[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 55 (Thursday, May 1, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3896-S3898]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
A SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENT
Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, there are times when I listen to the
remarks of another Senator that I realize the statement being made is
most significant. That was my feeling recently as I sat next to the
junior Senator from Massachusetts. Senator John Kerry spoke to the
national meeting of AIPAC--The America-Israel Political Action
Committee--here in Washington, DC. This was a bipartisan meeting of
AIPAC members from throughout our Nation.
In a strong worded presentation, Senator Kerry made an appeal for the
United States to be a true friend of Israel. I, particularly, agreed
with my friend as he forcefully said:
As a democracy, Israel has both the burden and the glory of
a vigorous public square. We as Americans must be the truest
and best kind of ally--both forthright enough to say what we
think--and steadfast enough to stay the course during the
hard passages as well as the easy ones.
Herzl's famous words--``If you will it, it is no dream''--
signify the promise and the greatest power of Israel--and the
hope, after half a century, that a fair and secure peace is
finally within reach. For our part, we must leave here more
committed than ever to support Israel in the exacting,
essential, and sometimes tense search for that dream. I think
its fair to say that the ashes of Holocaust victims were
scattered on the wind.
But that wind also carries on it their prayers and
purpose--above mountains and sea, across hundreds or
thousands of miles, so that the pain of history is redeemed
in the land of Israel. It is a sacred place--for them, for
their people who live there, and for all the world. So let us
now resolve again that the day will never come for Israel
when the redemption is put at risk--when any of us would ever
have to repeat Schindler's cry and say: We could have done
more.
Mr. President, the days seem to be disappearing when a Senator
compliments another Senator who sits on the other side of this aisle by
making the Senate aware of a significant accomplishment of a colleague.
For myself, I would like to restore that tradition.
Senator Kerry's statement was one of the best I have heard. Mr.
President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Kerry's speech to AIPAC
be printed in the Record. It is one, I believe, all Members of Congress
and many citizens of this great Nation of ours should read,
contemplate, and discuss.
There being no objection, the speech was ordered to be printed in the
Record, as follows:
Senator John F. Kerry--Address Before AIPAC--Washington, DC--April 7,
1997
I really want to share with you that I am honored to be
here tonight--and I'm privileged to stand up here tonight and
represent the Senate in bi-partisan fashion--because I share
your cause, and I also want to pay you respect for the way
that you fight the battle. The way that you do so literally
does honor to our democracy. The letters you write, the phone
calls you make, involvement in our campaigns, your
willingness to come to Washington, your commitment to, and
search for the truth, is the way it is supposed to be, and
you set an example for this country.
I was delighted to participate just a few days ago with
Steven in Boston in a Washington club event. And I think it
renewed in me my sense, in the intimacy and in the exchange,
the dialogue, that meetings like that really give a
continuing vitality to a fundamental truth that Israel and
the United States do share great ideas as well as a great
alliance; and security of Israel is indispensable to the
security of the United States of America.
But you know, in truth, our two nations really share
something much more than that, and I think you know it. As
Prime Minister Netanyahu stated so eloquently tonight--and
what a privilege it was to be able to listen to the truth
that he spoke this evening--Israel and the United States are
neither of us just a place in the land, a piece of geography;
both of us are founded on a shining vision of human dignity
and purpose.
The Jewish people have taught the world much about dignity
and purpose because they have preserved their vision through
two thousand years of exile and persecution. And they had to
outlast history's fiercest fires of hate.
Teresa and I watched Schindler's List as 25 million other
Americans did a few weeks ago. We were obviously left asking,
as anyone in their right mind and conscience would, why--
why--why? But I remembered my trip to Israel, as we all do.
My first visit to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. And I will never
forget one sight there that stood out above all others--not
the documents or the photographs as stark as they are--but a
small child's single lonely shoe, which brought home to me
the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust expressed on the
most human of scales.
Again, as I watched this movie about a handful who entered
the Nazi hell and returned, a small remnant who proved that
millions did not have to perish, I thought of the words of
Elie Wiesel about others who could have acted to prevent, to
stop, to oppose this crime of the century: ``Not all were
guilty,'' he said, ``but all were responsible.''
Schindler himself was a rogue and a philistine, whose
transformation was heroic--but it was all too rare. Too many
of the God-fearing forgot God. And at the end of the movie,
after the Nazis have surrendered and Schindler is preparing
to escape, he cries that he had not done all he could have
done--or early enough. He could have done more--sold a watch,
a lapel pin, a car to secure the lives of others. And so many
could have done more in Germany and elsewhere--and yes, done
more in America, and in the highest places of power in
Washington.
