[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

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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.