Likudists Within Administration Fuel Reckless Anti-Boycott Drive

By Lucille Barnes

"The nation's top trade official ordered a year-long investigation today into the costs to American companies of the Arab economic boycott of Israel and of companies that do business with Israel. The results of the study, ordered by President Clinton's trade representative, Mickey Kantor, could lead to threats of trade sanctions against some Arab countries next year. "

—Correspondent Keith Bradsher, New York Times, Nov. 9, 1993

The threat implied in Presidential Trade Representative Mickey Kantor's vaguely worded call for an investigation of the cost to the United States of the Arab League boycott of Israel puts the U.S. government on a collision course with its best friends in the Arab world. It also undercuts the Oslo principles of peace signed on the south lawn of the White House only last Sept. 13.

The Kantor statement, made three days before Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's Nov. 11 visit to Washington, is one of the clearest indications to date that the veterans of pro-Israel lobbying in the U.S. now occupying leading positions in the Clinton administration are prepared to pursue policies that could easily derail the Oslo agreement, signed by the Israeli Labor government, but bitterly opposed by Likud, Israel's principal opposition party.

White House Middle East Adviser Martin Indyk, without whose approval Kantor would not have made his statement, is a veteran of Likud politics in Israel as well as the Israel lobby in Washington. After a stint as Middle East adviser to the prime minister of his native Australia, he went to Israel, where he was a media consultant to Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Subsequently he came to Washington, DC, where he was employed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel's principal lobby in the United States. Funded by Barbi Weinberg, an AIPAC board member and wife of a former AIPAC board chairman, Indyk subsequently founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, from which he was appointed to his present position as senior Middle East adviser in the National Security Council.

Israel lobby influence also is evident in the appointment of Dennis Ross, who was associated with AIPAC before becoming State Department director of policy planning in the Bush administration, to remain as a consultant to the Clinton administration's State Department, backstopping the Middle East peace talks. Filling Ross's former State Department position is Samuel Lewis, who served for more than eight years as U.S. ambassador to Israel. Lewis, who was appointed to head the federally funded U.S. Institute of Peace after retiring from the foreign service, has long been a major player in the national capital's pro-Israel establishment.

Lobby watchers breathed a sigh of relief early in 1993 when Kantor, a Los Angeles attorney who has been a major fund-raiser for the Israel lobby and pro-Israel members of Congress, as well as for the Democratic Party, was appointed presidential trade representative instead of secretary of state, as he had hoped to be. Kantor was national director of the Clinton presidential campaign, but his peremptory and abrasive ways alienated colleagues and had become a major problem by campaign's end.

Most thought that in his new and demanding worldwide job he would be too preoccupied with troubled U. S. trade relations with major world powers like Japan, China and Russia to indulge his passion for Israel. That hope was dashed by Kantor's compliance with a request to investigate the Arab boycott made last spring by three of Israel's most vocal senatorial supporters, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Charles E. Grassley (R-IA), all of whom were only echoing strident demands made by both Likud and Labor leaders of Israel.

The Arab League boycott of Israel was initiated in 1948, the year after the former British Mandate of Palestine was partitioned into what were to be an Israeli and a Palestinian state. The primary boycott, similar to that maintained by the United

States against Cuba, now is observed by all of the Arab League's 21 members except Egypt. It precludes the import of any goods made in Israel, and the export of Arab goods or capital to Israel. The secondary boycott, imposed by the Arab League in 1951, also precludes Arab governments and companies from doing business with any companies that do business with Israel.

This secondary boycott is harder to enforce and has been observed less strictly. Kuwait recently suggested it was doing away with the secondary boycott altogether, but that it would adhere, like other Arab countries, to the primary boycott. A so-called "tertiary boycott" of companies that do business with companies that do business with Israel is not observed in practice by Arab League member states.

Recent History

Discussions of conditions under which the Arab countries would lift the boycott have a recent history. Immediately after Prime Minister Rabin won Israeli elections and formed Israel's present government in June 1992, then-President George Bush offered him a first $2 billion annual installment in U.S. loan guarantees if the Israeli government would freeze its support of Jewish settlement activities in the Israeli occupied territories seized in 1967. The U.S. believes these territories must be returned to Palestinian rule under any land-for-peace agreement based upon U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. Spokesmen for some Arab states upped the ante by saying that in return for an Israeli settlement freeze, they would lift the Arab boycott.

Although Bush gave Israel the first $2 billion in loan guarantees in January 1993 Rabin announced only a "partial freeze" of settlement activity. This involved continued work on some West Bank and Gaza settlements, and no slowdown at all on Israeli government-funded construction of Jewish housing in an expanded East Jerusalem, which the U.S. considers occupied territory.

Shortly after attending the Sept. 13 signing ceremony in Washington, Rabin visited Cairo. There he announced that Israel had made "major concessions" in signing the principles of peace, and therefore expected major concessions from the Arabs because "that's the way the game is played."

Rabin specifically called for lifting of the Arab boycott, thus seeking to unlink the boycott from the settlement freeze that Israel had refused to implement, and link it instead to the Oslo agreement. Since then, Rabin's demand has been picked up by President Clinton, on several occasions by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and by Israel's usual supporters in Congress and the American media.

Arabian Peninsula and Gulf leaders make clear, however, that they have no intention of lifting the boycott before the key issues of Mideast peace have been written into a final settlement signed by all parties. Said one Arab official in charge of his country's boycott implementation, who declined to be named: "The boycott will not be lifted until the issues of Jerusalem and Palestinian sovereignty have been negotiated and agreed to by all parties, including a definition of Israel's permanent borders and agreement upon the date upon which Israel will withdraw its forces within them. "

To lift the boycott prematurely, the Arab official said, would deprive the Arab parties to the peace talks of "their last card" and undermine the prospects of a comprehensive peace in the area. This is a position widely, perhaps unanimously, held not only among Palestinians who accept the Oslo principles, but also among the leaders of the Arab states closest to the U.S., including Egypt.

The speed with which President Clinton and Secretary Christopher added their voices to those of Israel's oldest supporters in Congress for immediate lifting of the boycott dismayed leaders of the moderate Arab states. Whatever it says about the quality of advice both Clinton and Christopher are receiving from their Middle East advisers, it also indicates that those same advisers have little more concern about sabotaging the Oslo principles of peace than do the Likud leaders, with whom Indyk, Ross, Lewis and Kantor all have had close ties during the nearly 15 years prior to January 1992 when Israel was ruled by Likud prime ministers or by Likud-Labor coalition governments.

Lucille Barnes, a free-lance writer, covers the U.S. and the Middle East.