    [Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 33 (Monday, August 21, 2000)]
    [Pages 1869-1873]
    [Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

    <R04>
    Remarks at a Jewish Community Celebration in Los Angeles

    August 13, 2000

        Thank you very much. Let me begin by thanking Tim and Joel Tauber
    and Todd Morgan and Bill Dockser and all the leaders of the
    organizations that brought you all here together. Thank you for giving
    Hillary such a good reception, I am grateful for that.
        I want to say, more than anything else, how profoundly grateful I am
    for the support I have received from the American Jewish community since
    1991, when I first began running for President.
        When Hillary and I were discussing whether I should make this race,
    way back in '91, well over 8 years ago now, one of the things that I
    hoped I could do was to bring whatever powers of persuasion and
    understanding of history, as well as human psychology, that I've
    acquired over the years, to the process of peace in the world.
        It seemed to me that the end of the cold war had imposed upon the
    United States a very special responsibility to reach out and build
    bridges to countries and regions that we had too often overlooked or
    seen through a limited lens during the period of the cold war and to try
    to be a special force for peace, from the Northern Ireland problem to
    the Balkans to Haiti and our own region, but especially in the Middle
    East.
        And for nearly 8 years now, we have worked to be faithful to the
    commitment I made to the American people when I began, that we would
    make the United States the world's leader for peace and freedom, for
    human rights and security wherever we possibly could. This has been the
    most rewarding thing, I think, in many ways I've been able to do as
    President. But it's a work that is--and by the very nature of the way we

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    human beings are--it's a work that will always be, to some extent, in
    progress.
        Hillary has done a lot, especially with her Vital Voices program in
    Northern Ireland, going to Israel and working with Mrs. Barak on the
    violence issue, and, before that, working with others who were in the
    Israeli Government.
        I think I should tell you that the last person I talked to before my
    plane landed in Los Angeles was Leah Rabin. She's back here in the
    United States seeing her doctor. She said she got a reasonably good
    report. And I told her I was going to see you, and she asked me to say
    hello, so I'm doing it. And I want to get my brownie points with her for
    doing it.
        Tim already mentioned the nomination of Joe Lieberman, but I want to
    say just a few words about it. I was at a dinner last night that a few
    of you attended, which honored the last 8 years of our administration.
    And one of the people who performed was the comedian Red Buttons, who
    must be--I don't know how old he is now, but he's not a kid. [Laughter]
    And he can say things the rest of us can't say. And the first thing, he
    got up and said, ``Do you know that in Los Angeles the Democrats are
    changing their theme songs from `Happy Days Are Here Again' to `Hava
    Nagila?''' [Laughter] He also gave me a lot of other jokes, but I don't
    think I should use any of them. [Laughter]
        Hillary and I have known Joe Lieberman--she may have said this--but
    we met him in 1970, when I was a first year law student, she was a
    second year law student, and he was a 28-year-old candidate for the
    State Senate. And I was especially impressed by the fact that he had
    been a Freedom Rider in Mississippi, or somewhere in the South, and was
    down there registering voters at a time when it wasn't easy to do and,
    frankly, anybody who tried to do it was in some measure of physical
    danger.
        In all the years since, we've kept in touch. And about 15 years ago
    we were among those who started the Democratic Leadership Council. He's
    a brilliant man, a little bit of an iconoclast and always willing to
    think new thoughts, and I think we need more of that in politics. The
    world is changing very rapidly, and we need people who can think.
        And most important of all, he will be a living embodiment--along
    with Hadassah, who, as all of you know, is the child of Holocaust
    survivors--they will be a living embodiment of America's continuing
    commitment to build one national community, to embrace people across all
    the lines that divide us. It's still the most important thing we can do.
        I want to say just a few words, if I might, about the peace process
    in the Middle East. You'll hear enough of the election rhetoric
    elsewhere, and maybe a little from me tomorrow night. But I want to talk
    about that for a moment.
        In the last 7 years we've seen the signing of the Declaration of
    Principles on the South Lawn, which reflected the direct engagement of
    the parties at Oslo; the Israeli-Palestinian interim agreement, a treaty
    leading to genuine peace between Israel and Jordan; the rallying of the
    world's leaders, including the leaders of the Arab world at Sharm al-
    Sheikh, to condemn terrorist attacks against Israel; the Hebron and Wye
    accords, which put the implementation of the interim agreement back on
    track.
        In these years, both sides have recognized that whether they like it
    sometimes or don't like it sometimes, the Israelis and Palestinians are
    bound to live side by side. Throughout the process, however, the
    ultimate question of how they would live side by side has been
    continually deferred. I always thought that was part of the genius of
    the Oslo accord. Some people didn't like it; I thought it was a smart
    thing to do. Everyone knew how hard these final status issues were, and
    everyone knew there was absolutely no chance of resolving them unless
    the people, particularly those in responsible positions, lived together
    and worked together over a period of years and gradually began to
    implement other parts of the agreement so they could get a feel for each
    other.
        However, they agreed that they would resolve all this by September,
    and we were coming up on the deadline. And they had never really had a
    formal, face-to-face set of official conversations about these final
    status issues. And I can understand why. It's kind of like going to the
    dentist without anybody to deaden your gums. [Laughter] I mean, if

