Geneva: Push Comes to Shove

"A Geneva settlement is like a tall mountain, full of crevices and sharp rocks. Therefore, you don 't go to it in a straight line. You go through zigs and zags. You even go down a little bit, then you keep moving. As long as you know where you're going, that's what's important. And we know where we're going. We know we 've got to make zigs and zags. "

Thus does President Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, describe the Administration's view of the twisting path toward peace in the Middle East. Last week, as the Carter Administration launched a major drive to make good on one of its most cherished foreign policy goals--a resumption of the Middle East peace conference in Geneva by year's end--the President produced some mighty big zigs and zags. In the process --deliberately or not--he also caused the quickest, deepest chill in years between a U.S. Administration and the Israelis and American Jewry. By week's end the frost had melted--a little. More important, Israel, the U.S., the Arab states and the Soviet Union were close to agreement in principle on a formula that might, with a little bit of luck, allow the Geneva conference to meet this year after all. As Egyptian Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmy put it, "Things are moving." Or, in Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's somewhat more cautious formulation, they were "inching along."

The Administration launched its renewed peace drive when Vance and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko issued a 700-word joint declaration that brought Moscow back into the Middle East peace picture. The unique declaration called for a comprehensive Middle East settlement, to include Israel's withdrawal from occupied territory, termination of a state of war, and the "resolution of the Palestinian question." The U.S. thus agreed formally that the Palestinians had "legitimate rights" in any settlement.

The U.S.-Soviet declaration infuriated Israel and its U.S. supporters as much as it encouraged the Arabs. But three days after that important zig came the zag. Vance sat down with Israel's Foreign Minister, Moshe Dayan, for a tough;even-hour negotiating marathon. That meeting resulted in a U.S.-Israeli statement on Geneva that seemed to back away from the freshly minted U.S.Soviet declaration in many ways.

Meanwhile, during his appearance before the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Carter attempted to set a course for the Geneva mountain somewhere between the declaration with the Soviets and his deal with Dayan. During his 35-minute address, Carter touched on many of the code words and phrases most cherished by both sides in the Middle East debate (see box). He supported legitimate Palestinian "rights" --which Carter, in a slip of the tongue that drew a chuckle from even the somber Dayan, first called "Panamanian" rights. (One Latin American delegate observed, "He's hung up on the canal, and rightly so.")

The President emphasized the U.S. view that the goal of a Middle East conference should be "true peace"--an Israeli-favored code phrase for full diplomatic, economic and cultural relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Carter also stroked the Jerusalem government by promising that the U.S. would never attempt to impose a Middle East settlement. And he struck from his prepared text a sharp passage criticizing Israel for continuing to establish settlements on the occupied West Bank. Explained a U.S. diplomat: "We've had enough salt on the wounds already."

That was indisputable. The Israelis had reacted to the U.S.-Soviet declaration as if they had been hit with the diplomatic equivalent of the surprise Arab attack that began the 1973 October War. Israeli Premier Menachem Begin had been shown a copy of the finished declaration 36 hours before it was released in New York. Scarcely three hours later, Begin was hospitalized--for the second time since his Likud coalition was elected in May. His doctor blamed his new heart problems on the shock of the declaration, which had been handed to him by U.S. Ambassador Samuel Lewis.

The White House was clearly unprepared for the volume and intensity of the subsequent uproar. The Israelis immediately charged that they had been sold out and that the two superpowers were trying to dictate the terms of a Middle East settlement for the sake of detente. "It has got the smell of an imposed solution," former Premier Yitzhak Rabin told TIME Correspondent David Halevy.

About the only bright spot that the Israelis could find in connection with the U.S.-Soviet declaration was that, as Finance Minister Simcha Ehrlich observed, "U.S. Jewry is behind us." Indeed they were. Shocked by a sense of betrayal on the part of the Administration, American Jews raised the most vigorous cry of protest a President has heard over Israel in recent years. In four days, 7 268 telegrams and 827 telephone calls barraged the White House. Said one lobbyist for Jewish organizations in Washington: "If there were any doubters that this is a pro-Arab Administration, this has knocked them off the fence."

The large and powerful pro-Israel bloc in Congress was equally vociferous. Washington's Henry (Scoop) Jackson, long one of the Senate's most anti-Soviet, pro-Israel members, accused Carter of "a step in the wrong direction." Before Carter's meeting with Dayan lifted the fears of a U.S. sellout of Israel, Jackson and Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Clifford Case planned to call a press conference to denounce Carter for recruiting the Russians in an attempt to impose a Middle East settlement.

