Begin's American friends
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington An eye for an eye is acceptable, but a hundred eyes for an eye is causing grumbles. For a few, at any rate. The Israeli bombing of Beirut had something of the Nazi response to the assassination of Hitler's Czechoslovakian 'Reich protector', Reinhard Heydrich. In retaliation, the Village of Lidice and the inhabitants thereof were dispatched, as you may recall.
This Israeli overkill has affected some People who have previously supported the Petite theocracy on the Jordan through thick and thicker. Morton Kondracke, the managing editor of the New Republic, the Israeli-loving liberal weekly, was on the radio the other night saying that, while he completely supported the Beirut bombing, he too thought it might require some strained rationalising to justify the killing of 300 or more civilians for the killing of three Israeli civilians.
The names of Guernica, Amsterdam and Coventry haven't yet been invoked in the discussion of aerial bombardment of naked cities but, for the first time, we are seeing some kind of shift in sentiment among liberals who were horrified by the bombings of Hanoi a decade ago, but have always been silent about Israeli behaviour towards Arabs. The right wing used to taunt American liberals about that, accusing them of pacifism in the Far and militarism in the Near East. Those polarities may be in the course of reversing themselves, although in previous crises we've seen People shaken out of their ordinary political Positions by some major event only to drop back into them again later.
Under the sponsorship of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, Mr Ephraim Evron, the smirky gentleman who is the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, is up and about explaining why so many had to die. The reasons given are that a) the Palestinians are learning to fight better, b) they are getting ever larger arms shipments from Libya, Russia and wherever else, c) cowardly Arabs that they are, they have located their headquarters in populated areas and d) they are terrorists and against terrorists no normal rules of conduct apply.
But a mischievous westward zephyr has brought just enough of a whiff of Lebanon's decomposing bodies to cause small shudders in our policy toward the Middle East.
While continuing to ship the largest quantities of war materials to Israel, the President has held up the delivery of a few F-16 bombers. No one believes it will be for long but, even after this new batch of bombers has arrived, the fuss here will go on. Mr Begin, who takes joy at rubbing American noses in its diplomatic impotency, will see to that.
He is irritating now even the group you might call the mellow conservatives, the people who put out the New York Times. Although the Times is thought of as a 'Jewish' organ because it is controlled by the Sulzberger and Ochs families, the publication has never had any difficulty moderating its enthusiasm for things Israeli. For many years it was vocally unsympathetic toward the Zionist movement and its recent editorials cannot be very pleasing to groups like the Conference of Presidents. The Times's trouble is not that it hasn't taken Mr Begin's measure but that it fails to see what Mr Reagan is about, as excerpts from this editorial suggest: 'As Mr Reagan has discovered, it is hard to define ethical limits in policies of vengeance. But the Israeli air attack that took at least 300 lives in Lebanon's capital was a particularly brutal escalation, ordered as much for political as military effect . . . what Mr Reagan needs now is a definition of American objectives in the Middle East, including a homeland for the Palestinians. . . Mr Begin's aims are clear and he is not afraid to promote them by force. Mr Reagan's ends, and means, ought to be different. If he wants to do more than wag F-16's in frustration, it is time he said so.'
That is a desultory wag on Mr Reagan who is clear in his mind on what his policy is, and smart enough not to articulate it lest he upset the namby-pambies who overreact to television 'clips' of disfigured Arabs being pulled from the basements of their bombed out homes. It is not that Mr Reagan enjoys a helping or two of barbecued baby, but he and his group come at the whole Israeli question from a different direction to the liberals.
Liberal support for Israel has its roots in the loam of guilt and idealism. Whenever Menachem Begin says 'Never again,' they think they were responsible for Auschwitz. Nowadays some liberals hear Begin saying, 'Never again, unless we do it to the Arabs,' and that offends the liberal conception of Israeli as a free, noble, pioneering state with a gentle, not too doctrinaire, caste to it.
For American conservatives. Israel is 'our only dependable ally in the region'.
The other day, Scoop Jackson, the Senator from the state of Boeing, so called because it is in his home state of Washington that the aircraft manufacturer is located, was asked if it was 'morally right or wrong' for Mr Begin's aviators to drop dangerous objects over Beirut. The Senator, long a big weapons man and a devoted Israelist, replied by pointing out that, to his mind, the two biggest threats in the region are a Russian invasion of Iran and a revolution in Saudi Arabia. In case of either one, whom do we have but Israel to bank our play? Only Sadat, but one suspects that military planners in Washington aren't expecting the Egyptian and Israeli armies to fight side by side expelling the Marxist-LeninistGaddafyites from Mecca. Not even Lawrence of Arabia, who had more than ordinary skill at putting together rag-tag desert coalitions, could bring that one off.
From the Washington perspective, it's either give Mr Begin a free hand or cut off his hand, a perfectly unchooseable choice. After Beirut and Baghdad, the Israeli premier is on notice that he can continue to deal with his neighbours as the head of the Hell's Angels, or some other motorcycle gang, would. And, if anything, we're becoming more indulgent. After Baghdad the United States was shamed into voting for the UN resolution of censure; after Beirut the Administration made it clear that it would not go that way again. Apparently what we have here between the United States and Israel is a hi-lateral parent-child relationship and, for our own reasons, Mommy and Poppa are delighted to equip Junior with an airgun and let him go terrorise the neighbours.
Cultural notices: judging from the television coverage, if the dear English people should ever decide to repeat 1649, Prince Charles and Lady Diana can always get work kinging and queening here. There has been some wonderfully bubble-headed controversy about whether Fancy Nancy should or should not toss her majesty a curtsy and the TV talkers have been showing footage of what they are pleased to call England's 'summer of shame,' meaning riots. Having plenty of riots of their own, however, Americans are much less interested in reports about turbulence than about royalty.
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