Let More Soviet Jews Come Here : Forgotten option in U.S.-Israeli fight over West Bank issue

President Bush appears to have won his fight with Israel and its supporters in Congress to postpone action on loan guarantees for immigrant housing. A vote on Jerusalem’s request that the United States act as co-signer for $10 billion in commercial loans--which would reduce the interest rate Israel has to pay--will be deferred until late January. But resolution of this contentious issue has hardly eased growing tensions between Washington and Jerusalem. On the contrary, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and his colleagues this week seem to have gone out of their way to reaffirm their intentions to press ahead with settlements in the occupied territories, regardless of the effect on Israel’s ties with the United States. What is unarguably a difficult period in relations between the two countries may also be shaping up as a decisive one.

SHAMIR’S REPLY: In an interview this week Shamir said the so-called Green Line--the pre-1967 boundary that separated Israel from the West Bank and Gaza Strip--no longer exists. In other words, from now on no distinction will be recognized between Israel proper and the occupied territories, at least where settlements are concerned. The statement is widely regarded in Israel as another step toward de facto annexation. This is Shamir’s latest answer to American pleas for a suspension of settlement activities while efforts to arrange a Middle East peace conference are under way.

That answer, to be sure, simply serves to re-emphasize the absolute priority being given efforts to populate the West Bank with Israeli settlers, the political goal being to deepen Israel’s legal claim to the land. About 100,000 Israelis already live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The government, encouraging a furious rate of new building activity, hopes to double that number within a few years. Thanks to generous subsidies that make housing in the territories far cheaper than in Israel itself, it has a good chance to do so.

AMERICA’S RESPONSE: How many of the hundreds of thousands of Soviet immigrants expected to reach Israel in the next few years might choose or be directed to settle on the West Bank isn’t known. Washington insists, as it did with an earlier $400-million housing loan guarantee, that no U.S. money can be spent to build or expand settlements in the disputed territories. But that demand effectively means little. U.S. guarantees factored into the Israeli budget simply release other funds that can be spent on new settlements; U.S. financing becomes indirect rather than direct. The result is the same. U.S. money helps support Israeli actions that Washington has regarded for 20 years as inimical to U.S. policy aims.

The innocent victims in all this are Soviet Jews eager to leave a disintegrating empire where a revival of overt anti-Semitism, a historical constant in Russia, the Ukraine and elsewhere, threatens. Many Soviet Jewish emigrants--a majority, surveys show--go to Israel because their opportunities to go elsewhere are severely restricted. This year, for example, only about 40,000 will enter the United States. That low quota, not so incidentally, was heavily lobbied for by the Israeli government, which wants as much Soviet Jewish emigration as possible channeled to Israel.

The Bush Administration and Congress ought to take an urgent new look at Soviet emigration quotas, especially in light of the loan guarantee and settlements controversies. The United States has been the leading champion of free emigration from the Soviet Union. Now that departure restrictions have been eased, American doors should be more widely opened, as a humane matter certainly but as a practical one as well. There is a very high level of skills and talents represented among the emigrant population. It’s time to again offer these emigrants a choice of destinations that political pressures have worked to deny them.