A Lost Peace by Galen Jackson;

Author:Galen Jackson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

Why Did Ford Back Down?

Ultimately, the White House chose to back away from a confrontation with Israel and to pursue instead a second Egyptian-Israeli interim deal—which would come to be called Sinai II—primarily for domestic political reasons.189 As an unelected and relatively weak president, Ford knew that a battle at home over the Arab-Israeli issue would politically be very risky. After all, the administration was, as Kissinger put it, “facing a massive onslaught by Israel.”190 “A settlement now,” he said in June 1976, “is impossible.” The reason, he strongly implied, was because it would require an enormous effort to “tak[e] on the lobby.”191

Ford and Kissinger also believed that the former would be able to regain some of the executive authority that the presidency had lost if he won the 1976 election. As Kissinger explained to Assad, neither Nixon nor Ford had been in a position to repeat what Eisenhower had done. “Eisenhower,” he said, “was a President with the biggest popular majority in 40 years. And let’s be frank—we had one President who was totally under attack, and now a President who was not elected. Until he is elected, he can’t speak with the same sweeping authority.”192

Trying to resolve the Palestinian issue—particularly if doing so required working with the PLO—would have been especially controversial. As the intense domestic reaction to Saunders’s Congressional testimony demonstrated, the matter remained an extremely sensitive one. As Scowcroft put it, the Israelis “went into orbit” over what Saunders had said, which was why Kissinger felt it necessary to try to distance both himself and the White House from it.193 The Americans, the secretary of state explained to Tunisia’s prime minister, had “an extreme domestic problem when we deal with the Middle East.” “If we get involved with the issue of the PLO at this stage,” he elaborated, “it would undermine our efforts, because the PLO is still considered here as a terrorist organization.”194 “In the US,” he told Sadat, “the Palestinians are regarded as murderers. We must start the process of rehabilitation of the Palestinians. If Israel can get the Arab-Israeli issue focussed [sic] on the problem of the Palestinians, it has succeeded.”195 “We cannot do it,” he similarly told King Hussein. “If the Greeks can cause so much trouble, think of what the Israeli lobby can do.”196 Given the sensitivity of the matter, he stressed, the Arabs simply had “to think in terms of what the political traffic will bear.”197

In other words, the administration did not want to deal with the issue prior to 1977. Recognition of the PLO, Kissinger maintained, was a “delicate” question, and “timing was of the essence.”198 “At a time when the power of the Executive Branch is as weak as it will ever be,” the secretary of state explained, “we cannot afford to make official contact with the PLO.”199 His reasons for not talking with the organization, he said, were “solely domestic.”200 “Our optimum course,” he told Ford in January 1976, “is to go to the PLO. Any other year I would do it.

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