October 30, 1973
Page 35417
SENATOR MUSKIE ON ISRAEL
Mr. RIBICOFF. Mr. President, a few days after the latest conflict began in the Middle East, the distinguished senior Senator from Maine delivered a most perceptive address in Chicago. Senator MUSKIE pointed to the unique human values which Israel has maintained even while existing in a sea of Arab enmity. He also stressed the need for face-to-face negotiations between Israel and its neighbors as the only hope for a real peace.
Today it is important to acknowledge the identity of interests between the United States and Israel and to make certain that Israel receives the support it needs to gain a lasting peace.
Because of the eloquence and importance of this speech, I ask unanimous consent that the full text of Senator MUSKIE's remarks be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the remarks were ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
REMARKS OF SENATOR EDMUND S. MUSKIE
We meet tonight to honor an idea and a reality, a vision and its fulfillment – the state of Israel, now, again, at war for its survival as a democratic state.
In this time of danger, in the middle of confused reports of battle, while all our hopes rest on the valor and strength of a few men at arms, locked in combat on two distant fronts, it is important for us to remember what Israel is all about.
The dream of Israel is as old as the struggle of all men to be better than they are. Israel is the prophecy of Isaiah and of Ezekiel, the threat of desolation overcome by the glory of salvation.
And the mission of Israel – to be "a light unto the nations" – is a mission Americans share. For it is the same role that an American visionary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, set for us: "To ... liberate, to take in the immigrant, to open the doors of the sea and the fields of the earth."
We are joined together – America and Israel – by the faith we share, really a utopian faith that men can live in justice, working toward perfection, committed to liberation and confident of success. Our common dream is our common bond.
That common dream, however, is once again under assault. A treacherous attack on Israel has shattered the peace of the highest Jewish Holy Day and the hopes for peace of the whole world.
Israel has met that attack and is repelling it with confidence and skill. And Israel is not alone.
Americans understand that the stakes in the Middle East are not limited to a few hills in the Golan Heights or the stretch of desert in the Sinai Peninsula. Beyond the geography of today's battleground is the continuing struggle of all free people to win lasting security.
Israel is proving again that her security can only be preserved through strength, that, in a hostile environment, peace can only be assured by the power to deter aggression or defeat it.
The clearest lesson, then, from this newest onslaught of terror against the Jewish nation is that America must not waiver in its support of Israel's right to live in peace. Some have argued that we contribute to tension in the Middle East by helping to provide Israel with the means to protect herself. But the deliberate Egyptian and Syrian attack disproves that theory utterly.
Even if we cannot yet be sure what led those nations to commit this senseless aggression, we can certainly dismiss the idea that they acted in response to an Israeli provocation. The joint offensive launched on the Day of Atonement is not the action of an aggrieved party, lashing blindly back at those who menace it. It is a calculated act of aggression designed to strike Israel at her most vulnerable moment of the year and to use a holy time of commemoration to attack a neighbor.
Israel was ready, because Israel must always be ready to fight for her life.
The second lesson – for the rest of the world – in Israel's conduct this week is that it teaches all of us how to respond to threatened and real force. Recently we saw Austria succumb to the threats of Arab terrorists by agreeing to close down the facilities at Schoenau Castle for Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union. And all of us who had honored Austria for the help she gave the fleeing Hungarians in 1956 and the refugee Czechs in 1968 were saddened to see her sacrifice that humanitarian tradition to the blackmail of the terrorist.
The Austrian action has been particularly saddening for those of us in Congress who have worked for the rights of the Jewish people of the Soviet Union to move to Israel if they so choose. 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 two 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. The concern is not limited to the American Jewish community. It is widely shared throughout our country, and its impact on Congress is heavy.
The example of Austria yielding to blackmail – and the contrasting example of Israel's resolve – is instructive to us and to the other oil-importing nations of the developed world: for we must not allow ourselves to be blackmailed by oil-producing Arab states simply because we believe Israel has the right to live in peace and to be confident of her own security.
America's support of Israel is not directed against any other state. Our support is based on our desire to achieve a lasting settlement in the Middle East, based upon acceptance of Israel's sovereign right to exist – and on permanent borders which are secure and defensible in case that sovereign right is ever challenged again. Americans have learned from history that great nations must never compromise fundamental principles for the sake of expedience. The oil-producing nations must understand clearly that we will not give in to any oil blackmail which has as its purpose the destruction of Israel's fundamental rights.
Finally, however, there is a third lesson to be drawn from the new fighting in the Middle East.
And that is that even secure, defensible borders are not adequate in themselves to guarantee a secure future for Israel. With the 1967 cease-fire lines as its borders, Israel has been able to act with admirable restraint in this war. As Senator Ribicoff said yesterday in the Senate, "Israel refrained from seizing the advantage by attacking when it knew for certain that there would be massive crossings of the ceasefire lines by both Egypt and Syria. It did so – and not without cost – so that there would not be a shred of doubt as to who began this war." But those same borders could not serve to prevent the Arab attack in the first place.
No physical boundaries, important as they are, can serve as permanent obstacles to neighbors who refuse to accept Israel's very right to exist. We can hope that the Yom Kippur attack is a last, desperate, military attempt to upset the political status quo in the Middle East, but we would be foolish to think that, even after another defeat, the Arab nations would be prepared to negotiate a lasting settlement without some territorial adjustments.
It may be, ironically, that the situation will now be more open to bargaining than it has been for the last six years. Any negotiations, of course, have to begin with a willingness on the part of the Arab states to sit down with Israel to seek agreement without preconditions. Israel has been seeking such negotiations for six years – but the Arab states have refused. No lasting settlement can be imposed on the Middle East by outside powers, for it is not probable that the difficult territorial questions can be resolved in any way other than face-to-face talks between Israel and her neighbors.
But the United States and the Soviet Union, through the United Nations, can use their power to guarantee the terms of any settlement Israel and the Arab nations are able to achieve. If the price of peace in the Middle East is a permanent international guarantee of physical security, we must be willing to make that guarantee good. For Israel's primary interest is in stable relations with her neighbors – and if there is a way to promote such relations through enforceable international agreements, we must seek such accommodations and help to implement them.
For no one should be misled by Israel's necessary readiness to use military power when threatened. The reality of Israel in the Middle East is the hope she offers to her neighbors and to the world.
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 twentieth-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.
In the midst of war it may seem rash and naive to talk of the promises of peace. But 25 years ago there was little evidence to support the vision with which Israel was born. And there is no knowing what potential for good may have been realized 25 years from now.
No one who has been to Israel and had his eyes opened to her energy and her promise would predict for her a future of perpetual conflict. I was fortunate enough to visit Israel two 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 Vashem for the six 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 three million Jews who have created an oasis of progress and promise in the midst of hostility and backwardness.
As Israel overcomes these new dangers, as she battles for a lasting peace, and as America supports her in that effort, both nations will find a reaffirmation of their common vision, so eloquently stated in 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."