Some politicians spotted votes in the furor--most egregiously, New York Democratic Congressman Edward Koch, who will almost certainly be the next mayor of the city with the world's biggest Jewish population (1,228,000). As Carter arrived at Manhattan's Wall Street Heliport on his way to the U.N., Koch thrust at the President a letter--already released to newsmen--expressing his "outrage" over the Administration's actions. Visibly annoyed, Carter handed Koch's letter to Press Secretary Jody Powell--who had tried to block the exchange from cameramen by standing in the way --and moved off to shake other hands. Carter and Koch made up later in the week at the White House after the Congressman apologized.

It was in this atmosphere of consternation and anger that the President approached his meeting with Dayan. Carter's scheduled hour and a quarter with the Israeli proved so productive that the two agreed to resume their discussions after Carter had taken time out to act as host at a banquet for foreign ministers and other representatives of 35 nations. Following the dinner, Carter and Dayan talked for another two hours, sitting together in the President's 36th-fioor suite in the United Nations Plaza Hotel, sipping coffee beneath an Indian cloth painting of two lovers. The discussions settled on the procedural and organizational issues of getting to Geneva, and gradually areas of agreement were found.

Carter slipped away from the discussions at midnight, leaving a weary Cy Vance--who had been holding up to 17 diplomatic discussions a day--to work out details of a compromise. When they emerged at 2:15 a.m., Vance and Dayan had agreed on a two-page "working paper" that included what one U.S. diplomat described as "new variations of formulations."

The most important provision of the working paper was Israel's acceptance of a unified Arab delegation at Geneva,* in which Palestinians would be represented. The Palestinians not only would be present at the opening "plenary session" of Geneva but could--at an undefined "low level"--take part in subsequent multilateral negotiations between Israel and the Arab states on specific issues. Dayan at an early-morning press conference insisted that Israel would never negotiate for a Palestinian homeland or permit the presence of the hated Palestine Liberation Organization at Geneva. Nonetheless, the language of the working paper offered a loophole: P.L.O. sympathizers or supporters might be included as members of the Arab delegation.

Dayan sent the U.S. working paper off to Jerusalem with the advice that "under the circumstances, it is the best we could hope for." He then flew off with Rabbi Alexander Schindler, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, to sell a few bonds for Israel--and also to urge Jewish leaders in Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles to lobby against the apparent new shift in U.S. policy.

The Arabs, of course, were dismayed by the agreement. Carter and Vance immediately began testing the working paper on Arab diplomats, including Egypt's Ismail Fahmy and Syrian Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam. The U.S. strategy was to discuss the working-paper provisions along with other American proposals that the Israelis had not agreed to, in hopes that Arab reaction might lead to further refinements of a formula for Geneva. Apparently the approach worked. As one leading Arab diplomat told TIME, "There have been more pluses than minuses for us in these sessions."

The goal of the Administration in last week's series of negotiations was to move speedily and toughly, if necessary, to end a stalemate. Carter's view of the Middle East after nine months in office is that the area is in an explosive, "unsafe situation" of no war, no peace that endangers the domestic political situation of Arab moderates like Egypt's President Anwar Sadat and heightens the possibility of another oil embargo. Settlement is imperative now, as Carter told the U.N. last week, because "of all the regional conflicts in the world, none holds more menace." In the U.S. view, three problems have to be settled somehow--territory, peaceful relations and the Palestinians --and the Administration blames Israeli intransigence for much of the frustration. Since January, as a result, the White House strategy--as Israeli supporters in the U.S. are angrily aware--has been a deliberate, escalating diplomatic offensive to nudge Israel toward negotiations that could lead to both peace and a Palestinian state on the West Bank. Simultaneously, the Administration has been trying to push the P.L.O. toward recognition of Israel.

There is universal agreement that the best forum for any negotiations would be the U.N.-sponsored Middle East peace conference at Geneva, called to order for only two days in December 1973 and then recessed because Israel was about to hold general elections. The conference, co-chaired by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, has never reconvened; during the recess, Henry Kissinger eased the Russians out of the picture temporarily, to conduct his own series of step-by-step negotiations involving Israel, Syria and Egypt.

