Washington Report, February 6, 1984, Page 5

Lobby Activities

For Arabs:

A group in Berkeley, California, has succeeded in collecting enough signatures to allow it to place on the city's election ballot, in the spring, a resolution calling for a cutback in U.S. aid to Israel. But a similar drive in Ann Arbor, Michigan, met with failure.

On January 23, representatives of the Berkeley group "Taxpayers for Peace in the Middle East" presented city-officials with over 7,000 signatures on a petition to put the resolution on a June ballot. City officials are now validating the names, and are required to place the resolution on the ballot if at least 4,800 of the names are legitimate. The resolution, if approved, will direct the mayor of Berkeley to urge the U.S. government—in letters to President Reagan, Secretary of State George Shultz, and the states two Senators—to withhold economic aid to Israel by an amount equal to that which Israel spends each year on settlements in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Syrian Golan Heights. The amount is estimated to be in the area of several hundred million dollars.

In Ann Arbor, however, a similar petition drive failed because the city council, which must first approve resolutions in order for them to be placed on a ballot, refused to do so. The council did not reject the ballot initiative by taking an actual vote, but rather by the unwillingness of any of its members to put the issue on the agenda for a January 16 meeting.

Leaders of "People for the Reassessment of Aid to Israel (PRAI)", the group which led the drive, had been confident through early January that the council would decide in its favor—since the group had met its goal of obtaining 5,000 signatures, which were submitted to council members on January 9. However, one councilman who had committed his support withdrew it prior to the decisive January 16 meeting, while other councilmen had gone on the offensive opposing it. One of them, Raphael Ezekiel, was quoted in an Ann Arbor newspaper as saying he objected to the resolution because he feared it could become "part of a general movement to isolate Israel."

For Israel:

Political discord between black and Jewish leaders has worsened as a result of recent publicity over Arab League contributions to civil rights organizations associated with the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

A story published in The New York Times on January 29 stated that the PUSH Foundation had received a $100,000 donation from the Arab League in 1981. At that time, Rev. Jackson, now a presidential candidate, was president of PUSH, Inc., the parent body which had spun-off the foundation in 1972 as a separate, charitable entity. A second gift of $100,000 was also given to an educational affiliate of PUSH, called PUSH for Excellence. At issue in the media was not whether the gifts were legal—which no one initially sought to challenge—but if Rev. Jackson knew of the donations at the time they were made, and in the event that he did, whether he thought accepting them was proper.

Hyman Bookbinder, the Washington representative of the American Jewish Committee, challenged Rev. Jackson's claim that he was unaware of the donations. He said Rev. Jackson "has been close to, friendly to and befriended by Arab forces ... I do find it difficult to believe that he didn't know about gifts of this size." Another Jewish leader commenting on the issue was Nathan Perlmutter, who hinted that the Arab League perhaps had some long-term plan in mind in giving the money. He said the League "is a sophisticated investor," which knew what it was doing. Mr. Perlmutter is the director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, which according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency prepared an in-house report last fall saying that Jackson had publicly committed a number of "insensitive and troubling" acts regarding Israel, relations between blacks and Jews, and the Jewish Holocaust.

Rev. Jackson's attorney, John Bustamante, said that the Times story was "part of an ongoing attempt to influence the public to view gifts from Arab sources as somehow different and more questionable than gifts from other sources."