Names in the Mideast News

By Ella Bancroft

Mark Robert Parris is moving from his State Department job as deputy to Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Robert H. Pelletreau Jr. to the White House, where he will replace Martin S. Indyk as National Security Council senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs, according to The Washington Post. Parris is a career foreign service officer whose last overseas job was deputy chief of the American Embassy in Tel Aviv. Australian-born Indyk, a former AIPAC official who founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy with funding supplied by AIPAC board members including Barbi Weinberg, wife of a former AIPAC board chairman, has been nominated by President Bill Clinton to be U.S. ambassador to Israel.

Indyk will assume a position that has been vacant since former Assistant Secretary of State Edward Djerejian resigned last May after serving only five months as U.S. ambassador to Israel. Djerejian, a career foreign service officer, attributed his retirement from the foreign service to his desire to accept an appointment to head the James Baker III Institute of Public Policy at Rice University in Houston, TX. Former Israeli government spokesman Dan Pattir, now a syndicated columnist, noted, however, in the June 9, 1994 Washington Jewish Week that prior to Djerijian's resignation he had been excluded from two meetings between Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, although Djerejian's Israeli counterpart, Ambassador to the U.S. Itamar Rabinovich, had attended the meetings.

Should Baker, secretary of state in the administration of President George Bush, re-enter politics, Djerejian presumably would be at his side during the campaign phase and would also be in line for a key foreign policy role in case of a Republican victory.

Former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Parker T. Hart, 84, observed the 50th anniversary of his opening of the American consulate in Dhahran with a return visit to Saudi Arabia. Hart, who entered the U.S. foreign service in 1938, served in Dhahran from 1944 to 1951, during which time the first of his two daughters was born in the Aramco Hospital there. After a stint in Washington he, his wife and their two daughters returned to Saudi Arabia, where Hart served from 1961 to 1965 in Jeddah as U.S. ambassador. Hart, who subsequently was appointed as U.S. ambassador to Turkey, retired from the foreign service in 1968 and has retained an active interest in Middle Eastern affairs ever since.

The Senate has confirmed the appointment of Alfred Moses, president of the American Jewish Committee, as U.S. ambassador to Romania. His long service as an advocate of Romanian Jewry was the catalyst for the Washington attorney's appointment. However, it also has stirred opposition in Romania, where seven parliamentarians, three of them priests, have charged that Moses was a supporter of the late Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. The Romanian strongman, now reviled as the most corrupt and despotic of Eastern Europe's post-World War II Communist rulers, often was depicted in the U.S. press during his lifetime as a benevolent figure because of his willingness to ransom Romanian Jews to Israel, and to serve as an intermediary between Israel and Palestinian and other Arab leaders with whom Israel had no formal relations.

Rep. Peter King (R-NY), a Jewish congressman from Long Island, was credited by Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS) with inspiring a letter from the Senate majority leader to Secretary Henry Cisneros of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) asking how much money is going to Nation of Islam-affiliated firms for providing security services at public housing projects. The Queens (NY) Jewish Week suggested in its Dec. 9-15 edition that Minister Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam has received between $12 million and $20 million in such U.S. security contracts. King has offered legislation that would deny federal contracts to groups controlled by individuals who promote "bias based on race, religion or ethnicity." In earlier responses to King, HUD officials said they have no legal basis to deny Farrakhan-affiliated firms the right to bid on federal contracts, so long as the firms comply with HUD regulations.

In a December speech at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, Kare Kristiansen, who resigned from the Nobel Prize Committee to protest its award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat, along with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, revealed some of the details of the committee's deliberations that led to his resignation. He said he had suggested that those who actually drafted the Middle East declaration of principles of peace be honored, on condition that Arafat not be included. He resigned when the committee rejected his proposal.

