Israelis Tell Palestinian-Americans in Jerusalem to Surrender Passports

By Lucille Barnes

U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem Edward G. Abington told Associated Press in December that his staff had documented some 60 cases of Palestinian Americans who were told by the Israeli government that they must give up their American citizenship or lose their residency rights in East Jerusalem. “It’s created some real personal hardships for people,” Abington said. “There have been cases where people wanted to go back to the States to visit dying relatives, but they’re afraid to leave because they’re not sure they’ll be allowed to come back.” Abington pointed out that thousands of Israeli Americans maintain dual citizenship “and no one questions it,” while Palestinian Americans, “who live here and were born here and have ties here” were apparently being asked to give up their U.S. citizenship. “It seems to be a real inconsistency,” he pointed out. The Consulate took out advertisements in Jerusalem Arabic- and English-language newspapers reassuring Palestinian Americans that “it is impossible for a U.S. citizen to lose U.S. citizenship by force or duress.” The ad invited people asked by Israel’s Interior Ministry to renounce their American citizenship or surrender their U.S. passport to contact the Consulate.

Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, Robert Pelletreau announced in answer to a question from the audience at a seminar on the UAE at Georgetown University Dec. 13 that he soon would be “leaving the administration.” If the rumor mills are accurate, his departure after four years in the position also will bring to a close a short-lived tradition whereby Arabists (officers who speak the principal language of the region and actually have served in other Near East countries besides Israel) occupy the State Department’s top Near East position. Pelletreau’s immediate predecessors were Edward Djeridjian and Richard Murphy, both of whom had been U.S. ambassadors to Syria, among many other Near East positions. Pelletreau’s as yet unannounced successor-designate, however, is said to be U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk.The naturalization of Indyk, an Australian former paid AIPAC lobbyist for Israel, was accelerated in 1993 so that he could be the top White House Middle East adviser for the first two years of the first Clinton administration. Rumors have it that Richard Schifter, a pro-Israel activist and sometime columnist for Jewish weekly newspapers who was the State Department’s human rights director in the administration of Ronald Reagan and who, after defecting from the George Bush administration, has been a White House counselor to President Clinton, may be appointed to succeed Indyk. Schifter had sought the position earlier when then-Ambassador to Israel William Harrop was pulled back to the U.S. after warning in a speech in Tel Aviv that Israel should not count on receiving U.S. aid indefinitely.

In rougher treatment than it normally accords Clinton administration appointees, in its Dec. 30 issue The Nation noted that besides being welcomed by isolationist Sen. Jesse Helms, the nomination of Madeleine Albright as secretary of state “was celebrated by women’s groups, Cuban-American groups, hawkish American Jewish groups, anti-Russian East Europeans and Baltic Americans and jealous protectors of Al Gore’s future...Much like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who 20 years ago used his office at the U.N. to run his campaign for the Senate, Albright has campaigned tirelessly for her new role from her seat in the General Assembly by insulting member nations unlikely to be popular with the American people. Her ham-handed manipulation of Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s forced departure...infuriated even those who agree with it...In the Middle East, where the peace process is unraveling in large part because of Israel’s unwillingness to stick to the deal that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed on the White House lawn, she has sounded more uncompromising than the United Jewish Appeal.” Noting her “expected coddling of Binyamin Netanyahu,” The Nation commented that “the State Department is the last place whose chief should be subject to engineering by interest groups.”

Jack Kemp,who had long been the Israel lobby’s favorite Republican, exulted during the 1996 presidential campaign that Republican nominee Bob Dole’s selection of him as vice presidential nominee had resuscitated him from the politically dead. By the time the campaign had finished, however, he had sunk back into the condition in which Dole found him. The Republicans despised his seeming political disloyalty to his running mate. What’s worse, according to writer Matthew Dorf of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he alienated Friends of Israel when, trying to score a double play, he responded to a question by television host David Frost about Minister Louis Farrakhan’s “million man march” that “part of the message was to be admired” although “I have asked him publicly to renounce anti-Semitism, which is repugnant to me as a Christian.” Now Kemp doesn’t have any friends in the Israel lobby either. “You simply can’t separate Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism from his message of self-reliance,” said national director Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. “He doesn’t understand,” said Stephen Silberfarb of the National Jewish Democratic Council. “You can’t separate the [message] of hate from the messenger.” Frankly, that’s something we’ll try to remember in the unlikely event that we ever read a reasoned statement from the ADL, America’s best-funded hate group, or from the gun-toting Jewish Defense League’s Irv Rubin, who long ago moved from Brooklyn out west to Los Angeles to stand guard with all those other armed militias against U.N. black helicopters.