And as we know--and I say we, all of us, with connections
of any kind with Israel--anti-semitism did not disappear with
the ashes of Auschwitz. Over fifty years after the end of
World War II, the ancient evil still stalks our time--
striking at Jews around the world and at the Jewish people
and the Jewish soul of the state of Israel. What Robert
Wistrich called the longest hatred continues to reach far and
wide. An explosion ruins a peaceful afternoon in a street
cafe in Tel Aviv. There are bombings in a Jewish Community
Center in Argentina; the rising popularity of the National
Front in France; the prevalence of Skinhead violence and
murders in Germany; the arson of Warsaw's last synagogue; the
anti-Jewish scape-goating and conspiracy of Louis Farrakhan
and the militia groups; the Nazi-like images of Jews in the
press in Egypt and Syria, and the blatant anti-Jewish hatred
of Hamas proclaiming: ``We worship God by killing Jews.''
These are different sins, but they are rooted in the same
anti-Semitic temptation. Some cannot face the truth, or the
twisted hates in their own soul, even today in this country,
or the rationalizations for the sake of political advantage
or profit. As the youth of Europe ask about the Holocaust and
challenge their parents about what they did or didn't do, the
legacy of collaboration and oppression still emerges from
under the rocks of a hidden history. We have just witnessed
the end of the myth of Swiss neutrality--and we are beginning
to look anew at what happened to the stolen property of Jews
in Vichy France and Peronist Argentina.
So the question must be asked: Would active resistance to
the Holocaust or the preceding anti-Semitism have made a
difference? I am not naive about the brutality with which the
Nazis often responded to dissent. But in recent years, from
the Philippines to Haiti to South Africa, to the former
Soviet union, resistance and dissent--and pressure from the
outside--changed the course of events. And it is no excuse
for citizens or the Church or other leaders of the world to
say that it would not have worked. For the most part, they
did not even try--and that is the shame of a century.
So the millions who watched ``Schindler's List'' must
contemplate, then amid the tears and heavy hearts, the deeper
lesson that we carry out of this blood-stained century.
Speaking out against injustice, acting to end bigotry,
raising our collective consciousness and looking honestly
into the unsparing heart of conscience, and standing up for
what is right and hopeful. This is the collective burden--the
collective burden and I say privilege of all of us who live
today. It is a collective responsibility that we must meet--
in our own country--and for so many of us, in the other
country of our hearts--the land of Israel.
So we need AIPAC's unwavering voice on this long and
winding road to peace in the Middle East. And the journey is
harder now than it was a year ago, harder than it was a month
ago, harder than it was a few weeks or days ago because we
must remind the world that peace is more just than a piece of
paper; it is the replacement of death with life, of danger
and violence with the laughter of children whose
playgrounds no longer need to be guarded with guns, Arab
or Israeli. Oh yes--the peace process has delivered a
certain amount to Israel--diplomatic, economic, and
political benefits--but again in a simple truth--it has
not delivered full or real security. It is not peace when
seven Israel girls are murdered at the Jordanian border.
It is not peace when three more innocent people are killed
on the eve of Purim in
[[Page S3897]]
Tel Aviv, with fifty more injured--among them many
children--cut and bleeding from broken glass and nails
embedded into the bomb. It is not peace when people cannot
get safely on a bus and arrive home to the embrace and joy
of family.
No--that is not peace--but I state emphatically--it is a
reason why the peace process must go on--not naively, not in
a rush, not on a fragile foundation--but it must go on in a
genuine search for real peace--and for the real security
which defines peace.
