Focus on Israel and Jews

Most American Jews were not surprised when Jordan's King Hussein announced last month that he had decided to cease working with the PLO leadership to achieve a negotiated peace with Israel. The Near East Report (NER), the organ of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the country's major pro-Israel lobby, greeted the announcement with something close to elation. "The King's courageous decision to walk away from the PLO has breathed life into the Mideast peace process," pronounced a March 3 NER editorial calling upon West Bank Palestinians not associated with the PLO to join Israel and Hussein in peace talks.

But the following week, after Zafer Al Masri, the Israeli appointed Palestinian mayor of the West Bank city of Nablus was assassinated, the NER was less sanguine about "non-PLO" Palestinians coming forward. It castigated "the politics of murder" for interrupting Israeli Prime Minister Peres' program of devolution i.e., the turning of control over municipal functions in the Occupied Territories to Palestinians saying that only "Palestinian and Syrian hardliners" and "Jewish fanatics" like Rabbi Meir Kahane could "celebrate" the Masri assassination.

Michael Berenbaum, editor of the Washington Jewish Week's Opinion Page, noted anxiety among Israeli and American Jewish doves over the effect the stalled peace process would have on an Israel committed to continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Berenbaum foresaw another generation of draftees spending three years of their lives as part of an occupying army, Kahane gaining strength among Jews, and a quickening of "the process of Belfastization in the territiories."

While Berenbaum and others worried over the dark clouds on Israel's horizon, events closer to home at the University of Maryland's College Park campus had many other Washington area Jews up in arms. The trigger was a February 5 lecture by Kwame Toure [the former Stokely Carmichael], sponsored by the University's Black Student Union. Toure attacked Zionism point blank, saying it had "nothing to do with Judaism" and declaring that "the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist." According to Jon Greene, news editor of the University's Jewish monthly Mizpeh, Toure's denunciation was so powerful that members of the audience began to launch verbal attacks at the two Jewish students attending the lecture. (Greene also reported, in a follow up article for the Jewish Week, that some Jewish student leaders claimed to have been physically harassed and to have found swastika graffitti on their office doors.)

The incident set off a wave of protest in local Jewish communities. Students organized a rally in front of the campus student union and called upon the University to prevent individuals with extremist views like Toure's from speaking on campus. The Anti Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL), the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), and Americans for a Safe Israel all publicly declared their support for the Jewish students at Maryland. Mordechai Levy, militant leader of the Jewish Defense Organization in New York [an even more extreme offshoot of Kahane's Jewish Defense League], sensing his time had come, arrived on campus, where he promised his audience at the Hillel/Jewish Student Centre: "No one has the fight to attack Jews and spread hatred. If anyone physically hurts one Jew, the attackers will be in a lot of hot water. We will launch Operation Wipe Out."

Meanwhile, leaders from ADL, ZOA and other Jewish organizations were getting the hard sell from President Reagan on the "need" for American Jews to back another type of operation: the Administration's effort to get $100 million in funding from Congress for Nicaraguan "contras" fighting the Sandinista government. At a special briefing earlier this month for Jewish leaders from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Reagan claimed the Sandinistas had ties with the PLO, Iran and Libya, and that they were trying to seize control of all Central America. The President went on to state that "our supply lines to Israel and NATO run through the Caribbean" and that "abandoning our friends" close to the U.S. might tempt the Soviets to strike directly at Israel. Reagan's pitch found at least one sympathetic ear. Kenneth Bialkin, who is a chairman of the Conference of Presidents, assured the President at the briefing that "the overwhelming sympathy and support of the American Jewish community lies with those who wish to fight for their freedom." (Bialkin's remarks notwithstanding, there is no evidence indicating that most American Jews either favor aid to the contras or that they are afraid Israel will be in danger if Congress refuses to authorize that aid.)

—Andrea Barron

Andrea Barron, a PhD Candidate in International Relations at the American University in Washington, D.C., is active in Washington Area Jews for an Israeli Palestinian Peace and writes frequently about the Middle East.

