elect anybody...
...It wanders around for a while in a scrubby patch of standarddiplomatese before finally making three key points: (I) Israel's policy of continuing to build settlements in occupied Arab territory is illegal and constitutes "a serious obstruction" to peace in the Middle East...
...For his part, however, Mayor Koch opted not to expand the Gang of Five to include Duncan...
...It stops at Cy's...
...accept responsibility," said Rep...
...Anwar Sadat is the first and still the only Arab leader that most Americans would welcome into their living rooms-largely because he understands how to get there via television, talking warmly to "Waltenr" about his hopes for his grandchildren...
...McHenry: "I might have argued with you, sir...
...They were all "viciously anti-Israel," he said...
...a sharp warning that American patience with Israel's expanding colonization is wearing thin...
...flap...
...If that's so, he was asked, why was· Carter bothered by the references in the resolution, since the V.S...
...It's obvious Begin won't take this deadline seriously unless the U.S...
...resolution...
...This got him an enthusiastic endorsement from Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the influential Union of American Hebrew Congregations and a leading defender of Begin's colonization program...
...over the region would end abruptly in May...
...representative...
...This hardly seemed to be the same Jimmy Carter who boldly brought Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin to Camp David in 1978 and kept them there until they agreed on the first steps toward peace...
...can support...
...He looks like someone you would instinctively avoid in a park...
...but on this particular issue, that ought to be a matter that is left between the parties...
...Maybe, maybe not...
...It wasn't Afghanistan...
...partition plan, and tens of thousands of homeless Arabs were sheltering in "temporary" U.N...
...Face it: the Israelis are better at P.R...
...As the deadline for the British pull-out approached, Marshall cautioned Truman: Wait...
...The president emerged, hisface taut...
...All in all, it wasn't the kind of front page likely to make an old campaign manager eager to get out of bed...
...Jonathan Bingham, "the president was forgetting the sound admonition of President Truman that 'the buck stops here.''' The Buck Never Stops That was Harry Truman's admonition, all right, but it wasn't always his practice...
...So it's possible to see the wording of the resolution-the first time you lay eyes on it-as a clever diplomatic booby trap, presumably engineered in the U.N...
...Business Week reported speculation that "it was a Machiavellian maneuver by Brzezinski to put the U.S...
...But how many settlements are really , necessary...
...I don't have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents...
...So do I," the president said...
...He named Ruth Carter Stapleton, Billy Carter, and Bert Lance, and noted that Brzezinski had shaken hands with Yasser Arafat...
...the State Department suggests this would be an excellent forum from which to send Begin a clear message...
...In 1978 he was widely and rightly admired for his steadfast sense of purpose...
...In allowing you to...
...AntiIsrael, pro-Arab elements appear to have gained the ascendancy" at the State Department, Anderson warned...
...oil-stockpiling program, and the negotiations were still in progress, Sherrill noted, when McHenry voted for the resolution...
...As for McHenry, he had been "long regarded" as a "staunch advocate of the Palestinians...
...Tough, yes-but you've ridden next to her on the bus, and she showed you snapshots of her nieces and nephews...
...Half the text of the latest resolution [see box] consists of standard referrals to these previous reports, resolutions, statements, and letters, all subject to more than one interpretation-the fourth clause, for example, can be read as claiming that Israel captured all of Jerusalem in 1967, when in fact the Israelis had been in the city since 1950...
...It wasn't Iran this time...
...has abstained from voting on Security Council resolutions critical of Israel...
...If Kennedy's language sounds like an invitation to war, it certainly wasn't much different from what other candidates were saying...
...Conceivably, they can be construed as urging the Israelis not only to withdraw from East Jerusalem-seized in 1967-but to relinquish some control over the rest of the city as well...
...They always have been...
...vote to be taken that afternoon...
...He still hoped to see a Palestine partition plan worked out-one in which Jerusalem would be internationalized, under a tripartite Christian, Jewish, and Moslem administration, and the rest of the territory would be divided between Jews and Arabs...
...Eastern Daylight Time, the British mandate over Palestine expired...
...Clearly, unless the issue is resolved it stands a good chance of preCipitating a fourth Arab-Israeli war, and, not coincidentally, an escalation of the economic warfare between producers and consumers of Middle East oil...
...The decision to support the U.N...
...there I was at Camp David, trying to get a moment's peace, never dreaming what Cy and Don were up to...
...Only relatively recently has that situation begun to change...
...But that's all forgotten...
...There are moments· in every presidency that seem later to cry out for docu-drama treatment, and this surely will be one of them: the bizarre weekend when the United States joined the other members of the United Nations Security Council in voting for a resolution criticizing Israel's policy of building settlements in occupied Arab territories and then disavowed the vote two days later because of what President Carter called a "communications foul-up...
...He had once served as Jimmy Carter's Middle East negotiator, but the problems of the Palestinians were not uppermost in his mind on Sunday morning when he picked up The New York Times and saw the lead headline: U.S...
...To the Arab world the settlements stand as proof that Begin has no intention of negotiating seriously to restore any of the territory seized in war...
...They say he's got some sort of skin problem that makes it hard for him to shave, but surely there's some way for a make-up artist to do something about that perpetual four-day stubble...
...By March 26, in fact, he had narrowed the Gang to one...
...It's just part of reality...
...TO REBUKE ISRAELIS OVER SETTLEMENTS and, directly under that, the ominous subhead: A MAJOR STIFFENING OF POLICY The Times story was full of words and phrases guaranteed to put Strauss's teeth on edge: "rebuke...
...He wasn't the only one...
...Certainly a docu-dramatist could have a merry time with this fiasco, but a key point would be lost in the course of going through the exercise...