So frankly, we all have to work harder, we have to work
harder to make real the peaceful dreams of millions of
Israelis and millions of others in the world, who look to
part of the world for peace. And all of us cannot continue to
be held hostage to Hamas and Hezbollah. We must all of us
reject the absurd, dishonest and cruel approach--the
propaganda, if you will--from some Palestinians--the attempt
by some Arafat advisers--to equate terrorist attacks with
Israel's decision to construct new housing in Jerusalem,
however controversial that decision may be. It is one thing
for the Palestinians and others to hear Prime Minister
Netanyahu say it, but I want to say it also: Terrorism is an
incontrovertible evil, and an unacceptable response. The idea
that every bitter dispute between Israelis and the
Palestinians can justify Palestinian violence, or justify
Arafat's winking at it, or should warrant the release of yet
most Hamas leaders, or could excuse the PLO's failure to
rewrite its covenant--all this reflects a moral blindness, a
failure of courage that only encourages the cowards, the
haters and the killers. As Israel is assailed with almost
unrelenting fury and Prime Minister Netanyahu is all but
demonized by the world press, the parting cry of Schindler--I
could have done more--that cry ought to resonate in this
room. Are we speaking up enough against a one-sided
enforcement of the Oslo Accords? Are the supporters of Israel
who did not support Netanyahu now less willing to rebut
inaccuracies and attacks than they were when Rabin and Peres
were in office? Did too many people just breath a sign of
relief when Israel in a single day carried out the withdrawal
from Hebron rather than shouting their support in words,
letters and op-eds? Will we demand again and again that Iran,
Iraq, and Syria be held accountable for Hezbollah and Hamas?
Will we insist, over and over, that our Arab friends must
move forward with full diplomatic relations with Israel? Will
we make clear that the reinstitution of the Arab boycott of
Israel is not only morally repugnant but unacceptable to all
Americans?
Let me say to you with humility and respect that this all
must happen first of all in AIPAC--or it will not happen at
all. Now I know that not everyone in this room completely
shared the vision of Rabin or Peres about the peace process.
Just as I know that not everyone in this room today shares
the vision of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Nor is that diversity
of opinion here different from what is going on in Israeli
living rooms or in the Knesset. There is a distrust of the
process, of Arafat, and there is division over how to
proceed--or in some quarters whether to proceed at all. But
one thing is clear, you know and we know it, an overwhelming
majority of people--there and here--seek, work and pray for
peace--not a passing illusion--but the reality of a solid,
meaningful, secure and reliable peace. As Americans, we owe
it to our Israeli partners to stand with them so that they
can negotiate from greater strength--to be an ally beside
them, not an ally that undermines them. Israel will and
should choose its own leaders, its own policy, its own
bargaining position; and the United States cannot and should
not dictate the outcome.
Let me state it as plainly as I can: The U.N. Security
Council has no right to impose insecurity on Israel.
President Clinton was right to veto the Security Council
resolution on Har Homa--and the United States can and should
veto any other similar, one-sided measures that bring
discredit on nations such as France and Russia--whose own
anti-Semitic records now rebuke their anti-Israel votes.
And I also say to you that for the parties to move ahead--
and I believe they will--for the peace to proceed--and I
believe it will--AIPAC must be both vigilant and tireless.
Legitimate criticism of Israel should be heard, yes. But
malicious charges without foundation have no place in our
policy debates--as when a shameless Syria sought to blame
Israel for intra-Syrian terrorism in Damascus. Last month, on
national television, repeated media questions about Israel's
alleged failure to carry out its obligations in Hebron were
forcefully rebutted by the State Department's Dennis Ross.
But they easily could have been accepted by a less
knowledgeable guest. It is critical--and this is your role,
and ours, as we listen to you--critical that the American
public be kept accurately informed about the obligations of
Palestinians--and whether they are being fulfilled. What
Prime Minister Netanyahu calls lapses in reciprocity are not
side issues, but central ones. Such lapses wouldn't be
accepted in our arms reduction talks with Yeltsin, they
wouldn't be accepted in our trade negotiations with China.
How can they be ignored in the life or death arena of the
Middle East? Signed agreements have to mean something. They
build confidence. They are the road to future negotiations.
And broken commitments--or neglected ones--foretell other
betrayals to come. Both parties must be held to the same high
standard.
In each of my visits to Israel, I have had the privilege of
seeing first-hand the special dangers of the Middle East, and
of beginning to comprehend the special nature of the Middle
East. On one occasion I became an honorary Israeli Air Force
pilot when I was allowed to fly an air force jet from the
Ovda Airbase. I want you to know it did not come easily. I
was frustrated, at one of those terrible, boring luncheons
when you're on those journeys, and this great colonel--he
was an ace in the war, several times an ace--was sitting
next to me, and I'm a pilot and I love to fly every chance
I get. And I kept saying, you're sure Tel Aviv won't let
me go flying? And finally I persuaded him to make a last
phone call, and he came back to me in the middle of a
meal, and said to me, ``Senator, I hope you haven't eaten
too much. We're going flying.''
