Relations between Israel and the US - 30 September 1991

I've been reading the memoir of an old soldier, an Englishman in the Second World War, who did with his two little children what many another English family did which had relations or close friends in America. They packed them off there for the duration, to be safe from the dreaded Blitz.

I mentioned this practice the other day to a man in his 40s. He was appalled, he thought it was a heartless thing to do and a glaring case of pulling rank over the rest of the community that had nowhere to go for a children's haven. He was getting very hot and bothered, so I suggested to him in as patient a way as I could manage that he had no idea how everybody, every parent, every expert, envisaged the prospect of war once it was declared on that brilliant Sunday morning in September 1939.

For a decade or more, we'd had HG Wells, and lesser prophets, warning us that shortly after a declaration of war, Britain, London at least, would be engulfed in a huge cloud of poison gas or subject to downpours of bombs – or both. There was serious talk of death rays and horrifying secret Nazi weapons. Poison gas we assumed was inevitable. It was never used. And since the enormous growth of aviation in the intervening 20 years and the dreadful, and true, reports of Hitler's new air force, there was no reason to suppose that the new war wouldn't take over from where the old war left off. It came out later that probably the most efficient of the government services for civilians during the war was the organisation of the hospitals. Only because perfectly rational men in the War Office, in the cabinet, Mr Churchill most conspicuously, had soberly calculated that something like 100,000 casualties a night could be expected once the bombing started. During the whole war, the London casualties from the bombing amounted to 60,000.

So you can see how any parent, especially in London or another big city, would want to grab any lifeline, any offer, to have their children stowed safely 3,000 miles away. It's true I never knew a family that regretted keeping its children at home, but then I never knew a family that regretted having sent its children to America. Though I do remember a Punch cartoon in which a returned English boy in a checked jacket greeted his father, "Hi Pop!" To which the moustachioed soldier father remarked almost as an aside, "T'were better that Little Willy had been hit by a bomb!" But that's a whole other subject.

What got me going on this topic was a remark the old soldier, the one writing the memoir, made after his children, who'd been away I think over two years, arrived back in England. Many, if not most of these refugees began to drift back pretty soon after Hitler followed in Napoleon's backward footsteps from Moscow, before and once the battle for the air over Britain had been won and the possibility of invasion was remote. Well, these two children, a boy and a girl, now eight and seven, when the father decided to fetch them home, it was still wartime, and the arrangements to get children back across the ocean took time. Eventually they were put aboard a Portuguese ship, which took a fortnight to land in Lisbon and from there they were expected to be put on a flying boat, as we quaintly called them. But one of them on the Lisbon to London service had been lately shot down so the two kids were put up in a hotel on the coast and they had to wait another two weeks.

By time they were put aboard a homebound plane, they'd been at sea or in a foreign land for a month. An ordeal their reminiscing father thinks must have been exhausting and maddening. But, he writes, "Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives. And, sure enough, even after they had, at last, been flown home, our children took the whole adventure as a matter of course and never referred to it again."

This passage came out from the page and glued itself to my mind. Because I had, that evening, seen heartbreaking scenes in a film just made about refugee children in Iraq, in Turkey, in Afghanistan, in Ethiopia, in the Ukraine, in Tibet. And I seized on that sliver of consolation on the hope that these children too would have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives. I suppose this, the time from 1988 through the early '90s, will be known as the refugee era. Surely there cannot have been a time in history where more millions of refugees were on the move from one country to another. The turn in the wound, the ironic twist of the refugee story I saw was the sight of thousands and thousands of Soviet Jews landing in Israel. Do you remember how, throughout the '80s and in fact long before, American presidents were always urging Khrushchev or Andropov or Brezhnev, finally Gorbachev, to let the Jews out, a few at a time.