...Primaries were coming up in Illinois, Florida, and Connecticut as well as New York, raising the spectre for Strauss of a clutch of states with large Jewish populations suddenly turning against Jimmy Carter...
...If this sounds excessively cynical, it's not intended that way...
...Robert Sherrill, writing in The Nation...
...What We Have Here...
...Later, Mondale would shudder at the thought of the cold steel in the president's soft voice as he spoke those words...
...In Mondale's office, they get the word: President Carter is furious, he wants to disavow the vote, he doesn't want to hear any arguments, now let's go to work on a statement and get it over with...
...Certainly the general thrust of the resolution seems reasonable, at a time when Israeli policy seems to be hardening into a dangerous variety of concrete...
...Robert Strauss, on the other hand, was giving the New York primary most of his moments and most of his thinking...
...It was simply a tribute to the lasting quadrennial influence of Chicken Little...
...VOTES AT U.N...
...I think he was genuinely upset about the settlements he saw in the West Bank...
...A president so blatantly and embarrassingly betrayed by his trusted representatives would surely have disciplined them...
...The vote, he says, has been scheduled for 4 p.m...
...It wasn't necessary- not for our politics and certainly not for the politics of the Middle East...
...That is not a false association, nor is terrorism something that can be corrected with a little upbeat image-building...
...When the 1948-49 war was over, Israel occupied territory well beyond the boundaries of the original U.N...
...But their turnout was lighter than usual-not that they weren't given ample opportunity to overreact, if they listened to political leaders or read the papers...
...He thought the vote would help the moderates in Israel...
...Of course, Menachem Begin, in his day, was every inch as much a terrorist as Arafat...
...It was a close call, and his experience has stamped itself indelibly on the collective consciousness of political advisers ever since...
...was gradually drawn into a vast military-aid program for Israel that has been sustained for 30 years...
...Vance struggled gamely with that: "The references have to be seen in the context of the present phase of the continuing gegotiations," he said...
...As events turned out, the- Jewish voters of Illinois gave him their votes anyway...
...than the Arabs...
...The government of Menachem Begin has flatly and repeatedly refused to talk about giving up so much as a single stone of the city, and the Carter administration has pussyfooted around the issue, vaguely intimating that the problem can no doubt be solved someday, somehow, by somebody...
...2) Construction of settlements should stop, and those already built should be dismantled...
...but it was only in the 14th paragraph, back on page 8, that the Times mentioned McHenry's disclaimer about the impracticality of dismantling them...
...Americans were disturbed by domestic issues over which the president seemed to have no control-inflation, skyrocketing housing costs, burgeoning government bureaucracy...
...Golda Meir...
...In the wake of the New York primary results, he told The Washington Post: "There's no question that Cy Vance did the president in...
...Two days before the primary, when interviewers on Meet the Press tried to get Kennedy to explain what he would do about the Israeli settlements, the candidate retreated behind blurry generalizations: "I think the United States ought to be offering its good offices to see the process move forward...
...McHenry does so...
...Could a peaceful solution have been found, given a little more patience...
...Duncan was trying to get the Saudis to soften their opposition to the U.S...
...apparently did not see them as compelling Israel to contemplate abandoning the entire city...
...He expects the U.N...
...Finally, at 10 o'clock Monday night, the White House press officI.: begins phoning networks, wire services, and news bureaus with the text of the statement, and Vance goes forth to accept responsibility for the alleged "communications foul-up...
...will have to abstain on the vote-and to see what he can do about the "dismantling" language...
...In a mid-March retrospective on the fiasco, The New York Times said Vance had reportedly told subordinates in February that the U.S...
...they are infuriated by Begin's insistence that even Palestinian autonomy means, in his words, "autonomy for people, not for land"-a concept the Arabs see as meaningless, an arrogant deception...
...Elsewhere in the same piece, the Times suggested the White House had suffered "a breakdown of the 'fail-safe' system instituted by the administration to protect against such confusion...
...The State Department urged Truman to pressure Israel to abandon its gains-but Truman, with an eye toward the same voters who had narrowly rallied to him in 1948, flatly refused...
...Begin agrees to a temporary freeze on construction of settlements while negotiations get under way on the future of the occupied territories...
...And on the other side of the Atlantic, the Russians were on the move, seizing Czechoslovakia one day, trying to strangle Berlin the next...
...Carter did not reverse his position, Sherrill wrote darkly, "until after Duncan had been turned down by the Saudis...
...should not support any U.N...
...Satisfied that "the Jerusalem stuff' has been properly disposed of, Vance then calls McHenry early Saturday morning and tells him to vote for the resolution, making sure to add the disclaimer about dismantling the settlements...
...At 6:01, the new State of ISrael declared its existence...
...Moreover, although Carter insists he hadn't seen the full text of the resolution before March 3, there's lingering confusion on this point...
...Later, after Vance accused him of uttering "a bsolute baloney," Koch explained blandly that he was only using "a colorful expression...
...refugee camps where they would remain for decades...
...The Carter administration should be given credit for organizing its retreat with amazing speed...
...Meanwhile, Carter is on his way to Camp David for the weekend...
...Secretary of State George Marshall, however, took the view that the V nited States should not permit itself to be stampeded into recognizing a new, self-proclaimed Jewish state in the Middle East...
...Security Council, meanwhile, begins debating the Hebron question in particular and the settlements question in general...
...to vote now will be to provide an unmistakable warning to Begin that he risks losing his best ally if he persists in his settlements policy...
...applies intense pressure...
...Carter: "All the same, if I had known they were in there, I would have ordered you to abstain...
Vol. 12 • May 1980 • No. 3