Shuttle diplomacy, however, proved to have its limitations. By the time Cyrus Vance succeeded Kissinger as Secretary of State, all sides seemed ready for a comprehensive settlement. The Arabs realized that a return to Geneva offered the alternative to a war to recover occupied territories. The Israelis perceived it as the only way to obtain true peace. But what of the status of the Palestinians? Two years ago, the Brookings Institution, in a study report on the Middle East now famous as "the purple pamphlet," had called for an independent Palestinian state or entity as a possible solution. Among the authors of the purple pamphlet: Zbig Brzezinski, then a professor of political science at Columbia University, and fellow Academic (University of Pennsylvania) William Quandt, now Brzezinski's Middle East deskman at the National Security Council.

The Carter Administration's early optimism about reconvening Geneva was dashed by Menachem Begin's surprise election as Premier of Israel in May. In a visit to the White House in July, Begin declared that he would go to Geneva at any time--but he refused to work out procedures before he got there or to meet with the P.L.O. The Administration had initially envisioned a conference at which the procedures and agenda had been arranged ahead of time, on the theory that a conference that collapsed because of poor orchestration was even worse than no conference at all. Such a prepared conference became known in the White House by a Brzezinski-coined phrase: Geneva Up. But the bitter differences between the Israeli and Arab positions forced Washington to settle for Geneva Down--a conference at which even the agenda would have to be negotiated. As Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Alfred L. Atherton puts it, "Diplomacy is the art of the possible, and we have to keep readjusting our concept of what is possible."

One thing that was no longer possible--as Arab leaders made unmistakably clear to Carter and Vance--was a conference without a Palestinian presence. The Arabs were as adamant in insisting that the P.L.O. must be at Geneva as the Israelis were in saying that they had no right to be there. It was partly to force a resolution of this conflict that the Administration decided to bring the Soviets back into the picture.

The genesis of last week's Soviet-American declaration was a trip to the Middle East by Cyrus Vance in August. The Secretary of State returned home with a sharper vision of the issues that needed to be settled. Through Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin, the Administration signaled Moscow to work up the draft of a joint declaration on where the two superpowers stood on the issues. Gromyko's initial, proposals were heavily one-sided--strongly endorsing the P.L.O., the need for a Palestine national homeland, and General Assembly resolution 3236, which roundly supports Palestinian rights at Israel's expense. The Soviets were so eager to be included in the pre-Geneva diplomatic maneuvering, however, that a compromise was worked out.

The Administration concedes that it could have handled the public relations aspects of its deal with the Soviets more deftly, but staunchly rejects some more serious doubts about its motives in bringing Moscow into its Middle East effort. The charge that the Administration may find most difficult to dispel is that there is some link between the joint declaration and the problems that Washington has been having in its negotiations with Moscow on a new agreement on strategic arms limitation. The accusation, as New York Congressman Benjamin Rosenthal has bluntly put it, is that "Israel has become a pawn of SALT." Secretary Vance's reply is equally direct: "Not true."

Insists one Carter national security aide: "It's absurd to think that the Russians are going to give up ICBMS in exchange for three words--'legitimate Palestine rights'--on a piece of paper. Linking the two just shows Israel's paranoia." Defending the declaration, the Administration points to the significant Soviet concessions embodied in it: acknowledgment by Moscow for the first time of the Israeli demand for "true peace," omission of any specific reference to the P.L.O., acceptance of an Israeli veto over the nature of any international guarantees of the ultimate borders. In its effort to knock down charges of a SALT sellout, the Administration got some help from the Syrians: they were as critical of the declaration as the Israelis--only their complaint was that their Soviet patrons had been too generous to Israel.

Another criticism that the Administration had to counter concerned its timing. The sudden speedup in the drive to reach Geneva by year's end raised suspicions that Washington's zeal might have had less to do with urgent realities in the Middle East than with the Administration's own hankering for some important post-Lance affair foreign policy successes. Vance concedes that the year-end goal for Geneva is totally arbitrary. But he maintains that Middle East diplomacy had been stalled for so long that some calendar goal, however artificial, was necessary if the peacemaking momentum was ever to be resumed. Says Vance: "You have to try to set some sort of target that would make people realize that they can't keep putting off these problems."

There was some surprise at the Administration's move to bring the Russians back into the Middle East diplomacy so soon; after all, the Nixon-Kissinger policy had been to curb sharply Soviet influence in the region. But Kissinger himself has noted that Moscow would have to be brought back into the arena eventually. Says a State Department official: "The Soviets are not an ornament in the Middle East. We simply cannot reconvene Geneva without one of the co-chairmen." If Geneva collapses or is never reconvened at all, critics of the Administration will undoubtedly argue that the Russians will have won diplomatic re-entry into the Middle East, and for nothing.

