Kissinger Tells a Joke

Found here, p. 458, in a discussion of the Arab boycott and a problem that developed in getting up contracts with Saudi businesses to tighten or U.S.-Saudi relations

Minutes of the Secretary of State’s Staff Meeting

Washington, February 26, 1975, 8 a.m. 

MR. ROBINSON: We have the Saudi Arabian Commission meeting starting here in a few minutes. We have run into a problem. The problem is developing over the exclusion of Jews from any of these contractual arrangements. We are going to have to try to work it out. And I think there are solutions. But it is going to create— 

SECRETARY KISSINGER: Like what? Like Faisal converting? That way he can also go to Jerusalem...

...SECRETARY KISSINGER: Get that word around, will you, McCloskey. We are against discrimination on the grounds of race and religion. 

MR. ROBINSON: It is going to be a problem.

Of course, as Kissinger should have known, and Sadat's 1977 visit later proved it, there was no problem with the King visiting Jerusalem.

There is, however, still is a problem with Jews visiting Mecca, not to mention the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

__________

P.S.

Two pages later, we read:

Congressman Waxman, who was not a member of the House Foreign Armed Forces Committee, got onto the Committee’s tour of the Middle East apparently solely to raise the question of visas for Jews. He asked King Faisal why Jews were not permitted freely into the Kingdom and the King asked why they would want to come. Most Jews, said the King, support Israel.

^

How Important is the Temple Mount?

By important, I mean central, even crucial, to Israel's position within the context of how the powers look at the conflict with the Arab world that Israel is forced to confront.

For example, here is Henry Kissinger as recorded in the Minutes of a Bipartisan Leadership Meeting that was held in Washington, November 27, 1973:

A way must be found to remove the Arab holy places from Israeli control. 

Attending were, among others, Senate Majority Leader Michael J. Mansfield, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R–Pennsylvania), and Senators J. William Fulbright, John C. Stennis, Milton R. Young (R–North Dakota), and John L. McClellan (D–Arkansas); Speaker of the House Carl Albert, House Majority Leader Thomas P. O’Neill (D–Massachusetts), House Minority Leader and Vice President-designate Gerald R. Ford, and Congressmen William S. Mailliard (R–California) and Samuel S. Stratton (D–New York).

That would make continued Israeli control a central, even crucial, issue, no?

Oh, there was this there, too:

Scott: Are the Israelis more or less intransigent than American Jews?
Kissinger: Less. Israel’s problem now is the election campaign. Since October 22, Israel’s position has evolved and they are willing to talk about things. But the American Jews are so tough and tend to hypo the Israelis and give them illusions.
Fulbright: Isn’t that an illusion?
President: It is in this Administration.
Fulbright: Not in Congress.
Kissinger: Let’s make clear: We are trying to preserve Israel’s security. We have no intentions of sacrificing Israel, and some day they will thank us.
Albert: Why do the Europeans think the destruction of Israel would end the blackmail?
Kissinger: This is a sad chapter in the history of Europe. There is no good answer.
Mailliard: Are you going to Europe?
Kissinger: I am going to the NATO meeting and the President has told me to lay it out cold. There will be screaming.
Scott: Do the American Jews know the extent of Israeli losses?
Kissinger: We will be working with the American Jews. The President is the best friend Israel ever had. In time they will realize that. Israel can’t go on with military solutions. They cannot win a war of attrition.

Kissinger vs. A 'Palestinian State'

(with appreciation to LLM)

Announced:

The Department of State released today Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XXV, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1973...This volume documents U.S. policymaking toward the Arab-Israeli conflict between January and December 1973, i.e., during the months before, during, and immediately after the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973...This volume covers an important period in the history of the U.S. engagement with the Arab-Israeli dispute. The October 1973 War represented not only a renewed clash of Arab and Israeli forces, it ignited an energy crisis brought on by an Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) oil embargo against the United States, and led to the threat of a direct superpower confrontation. The war also prompted the United States to undertake an unprecedented role in the pursuit of a negotiated settlement to the dispute.

So, I started looking through and found something interesting connected with Henry Kissinger.
Here, on page 1143:

Shall I repeat that?

Arafat was a big no-no.

And no Palestinian state on the 'West Bank'.

Henry, where are you now?