Focus on Arabs and Islam

Arms sales to Saudi Arabia are once again in the news. On March 11, in the wake of an Iranian push to the borders of Kuwait, the Reagan Administration sent a $354 million arms package request for Saudi Arabia to Congress, where it is expected to meet with strong opposition. [See Update on Congress section, page 3 this issue.] The National Association of Arab Americans immediately endorsed the proposed sales. Its March 11 press release cited three reasons why support of the sale was in the national interest:

The sale would enhance the capability of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to continue exporting oil to our European and Japanese allies, for whom Gulf oil is of particular strategic importance;
Rejection of the sale might endanger the security of the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a group of moderate Arab states that the U.S. has pledged to help defend; and
Supporting the sale would show an unambiguous U.S. stand in opposition to radical forces seeking to de stabilize the region.

In an earlier statement, NAAA Executive Director David Sadd called "failure to reinforce the defensive capability of the Arab Gulf countries" the "principal weakness of American policy in the Gulf." He noted that "over the past several years, the Administration has failed to provide key arms sales to the Arab countries, sales which would have bolstered Arab Gulf defenses and helped protect American strategic interests."

Congressional opponents of the sale, already busy at work signing up cosponsors for resolutions against the deal, were quick to predict defeat for the Reagan proposal. One Washington writer, however, noted that the "Pavlovian reflex" among the pro Israeli lobby in Congress was counterproductive. Writing in a March 12 Washington Post Op-Ed piece, Milton Viorst observed: "For as long as one can remember, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has ferociously spearheaded opposition to the sale of arms to Arab countries any country, any kind of arms. To do so, under our system, is surely its right. The exercise of that right, however, is not in Israel's interest or America's."

Should the Lobby scuttle the Administration proposal, it will only underscore the need for more effective Arab American counterbalances to the political muscle of groups like AIPAC. How best to do this has been an ongoing subject of discussion and debate among Arab American leaders. Arab American Institute (AAI) Executive Director James Zogby expressed one point of view when he told a Los Angeles Times interviewer last month: "We've felt the burden of not being able to challenge the government's Middle East policy, but until we can become a constituency of note in local communities, we're not ready ... It's important that our people retrace the steps that everybody has walked. Electoral politics is the key to empowerment."

A February 13 AAI conference in Detroit, attended by some 140 Arab American activists, further elaborated this theme. AAI Co Founder and Labor Department Official George Salem told conferees that: "Having people on the inside is where it's at. I have 900 employees reporting to me, 600 of them are lawyers. Everyone knows I'm an Arab American because I wear my ethnicity on my sleeve ... It doesn't matter to me if you're a Democrat or Republican or socialist. If you're part of us, we're going to promote you." Michigan State Senator Patrick McCollough, whose district includes close to 18,000 Arab American in Dearborn, urged Arab Americans to help local candidates with "door to door work and with campaign contributions ... You can influence elections if you remember that if you want a friend, you have to be a friend."

AAI's efforts at building an Arab American political presence may come to naught, however, if the American media mill continues to churn out the grotesque stereotypes which prejudice American opinion towards the Arabs and their causes. A choice example of media distortion is the recently released film Delta Force, a fictionalized re-enactment of the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in which, according to a New York Times review, "a heroic band of American commandos effectively takes over all of Beirut slaughtering Arabs not only at will but also with some pleasure." American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) Spokesman Stephen Menick denounced the film as "a festival of Arab bashing."

ADC responded quickly, holding demonstrations at a Washington theater showing the film and at the Los Angeles offices of the Cannon Fill Group, the Israeli run company that produced Delta Force. ADC also experimented with a new strategy of combating stereotyping. In addition to sending "Action Alerts" to its local chapter leaders, ADC invited groups of rabbis and concerned Jews to attend March 12 screenings of the film in New York and Los Angeles. ADC is considering similar outreach efforts with Jewish communities in other cities, in the hope that such contacts will bring forth over time joint Arab Jewish statements condemning instances of stereotyping.

Anthony B. Toth, of Arlington, Virginia, is a freelance writer specializing in US relations with the Middle East.