Rep. Tom Lantos is not on the same timetable as President Bush.
In fact, Lantos doesn’t believe at all in timetables when it comes to a peace plan for the Middle East.
He made that clear earlier this month when he introduced an amendment in Congress that ties the creation of a Palestinian state to performance rather than schedules like those contained in Bush’s “road map.”
“The notion of calendar dates is absurd,” Lantos (D-San Mateo) asserted in a phone interview last Friday. “We don’t have arbitrary time posts by which certain things will happen.”
Interviewed before the latest wave of suicide bombings, the 12-term congressman described his proposal and his visits last month with Syrian, Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
His measure, part of a State Department reauthorization bill, supports the establishment of a Palestinian state providing that Palestinians stop terrorism, establish a democracy and demonstrate a commitment to peace with Israel. It lacks the timetables of the administration’s three-phase, three-year road map to Middle East peace.
Lantos, the top Democrat on the House’s International Relations Committee, said he conducted a “very civilized and very hard” meeting in late April with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.
“I made it clear to him the position of Congress,” Lantos said. “Unlike the administration, the road map has to be entirely performance-based. Chronology is irrelevant.”
A Holocaust survivor from Hungary, Lantos is considered one of the strongest supporters of Israel on Capitol Hill.
As part of the performance expected of Palestinians, “terrorists will have to be dismantled,” Lantos said he told Abbas. Lantos also held separate, face-to-face meetings with Syrian President Bashar Assad and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Lantos described extending an invitation to Abbas to visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as the congressman’s guest if Abbas is ever invited to the United States.
Abbas, noted Lantos, wrote a “preposterous book” that placed the death toll from the Holocaust at just 1 million.
“I decided as the only survivor of the Holocaust in Congress, I had to deal with that,” Lantos said.
If Abbas visits, “I will personally take the time and trouble to take him through the Holocaust museum. At the end of the trip to the museum, he will no longer write books like this.”
After returning to Washington, Lantos said he received a May 2 letter from Abbas in which the Palestinian leader said he looks forward to “accepting your invitation to accompany me” on a museum tour.
Lantos said he didn’t expect immediate solutions from a single meeting with Abbas. “You need to understand the Israel-Palestinian crisis has been going on since 1948. I didn’t expect in one and a half hours with Abu-Mazen [Abbas] to solve it. But I laid out my road map.”
Lantos was similarly straight-talking in his earlier visit with Syrian leader Assad in Damascus.
In a two-hour session, Lantos said he warned Assad: “I don’t think you realize what deep trouble you are in. You are surrounded by four countries which are great friends of the United States.”
Lantos warned Assad: “You are now at a crossroads. You can either continue this policy, which will lead to disaster, or make a dramatic change.”
Among Lantos’ stipulations were closing terrorist headquarters, discontinuing military support of Hezbollah, removing troops from Lebanon, and ending the “agitation and propaganda” against the United States and Israel.
In response, Assad asked, “Well, do you want all of this for free?” Lantos replied, “If you do all of these things, you will have gotten yourself a tremendous amount of good will.”
The congressman said he’d recently written Assad, “indicating I was very serious about my list. Since I see no action, I will do everything I can” to ask Congress to consider punitive actions against Syria.
Asked if he thought the meeting in Syria was ultimately fruitless, Lantos said, “Not at all. I thought it was a very civilized but a very strong meeting. He was not accustomed to being given a list of things to do.”
After that session, Lantos stayed in Damascus to give what he described as an “unprecedented” press conference that candidly discussed his meeting. In it, Lantos repeated his call for Syria to stop supporting Hezbollah and get rid of terrorist groups.
“I just felt I had nothing to hide,” he said. “I think Syrian leadership needs to know where they stand, which is an awful place.
“They need to be shaken up to understand that they’re looking at a new Middle East.”
Meanwhile, in a recent interview during a Bay Area visit, Howard Kohr, national executive director of AIPAC, refuted a published report that his organization objected to Lantos’ measure calling for a Palestinian state.
“We’ve endorsed publicly the vision,” Kohr said. “The Palestinians have to clean up their act and if they do, they get a state.”