Word: shamir
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...face of it, the request seemed reasonable enough -- especially since the friend doing the asking was also the friend destined to be doing the giving. But last week when President Bush, anxious to keep the Middle East peace process on track, asked Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to delay his request for $10 billion in loan guarantees to help with the settlement of Soviet Jewish emigres, Shamir responded with a belligerent no. Americans, Shamir insisted, "are obliged, from a moral point of view, to give Israel this aid." Moreover, he lectured, "humanitarian aid" should not be mixed up with political...
Morality lectures from Shamir, Bush did not need. And when the pro-Israeli lobbyists subsequently stepped up their efforts to secure quick passage of the loan guarantees on Capitol Hill, an irate Bush summoned his aides, saying, "I want to talk to the American people." Last Thursday afternoon Bush stepped into the White House press room, the stony fighter-pilot look in his eyes not unlike the determination he exhibited the morning after Iraq invaded Kuwait. In plain language he threatened to veto any congressional loan bill that might emerge before the prospective Middle East peace conference, which he hopes...
...need of America's help and humanitarian aid, but as a bargaining chip for his Middle East agenda. His veto threat is an unjustifiable use of political leverage at the expense of human rights. He is using the Soviet Jews' lives as a device to pressure Prime Minister Shamir into ending settlements in the territories before negotiations at next month's peace conference even begin...
...Shamir, the agreement to attend the conference required only a slight shift in emphasis: he simply said yes, Israel would sit down at the peace parley provided the Palestinian delegation was acceptable, rather than no, it would not attend if the Palestinian group was not acceptable. Beyond that, the stone-faced Prime Minister gave away little. At meetings with his right-wing supporters, Shamir emphasized that he had not agreed to sacrifice -- or even discuss -- the status of Jerusalem and that there was no requirement for Israel to halt construction of new settlements in the territories or lift the occupation...
...Soviet and other organizers of the peace conference hope the negotiating process may serve to soften Shamir's intransigence. Their strategy is to coax the old enemies toward agreement on less contentious issues in the hope that the result will be a climate of trust that enables progress on more explosive issues. "You want to give this process time so that thinking can evolve," says a senior Administration official. "Different kinds of compromises become possible over time because people see things in different ways...