MIDDLE EAST WATCH : Right Time, Right Step

The United States has never regarded the West Bank as properly a part of Israel. But when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was in office, a program of Jewish settlement of the West Bank was clearly aimed at the incorporation of the region into the Jewish state. This political difference between Israel and the United States came to a head when the Shamir government sought U.S. guarantees for loans to finance exactly the settlement policy that the United States opposed.

With bipartisan support, President Bush denied the loan guarantees. The denial came as Israel approached an election, and Shamir’s Likud Party and its allies were furious over what they saw as an American attempt to manipulate Israeli domestic politics. But if this was manipulation, there was nothing clandestine about it. Shamir and Likud had alienated not just the Bush Administration but much of Congress and the U.S. public.

Apparently the Israeli voters had had enough, too. They elected Yitzhak Rabin, who ended Shamir’s settlement policy and made other moves that boded well for the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. On Tuesday, with the alienation fast fading, President Bush announced that the requested loan guarantees would be granted.

He was right to do so and right to claim that the approval has nothing to do with U.S. election-year politics. The United States has encouraged Israel to admit Jewish emigres from the former Soviet Union. Now that the loan guarantees will serve that policy, they will have and deserve broad American support.