So I raced down to the tarmac, and they had a helmet and a
suit for me, and put me in the front seat. He said ``I don't
have time to do the run-up with you or anything, but the
minute we're off the ground, it's your airplane.'' And I
said, boy this guy is trusting. I didn't even tell him if I'd
ever flown a jet before. So we took off into the sky, he gave
me the airplane the moment we took off, and the next thing I
know, he says point-blank into my helmet, ``Senator, you are
about to go into Egypt airspace.'' So I immediately ground
the stick in and turned, and within a matter of minutes, this
United States Senator came close to violating the airspace of
Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. let me tell you something, I
learned a magical lesson: The promise of peace must be secure
before the promised land is secure on a thin margin of land.
Back on the ground on that first trip, I, like so many of
my colleagues, toured the beautiful country from Kibbutz
Mizgav Am to Masada to the Golan. I stood in the very shelter
in a kibbutz in the north where children were attacked and I
looked at launching sites and impact zones for Katousha
rockets. And like many visitors, I was enthralled by Tel
Aviv, moved by Jerusalem and inspired by standing above
Capernum, looking out over the Sea of Galilee, where I was
bold enough to read aloud the Sermon on the Mount to those
who were traveling with me. And I met people of stunning
commitment, who honestly and vigorously debated the issues as
I watched and listened intently. I went as a friend by
conviction; I returned a friend at the deepest personal level
with new connections, new understanding.
Who would have thought so much would have changed since
that first journey of 1986. But still the Middle East remains
a place of deep and disturbing contradictions. Israel's
oldest Arab peace partner--Egypt--has a press obsessed with
Nazi-like images of Jews and Israel. At the same time, a
Jordanian soldier murders seven Israeli school girls and
Jordan's King Hussein pays a personal, poignant, eloquent and
historic shiva call on their families.
Through all these contradictions let no one doubt the
importance of the road we are on, for the truth is that
Hussein's beautiful gesture to a nation all too used to
mourning alone is a symbol of real progress. Without Oslo, it
would not have happened. It's not that sympathy calls make
the peace process worthwhile; it's that bridges between
leaders and their people are being built.
Needless to say, there is a very long journey yet ahead of
us, and we must march through criticism abroad, and at home,
and internally, and in Israel.
As a soldier in Vietnam, who came home to oppose the war, I
must say to you that I don't see that kind of criticism as
being un-patriotic. For nations like Israel and America that
are founded on principles and not just as places, dissent can
be the loyalist act of all, and lively debate the living
proof of freedom.
As a democracy, Israel has both the burden and the glory of
a vigorous public square. We as Americans must be the truest
and best kind of ally--both forthright enough to say what we
think--and steadfast enough to stay the course during the
hard passages as well as the easy ones.
Herzl's famous words--``If you will it, it is no dream''--
signify the promise and the greatest power of Israel--and the
hope, after half a century, that a fair and secure peace is
finally within reach. For our part, we must leave here more
committed than ever to support Israel in the exacting,
essential, and sometimes tense search for that dream. I think
it's fair to say that the ashes of Holocaust victims were
scattered on the wind. But that wind also carries on it their
prayers and purpose--above mountains and sea, across hundreds
or thousands of miles, so that the pain of history is
redeemed in the land of Israel. It is a sacred place--for
them, for their people who live there, and for all the world.
So let us now resolve again that the day will never come for
Israel when the redemption is put at risk--when any of us
would ever have to repeat Schindler's cry and say: We could
have done more.
I might say to you on a personal note that that imperative
has been clear since long before the Holocaust. I learned it
and I learned how long it has endured in an emotional moment
on top of Masada, when I stood on that great plateau where
the oath of new soldiers used to be sworn against the desert
backdrop and the test of history. I spent several hours with
my guide and friend Yadin Roman. On top, we argued, we
debated, at his insistence whether or not in fact Josephus
Flavius was correct in his account of the siege--whether
these really were the last Jews fighting for
[[Page S3898]]
survival--whether they had escaped since no remains were ever
found. And we journeyed back and forth through the
possibilities and finally, after our journey through
history--which we resolved with a vote in favor of history as
recorded--Yadin motioned to me and said come over here and
stand with those that we were travelling with, and we stood
at the edge of the chasm looking out across the desert,
across to the mountains at the other side. And we stood as a
group, and altogether, at his command, we shouted across the
chasm--across the desert--across the silence--Am Yisrael
Chai. And back a slow, echoing voice speaking to us through
history came the word Am, Yisrael Chai. Israel lives. The
State lives. The people of Israel live. And that is the cause
of America, it is the cause of people of conscience all
across this planet, and that is why I am proud to be here
with you tonight.
Mr. DeWINE addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
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