To the Editor:

In a letter to the editor in your July-August issue, commenting on Norman Podhoretz’s article, “Bush, Sharon, My Daughter, and Me” [April], Allan Leibler asserts: “At the end of March, the American ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, stated emphatically that there was no understanding with the U.S. regarding Israel’s retention of major Jewish population centers on the West Bank.” In his response, Mr. Podhoretz refers to “the Kurtzer flap.” Both Mr. Leibler’s assertion and Mr. Podhoretz’s offhanded response have no basis in fact.

The reality is that President Bush made a clear statement of U.S. policy in his April 14, 2004 letter to Prime Minister Sharon (an excerpt of which Mr. Podhoretz quotes accurately), and I, as the United States ambassador to Israel, have emphasized repeatedly and publicly that this letter reflects American policy. There is no misunderstanding between Israel and the United States in this regard. Unfortunately, a totally false article in an Israeli newspaper in late March 2005 got its facts wrong about statements attributed to me, apparently leading Messrs. Leibler and Podhoretz to draw erroneous conclusions. My own public statements on the day the false report was published, as well as statements for the record by senior U.S. officials in Washington, clearly underscore the continued applicability of the understandings conveyed by President Bush to Prime Minister Sharon.

Daniel C. Kurtzer

United States Ambassador to Israel

Tel Aviv, Israel

Norman Podhoretz writes:

The “flap” to which I referred did indeed take place, and it did indeed concern Ambassador Kurtzer’s reported denial that the United States had agreed to Israel’s retention of the major Jewish population centers on the West Bank. Furthermore, Allan Leibler was—to put it mildly—far from the only Israeli who remained unconvinced by Mr. Kurtzer’s insistence at the time that he had never made the statement attributed to him by an Israeli newspaper.

In my own response, I neither endorsed nor rejected Mr. Leibler’s interpretation of Mr. Kurtzer’s disavowal as “damage control.” I must confess, however, that Mr. Kurtzer is not altogether wrong in suspecting me of having leaned toward Mr. Leibler’s skepticism. Even so, I strongly disagreed with Mr. Leibler’s idea that the Bush administration was using its ambassador to distance itself from the plain sense of the letter President Bush wrote to Prime Minister Sharon on April 14, 2004. (Here, yet again, is the crucial passage: “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final-status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949 [i.e., the ’67 borders].”)

Unlike Mr. Leibler, I thought it more likely that if Mr. Kurtzer had in fact denied that these words meant what they certainly seemed to mean, he was acting not as a spokesman for the President’s policy but as an opponent. But if so, how could a sitting ambassador have dared to come out openly against the President he was supposed to be representing?

My guess was that the answer—if the case were truly such as to require one—might lie in Mr. Kurtzer’s continuing thralldom to the old policy (according to which it is axiomatic that law and justice and peace require a withdrawal by Israel to the ’67 borders and the removal of all Jewish settlements from the West Bank). If this too were so, he might simply have been unable to believe that President Bush had actually committed the United States to what could easily have struck anyone like himself—anyone, that is, who had cut his diplomatic teeth on the old axioms—as the political equivalent of declaring that parallel lines will eventually meet.

And now? Well, persuaded as I am that (1) President Bush most definitely did repudiate the old policy in his April 14 letter; (2) that he intends to stick by the assurance contained in that historic document; and (3) that Prime Minister Sharon is therefore right in claiming American backing for the inclusion within Israel’s future borders of “the already existing major Jewish population centers” in Judea and Samaria—persuaded of all this, I am more than happy to drop my initial suspicions and to take Mr. Kurtzer at his word when he writes above that he never questioned “the continued applicability of the understandings conveyed in April 2004 by President Bush to Prime Minister Sharon.”