COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Is There A Second Strategy Here? : Bush’s row with Israel made more sense when he said ‘1992.’

The fury of supporters of Israel against President Bush boils down to the following:

In pursuit of a conference on the Middle East, Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III are blackmailing Israel into perilous concessions by seeking to withhold $10 billion in desperately needed loan guarantees. To satisfy the demands of the Arab states on Palestinian rights, they are arm-twisting Israel into a colloquy where the latter will be compelled to yield significant portions of lands it has occupied since 1967. Finally, with his reference to himself in his Sept. 12 press conference as “one lonely little guy” fighting “a thousand lobbyists,” Bush is tapping latent wellsprings of anti-Semitism, whipping up resentment at the ungrateful recipient of $47 billion in U.S. aid since 1949.

Much of this picture is ludicrously misconstrued. Within Israel’s grasp is a diplomatic denouement which, a decade ago, it could scarcely have dreamed of. Before the United States emerged as the unchallenged arbiter of the Middle East’s political agenda, the international consensus about a proper path to peace and to recognition of Palestinian rights centered on an international conference co-sponsored by the United States, the Soviet Union and other major powers. Such a conference would call for settlement on internationally recognized, pre-1967 borders, full guarantees for all states in the region, including Israel, and a new Palestinian state.

All of this has now been swept away. The United States has achieved its long-term goal of a conference held on its own terms. A Palestinian state is nowhere on the agenda. The Bush-Baker plan is in fact the Shamir-Peres plan of the former Likud-Labor coalition: no “additional Palestinian state” (Jordan being such) and--to take the 1989 State Department language--no “change in the status of Judea, Samaria and Gaza other than in accord with the basic guidelines of the Israeli government.” This, by definition, excludes Palestinian rights.

In its projected conference, the United States has permitted Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir a veto over any Palestinian delegate he doesn’t care for. Palestinian “rights” will amount to dog-catcher elections and garbage collection, all under Israeli military supervision.

This is an extraordinary triumph for rejectionism, which in anything but an Orwellian mangling of the word means U.S.-Israeli denial of Palestinian rights as embodied in U.N. resolutions.

In this perspective, the row over the $10-billion guarantee can be seen as virtually irrelevant, involving only a four-month delay. No one challenges the guarantees in principle. (But why issue them at all? The money will be used to build roads to the West Bank and finance fancy villas in a “Jerusalem” that is ever-expanding over Palestinian lands.) The only impediment to the denouement sketched above is Shamir and his ultra-rejectionists, whose posture differs from Washington’s only in its tactless bellowing about goals that a conference would decorously satisfy. But the fight with Shamir is scarcely disadvantageous to Bush.

Here we come to the famous press conference, the President portraying himself as “one lonely little guy,” duking it out with “powerful political forces.”

As Bush and his advisers must have known, the cameras of the evening news shows swiveled from the lonely little guy to American Jews flooding Congress to implore their representatives to deny the President his delay. A moment later the President was telling the cameras, “I’m going to fight for what I believe. It may be popular politically but maybe not. But that’s not the question here, whether it’s good 1992 politics.”

No one had mentioned 1992, so Bush’s use of it was revealing. The President and his advisers could well have a very hardball strategy in mind. For example, the populist Democrat from Iowa, Tom Harkin, now savaging “George Herbert Walker Bush” for failing to put money in the pockets of ordinary Americans, is one of the largest recipients of Israel-oriented PAC money in Congress. It would not be so hard for a surrogate of the President to question whose pockets Harkin is truly interested in.

Israel’s lobby in the United States is of fabled potency, but Shamir and his thousand lobbyists should not believe in their own propaganda; instead they might read up on the fate of the old China lobby, once equally fabled in its protection of Taiwan’s interests, but which shriveled the moment the United States changed its policy. It would not take a determined President very long to whip up resentment at the “powerful political forces” seeking to bully the U.S. government and controvert the national interest. Then see how long the lobby would intimidate a Congress suddenly fearful of an electorate whipped up against an uppity Israel.