The hoopla of the 1992 political campaign has overshadowed for many Americans the recent Israeli elections and their aftermath. The ouster of the Likud government after 15 years has been described as Israel's second "political earthquake," the biggest change in the country's politics since 1977, when Likud broke the Labor Party's 29-year grip on power.
The Israeli electorate spoke loud and clear on at least one important issue in ousting Yitzhak Shamir and Likud. The public wants the peace process with the Palestinians to go forward on a faster track than Shamir was willing to move it. Sensing this, Israel's new Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin visited Cairo and invited Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and other Arab leaders to Jerusalem for further talks. Should such visits actually take place, Rabin will have scored a political coup, as the presence of Arab leadership in Jerusalem implies their recognition of Israel.
Yet the accession of the 70-year-old Rabin may have a downside as well. His long career as head of the Israel Defense Forces in the 1967 Six Day War, as ambassador to Washington from 1968 to 1973, as prime minister in the mid-70s, and as defense minister from 1984 to 1990 leaves a well-marked track by which to anticipate his conduct.
Rabin is remembered especially as the defense minister who ordered the army to use "force, strength, and blows" to stop the Palestinian intifada and before that for proposing a cutoff of food and water to the populace of Beirut during Israel's 1982 siege there. The man is not a dove.
Rabin's current ambivalence about Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories--the pivotal question that has soured U.S.-Israeli relations in recent months--gives Middle East watchers, not to mention Palestinians, reason for nervousness. Hanan Ashrawi, spokeswoman for the Palestinian negotiating team at the peace talks, said recently, "If the new [Israeli] government wants to signal that it is a clear departure from the Likud, it has to stop all settlement activities."
This, like most other aspects of U.S. foreign policy, has been largely ignored in the presidential campaign here. Yet President Bush and Gov. Clinton have substantially different positions on Israel, which ought to be relevant to voters as they think about November 3.
GEORGE BUSH'S Washington can hardly conceal its delight over Labor's victory in Israel. The president had despaired of Shamir's ever seriously pursuing the peace process with Palestinians and other Arabs. Within a week of Rabin's July 13 swearing-in, then-Secretary of State James Baker was dispatched to Jerusalem and other Mideast capitals to jump-start resumption of the peace talks. Bush now supports giving Israel its long-sought $10 billion in loan guarantees despite Rabin's ambivalence on Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories.
Virtually every other position Bush has taken on the Middle East--including the Gulf war and its aftermath and arms sales to Saudi Arabia, to mention two examples--deserves reproach. But on Israel the administration merits moderately high marks.
Not so Clinton, at least thus far. During the primary campaign in New York state, he was "shameful" in his pandering to the Jewish vote, according to one Mideast expert. Clinton took the untenable position during the primaries of supporting the $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, and he criticized Bush for tying the loan guarantees to a freeze on West Bank settlements.
Clinton has ties to the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee--former AIPAC legal counsel David Ifshin works for the Clinton campaign. His foreign policy advisors include well-known Israeli apologists such as Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.
Early in this year's electoral process the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee asked both candidates, "As president, would you support Palestinian self-determination and statehood? What steps would you take to affirm the Palestinians' right to self-determination?" The Bush people replied, "This administration has launched a process designed to bring comprehensive, just, and lasting peace between Israel and her Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians."
The Clinton campaign responded with excerpts from the governor's speeches, which said in part, "[T]he president is wrong to use public pressure tactics against Israel. In the process, he has raised Arab expectations that he'll deliver Israeli concessions and fed Israeli fears that its interests will be sacrificed to an American-imposed solution."
With Rabin's Labor government now in place, President Bush can more easily promote the peace process, and there is reason to hope for movement on the decades-old Palestinian homeland question. The course for a President Clinton is not so clear. He cannot afford to continue a policy that hews more to the old Likud line than that of the new Labor government. How he moves on this issue may tell as much about Clinton's character as it does about his political judgment.
Joe Nangle, OFM, was outreach director of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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