Forty years ago, the American Jewish community found itself faced with a White House that was determined to come to an arms control deal with a tyranny. Despite hesitation about challenging the Nixon administration’s policy of detente with the Soviet Union, the community and a group of senators pushed for a better deal and achieved it, former Soviet refusenik and current head of the Jewish Agency, Natan Sharansky, wrote Saturday in an op-ed for The Washington Post.
At issue was the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which would have conditioned the opening of economic cooperation with Moscow on the Soviet Union opening its society and allowing anyone who desired to leave to do so.
Yet the Soviet Union, with its very rigid and atrophied economy, badly needed cooperation with the free world, which Nixon was prepared to offer. The problem was that he was not prepared to demand nearly enough from Moscow in return. And so as Nixon moved to grant the Soviet Union most-favored-nation status, and with it the same trade benefits as U.S. allies, Democratic Sen. Henry Jackson of Washington proposed what became a historic amendment, conditioning the removal of sanctions on the Soviet Union’s allowing free emigration for its citizens.
By that time, tens of thousands of Soviet Jews had asked permission to leave for Israel. Jackson’s amendment sought not only to help these people but also and more fundamentally to change the character of detente, linking improved economic relations to behavioral change by the USSR. Without the free movement of people, the senator insisted, there should be no free movement of goods.
The Republican administration in the White House objected furiously. It also claimed that by improving relations with Moscow it would be better able to protect us personally and to ensure that some Jews could emigrate each year. This put Jewish activists inside the USSR in a difficult position. We feared opposing our greatest benefactor, yet we wanted freedom for all Soviet Jews, and we believed that would result only from unrelenting pressure to bring down the Iron Curtain. This is why, despite the clear risks and KGB threats, we chose to publicly support the amendment.
According to Sharansky, the administration’s stance put American Jewish groups into a bind as they did not want to be viewed as pursuing a “‘narrow’ Jewish interest” over peace, yet also understood that linking economic relief to policy change could free many more people.
American Jewish organizations also faced a difficult choice. They were reluctant to speak out against the U.S. government and appear to put the “narrow” Jewish interest above the cause of peace. Yet they also realized that the freedom of all Soviet Jews was at stake, and they actively supported the policy of linkage.
Sharansky credits the late Jacob Javits, a Republican senator from New York, for bucking his party’s leadership and creating a bipartisan group of senators to support the bill. Javits and several senators went to Moscow in 1975 and met with Jewish refuseniks, who encouraged them to pass the bill.
Sharansky acknowledged that the initial reaction of Soviet authorities made things harder for the refuseniks, but the “amendment made the principle of linkage the backbone of the free world’s relations with the USSR,” and had the effect of freeing up the Soviet Union and allowing many more Jews to leave. He then drew a direct parallel between the situation forty years ago with the Soviet Union and the reality with Iran today, noting that once again the United States is in a position where it “can either appease a criminal regime — one that supports global terror, relentlessly threatens to eliminate Israel and executes more political prisoners than any other per capita — or stand firm in demanding change in its behavior,” and concluded with his hope that someone today will emulate the examples of then Senators Henry Jackson and Jacob Javits.
[Photo: Axel Axel / Flickr ]