Executive Director Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank spun off by Israel's principal Washington lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), led a delegation to Damascus to meet with Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad. Reporting in December on the meeting, delegation member Joseph Sisco, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian Affairs, was quoted in Near East Report, the biweekly newsletter for AIPAC members, as saying that Assad spurned the delegation's request that he make gestures aimed at Israeli public opinion. Sisco said Assad told the delegation: "I'll take care of my public opinion and the Israelis will take care of their public opinion."

Suha Arafat announced Dec. 10 that she and her husband, Palestinian National Authority President Yasser Arafat, are expecting a child next summer. The following day the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz published an article quoting Najla Yassin, long-time office manager for Yasser Arafat, as saying he had been her husband for 18 years until 1985. Ms. Yassin denied the Ha'aretz report in an interview published the next day by the UAE daily Al-Khaleej.

Meanwhile, another report was published in Israel saying Arafat had had an Egyptian wife before he met Ms. Yassin. Suha Arafat, who is the daughter of Raymonda Tawil, a Palestinian editor and publisher who has been compared to "La Pasionara," an inspirational leftist orator of the Spanish Civil War era, became passionate herself in denouncing the reports that her husband had been married previously. In an interview with the Saudi newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat she said, "These news reports are fabricated and aimed at distorting the image of Abu Ammar [Yasser Arafat's nom de guerre]."

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter may just have been indulging in diplomatic doubletalk when he said he could "not dispute" Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic's statement that, regarding Bosnia, "the American people have heard primarily one side of the story." Nevertheless, the statement, made during Carter's mediation shuttle between Bosnian government officials in Sarajevo and the Bosnian Serb headquarters in Pale, disturbed Ambassador Sven Alkalaj, the newly arrived representative of the Muslim-led Bosnian government to the United States.

"The so-called Serbian side of the story has been told here in the States, but the genocide and aggression were too much for the American people," said Alkalaj, who is Jewish, to the "Fox Morning News." "There is a clear point, who is the aggressor, who is the victim in this case."

Abraham D. Sofaer is the recipient of the first George P. Shultz senior fellowship at the Hoover Institution. The fellowship has been endowed by $3 million received from Shultz and corporations, foundations and individual donors, according to the conservative California think tank. Sofaer, born in India of Iraqi Jewish parents and a former professor of law at Columbia University, served as the federal judge hearing former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon's libel suit in New York against Time magazine. By breaking his decision into three parts, announced on separate days, Sofaer generated media reports that made it appear to the casual observer that Sharon had won major damages from Time, which was not the case. Later, after then-Secretary of State Shultz appointed Sofaer as State Department general counsel from 1985 to 1990, he was involved deeply in Middle East affairs, becoming the U.S. negotiator in the long-standing Israeli dispute with Egypt over Taba, a strip of Sinai resort property on the Gulf of Aqaba near Eilat from which Israel was reluctant to withdraw, despite its Camp David commitment to Egypt to do so. While at the State Department, Sofaer also was involved in unsuccessful efforts to get Israel to return copies of thousands of secret U.S. documents stolen by convicted spy Jonathan Jay Pollard before his 1984 arrest. Subsequently, the Israeli government charged that during negotiations in Israel Sofaer misused his diplomatic immunity to smuggle Middle Eastern antiquities to the United States.

Biblical King David of Israel and Bathsheba, the beautiful housewife whom he spied upon from his rooftop while she was bathing, played starring roles in a December 1994 drama that threatened the Middle East peace process. It started when Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres condemned Israeli military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as contrary to the heritage of Judaism. When a rightist member of the Knesset reminded Peres that King David had conducted wars of occupation, Peres replied: "Not everything that King David did on the ground or on the rooftops is Jewish in my eyes." His reference was to a passage in II Samuel 11, in which the king, after admiring Bathsheba's beauty, sent her husband, Uriah, off to his death in battle and subsequently married her. Peres' offhand witticism triggered demands from representatives of Israeli religious parties for a no-confidence motion in the Labor-led Israeli government. Knesset Member Avraham Verdiger of the United Torah Judaism bloc became so emotional in denouncing the Labor regime that he fainted and had to be taken to the Knesset infirmary. Peres responded with a letter to Israeli religious leaders disclaiming "any intention of insulting the 'Sweet Psalmist of Israel.'" Although the letter, too, was denounced by some Israeli religious leaders, they failed to bring down the government.

