How Not to Settle This Issue

Arab governments and the Palestine Liberation Organization want Moscow to cancel the liberalized emigration policy that has let an increasing number of Soviet Jews resettle in Israel. Soviet officials say they are sympathetic to the Arab complaints, but don’t intend to suspend emigration. This year Israel expects to welcome between 50,000 and 100,000 Soviet Jews, and perhaps as many as 750,000 by the mid-1990s. That prospect agitates Arab regimes, but what arouses particular ire is Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s recent call for a “Big Israel”--including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, home to more than 1.2 million Palestinians--to accommodate the new wave of immigrants. The State Department is right to make clear its own distaste for that notion.

Arab opposition to any expansion of the Jewish population is an old story. It was particularly violent in the 1930s and 1940s, exerting pressures that caused Britain, at the time the mandatory power in Palestine, to bar virtually all Jewish immigration. That policy had the unintended effect of condemning countless European Jews to perish in the Holocaust. Soviet Jews don’t face as serious a danger, but they do confront an uneasy future. Moscow may have abandoned anti-Semitism as an official policy, but emerging ultranationalist groups are actively filling the void. In these conditions it’s understandable that many of the Soviet Union’s 3 million Jews want to get out.

Most would prefer to emigrate to the United States. But U.S. quotas are filled, so many are moving to Israel, which is eager to have them. The free movement of peoples is a fundamental right. What’s at issue is where the newcomers should settle. Shamir and other expansionists would be delighted to see them flock to the West Bank and Gaza so as to physically reinforce their ideological claim to sovereignty over these lands, although the government denies it’s encouraging such settlement. So far, 98% of Soviet Jews have chosen to reside in Israel proper.

The U.S. has always said that all settlements in the occupied territories are a barrier to hoped-for eventual negotiations. U.S. economic aid to settle immigrants in the occupied territories is specifically barred. That has been--and remains--a sound policy, and as Israel goes about the necessary and humane task of absorbing new immigrants, it’s one that should be steadily reaffirmed and closely monitored. The humanitarian door-opening to Soviet Jews shouldn’t become the vehicle for slamming the door on the possibility that one day occupied lands can be traded for real peace.