^

On Kissinger's "Apology"

From Glenn Richter, former director of SSSJ, who has tried posting
responses to Kissinger's excusing himself (Kippa tip: JTobin) based simply on emigration figures. This to show that Kissinger lied both in his initial response a couple of weeks ago and again in today's Washington Post op-ed. Here's his retort, posted online on the Washington Post site of the op-ed, and I hope, on the Jerusalem Post webpage of the article on the op-ed:

I think history disagrees with Secretary Kissinger. Whatever White House quiet diplomacy worked to free Soviet Jews, it was against an increasing background of public pressure on both the Kremlin and White House, not despite it. As an activist for Soviet Jewry since 1964, I well recall these years.

Secretary Kissinger also misstates the facts. He asserts that in Nixon's first administration, over 100,000 Soviet Jews emigrated. The fact speak otherwise. Emigration in 1969 was 2979, 1027 in 1970, 13,022 in 1971 and 31,681 in 1972, for a total of 48,709. The international public campaign for Soviet Jewry took off in 1971 after the sensational first Leningrad Trial of Jews seeking to flee the USSR. In 1972, the Soviets wanted an arms control treaty and reacted to the introduction into Congress of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which linked trade credits to the Kremlin with Jewish emigration.

Dr. Kissinger also stated in his initial response and in this op-ed that Jewish exit didn't exceed the 1972 total (which he claimed was 40,000) until the USSR collapsed. Simply untrue. In 1979, 51,320 Jews were let out, as the Kremlin attempted to reverse the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, by then law; then 71,196 in 1989, 213,437 in 1990, and 178,026 in 1991 as the Soviets tried desperately and unsuccessfully to gain US economic assistance.

********
And he adds:

Meanwhile, reading today the new and fascinating book, "The Student Struggle Against the Holocaust" (yes, title deliberately chosen) by Dr. Rafael Medoff and Rabbi David Golinkin, I found an eerie parallel.

The notorious Ass't Secretary of State under FDR Breckinridge Long testified on Nov. 26, 1943 before a Congressional committee re a proposed resolution calling on the White House to establish a rescue committee for European Jewry. Long declared that "we have taken into this country since the beginning of Hitler's regime and the persecution of the Jews, until today, approximately 580,000 refugees." The authors state that "a few days later his figures were exposed as false. The actual number of refugees admitted was not more than 250,000, and many of them were not Jews."

^

On Defending Kissinger - An Unpublished Letter

In response to a letter published in the New York Times defending Henry Kissinger, I responded thus:-

The letter in defense of Henry Kissinger by three past chairmen of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations asks us to consider the context of all of the former Secretary of State's actions on Israel (Dec. 22, 2010).

In doing so, we need recall that it also was his intention to see Israel “bleed just enough to soften it up for the post-war diplomacy he was planning” as your paper published the story on March 17, 1976. In fact, it was President Nixon, ostensibly the more verbal anti-semitic of the two in the recently released tape transcripts, who overruled Kissinger's policy and ordered the airlift to beleaguered Israel.

I guess the NYT isn't that excited over Kissinger's lack of morals.

P.S.

From Shmuel Katz:

...When the Israeli Army, after its initial were and nearly fatal setback, began turning the tables, and while the Soviet Union was operating its new, massive supply train, airborne and seaborne, of supplies to Egypt and Syria, the losses the Israeli Army bad suffered threatened a shortage of essential materiel. There occurred then a never officially explained delay, lasting eight days, in the shipping to Israel of promised supplies by the United States. In reply to the daily agitated appeals by the Israeli Ambassador, the American Secretary of State claimed that it was the Defense Department that was holding up the supplies. In fact, the Defense Department was acting according to the directions of the State Department. What the Secretary of State omitted to explain to the Israeli Ambassador was that (as he had explained to his colleague, the Chief of U.S. Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr.) it was his intention to see Israel “bleed just enough to soften it up for the post-war diplomacy he was planning.”

http://shmuelkatz.com/Articles/BattlegroundFactandFantasyinPalestine.pdf

^

Gee, Me Agreeing With Kissinger

“Senator McCain is right. I would not recommend the next President of the United States engage in talks with Iran at the Presidential level. My views on this issue are entirely compatible with the views of my friend Senator John McCain. We do not agree on everything, but we do agree that any negotiations with Iran must be geared to reality.”

Henry Kissinger

The Jew Henry Kissinger

Jeremi Suri has published now "HENRY KISSINGER AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY", with an interesting perspective.

Some extracts from a book review by Niall Ferguson who is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and currently working on a Life of Henry Kissinger.