When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin brought up during his November visit to Washington the issue of clemency for convicted spy for Israel Jonathan Jay Pollard, 40, members of the U.S. intelligence community who oppose clemency were not caught off guard. An article in the issue of Defense Week published during Rabin's visit quoted a seven-month-old letter from CIA official Colin Jellish to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence affirming that Pollard "retains the ability to harm our national security because of his intelligence, his power of recollection, his history of significant emotional instability, his history of drug abuse, and his overriding loyalty to another country." Pollard is a former U.S. Navy counterintelligence specialist who also was paid a salary by Israeli intelligence for turning over a weekly satchel of secret U.S. documents to the Israeli embassy in Washington. Since his November 1984 arrest and subsequent conviction, the Israeli government has doubled Pollard's monthly salary, which is banked in an account opened in his name in Switzerland. Nevertheless, leaders of the campaign to pressure President Clinton into pardoning Pollard expressed outrage at the attempt to remind Clinton of the extent of Pollard's treachery.

Said President Seymour Reich of the American Zionist Movement, "there are those in the intelligence community who want to keep Jonathan in jail for life." Among those who lent their support in 1994 to a campaign by Pollard's sister, Carol Pollard , for clemency for Pollard were leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and Hollywood celebrities Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Hershey, Jack Lemmon, Roddy McDowell, Gregory Peck and Jon Voight.

Former foreign service officer Eugene Bird, now president of the Council for the National Interest, is one of many Americans who have proposed that Pollard be exchanged for Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli citizen who converted to Christianity in Australia and then revealed to a London newspaper secrets of Israel's Dimona nuclear weapons production facility, where Vanunu had been employed. Vanunu's whereabouts were revealed by a London editor to Israel's Mossad, which seized him and smuggled him to Israel, where he was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment for revealing his country's secrets.

Unlike Pollard, who has divorced his first wife and early in 1994 married Esther Zeitz-Pollard, a Canadian with whom he began correspondence while in jail, Vanunu is being held in solitary confinement. Vanunu's contacts with the outside world are limited to his lawyer and clergy and he is permitted visits with his family every two weeks.

Four Americans kidnapped and held hostage in Lebanon in the 1980s also have called upon the Israeli government to release Vanunu. They are journalists Terry Anderson, Jeremy Levin and Charles Glass and Catholic priest Father Lawrence Jenco. Citing their own experiences in a letter to Israeli President Ezer Weizman last June, they called the conditions of Vanunu's imprisonment "cruel, inhuman and degrading."

Two California Democrats, Rep. Tom Lantos and former Rep. Mel Levine, resigned from the board of FLAME (Facts and Logic About the Middle East), a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to placing pro-Israel advertisements in the U.S. media (much as does the East Coast-based CAMERA, formerly headed by Morton Klein, who now is president of the Zionist Organization of America). Lantos and Levine said they resigned to protest a FLAME fund-raising appeal which "excoriated" the current Israeli Labor government. In a subsequent advertisement in the Washington Jewish Week of Dec. 22, 1994, FLAME accused the two legislators of hypocrisy and pointed out that another legislator, Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, presently campaigning for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, remains on the FLAME board.