The heart-rending scenes on the tube then were of the desperate efforts of say an author or a doctor who'd managed to New York, his efforts to have his wife and children follow. We begged, urged, pleaded, negotiated and then, suddenly the gates are open and the deluge. And the United States says, please, not here. There must be limits, quotas. As for every other nation. And so, what, is it, just under a million pouring into Israel? And, by now, the heart-rending documentary is not of children in arms, bobbing across bone-dry deserts or up in howling mountain passes, but of an endless troop of adults lined up in Tel Aviv waiting to be, chilling word, processed. And then the bitterest fruit of their leap into liberty, we see here a man doing bits of carpentry. A week or two ago, at home, he was a lawyer. Another man using a broom on a side street, a university professor of economics. A man cleaning out lavatories, a former air force colonel. Even qualified doctors, so many of them that, at the moment, some of them are lucky to be employed as orderlies.

I don't know if President Bush before he came to the United Nations this week has seen such a film. I'm quite sure he's been well briefed about the substance of it. The plight of thousands of first-rate professionals, Soviet citizens, who must somehow wait to have their skills absorbed into Israeli society. Mr Abba Eban, once Israeli ambassador to the United States, once foreign minister, said the other day that the present dispute, whatever you want to call it, between Israel and the United States is as bad as, if not worse than the Suez fiasco. Those are strong words. And by the time you hear this talk, it's possible, likely, I hope, that the two countries will have agreed on some compromise over that $10 billion guarantee for a five-year loan. But I must say for the past month I've not talked to anybody or read anybody who has managed to invent a creative compromise between two opposing positions that seem as impossible to merge as war and peace.

M. Bush, as we know, appealed to the General Assembly of the United Nations to repeal that atrocious 1975 resolution which, by equating Zionism with racism, practically branded the state of Israel as a creation of bigots. The repeal, said the Israelis, was long overdue. What Mr Bush and any American administration has secretly longed to repeal is something they don't dare bring up. Which was that other resolution of the Security Council requiring the Israelis to withdraw from territories occupied during the 1967 war. As we all know, the resolution missed out the definite article, it said "territories" not "the territories". So Israel did, indeed, withdraw from some but not from all. Not from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

During the hot debates in the United Nations that ended with the Security Council's demanding Saddam Hussein's withdrawal from Kuwait and sanctioning the use of force if he didn't do it, the Iraqi UN ambassador was embarrassingly eloquent about Israel's non-compliance with that other resolution, "You threaten us with war," he said, "if we don't obey your resolution. Yet for years and years, Israel has not complied and you don't threaten to throw Israel out." There were, there are, of course, different political factors at work but it was always difficult for us to maintain that ignoring one Security Council resolution and enforcing the other were stages, or parts, of the same peacekeeping process.

Of course, the United States wants to offer the money and, of course, the United States wishes fervently that Israel would stop building houses on the occupied lands. And, of course, where else can the Israelis find space and build homes for a million refugees?

I think the one politician, statesman I feel for more than another these days is Mr James Baker, the Secretary of State. I've calculated that in the past two, three months, he has flown, over scores of interrupted stops, something like a quarter of a million miles, enough to give him, on the mileage plan of any of our airlines, free first class tickets for him and his wife to Hawaii, once a month, for the rest of their lives. He has been plunged for the past two years into meeting and listening to and advising the residuary legatees of all the broken bits of the Soviet empire. In between, he's been on flying two-hour visits to all the Arab leaders. Then to Israel. Then comes the coup. So now, he has to go not only to Moscow but to the Baltic capitals and into the Ukraine. And now up comes the $10 billion hassle with Israel.

How he goes along without blowing up, I can't think. For everywhere he goes, he's being begged for money, for loans, for gifts. But always money. And he is, everywhere, the victim of a delusion, to which I must say, American presidential rhetoric for the past 30 years has mightily contributed.

It is the delusion that the US stands for rich old Uncle Sam. Many of the new democratic leaders in the breakaway Communist countries, have come to Washington, mentioned a billion or two they'd like, and been astonished to hear that Washington can't afford it. Every day another country asks for more millions, several billions. Millions, billions … Pretty soon, as the man said, it adds up to money. Which the United States does not have. This may never be believed by Uncle Sam's supplicants until one fine day they wake up and find that Japan had decided it won't, or can't afford to pay the monthly interest on America's debt.

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