May 7, 1973
Page 14466
THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, today marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. Last night, I had the pleasure of celebrating this historic occasion as the guest speaker at an Israel Bond Drive dinner in Cincinnati, Ohio. I would like to take this opportunity to repeat some of the thoughts I expressed yesterday.
Mr. President, I believe that America and Israel are joined together by the faith we share, really a utopian faith that men can live in justice, work toward perfection, committed to liberation and confident of success. Our common dream is our common bond.
In this year – the 25th since the founding of Israel, the 30th since the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, the 1,900th since the fall of the fortress at Masada – the lesson of past suffering often seems to be spelled out too bleakly in the sight of modern Israel's armed strength. Today an independence parade through the streets of Jerusalem will stress the nation's military preparedness.
Some Israelis are critical of plans to celebrate their nationhood through a display of armament. And outside Israel, we can hear even well-meaning critics complain of her apparent belligerence, her absorption with defense and readiness for war.
But such faultfinders – and many of them, of course, are not well meaning – miss the point about the tension between dream and reality in Israel. They overlook the promise Israel holds out to her neighbors and to the world and identify the legitimate concern for selfprotection as a threat to peace in the Middle East.
No one who has been to Israel and had his eyes opened to her energy and her promise would foster such dangerous confusion. I was fortunate enough to visit Israel 2 years ago, and the images that remain with me are of strength, but not violence, of hope, not menace.
I remember, for instance, going to Kibbutz Gesher on the west bank of the Jordan River, where I saw the bomb shelters. The walls of those bunkers were decorated by children's pictures, and not one picture showed a scene of the fighting which was the everyday reality for the youngsters there.
The paintings were of flowers and of sunshine. The dream of the artists was of peace, not of the war that has been their fate.
And at a Nahal settlement in the Golan Heights, I remember talking to a 23-year-old farmer- soldier named Yeheskel. I asked him what, in that still endangered and bitter terrain, he and his friends did with the little leisure they had.
"We have our books," he said, "and we love this view over the Sea of Galilee. And we talk about the future, about peace."
It is possible, of course, to go to Israel and to feel the inconsolable anguish of the memorial at Yad Veshem for the 6 million European Jews whose murder will always be a living memory. And it is possible to climb that forbidding hill at Masada and feel the spirit of intransigence of the besieged zealots who chose death in glory over submission to Roman rule.
But to see only the martyrdom, or the "Masada complex," or the military strength of Israel is to be blind to the resources and the resourcefulness of 3 million Jews who have created an oasis of progress and promise in the midst of hostility and backwardness.
I think of the words of the physicist, I. I. Rabi, about the great Weizmann Institute of Science:
The meaning of Israel is moral.
He said: It is a meaning of learning, of understanding, of extending man's knowledge throughout the world.
The fulfillment of that moral meaning will be the test of Israel's next 25 years. And the help America gives in answering that challenge will also be the test of our moral strength. Let me suggest some of the immediate, practical measures we can take to fulfill our responsibility to
Israel and to ourselves.
First, we must answer recent threats of economic blackmail from oil-producing Arab states with total rejection. Two weeks ago in Washington, the Saudi Arabian Petroleum Minister is reported to have advised our Government that Saudi Arabia will not significantly expand its present oil production – of which American oil companies are the exclusive purchasers – unless we change our policy of support for Israel.
In the context of our energy problems the thrust of that threat is clear. But we must reject such threats if we are ever to help promote a genuine negotiated settlement in the Middle East and insure security for all nations and justice for all people there.
Second, we cannot let down the pressure we have brought to bear on the Soviet Union. over its treatment of Jews in Russia.
The Congress has made it clear that much as we all want to liberalize trade relations with Moscow, we are prepared to defer such action because of higher goals. Before making new trade arrangements with the Soviet Union, we must be satisfied that Russian Jews are free to build new lives for themselves wherever they choose to go.
The clear resolve of Congress on this issue has already brought some progress. It appears that the head tax imposed on Jewish emigrants has been modified. But we cannot be sure that all such unfair restrictions have been eliminated
For more than 2 million Soviet Jews, Russia's ratification of the universal declaration of human. rights and provisions of its own laws are too often dead letters.
Soviet leaders would be profoundly mistaken if they underestimated American feelings on this issue. It is widely shared throughout our country, and its impact on Congress is heavy.
Our position comes from our recognition that an attack on human liberty anywhere endangers freedom everywhere.
