KISSINGER SOUGHT A "SMALL, FRIENDLY" ISRAEL

Kissinger sought 'small friendly' Israel (YNet)

The United States reached out to hostile Arabs three decades ago with an offer to work toward making Israel a ``small friendly country'' of no threat to its neighbors and with an assurance to Iraq that the U.S. had stopped backing Kurdish rebels in the north. ``We can't negotiate about the existence of Israel,'' then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told his Iraqi counterpart in a rare high-level meeting, ``but we can reduce its size to historical proportions.''

A December 1975 memo detailing Kissinger's probing conversation with Foreign Affairs Minister Saadoun Hammadi eight years after Iraq severed diplomatic relations with Washington is included in some 28,000 pages of Kissinger-era foreign policy papers published in an online collection Friday. George Washington University's National Security Archive released the collection, drawn from papers available at the government's National Archives and obtained through the group's Freedom of Information requests....

The transcript of Kissinger's meeting with Hammadi in Paris sheds light on a little known maneuver that spoke to America's broader effort to win friends in the Arab world even as it was giving military support to the Jewish state. The meeting was frank and open - diplomats' preferred description of any such meeting but in this case, true. And Hammadi, a friend of the Soviets, was a tough sell.

 

``We are on the other side of the fence,'' he asserted. ``What the United States is doing is not to create peace but to create a situation dominated by Israel.''

 

Kissinger pressed: ``Our attitude is not unsympathetic to Iraq. Don't believe; watch it.''  He said U.S. public opinion was turning more pro-Palestinian and U.S. aid to Israel could not be sustained for much longer at its massive levels. He predicted that in 10 or 15 years, ``Israel will be like Lebanon - struggling for existence, with no influence in the Arab world.''

 

Mindful of Israel's nuclear capability, a skeptical Hammadi peppered Kissinger with questions, including whether Washington would recognize Palestinian identity and even a Palestinian state. ``Is it in your power to create such a thing?''  Kissinger said he could not make recognition of Palestinian identity happen right away but, ``No solution is possible without it.''  ``After a settlement, Israel will be a small friendly country,'' he said.