    [[Page 1871]]

    this were easy, somebody would have done it years ago.
        But that is the context in which I brought them together at Camp
    David, not because I thought that there was a guarantee of success--far
    from it--but because they needed a setting in which they could speak
    openly, think freely, protected from the competing pressures and
    constant scrutiny that is a part of political life in Israel and
    throughout the Middle East, perhaps even more than it is in the United
    States.
        Now, I don't want to sugar-coat it. I wanted an agreement. We didn't
    get one. But I can tell you, significant progress was made at Camp
    David. One of the Palestinian negotiators said that these were truly
    revolutionary talks because on their side they entertained publicly--or,
    not publicly but in front of others--positions they had never before
    considered. It's almost as if we cracked open a sealed container and
    took out a set of problems that had been festering in a dark place for
    52 years. They're now out on the table; the parties are talking about
    them--issues never before confronted in an official setting. How would a
    new Palestinian State be defined? What would its borders be? What should
    be done about refugees from 1948, not just Palestinian refugees but
    Jewish refugees, as well. And you might be interested in knowing that
    the Palestinians felt that their families should be entitled to
    compensation as well. How do you protect Israel's security if it
    withdraws from the West Bank? What in the world do you do about
    Jerusalem? It is a holy city, but it has caused a hellish lot of
    problems. And we have to think it through in a very serious and sober
    way.
        The process is not over, and therefore, it is inappropriate for me
    to discuss the specifics. I don't want to make a hard problem more
    difficult. But I can say one or two things.
        First of all, everybody affected by the peace process is faced with
    a choice. We are now at a crossroads because of the calendar to which
    the parties themselves have agreed: Down one path lies more
    confrontation and conflict, more bloodshed and tears; down the other is
    an agreement, however difficult. By definition, agreements require
    compromise, which means no one gets 100 percent and neither side can be
    in a position to say that it has completely vanquished the other.
        That means that, given the positions taken--and I talked about this
    at the end of the Camp David process--this is an excruciatingly
    difficult negotiation. The choices are painful and agonizing, but they
    have to be made. Otherwise, we will repeat the pattern of the past, and
    then, sometime in the future, another group of leaders will come back to
    the same set of choices with the same history after more bloodshed and
    tears, more grievances to redress, more bitterness to overcome.
        We may or may not be able to get an agreement, but we ought to keep
    trying, and I will keep trying every single day.
        I want to emphasize some things I have said for 7\1/2\ years now,
    and I haven't changed my mind. We can come up with ideas. We can offer
    alternatives, but we must not, indeed, we will not attempt to impose any
    of our ideas. These choices must be freely made by people who must live
    with them.
        In the meanwhile, we must continue to stand by Israel, as we have
    during my entire tenure as President and for the last 52 years. We will
    help Israel to maintain its strength. We will minimize the courageous
    risks the Prime Minister is taking for peace. We will improve our
    security relationship. We will do everything we possibly can to make
    this work.
        One of the things I think you should know that struck me most at
    Camp David, and says something for the people who launched the Oslo
    process 7 years ago, is the difference in the way the negotiators relate
    to each other even when they were fighting. When I brought the parties
    together at Dayton after we and our NATO Allies ended the Bosnian war,
    they could barely stand to be in the same room together. When I went to
    Kosovo to see our soldiers and to meet with all the parties there, the
    wounds of ethnic cleansing and the battle we waged to reverse it were so
    fresh and raw that people could hardly bear to come into the same room
    and came only because I invited them and insisted that they come.
        When I went first to Northern Ireland and walked down the Shankel
    and the Falls, the Catholic and the Protestant streets in Belfast, it
    was difficult for the most controversial of