Speaking of articulate haters, House International Relations Committee Chairman Benjamin Gilman, American Jewish Committee counsel Richard Foltin, Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich all sounded off angrily after the Netanyahu government broke through a stone wall in the middle of the night last September to open a tunnel linking Jerusalem’s Western Wall, revered by Orthodox Jews, to the city’s Arab quarter, setting off rioting that killed some 60 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers. But their comments, which just happened to be made shortly before U.S. general elections, all seemed aimed at the Palestinian reaction, not the Israeli provocation. They also demanded, in Specter’s words, that the “U.S. should not exercise pressure on Israel in terms of what they are expected to do.” Gingrich went a bit further by placing a conference call to reporters from Jewish weeklies to “express concern that Israel may be bearing the brunt of the conflict.”

Speaking of conflicts, Gingrich, who has long been as zealously pro-Israel as the late (politically speaking) Kemp, just happens to have a second wife named Marianne who is paid to lobby American corporations to set themselves up to do business in a recently established free-trade zone in Israel.

Eliahu Ben Elizar, the new ambassador in Washington, DC of Israel’s Likud government, who looks like a cross between Mephistopheles and a bear, but probably is more dangerous than either, was keynote speaker at the annual dinner of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) last fall. He warned (accurately as it turned out) that “we may have to witness more tension, but anyone who thinks they can score points with this violence is wrong.” After that inspirational message, awards named for the late Sen. Henry M. Jackson who, according to JINSA chairman Benjamin Gettler, “believed the close relationship between the United States and Israel is of paramount importance” and also believed in a strong military “backed by a vibrant and dominant defense industry,” were presented to Representatives Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and Norm Dicks (D-WA). Accepting their honors, both emphasized “the importance of the U.S-Israel relationship,” according to Washington Jewish Week staff writer Eric Fingerhut. Speaking of the devil, it’s too late for Jackson, who died early, but we wonder if Hunter and Dicks have considered fully the long-term implications of the deals they are cutting.

Wall Street financier George Soros, described by the Washington Jewish Week as a “billionaire...Hungarian-born Jewish philanthropist,” has funded a number of pro-democracy institutions in South Africa, Haiti and in the former Yugoslavia to alleviate the political effects of the brutal civil war there. The tragic plight of the dispossessed Palestinians seems so far to have escaped his notice, but perhaps some of the Muslims and Christians being expelled from their native land by the Israeli government will benefit from a $50 million fund Soros is setting up to help legal immigrants to the United States. Soros has named his fund after Emma Lazarus , described by the Washington Jewish Week as a “Jewish poet,” whose words “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” are inscribed on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. One thing the foundation will do is provide legal immigrants who need it the $95 fee currently required by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for naturalization. Present at the inauguration ceremony for the Emma Lazarus fund was civil rights advocate Aryeh Neier, who was active on behalf of Jewish cultural rights in the Soviet Union and who served for 12 years as executive director of Human Rights Watch and for 8 years as national director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Respected Israeli journalist Ron Ben Yishai’s 1982 telephone calls to Israeli officials from Beirut were instrumental in making them halt the Sabra-Shatila massacres, which had continued for three days under the watchful gaze of Israeli soldiers who had surrounded the two adjacent Palestinian camps and were preventing their occupants from fleeing their Maronite Christian persecutors. Ben Yishai has reported in Tel Aviv’s Yediot Aharonot that when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu made his first post-election visit to Washington, DC last July, he shocked President Bill Clinton by telling him that Iraq had attained nuclear capability despite the U.N. sanctions designed to prevent it. When U.S. intelligence officials, who denied Netanyahu’s report, checked with their Israeli counterparts, they were told Israeli intelligence operatives had no idea where Netanyahu got his story, but assumed he had simply made it up. It turns out Israeli intelligence was dead right, perhaps for the first time in years. Netanyahu apparently invented the story, presumably as a prelude to requesting an increase in Israeli military aid.

Marine Col. Robert C. McFarlane, national security adviser to former President Ronald Reagan, has lost a libel suit against the U.S. publisher of a book by former Israeli secret agent Ari Ben-Menashe. Ben-Menashe had charged in the book that McFarlane was among Reagan aides who urged the Iranian government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to delay the release of American Embassy hostages in Tehran until after the November 1980 election in which Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter. The hostages were released 15 minutes after Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981, ending their 444 days of captivity. A three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals panel upheld a lower court ruling that McFarlane had not shown that Sheridan Square Press, which published Ben-Menashe’s Profits of War in 1992, knew or should have known that Ben Menashe’s allegations concerning the original “October Surprise” were false. Ben Menashe’s sweeping allegations implicating many public figures, including George Bush, in various aspects of the case are believed by some to have been devised to discredit accounts of the entire incident, which may have planted the seeds of what later became the Irangate scandal in which Israel served as instigator and middleman in Reagan administration arms-for-hostages transactions.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu took an hour off from a mid-September pre-election visit to the United States to visit the Queens, NY grave of the late Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem Schneerson. The visit was organized by Rabbi Joseph Gutnick, a major financial backer of Netanyahu’s razor-thin Israeli election victory last May 31. Gutnick, who had been instructed by the Lubavitcher rebbe to leave his job as a yeshiva teacher and form a mining concern in Australia, subsequently became a multi-millionaire. Gutnick is particularly identified with support for the Jewish “settlers” in Hebron where, Gutnick said, “we have a lot of real estate.” In his remarks at Schneerson’s grave, Netanyahu said “it is just that we maintain our control and our access in Hebron.”