Israeli officials are interrogating kidnapped Lebanese Shi'i guerrilla leader Mustafa Dirani , 43, about missing Israeli airman Ron Arad. Dirani was seized in an Israeli airborne commando operation at his home in southern Lebanon last May 21, setting off a round of retaliatory attacks in which more than 200 Lebanese and dozens of Israelis subsequently were killed. Dirani, head of security for Amal, a Syrian-backed Shi'i militia, when Arad's plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1984, was rumored to have held Arad for two years in Beirut. Dirani subsequently left Amal and founded the "Believer's Resistance Group," which was closely linked to the Iran-funded Lebanese Hezbollah (Party of God), a more radical Shi'i group. Arad is the only one of six missing Israeli soldiers believed to have remained alive, at least for a time, in captivity. He was rumored to have passed to the control of Hezbollah and later to Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who were said to have paid $300,000 for him. Israel is believed to be holding Dirani as a bargaining chip for the return of Arad or, if he is not alive, for information on all of the missing Israeli servicemen.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson has spent years making conciliatory overtures to American Jewish leaders whom he offended by meeting with Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat in Lebanon long before the latter's handshakes with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres made such meetings "politically correct." Nevertheless, B'Nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League still uses attacks on Jackson to shore up its own stature within America's increasingly fractured Jewish community. After Jackson, in a meeting with the editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times, compared America's Christian Coalition to right-wingers in Germany before World War II and to South Africa's former apartheid government, ADL national director Abraham H. Foxman wrote in a letter to Jackson that his remarks were "inappropriate, inaccurate and highly divisive." Ironically, the ADL itself issued a scathing report last summer about the same Christian Coalition, expressing "serious concerns regarding the Religious Right on a variety of subjects—including church-state issues, tolerance and a pluralist society."

Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller's November visit to PLO leader Faisal Husseini in Orient House in East Jerusalem was "a cheap trick," according to Israeli Prime Minister Rabin. The Turkish prime minister, who called upon both Rabin in Israel and Palestinian National Authority President Yasser Arafat in Gaza before continuing on to Cairo for a visit to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, was drawn into the Israeli campaign to ban meetings between foreign officials and Palestinians in Orient House. The campaign has included Israeli insistence that American officials can meet Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank but not in East Jerusalem, which was seized by Israel in the 1967 war but which Israel does not want to return to Arab control as part of a land-for-peace settlement. "No one has the authority to meet a prime minister at Orient House," Rabin said of the Ciller visit.

Israel has rejected formally a U.S. request for the extradition of former Israeli air force Brig. Gen. Rami Dotan, who was convicted of receiving kickbacks from U.S. military aid to Israel, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency. "We have told them, before they submitted any formal extradition request, that we would not comply because he was an Israeli citizen when the crimes were carried out," Israeli Justice Ministry spokeswoman Etti Eshed said. She added that Dotan already had been tried in Israel for the same offenses he is wanted for in the United States. He was convicted in March 1991 on 12 counts of corruption and bribery, including having acquired $12 million in bribes and kickbacks from U.S. companies he selected to supply equipment to the Israeli air force. The purchases, when Dotan was serving as the Israeli air force's chief procurement officer in New York during the 1980s, were paid for with U.S. government military aid funds voted by Congress. Under a plea bargain agreement, Dotan was sentenced to 13 years in prison and demoted to the rank of private.

Dotan is said to be serving his sentence in isolation from other prisoners and under luxurious conditions closer to house arrest than prison, with full family visits permitted at any time. Israel has denied direct access to Dotan by congressional investigators sent by Rep. John Dingell (D-MI). The congressional investigation was prompted by suspicions that the transgressions for which Dotan was tried were part of a larger scheme to divert U.S. government-provided foreign exchange to the support of various Israeli government projects, possibly including clandestine Israeli intelligence operations abroad, which would not have been approved by the U.S. government had they become known.

Dr. Abid Al-Marayati, a tenured professor of political science at the University of Toledo for more than 25 years, has won a ruling from the Ohio Civil Rights Commission that he was denied research money and discriminated against by the university because of his national origin. The OCRC determined that Dr. Al-Marayati, who was born in Iraq, was the only professor in his department to be denied research money. Dr. Al-Marayati filed a complaint with the OCRC in June 1993 and filed a civil lawsuit against the University of Toledo in U.S. District Court in 1994. The civil suit still is pending.