PlaneTalk on Capitol Hill

The Carter Administration tries a new tack on its sales package

I'm getting some danger signals," Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd told President Carter. House Speaker Thomas ("Tip") O'Neill had a similar feeling. On behalf of their Capitol constituencies, both men advised the President last week of widespread congressional opposition to Carter's proposal to sell U.S.-made jet fighters to Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No one objected to the sale of 15 F-15s and 75 F-16s to Israel and few were worried about Egypt's purchase of 50 less sophisticated F-5Es. But a number of Senators and Congressmen, many of them under pressure from the Israeli lobby, were dead set against allowing Saudi Arabia to buy 60 F-15s (seebox).

In addition, many legislators objected to Carter's strategy of submitting the three sales proposals to Congress as a package deal. The President hoped to get congressional approval for all three sales -or, if necessary, to end up with no sales at all. But some lawmakers objected to his tactics. Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who will be the next chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, complained to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance that the "linking" of the three items "violates the intent and spirit of congressional review procedure."

Mindful of that sentiment, both Byrd and O'Neill urged Carter to delay presenting the package to Congress. The President at first seemed adamant. At his midweek press conference he warned that if Congress rejected part of the package, then "my intent is to withdraw the sales proposal altogether." His reasoning, as Press Secretary Jody Powell explained later, was that if commitments to both sides were not honored, U.S. standing in the Middle East would be damaged.

At week's end, however, the Administration appeared to change its tactics, while standing firm on what it wanted to achieve. Secretary Vance insisted that the White House was "not attempting to place conditions on the scope of the congressional review or the action by Congress." He reiterated Carter's press conference point that the sales requests would indeed be sent to Congress individually -but simultaneously. If any of the three sales was disapproved, the President would still be in a position to cancel the others.

Both the jittery mood of Congress and the Administration's recognition that some concession to its feelings was necessary reflected the fact that a lot of lobbying was going on. Except for a few full-page newspaper ads by Jewish organizations, however, much of that activity was characteristically invisible, the spontaneous reaction of many of the 5.8 million Jews in the U.S. "There has been a tremendous outpouring of mail," says one congressional staffer. "But no one has to tell concerned Jews to write to their Congressman. When they see an issue that is dangerous to Israel, they respond." Similarly, he notes, "you don't have to call up a Senator to tell him the Jews don't like the U.S. selling planes to the Saudis. He knows it already."

Early in the week Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan arrived in Washington, primarily to discuss the Middle East peace talks. Dayan, however, did some lobbying of his own against the Saudi planes deal. The spectacle of the Minister breakfasting privately with six Senators, five of them members of the Foreign Relations Committee, led New York Times Columnist James Reston to reflect ruefully: "There was a time in this capital when a British ambassador was recalled to London because he expressed a preference in a social gathering for one Presidential candidate over the other, but that was in the days when there were rules and even manners about what was permissible in the conduct of foreign relations."

Before leaving for Washington, Dayan had stressed his government's opposition to the sales package, adding: "Even if we have to absorb the punishment, we will continue to oppose the deal." He apparently was referring to repeated warnings by U.S. officials and concerned American Jews that a battle with the Carter Administration on a matter so related to U.S. energy needs, because Saudi Arabia is involved, could cause severe and lasting damage to Jerusalem's relations with Washington. Some influential American Jews warned the Israeli government privately that it could probably win on this issue, but at a grave cost to its special relationship with the U.S.

Israeli Premier Menachem Begin was prepared to take that chance. He opposed the sale of modern American weaponry to the Saudis, but he was even more concerned that a package deal would set a pattern for equating U.S. aid to Israel with similar aid to Arab countries. "This would tend to weaken our special relationship," said one Israeli official, "and strengthen Arab relations with America, and that is not in Israel's interest." Dayan stopped short of saying publicly that Israel would rather give up the planes it stood to gain than see the whole package go through, but many Israelis took that position.

Carter seemed somewhat puzzled by the Israelis' continued stance. Talking to a group of editors and broadcasters last week, the President noted that during Begin's March visit to the White House, the Israeli leader "never mentioned to me one time any concern he might have about the sale of weapons."

As the debate over the plane sales continued, the week's peace negotiations -highlighted by Dayan's trip to Washington, to be followed by Begin's visit this week -resumed but made little headway. After nearly six hours of talks with Vance and 90 minutes with National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Dayan left the Administration with scant hope of a break in the diplomatic stalemate. At issue in the talks were the interpretation of an old document, U.N. Resolution 242, and the formulation of a new one, a declaration of principles to govern a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement. The real question: whether Israel is obligated to withdraw from a substantial portion of the West Bank. Jerusalem's answer remained "not necessarily" -which to many ears still sounded like "never."

When his American hosts argued that Israel should adopt a more flexible attitude, Dayan replied that the U.S. must accept the fact that Begin is too committed to the concept of "Eretz Israel" for him ever to accept withdrawal from the West Bank. Nonetheless, said one American diplomat, "Dayan the pragmatist emerged. He told us, in effect, 'Let's not get hung up on 242 or on formulas, let's worry about what happens next.' " American officials took some encouragement from one Dayan admission: Israel now recognizes that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat cannot be expected to negotiate a separate peace. Dayan indicated that Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, the Israeli official who has had the most contact with the Egyptians, had persuaded his colleagues in Jerusalem that Sadat has gone as far as he can, at least until the Jordanians and perhaps the Syrians are brought into the peace process.

Dayan's visit did not, however, narrow the U.S.-Israeli disagreement over the wording of the declaration of principles. In the end, Israel may accept some version of the phrase recognizing the Palestinians' "right to participation in the determination of their own future," but it still rejects such phrases as "Palestinian problem in all its aspects" or "legitimate rights of the Palestinian people" on the ground that such words imply a Palestinian state on the West Bank -a concept that is anathema to Jerusalem. All in all, the two sides remained uncomfortably far apart.

Although American Jews generally back the Begin government, some disquiet about its policies has surfaced. Two weeks ago, 36 leading U.S. Jewish intellectuals, including Novelist Saul Bellow and Sociologist Daniel Bell, sent an open message of support to an Israeli peace group that had urged Begin to be more flexible in negotiations. Last week in Israel 4,000 members of an organization called Peace Now lined up along the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway in a demonstration on behalf of that cause. The gentle protest hardly daunted the peppery Begin, who told a more militant group known as Secure Peace: "We are called upon to do things likely to endanger our existence and our future, but to these demands we will respond with one small, quiet, great word: no."

Unrest is on the increase on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, with terrorist incidents leading to arrests and crackdowns. But this, like the diplomatic pressure Israel is facing, only seems to polarize the nation further. At the Wailing Wall last week, the ardently nationalist Gush Emunim held a rally and declared the founding of a new Jewish settlement on the West Bank at Karnei Shomron. The settlement had actually been started in January, but the rally was the Gush Emunim's way of proclaiming that settlement is continuing on the West Bank. Significantly, the Premier's office made no protest against the announcement of the new -and provocative -settlement. qed

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