Palestinian Revolt Sends Shamir to Quell Concerns Among U.S. Friends

Israel’s feisty leader, Yitzhak Shamir, scheduled for a U.S. visit this week, will find himself more politically embattled in Washington than in Israel. Three months of unremitting warfare between the Israeli army and Palestinians in the occupied territories have left Israel’s American supporters shakier than the Israeli public.

Just two weeks ago, 30 U.S. senators, led by some of Israel’s biggest boosters-- including Sens. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), Rudy Boschwitz (R-Minn.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.), wrote to Secretary of State George P. Shultz in support of his recent efforts to reinvigorate the Reagan Administration’s Middle East peace process. More significantly, they expressed “dismay” at Shamir’s unwillingness to accept the crucial element of the U.S. plan--exchanging occupied territory for a treaty with the Arabs.

Writing to the most pro-Israel official in the most pro-Israel U.S. Administration in memory, their act represents an earthquake in U.S.-Israel relations. One Israeli diplomat preferred to call it “erosion” but admitted that it was “the kind of erosion that causes those houses in California to fall into the ocean.”

Since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the U.S. Congress has been Israel’s most important bastion of support. In 1975, for example, then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger tried to pressure Israel to accept his terms for an interim accord with Egypt. Unlike the Kissinger of today--who has reportedly urged Israel to play hardball--Kissinger circa 1975 was threatening the Israelis with sanctions if they did not cooperate. In response, the Israelis could muster more than three-fourths of the U.S. Senate to, in effect, tell Kissinger to back off. He did.

Part of Shamir’s problem is that his hard-line Likud party has never developed a constituency among U.S. supporters of Israel, particularly in the Jewish community. Unlike Israel’s Labor Party, the ideological Likud refuses to withdraw from any part of the occupied territories--the members go so far as to refer to them by their old biblical names, Judea and Samaria.

But Shamir’s major problem remains the inhabitants of those occupied territories. Unarmed Palestinian youths taking on the might of the Israeli army have shattered old images. “It is like David and Goliath in reverse,” said one Israeli analyst: “The Palestinians use slingshots while we stagger about like helpless giants.”

Intense television coverage has brought Shamir’s policies home to Israel’s American friends. Israeli embassy officials in Washington, who closely monitor such things, say that since December what the Israelis label as the “disturbances” and the Palestinians call the “uprising” has dominated U.S. network television coverage. In January, for example, they say ABC devoted 67 minutes to the issue, leaving Vice President George Bush’s Iran-Contra troubles a distant second with 17 minutes.

The media-conscious Reagan Administration was not slow to react. One month of TV coverage had, by late January, revived interest in the five-year-old Arab-Israeli peace process. And 10 days ago, after two intense rounds of talks in the Middle East, Shultz presented Israelis and Arabs with his latest blueprint for peace.

To be fair to Shultz and other U.S. officials who care deeply about Israel’s future, the Administration is pressing so hard so quickly because it fears the alternative. One State Department observer flatly predicted that it is only a matter of time before “there is an armed resistance in the occupied territories fighting a true war of national liberation.” Another seasoned analyst agreed, “It is the logical outcome for people willing to face down soldiers with stones and Molotov cocktails.”

If the Palestinians do take up arms, the Israeli army seems willing, even eager, to confront them. “The use of guns by the Palestinians would unleash Israeli inhibitions,” said one Israeli military analyst. He expects the Palestinians ultimately to use firepower and “this will make them easier to fight. Now we have to show restraint when confronting non-lethal force.”

The prospect of widespread bloodletting seems not to deter Shamir. His constituency worries instead about negotiating over--they would say “away”--the sovereignty of the occupied lands. This obsession with the West Bank and Gaza is not, however, shared by the Labor Party. Shimon Peres, the Labor Party leader and Shamir’s partner in the coalition government, supports Shultz’s proposals and publicly embraces the idea of territory for peace.

Yet Shamir has his advantages. He is aware that time is running out on the Reagan Administration. A delay of a few months or even weeks could completely upset Shultz’ delicate timetable for getting talks off the ground. And in Peres, Shamir faces an opponent whose political gaffes are legion. “What is infuriating about Peres,” one senior Administration official said, “is that his heart is in the right place, but his foot is always in his mouth.”

More important, according to a number of U.S. and Israeli analysts, is that the tougher the going gets for Shamir, the greater his appeal to latent Israeli fears, such as one Israeli diplomat’s reaction to the senators’ letter: “While it may be valuable to the Arabs, in Israel it only adds to our ‘Masada complex’--us against the world.” And some U.S. officials are afraid that Shamir is impatient to use international hostility as a domestic political weapon in the coming Israeli elections. One key Administration official said, “Shamir could effectively argue, ‘We exist as a state because of what the world thought of us.’ ”