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BACKGROUND

What Went Wrong?

against his wishes — a particularly
sensitive issue with Mr. Bush, who
jealously guards his foreign policy
prerogatives.

111

A Capitol Mistake

nother major miscalculation
in the loan guarantee battle
came in assessing the depth
of pro-Israel strength in Congress.
On one level, support for Israel
remains strong in the Capitol. An
overwhelming majority of legis-
lators still favor the loan guarantees
as a humanitarian gesture, and pro-
Israel campaign contributions are
still important enough to keep
marginal members in line on most
issues.
But when President Bush made it
clear he would go to the mat over
any immediate granting of loan
guarantees, even some of Israel's
strongest defenders in Congress
backed off.
Congressional leaders were
perfectly willing to support the
guarantees against administration
resistance. They were not prepared
to wage all-out war against the
White House — not with an upcom-
ing election and its emerging theme
of foreign versus domestic needs.
Complicating the issue was pent-
up frustration over the policies of
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak
Shamir.
"There is a feeling in Congress
that the Shamir government has
been sticking its fingers in the ad-
ministration's eye for too long," said
an aide to a fiercely pro-Israel legis-
lator. "There's a lot of anger toward
Shamir and friends, and that
resentment was just looking for an
outlet."
So, too, was resentment over the
renowned clout of the pro-Israel
community in general, and the
American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) in particular.
By publicly expressing what some
legislators privately believed — that
Israel's friends in Washington are
too aggressive and too single-minded
in their pursuit of Israel's interests
— the president may have given a
tacit go-ahead to legislators who
have harbored resentment over
AIPAC's hardball tactics.
"The president provided cover for
members who've felt pushed around
by AIPAC for years," this congres-
sional staffer said. "Now it's payoff
time. This is their chance to get back
at AIPAC. They smell that AIPAC is
vulnerable, and they're going to
take their shots."
In the past, the pro-Israel coin-

A

The $10 billion
loan guarantee fiasco.

JAMES D. BESSER

Washington Correspondent

the Jewish community and Congress,"
Mr. Foxman said. "Maybe the presi-
dent thought we were the ones who
were posturing."
A massive grass-roots campaign
targeted most members of Congress
over the summer recess. But there was
little effort to communicate directly
with Mr. Bush because of the assump-
tion that the real fight would be in
Congress, and that pro-Israel clout
would carry the day on Capitol Hill
even if the president quietly fought an
unrestricted loan guarantee measure.
But President Bush chose not to
fight quietly — something pro-Israel
strategists had not counted on.
"One of the things I regret is that we
didn't push the idea of meeting with

the president more vigorously," said
Larry Rubin, executive vice-chair of
the National Jewish Community Re-
lations Advisory Council (NJCRAC),
one of the groups that coordinated the
massive Sept. 12 lobbying effort that
earned the president's ire.
"When we began planning for the
Washington action day, NJCRAC pro-
posed that a meeting be set up with
the president. That might not have
changed the president's opinion — but
it might have cooled the rhetoric."
And, he suggested, such a meeting
might have tempered the president's
anger about what he saw as an at-
tempt by pro-Israel activists to do a
foreign-policy end run on the White
House by pressing Congress to go

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

31

1 N TERNATI • A

1 he dust has yet to settle, but
Jewish activists are already
assessing what went wrong
with the push for $10 billion in loan
guarantees for Israel — a test of wills
touted as the most important exercise
of American Jewish political power in
a decade.
Despite grimly upbeat statements
by a number of Jewish leaders about
the prospect of success when the loan
guarantee legislation comes up in
January, there is widespread agree-
ment that the four-month delay forced
by President George Bush represents
a major loss for Israel's friends in this
country.
Moreover, Israel's instance on
expanding Jewish settlements during
the loan guarantee struggle has left
some Jewish activists frustrated and
angry. Put bluntly, they feel that
Israel's Likud government sandbagg-
ed them by continuing to push Jewish
settlement in the occupied territories
at a time when political sensitivity
dictated a more diplomatic approach.
"We were led down a very dangerous
path," said one top official of a major
Jewish group. "Acceleration of the
settlements — that is a card we
couldn't plan for and it was something
we couldn't cope with.
"Maybe we should have made that
clearer to the Israelis . . . a lot of us
feel now that the Israelis were not
playing fair with their supporters
here."
On a tactical level, the most glaring
error on the part of American Jewish
leaders was their failure to recognize
signals indicating President Bush's
determination to use the loan guar-
antee issue as a cudgel in fighting
Israel's settlements policies.
Several times this past summer — a
season that was filled with frantic ac-
tivity on behalf of the loan guarantees
— Mr. Bush dropped strong hints that
he would seek to link the guarantees
to a settlements freeze.
Jewish leaders read these signals as
political posturing and choose instead
to believe formal White House
statements promising no linkage.
"We thought it was just muscle flex-
ing," said Abraham Foxman, director
of the Anti-Defamation League of
B'nai B'rith. "We did not anticipate to
what extent the president would make
this a personal issue. Once he does
that, it's almost certain to be a losing
battle."
When the president came out
shooting from the hip in his push for a
120-day delay, pro-guarantee forces
were caught by surprise.
"There were miscues and
misunderstandings all over the lot —
between the administration, Israel,