Israel is an island of stability and domestic cohesion at a moment of upheaval
everywhere else, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said Tuesday
night.
Kissinger, the keynote speaker at the opening of President Shimon
Peres’s fourth annual Facing Tomorrow conference, said that the essence of all
revolutions, including those now taking place in the Arab world, is that they
begin with resentment “and then have to find a positive direction in which to
evolve.”
Kissinger, who received Peres’s Presidential Award of
Distinction for his “exceptional contribution to the State of Israel and
humanity as a whole,” said that one of the peculiarities of the Arab-Israeli
negotiations is that “one side [the Arabs] consider recognition of another state
as sufficient for the formation of peace. But the recognition of the state is
the beginning of peace, it is not the end of peace.”
“Everyone knows the
sacrifices Israel has made, and is prepared to make for peace, but the other
side has to give some content to what a peace would look like,” said Kissinger,
who was instrumental in brokering disengagement agreements after the 1973 Yom
Kippur War in which Israel battled Egypt and Syria.
Regarding the current
negotiations with Iran, Kissinger noted that the UN Security Council has stated
for a decade that a military nuclear program in Iran was
unacceptable.
While now the world powers see a need for diplomacy,
Kissinger said that “a point will be reached where they will have to define what
they mean by unacceptable, and how that should be implemented.”
This
moment, Kissinger declared, is approaching in the months ahead, “and it is
something we should all do together.”
Kissinger, a Nobel Peace Prize
winner, said that when one looks at history he realizes that in order to have
peace there must be two elements: justice, meaning that the people concerned
must feel they live in a world that meets their essential needs; and
equilibrium, “so that the strong cannot dominate the weak.”
“This is our
challenge today, and it is at a strange moment, because we find that the
nation-state on which the European and international polices have been based is
in the process of disintegrating in many parts of the world,” he
continued.
Peres, in a warm speech bestowing his award on Kissinger,
praised him for putting Israel on the track of peace with Egypt, ensuring a US
airlift of arms to Israel during the Yom Kippur War and helping to open the door
for the exodus of Soviet Jews.
Kissinger, who seemed moved by the honor,
quipped that it was unusual for an 89-year-old man to say, “I wish my parents
could be here.”
“They would be moved more by this distinction than any of
the other honors that have come my way,” he explained.
Lost in the
evening of praise for Kissinger were some recently uncovered harsh statements
that he made about Jews while working in the Nixon White House, reputedly
plagued by a garden-party style of anti-Semitism.
For instance, a 1973
recording from the White House released in 2010 had Kissinger – then president
Richard Nixon’s national security adviser – telling him that helping win the
freedom of Soviet Jews was “not an objective of American foreign
policy.”
“And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it
is not an American concern.
Maybe a humanitarian concern,” said
Kissinger, a Jew who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938.
Kissinger
later clarified that the quotations needed to be “viewed in the context of the
time.” He said that Nixon pursued the issue of Soviet Jewish emigration as a
humanitarian matter, separate from foreign policy issues, because normal
diplomatic channels were closed, and to avoid questions of
sovereignty.
In another instance, the State Department released documents
in 2011 showing that the White House was flooded with appeals in 1972 from
Jewish organizations and then-prime minister Golda Meir on behalf of Soviet
Jewry.
Kissinger, at the time an assistant to national security adviser
Alexander Haig, was asked by White House official Leonard Garment how to proceed
on the matter.
According to transcripts released by the State Department,
Kissinger said to Garment: “Is there a more self-serving group of people than
the Jewish community?” Garment, also Jewish, replied, “None in the
world.”
Kissinger was then quoted as saying, “What the hell do they think
they are accomplishing? You can’t even tell the bastards anything in confidence
because they’ll leak it.”
It has also been widely reported that for six
crucial days during the 1973 war Kissinger delayed the badly-needed airlift of
weapons to Israel. An unnamed source close to former US defense secretary James
Schlesinger has widely been quoted as saying Kissinger’s strategy was to “let
Israel come out ahead, but bleed.”