Jeremi Suri’s Henry Kissinger and the American Century puts Kissinger’s Jewishness centre-stage in an interpretation of his life that stands out among recent books on the subject for the extent and depth of the author’s research...For Suri, Kissinger’s Jewish origins are the key to understanding both the man and the world’s reaction to him.

Kissinger, writes Suri in one of his boldest sallies, was like “a hybrid of the Court Jew and the State Jew – what we might tentatively call the ‘policy Jew’”...Advising politicians politicians can be interesting, usually involves a measure of sycophancy, and is not a peculiarly Jewish activity. As for the Weimar trauma, I am inclined to think [Kissinger's] experience of returning to Germany as a GI had a much greater impact. Still, these are matters of interpretation. Suri deserves credit for producing a more convincing account of his subject’s German-Jewish background than any previous biographer of Kissinger, including the broadly sympathetic Walter Isaacson.

Heinz (as he was originally named) and his younger brother grew up in an Orthodox household in Fürth, Bavaria, where their father Louis was a respectable schoolteacher, a firm believer in the benefits of German Bildung. Louis Kissinger’s world was shattered by the rise of the Nazis, but it was his wife Paula who had the wit to get the family out of Germany just months before the regime’s anti-Semitism erupted in full-blown pogroms. Kissinger lost at least a dozen relatives in the Holocaust, including his grandmother, Fanny Stern (who Suri says perished in the Belzec death camp).

One puzzle that is not quite resolved here is why Kissinger abandoned his parents’ Orthodox allegiance, which they maintained after moving to New York’s Washington Heights by joining the most conservative synagogue in the neighbourhood. Was it the drudgery of the brush-cleaning factory where Kissinger worked for a time? Or was it, as Suri seems to imply, the experience of “eating ham for Uncle Sam” in the US Army after he was drafted in 1943?...

...As has often been remarked, there have been few odder couples in American politics than Nixon and Kissinger. Not the least of the oddities about their relationship was Nixon’s tendency to give vent to his own anti-Jewish prejudices, sometimes even in Kissinger’s presence. Yet Suri argues that their differences were always outweighed by fundamental similarities of outlook. In particular, Kissinger was impressed by Nixon’s faith in his own willpower and the effectiveness of firm, decisive action. As the President told his adviser, his long, hard ascent of the greasy pole had given him “the will in spades”; hence his readiness to take “action which is very strong, threatening, and effective”. On occasion, Kissinger could talk in similar terms. As he told Yitzhak Rabin in 1973: “When you use force it is better to use 30 per cent more than is necessary than 5 per cent less than is necessary . . . . Whenever we use force we have to do it slightly hysterically”. Suri details the two occasions when Kissinger used nuclear sabre-rattling to exert pressure on the Soviets – October 1969 and October 1973 – though he does not offer a clear verdict as to whether these actions were effective diplomatically, or needlessly reckless.

...An enduring peace in the Middle East was probably not attainable in the wartorn 1970s. What was attainable was a diminution in the power of the Soviet Union and a stabilization of Israel’s position relative to her Arab neighbours. These goals, as Suri points out, Kissinger was uniquely positioned to achieve. As a Jewish Secretary of State, he could credibly promise the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to “get [Rabin] to move in the right direction . . . to work on him”. At the same time, he could withstand the bitter claims of Menachem Begin that he was one of those “Jews, who out of a complex feared non-Jews would charge them with acting for their people, and therefore did the opposite”. And, having ousted the Soviets from Egypt, he could reassure Rabin, with equal credibility: “We are working for a common strategy, one element of which is a strong Israel”.

...What [Suri] has done is to provide an invaluable insight into the background of an American statesman who has surely received a disproportionate share of criticism relative to his predecessors. How far Kissinger’s Jewishness provides the real key to his inner motivations remains a matter for debate. (My own preference would be to see him as first and foremost a historian – one of the very select band of serious scholars of the past who end up actually making policy in the here and now.) But it certainly provides a part of the explanation for the vitriol that has come his way.

Kissing Kissinger Good-bye

"What happened in the King David lobby suggests that our brilliant American secretary of state - forty-fourth in line since Thomas Jefferson - behaved in a neurotic fashion. One minute he was glorying in the world's spotlight at his press conference, and the next, when he saw me, was hurtled back into Jewish memories he'd spent a lifetime trying to suppress. He certainly recognized me. You noted how he bridled at my mention of his name, Heinz. He utterly despised me for that. So yes, I have to conclude the man is disturbed. Tell the prime minister he should be most wary in dealing with our secretary of state. Tell him that deep inside him is an insecure and paranoid Jew."