    [[Page 1872]]

    the political leaders who had to be involved in any resolution to even
    be seen talking to each other, much less for anyone to know they had
    shaken hands.
        The Israelis and Palestinians, after these years, know each other by
    their first names. They know their spouses' names. They know how many
    children they have. They know how many grandchildren they have. They
    tell jokes to each other, sometimes about their own leaders. They laugh,
    and they talk, and they have a feel for the humanity and the difficulty
    of the situation.
        This is not to say that they are soft-headed. Indeed, I never saw
    anyone more resolute about the fundamental security interests of the
    State of Israel than the Prime Minister was in these negotiations. And
    for whatever it's worth, the security questions were the ones on which
    we made the most progress, which is something that should be encouraging
    to all of you.
        I don't know what's going to happen. But I know this. The most
    heartbreaking moments of the last 8 years for me and for Hillary, for
    Al, and for our whole team, have been those moments when people were
    blinded by acts of hatred against others because they fit in some sort
    of category or another--that poor twisted boy that blew up the Federal
    building in Oklahoma City, his mind and soul polluted by this anti-
    government venom that was out there at the time; the school children who
    were killed by terrorist attack in Israel; the man who belonged to a
    church that he said didn't believe in God but did believe in white
    supremacy, murdering an African-American basketball coach in Chicago and
    killing a Korean Christian as he walked out of his church; people who
    shot the--the man who shot the Jewish children here going to their
    school and then killed a Filipino postal worker and thought he had had a
    double success--he killed an Asian and a Federal employee.
        We see it within our country and beyond our borders. I have seen
    people who were literally ethnically indistinguishable in the Balkans
    killing each other because history made them Orthodox Christians or
    Muslims or Catholics.
        It is ironic that at a time when we celebrate the triumph of the
    human genome and where the Internet is the fastest growing
    communications vehicle in human history--and, by the way, Al Gore did
    sponsor the legislation. [Laughter] Part of my job since I'm not
    running, you know, is to correct the record here. [Laughter] The
    Internet was, in the beginning, the private province of a few
    physicists. Al Gore saw--virtually before anybody else, certainly in
    Congress--that it could be transformed into a medium of communication
    and could hold information that could benefit all of human kind, that
    the whole Library of Congress would one day be on the Internet. That was
    the metaphor he said well over a decade ago.
        Now the whole Encyclopedia Britannica is on the Internet. Pretty
    soon, my whole Presidential library will be on the Internet. There were
    only 50 sites on the World Wide Web when I became President--5-0. Today
    there are--I'm not sure how many--but way, way over 10 million, the
    fastest growing mechanism in human history.
        But anyway, so you've got all this stuff happening, all this
    wonderful, modern stuff, and here we are bedeviled by the oldest
    problems of human society--the fear of the other, people that are
    different from us.
        That's why it's a good thing that Al Gore put Joe Lieberman on the
    ticket, and other Americans will see that he is a brilliant person, that
    he is a good person, that he has a contribution to make. And I think
    more and more people will respect the fact that he gives up his entire
    Sabbath away from all work and politics on a day that coincidentally
    happens to be the best politicking day in the American political system.
    I think this will be a good thing for America.
        And what I would ask you to do as we see the events of the coming
    weeks unfold, is to never lose your passion for peace and for
    reconciliation, to remember that America cannot do good works abroad
    unless we are a good country first here at home, that we have to purge
    ourselves of all traces of bigotry and hatred, and that we have to go
    forward together as one community, and that we have to do it not just
    with our words and our pictures but with our deeds.
        It is one thing to say we want to build one America and another
    thing to do it, whether

    [[Page 1873]]

    it's passing hate crimes legislation, employment nondiscrimination
    legislation, raising the minimum wage, or doing the other kinds of
    things that show that we really believe that we're all in this together,
    and we all do better when we help each other.
        The overwhelming fact of modern life is not the growth of the
    Internet, the growth of the global economy, the explosion of
    biotechnology, but what they all mean in a larger sense, which is that
    every single day, in breathtaking ways, many of which we cannot see, we
    are growing more interdependent. We need each other more. So we have to
    find a way not just to tolerate one another but to celebrate our
    diversity and take comfort from the fact that what we have in common is
    even more fundamental and more important. Yes, compassion is important,
    but enlightened self-interest is even better. We need to know we
    actually need each other, and we need to do the right thing by each
    other.
        So for me it's a great comfort to know that the Vice President and
    Joe Lieberman are running, that Hillary is running, and that we're
    moving in the right direction. I just want to ask you this. Spend every
    day you can between now and November reminding people that it matters
    and that there are differences. And if you do that, we'll all win, and
    America will be fine.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

     Note: The President spoke at 6:20 p.m. at the Sony Picture Studios. In
    his remarks, he referred to Tim Wuliger, president, American Israel
    Public Affairs Committee; Joel D. Tauber, chairman, executive committee,
    United Jewish Communities; Todd Morgan, chairman, Jewish Federation of
    Greater Los Angeles; William B. Dockser, national chairman, National
    Jewish Democratic Council; Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel, and his
    wife, Nava; Leah Rabin, widow of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of
    Israel; and Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Senator Joseph I.
    Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah.