STEADY AS SHE GOES AT FOGGY BOTTOM George Rubin It should have surprised no one when the American ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, boycotted the kick off ceremonies for the Jerusalem 3000 celebrations. Continuity is the word that best describes the policies of the U.S. Department of State in the Middle East. The State Department was always against the idea of re-establishing the Jewish homeland with Jerusalem as its capital. It opposed the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and opposed the decision of the League of Nations to establish a Palestine Mandate for the purpose of facilitating the reconstitution of the Jewish nation. In more recent times, the State Department tried, but failed, to prevent President Truman from supporting the U.N. partition plan that established Israel; but it did succeed in convincing him to impose an arms embargo on "both sides" that, of course, only affected Israel since the Arabs received all the armaments they needed from Great Britain and other countries while the British also maintained a naval blockade against Israel. Fully expecting that the British blockade, the five invading Arab armies and the crack British-created, equipped and officered Arab Legion would solve the problem of Israel for them, the bureaucrats at Foggy Bottom must have been frustrated indeed when Israel miraculously emerged victorious in the 1948 War of Independence. Undeterred, they decided on a new strategy that The Labor government rushes headlong to turn into reality what had been confined to State Department blueprints. continues to the present time. This policy is to reduce that nation to the indefensible 1949 borders, to partition or internationalize Jerusalem, to promote the establishment of a "Palestine" Arab state on historically Jewish land, and to allow the "right of return" for all "Palestine Arab refugees" and their descendants who would swamp Israel. In his sympathetic portrait of the men (and women) who shaped State Department policy The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite, Robert D. Kaplan describes the background of these people and why they became so influential. The State Department's Arabists were the children of American missionaries and educators in the Middle East, who took pride in having created the institutions--like the American University in

Beirut--which gave birth to modern Arab nationalism. The children of this largely upper class Protestant elite grew up in what they experienced as idyllic conditions in pre-World War II Syria (which in their youth included Lebanon), Iraq and Egypt. They spoke Arabic from childhood and identified fully with the nationalist aspirations of the Arab intellectuals whose ideas their parents had contributed so much to forming. For this transplanted American elite, the birth of Israel was a catastrophe; it was responsible, as they saw it, for the unrest, extremism and anti-Americanism that would henceforth keep the Arab world in turmoil. After World War II, the State Department turned to the Arabists to staff its embassies in the Arab world. Arabic had the status in the State Department of a "super-difficult" language, on a par with Chinese, and here were people both fluent in the language and expert in the area. The influx of these people had the effect of cementing the already existing hostility of the State Department toward Israel. U.S. diplomat in the Middle East Carleton Coon, whose uncertain mastery of Arabic kept him from being strictly speaking an "Arabist," openly expressed the sentiments of the Arabists: "It was pretty obvious to those who were closely attuned to the facts that the creation of the State of Israel was probably the single most damaging thing to U.S. policy and interests abroad that's happened since the Second World War, and with a long-term aftereffect. What it was doing to our credibility and our position--not only in the Arab states but throughout the Third World--was already evident to anybody who was thinking about it, and looking at it." Kaplan maintains that the supremacy of the Arabists in Middle East diplomacy was loosened when Nixon assumed the Presidency and Kissinger became Secretary of State. But while the ethnic and cultural background of U.S. diplomats in the MIddle East may have shifted somewhat, the changes have been in style, not substance. State Department policy has changed not at all, and it does not matter who occupies the White House, to which party he belongs, or his personal feelings toward Israel. There is nothing to separate the (pre-Kissinger) Rogers Plan of 1969 from the (post-Kissinger) Reagan Plan of 1982. Both reduce Israel to a tiny, waterless, defenseless coastal strip that cannot survive in the Middle East. What has changed is not the State Department, but the Israeli government which, until 1993, served as the chief obstacle to implementing the State Department's "plan," variously named over the years, but always the same. The Labor government, of its own accord, responding to the ludicrous vision of its leaders, rushes headlong to turn into reality what had been confined to State Department blueprints. This "peace process" requires nothing of the Arabs except to demand that the Israelis (who defeated (Continued on p.11)

Outpost               - 8 -               December 1995