The U.S. Justice Department inserted advertisements in U.S. Jewish newspapers in September offering a $1 million reward for information leading to solution of the bombing death of Arab-American activist Alex Odeh 11 years ago. Odeh, the 41-year-old Southern California director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), was killed by a bomb attached to the door of his Santa Ana office. Federal authorities have cited Los Angeles-born Israeli Robert Manning as a “key suspect” in the case, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. After many years of litigation, Israel agreed to extradite Manning, a veteran of Jewish Defense League activities in the U.S., to California, where he was convicted of the mail bomb murder of a secretary in a real estate firm owned by a business rival of a Manning associate in militant Jewish activities. Under terms of the extradition worked out with Israel, however, Manning cannot be charged with any crimes other than the secretary’s killing in 1980. Three other Americans living in Israel also have been mentioned as suspects in the Odeh murder. At least two of them are former JDL members, JDL national chairman Irv Rubin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The U.S. Treasury Department has denied Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan’s request to receive $1 billion in humanitarian aid offered him by Libyan leader Muammar Khaddafi. The U.S. government has jurisdiction because of U.S. sanctions against Libya. The Nation of Islam pledged to fight the ruling in court, noting that “it is an action taken in callous disregard of the needs and hopes of black people.”

Dick Morris, long-time political adviser to President Bill Clinton, was publicly taking credit for the president’s successful 1996 political metamorphosis from liberal caterpillar to middle-of-the-road butterfly until Morris underwent a metamorphosis of his own at the hands of a Washington, DC prostitute, who told all about her relationship with him to a national tabloid. Morris was disowned by the White House in the midst of the otherwise successful Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Subsequently a source told staff writer Eric Greenberg of The Jewish Week of New York that the Upper West Side political strategist behaved “like a real punk” at a dinner with Democratic political strategists shortly before his fall, bragging that he was writing the family values section of President Clinton’s acceptance speech. Greenberg also reported that Morris was a teenage friend of U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and New York State Sen. Richard Gottfried. Morris is a cousin of the late Roy Cohn, counsel to the late Red-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, and also of Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer. Another Morris colleague told Greenberg that Morris’s dream was “to one day sit in the Oval Office and advise the president of the United States, and that’s exactly what he did.”

Members of Bethesda, Maryland’s Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church have been acting like, well, Christians, by partially funding the graduate studies of 28-year-old Palestinian George Ghanem at New York University. Some church members met Ghanem during a visit to his hometown, Beit Sahour, adjacent to Bethlehem. Christian Beit Sahour became so famous during the Palestinian intifada for its tax resistance against the Israeli occupation that armed Israeli soldiers went in and picked a pharmacy and other Beit Sahour stores clean while television cameras recorded the looting. Church members learned that Ghanem wanted to earn a master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling so that he could work at the Beit Sahour YMCA rehabilitation center that aids Palestinians injured in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The church raised $11,000 for Ghanem’s tuition because “we wanted to help a Palestinian Christian,” explained Bradley Hills pastor Susan Andrews. Now the church is trying to raise tuition for Ghanem’s second semester. Perhaps Christian televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Roberts, who have taken thousands of American Christians to the Holy Land but then turned them over to Israeli guides who make sure they don’t meet any Palestinian Christians, would like to help. Falwell’s done such a great job that the Israeli government gave him an airplane. Roberts has a different motive for his benevolent interest in Israel. When people suggest that his encouragement of the conversion of America’s Jews to his own religion might be considered a little bit, well, you know, he counters that he can’t possibly be called anti-Semitic over here because he’s so pro- Israel over there. In case both Roberts and Falwell are too busy to read this and do the right thing, however, it might be helpful for Washington Report readers to send a contribution to Project Rehab, Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church, 6601 Bradley Blvd, Bethesda, MD 20817. It might be equally helpful for members of other U.S. churches or mosques to adopt an aspiring Palestinian Christian or Muslim professional of their own. In case you can’t find one, we’ll put you in touch with someone who can.

Commissioned by Esquire magazine to do a profile of media commentator and quadrennial Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, author Norman Mailer brought up what he called “the stale question” of anti-Semitism. Writing in the third person, Mailer reported in Esquire’s August issue: “Mailer almost couldn’t bring himself to ask it….Mailer hated the question because it served the forces of political correctness.” He asked, however, “Just for the record, am I correct in saying you are not at all anti-Semitic?” Answered Buchanan: “You are correct.” Concluded Mailer: “Many would not forgive him [Mailer] for letting Buchanan off easy. Mailer could only shrug...It was time for Jews [to start] comporting themselves like WASPs. For if there was one virtue the WASPs held above any other, it was that you could satirize them to the point of drawing blood and they would continue to do business with you and get the advantage and grow stronger.” We would analyze for our WASP readers whether that’s pro- or anti-Waspism but, if Mailer is correct, they’d probably just tell us to buzz off.