Was Carter guilty of unnecessary roughness in dealing with Jerusalem? Administration spokesmen insist that the sharp Israeli reaction to the U.S.-Soviet statement did not mean the U.S. miscalculated in its strategy to stimulate a solution. Instead, they say, the problem lies in Israeli perceptions of diplomatic realities. Says one senior official: "They became hysterical. They read into that statement things that were never there." "It's the Holocaust mentality," said a White House aide. "If we're not behind them 300%, they think we're against them."

Israelis might quibble with the percentages, but they too blame the overreaction on what has become known in that beleaguered nation as the Holocaust syndrome, after the Hitler pogrom in which 6 million Jews were murdered. "Every Jew carries the Holocaust in his subconscious," says Dr. Geoffrey Wigoder, director of Hebrew University's Institute of Contemporary Jewry. "Every Israeli has at least a subconscious fear that what happened before could happen again. There is a general fear of the destruction of Israel, especially since the Yom Kippur war. This almost hysterical reaction of the past week is connected to the underlying feeling that any retreat on the part of America once again brings back the sense of isolation that Jews knew at the time of Hitler, the same feeling they had in the late '30s and '40s when they were on their own."

Reports TIME Jerusalem Bureau Chief Donald Neff: "The Holocaust complex, while it may be unrealistic, retains its hold on Israeli decision makers. Probably no one in Israel is more haunted by the Holocaust than Menachem Begin. The Holocaust symptoms of stubborn independence, of deep suspicion of foreign governments, of persecution and betrayal and, most profoundly, of the threat of extermination--all these are displayed almost daily by the Begin government. One wonders if Jimmy Carter truly appreciates this irrational side of the conflict and how pervasive it is in the Israeli government."

Even Moshe Dayan, the hero of the Six-Day War, reflects the syndrome. In Los Angeles last week, Dayan told a Jewish audience of 400 what he had told President Carter: "I said that I, Moshe Dayan, as an individual am not a coward. But as a Jew I am a very frightened man." Dayan received a standing ovation.

This attitude conflicts with U.S. Middle East policy because Israel is still uncertain about the commitment and dedication of Jimmy Carter's Administration. In truth, the Israelis have a right to be concerned. Even U.S. diplomats who have served both the Nixon-Ford administrations and Carter's see a notable difference. Says one: "This Administration is much more coldly realistic. Carter doesn't have an emotional hang-up on Israel and doesn't pursue it with the moral force of the previous Administration. Kissinger was emotionally attached to Israel, no matter how hard he tried to disguise it. Carter is committed, but in an absolutely practical sense." Jerusalem regards Brzezinski and Quandt as pro-Arab because they are on the record with the Brookings report. But it is Vance, who speaks discreetly and has written nothing on the Middle East, who has done most of the pushing for Carter's policy.

As an example of what they believe to be Brzezinski's pro-Arabism, Israelis cite a Canadian television interview last week in which the President's adviser said flatly: "The U.S. is not just an interested bystander, not even a benevolent mediator. The U.S. has a direct interest in the outcome of the Middle East conflict. And therefore the U.S. has a right to exercise its own leverage, peaceful and constructive, to obtain a settlement."

Many Israelis and their supporters are certain that what Brzezinski means by leverage is the withholding of aid. The U.S. now provides nearly $2 billion annually in military assistance and economic aid to Israel, far more than it gives to any other country. Depriving Israel of such assistance would be a fatal blow. But as Vance told TIME State Department Correspondent Christopher Ogden last week. "We have indicated that we will not use pressure which would in any way jeopardize the security of Israel, either in our military or economic assistance." And as former Premier Yitzhak Rabin pointed out, the aid program has become so large and complicated that it has almost ceased to be a sword over the Israelis. The two nations, for instance, are presently discussing assistance for the 1979 fiscal year. Says Rabin: "Pressure that takes a year to be felt is not pressure at all."

More effective than pressure, to some observers, would be a U.S. guarantee assuring Israel's survival. But that would present complications. Basically, the Israelis trust no one but themselves to guarantee their country's safety. Asks Defense Minister Ezer Weizman: "Who will give us the MEYER guarantees that these guarantees will be used in the right moments and according to Israel's needs?" Jerusalem might accept some type of military security treaty similar to NATO. But this would almost certainly require the presence in Israel of some American forces in a "trip wire" role to deter attack, as in Western Europe. For the U.S. that would be militarily feasible but politically risky.

