Israeli Regime in an Awkward Spot : Because of U.S. Aid, Reaction to Reagan Trip Is Low-Key

Placed in an awkward political position by the deepening controversy over President Reagan’s planned visit Sunday to the German military cemetery at Bitburg, the Israeli government is getting a small taste of the intense criticism being focused on Reagan.

Israel has long assumed the mantle of leadership for world Jewry and, as a result, it might have been expected to be in the forefront of those protesting the President’s visit to Bitburg. There, among more than 1,800 graves of German World War II dead, there are those of 49 soldiers who served in the combat arm of Adolf Hitler’s elite SS, other elements of which ran the Nazis’ concentration camps where 6 million Jews were methodically exterminated.

However, Israel also depends heavily on American military and economic aid, and its leaders have found a particularly sympathetic ally in Reagan. Those factors make Israel officials reluctant to attack him and his government even though they are being pressed here to do so.

The Reagan Administration is currently weighing a $1.5-billion aid supplement for Israel for fiscal years 1985 and 1986.

Therefore, top officials here have deferred almost completely to the American Jewish community on the Bitburg issue, reacting only mildly to the controversy despite sharp criticism of the planned visit voiced privately by Israelis and by the independent Israeli press.

It was not until last weekend that Prime Minister Shimon Peres made his first public comment on the controversy, and he took a conciliatory stance. “A friend is a friend and a mistake is a mistake,” he said. “A friend remains a friend even if he makes a mistake.”

Expectable Reaction

Moshe Arens, minister-without-portfolio in Peres’ government and a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, said, “I think there is no reason to be surprised that official reaction here has been very moderate.

“Israel is a country which receives a great deal of assistance from the United States,” he added in an interview. “I believe (it) also, in return, gives things that are important to the United States and to the Western alliance. And under these circumstances, you really would not expect that people in the Israeli government, including myself, would publicly criticize the itinerary of the President of the United States when he goes to visit another country.”

Abba Eban, Israel’s first ambassador to the United Nations and now chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset (Parliament), said on Israel radio, “If the Israeli response was muted, it’s because on the one hand we join with the Jewish people as a whole in our total negation of this step (the Bitburg visit). This is an extremely ill-advised step. On the other hand, we know that the mistake has been made by a genuine and authentic friend of Israel.”

But outside official government circles, there has been pointed criticism of Reagan’s plan to visit the cemetery.

Anti-Reagan Leaflets

Organizers of an assembly to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Germany’s defeat in World War II demonstrated Tuesday in central Jerusalem. They covered a small plaza near the Hamashbir department store with chalk outlines of bodies like those used in police investigations and passed out leaflets accusing Reagan of “trying to forget and to make others forget the Holocaust.”

“I suppose the vast majority of Israelis are not enthusiastic about anybody . . . visiting a cemetery in which are buried SS officers who were involved in some of the Nazi atrocities and SS atrocities,” Arens said. (German sources have said that most of the SS members buried at Bitburg were young draftees.)

The leftist newspaper Al Hamishmar said the Bitburg affair looks as though it were being played out from “a script taken from one of the cheap movies which Reagan starred in.”

Termed a Scandal

The independent Haaretz said that what it called Reagan’s attempt to equate the fallen German soldiers with the millions of Jews and others murdered in the camps “is a scandal which cries up to heaven.”

Several newspapers have criticized the low-key official Israeli response. “Israel, more than any other country in the world, should have raised a bitter outcry against an obtuse President,” editorialized the trade union daily, Davar.

By far the largest-circulation Israeli paper, Yediot Aharonot, called on the government “to add its voice to the protest in the hope that Reagan’s itinerary will be altered.”

Diaspora Tension

The Bitburg controversy has also exposed some of the tension that lies beneath the surface of relations between Israel and Jews living elsewhere--in the so-called Diaspora.

The representative here of one influential American Jewish group noted that one argument that Israeli officials frequently use in trying to encourage Diaspora Jews to immigrate here is that, in contrast with citizens of the sovereign state of Israel, Jews living elsewhere will always be outsiders in their societies, unable to fully pursue their Jewish identities and interests for fear of stirring up anti-Semitic feelings.

But, with the Bitburg affair, this source continued, Israel officials have “for the first time . . . perceived that they’re not the free, independent operatives that they thought they were.”

Countered a senior government official who requested anonymity: “The campaign against (Reagan’s) decision is so effective and wide that the leadership of the state of Israel is not required.”

Meanwhile, some Diaspora Jewish leaders have devised their own formula for bridging the gap between the desire to underline reconciliation with the modern, democratic West German state and determination to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive.

To Salute Foes of Nazis

In ceremonies in both Munich and Jerusalem later this week, they will pay homage to Germans who opposed the Nazis. “These are the Germans to honor if you want to stress reconciliation,” said David Clayman, head of the Jerusalem office of the American Jewish Congress, which was instrumental in organizing both ceremonies. An international group of mayors, including seven Germans and 12 Americans, is scheduled to lay a wreath here today at a marker honoring a German soldier who helped save Jewish lives during World War II.

On Friday, Jewish leaders from the United States, Canada, Britain and France plan to visit a cemetery in Munich where members of the White Rose anti-Nazi German underground are buried.

Israel has been asked to send a delegation to the Munich ceremony, but it was uncertain Wednesday whether it would do so. “If you ask me personally, I hope so,” said Avraham Burg, the prime minister’s adviser on Diaspora affairs. “If you ask me professionally, no comment.”