Read more.

My Letter in the Int'l Herald Tribune

It's been a dry spell for a while but I have a letter published in the International Herald Tribune:

Henry Kissinger warns: "If either America's Arab or Israeli friends are asked to take on more than they are able to withstand, there's the risk of another, even larger blow-up" ("Bold script, weak actors," Views, Oct. 24). I suggest that the concessions Israel is being asked to make are too bold and will leave Israel too weak.

Kissinger's own experience in Sinai with the Egypt-Israel peace agreement is an example. Currently, Egypt is facilitating deliveries of weapons into the Gaza Strip. Very few, if any, of the smuggling tunnels have been shut down. True, Egypt is not engaged in a major war with Israel. But this isn't peace.

Yisrael Medad, Shiloh, Israel

Here's one that didn't make it, sent on Oct. 17:

Daniel Levy asserts that the world must recognize that anti-American mobilization and support for jihad are facilitated by "the role of Israeli occupation" ("How about a peace lobby?", Oct. 16).

However, the roots of jihad from which we currently suffer are totally disconnected from any such "occupation", which is claimed began in 1967. To highlight but one aspect: Hassan al-Banna, who died in 1949, and who established the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 and Pakistan's Syed Abul Ala Maududi who founded the Jamaat Islami in 1941, sought to restore the Islamic ideal of the union of religion and state. Their enemy was the west which they they blamed for the decline of Muslim societies by separating religion and politics.

Furthermore, prior to 1967, Israel neither "occupied" territory nor had established any Jewish communities in "conquered" areas but still there was Arab terror throughout 1948-1967. I would suggest that Arab hostility and Islamic extremism acts independent of any specific Israeli policy but, if anything, rather rejects Israel existence totally and unequivocally without regard to any geographical dimension.

And another, from Oct. 4:

No one knows how many are the "many Jews" for whom Jacob Bender claims to speak in his opposition (letter, Oct. 3) to the Jewish communities established in the disputed territories Israel controls since 1967. I write as one of over 400,000 Jews in these areas, including Jerusalem's eastern neighborhoods.

We need recall that no Jew lived in a "settlement" nor was there any "occupation" during the years 1948-1967 in these areas of Judea and Samaria but Arab fedayeen terror existed and peace was the furthest goal of any Arab entity. The PLO was founded in 1964, three years before the war. Any further retreat through disengagement will result in many of Israel's towns facing the security threat of Qassam rockets and, at Ben-Gurion Airport, even worse.

The term "illegality" can not be applied to places, like my home of Shiloh, for it was here that the Jewish people created its culture, history and religion and became a nation, where our kings, priests and prophets walked, deliberated and acted. Bender is misrepresenting Judaism and the Jewish people.

Plausible or Improbable?

Henry Kissinger knows what Israel must agree to:-

The process is being driven by the assumption that the parties can be led to accept by the end of November - or have already tacitly accepted - the so-called Taba Plan of 2000, developed in the wake of the abortive Camp David meeting by technically non-official negotiators.

It provides for Israeli withdrawal to essentially the 1967 borders (with minor rectifications), retaining only the settlements around Jerusalem but narrowing the corridor between two principal Israeli cities, Haifa and Tel Aviv, to about 20 miles. The to-be-created Palestinian state would be compensated by some equivalent Israeli territory, probably in the underpopulated Negev.

Israel seems prepared to agree to an unrestricted return of refugees to the Palestinian state but adamantly refuses any return to Israel. Plausible reports have the Israeli government willing to cede the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem (as yet undefined) as the capital of a Palestinian state.

But, he is aware of a problem:-

Will diplomacy be able to deliver on these expectations?

The interlocutors on both sides have extremely shaky domestic positions. The governing coalition in Israel has collapsed, and the approval ratings of the Cabinet are at a historic low.

The definition of a Palestinian partner has so far proved elusive. Gaza is governed by Hamas, which is unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of Israel, not to speak of the specific terms under negotiation. Who then takes responsibility for Gaza? And it is unclear how much of the West Bank population Abbas can speak for.

And warns:-

If either America's Arab or Israeli friends are asked to take on more than they are able to withstand, there's the risk of another, even larger blow-up.

So, he can still come up with a bit of wisdom - when it stares him in the face.