The Administration took considerable pains last week to counter charges that the Carter position on the Middle East had tilted as sharply toward the Arabs as Israelis and U.S. Jews have charged. White House Counsel Robert Lipshutz, who is Carter's liaison man with the U.S. Jewish community, insists that this impression "comes about because the President is taking initiatives out in the open. He's dealing with the questions that have always been vital but have been kept in the back room. When we talk about total peace, borders, security, the rights of the Palestinian people, we're talking about things that have been hush-hush in the past. To talk about them creates knowledge, but it also creates a great deal of anxiety. By putting these things on the table, we're making them a matter of public understanding, but also of public debate. There is much more vociferous reaction than if they are dealt with just by diplomats who put out press releases in carefully couched terms."

After his New York trip, Carter invited some of his most vociferous congressional critics to the White House. "I'd rather commit political suicide than hurt Israel," he told a group of 27 Congressmen. Carter insisted that he would uphold U.S. commitments to Israel and that the Soviet-American declaration was tilted not toward the Arabs but simply toward Geneva.

Moderate Arabs may have sensed this more clearly than the Israelis did. Egypt and Saudi Arabia, among other states, have signaled the P.L.O. that informal discussions with the U.S.--and perhaps even Washington's backing for the organization's presence at Geneva--would become possible if the fedayeen were to reconcile themselves in some way to Israel's right to exist.

The P.L.O. refuses to do this without concomitant recognition from Israel, but its leaders have suddenly seemed to be amenable to compromises. Farouk Kaddoumi, who acts as the organization's foreign minister, complained predictably that "our rights are fundamental, not negotiable." But he also indicated, for the first time, some give on the question of Palestinian representation at Geneva in the U.A.D.

"There are several formulas that could be adopted," he told TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn. "Perhaps there could be a delegation of Palestinians who are not P.L.O. officials but who are named by the P.L.O. and receive their instructions from [us]. Also, we would be willing to form a provisional Palestinian government-in-exile if it would help."

After a meeting with Egypt's Sadat in Cairo last week, P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat notified his staffs in Beirut to devise some ways to get to Geneva, even if that meant less direct representation than they felt entitled to. Otherwise, he warned, they might miss a one-shot chance and be forced into another 30-year struggle for their rights. One thing was certain, however, despite the talk of compromise. "If any Palestinians try to go to Geneva without our approval," a P.L.O. official in New York told TIME last week, "they will be assassinated. We absolutely will not tolerate that."

So far, all the furor over the Administration's peace plans has concerned the question of how--and whether--to get to Geneva. The conference, if it ever convenes, could collapse in days or continue for years. Brzezinski concedes: "A Geneva conference will not be easy, far from it. I anticipate a very difficult conference, a conference that will have its ups and downs, a conference that may be occasionally on the brink of real conflict, perhaps even suspension. Then it will go on."

The Administration's uncertainty about what a Geneva extravaganza might accomplish besides keeping the participants in a jawjaw posture is one source of concern about the Carter plan. There is no easy way to judge the Administration's argument that the most probable alternative to Geneva is more bloodshed. Of course, talk of war is as much a part of the daily Middle East vocabulary as those diplomatic code words. Syrian President Hafez Assad's contribution last week was particularly grim. "Naturally, I don't want to negate the chances of the peace altogether," he said in Damascus. "But I still say if we [Arabs and Israelis] don't go to war again, it will be a miracle."

Given the deep-seated hostility on all sides, the Administration has done surprisingly well so far at narrowing the initial differences between Israelis and Arabs so that they are seriously considering sitting down together at Geneva. The result of the Administration's decision to move from push to shove in the Middle East could easily have been different: a violent shouting match with the parties involved that would dash the prospects for negotiations and saddle the Administration with a highly visible foreign policy failure that it can ill afford.

Surely, the Administration was fortunate that the Israeli view of its aims turned from Holocaust hostility to acceptance (if grudging) as rapidly as it did. Reports Correspondent Ogden: "The Administration says it was all planned that way, but that is not precisely true. They knew there would be anger in Israel at first, and they hoped it would help push things forward, but they were not certain how well it would work. There was design, and some skill, involved in this strategy. But there was also luck that it fell in place as well as it seems to have." The Carter Administration's push for Geneva will surely require much more shoving, not to mention zigging and zagging, in the weeks ahead if it is to succeed. Some more luck would not hurt either. -

* Which diplomats quickly shortened to its initials, U.A.D. One American participant at the talks suggested that this new code word "sounds like a birth control device. I hope it works."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.