Third, while maintaining pressure on the Soviet Union, we must continue the effort to help Israel help her new citizens. Last month I attended a ceremony at the State Department releasing $33 million in funds to assist Israel in resettling Soviet Jews and putting them on the path to new and fruitful lives.
The money was authorized in the last Congress, on my motion, as a pledge that in our own relative comfort and prosperity, we will, not forget those who suffer and need our help. The Congress authorized $85 million in grants for the resettlement program. It appropriated $50 million, of which $33 million has now been released for the use of voluntary agencies in Israel.
Those funds will cover the costs of bringing 22,500 immigrants from the Soviet Union to Israel.
They will insure that, on arrival, they receive the language and vocational training, the health care and social services, most of all, the housing they need to rebuild their families and their futures.
But just as the bonds you give to build Israel can never equal all the needs, so this first American government grant cannot end our commitment to the refugees. I am hopeful that new appropriations, equal at least to the money authorized but not yet formally allocated, will be approved by this Congress, and I will do what I can to that end.
As we resist Arab blackmail, insist on fair treatment of Soviet Jews and support Israel's drive to build a better life, we must, of course, also maintain our pledge to the military security of Israel. Arms sales and credits to finance them are essential to that pledge, but more broadly we must gear our diplomatic efforts in the Middle East to. the end of stopping the arms race and negotiating a permanent peace.
We must assure Israel of enough power to deter renewed war. And we must work from that base toward a satisfactory solution of the tensions for which war is no solution.
For I return to the idea with which I began this address: Israel offers a hope to her neighbors and to the world that transcends the special symbolism of Israel for Jews.
In an area which was the cradle of civilization, Israel is the new example of progress. In a land that history shunted aside, Israel is the force of modernity.
The 20th century ways of Israel have a special importance in the Middle East. There, until the birth of Israel, traditionalism had too often been a synonym for stagnation. Now a new nation born of our oldest Western tradition has shown the way to progress.
More than any other developing society, Israelis have found the elusive middle way to preserve the values of the past – ties of family, of religion, of culture – and to advance the values of the present – of free inquiry, of material development, of individual fulfillment. Among all the struggling nations of the third world, Israel stands out as a model for emulation, an instructor in the art of reconciling history and the future.
To the other "people of the book" – to Israel's Arab neighbors – the lessons learned, the failures suffered, the advances scored can be the textbooks for their own development. In an atmosphere of cooperation, the contribution Israel can make to the well-being of the region would be without limit.
It may seem rash and naive to talk of the Middle East in terms of an atmosphere of cooperation, when all the evidence points to continued conflict. But 25 years ago there was not much evidence to support the vision from which Israel was born. And there is no knowing what potential for good may have been realized 25 years from now.
There is, I know, one remarkable ground for hope. One-and-a-half million Arabs now live under the Israeli flag, either in Israel or in the occupied territories. The coexistence is tense; it has flared into violence on too many occasions. But the fact is that Jews and Arabs have traveled through history on parallel paths and again are living together in a measure of cooperation.
And that measure is not diminished by the slightest hint of racial or religious prejudice. Where there is hostility in Israel for the policy of Arab governments, there is none of the searing bigotry toward individual Arabs which Jews themselves once felt in European ghettoes. There are no nasty epithets for Arabs, as there are for minorities even in America. And if there is not love, there is, at least, respect, and tolerance.
This welcome reality is the result of conscious, but not artificial policy. Knowing the bitterness of official antisemitism, the Israelis have chosen understanding instead.
From that foundation I am confident that Israel can build toward peace – a peace based on strength and resolve but also on the promise of progress which is the reason for Israel's being. America can help promote that peace through a diplomacy which never wavers in its support for Israel's basic claim to security and which actively seeks to reconcile that claim with the legitimate concerns of Israel's neighbors.
And through Israel, America can find expression for the dream that is common to all democracies – the vision of a just and open society, tolerant of her neighbors, and inspired by the opportunities to advance the life of all peoples.
We in America have sometimes fallen short of that dream. In recent months we have seemed to lose some of the generosity of spirit that shaped our greatness. We have appeared unsure of ourselves, distrustful of our leaders and uncertain of our direction in the world.
Israel, as she comes of age, also faces great problems and the danger of mistaking militancy for preparedness. But as it overcomes the threats she faces, and as America contributes to the realization of the promise of Israel, both nations reaffirm their shared vision.
That vision is, of course, the promise of Isaiah:
Out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem – they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.