Lobby Activities

By George F. Smalley

For Arabs:

The American-Arab Affairs Council (AAAC), which publishes the journal American-Arab Affairs, also is involved in organizing nationwide conferences, and it believes that its most recent meeting in Salt Lake City was one of its best yet.

AAAC president George Naifeh said at a Washington press conference that the nine meetings AAAC has sponsored throughout the U.S. in the last two and a half years were to educate Americans on the Arab world and the mutual benefits of strong U.S.-Arab relations. He said that the Salt Lake City conference in late March was particularly successful because of the high calibre of participants and the "considerable media attention" it generated. Mr. Naifeh said that three major newspapers in the state featured stories on the event, and that ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates in Salt Lake City also broadcast reports.

Co-sponsoring the event with AAAC was the Middle East Center of the University of Utah and the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies at Brigham Young University.

Following its conferences, AAAC works with local businessmen, educators, and others in setting up committees to sponsor future programs on the Arab world. So far state committees have been established in Alabama, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri and Wisconsin, with three others being planned in California, South Carolina and Utah.

For Israel:

The members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) who attended the lobby's recent policy conference heard praise for the Reagan Administration's policies in the Middle East but also more criticism of the President himself for refusing to cancel his plans to visit a German military cemetery in May.

In his speech on the "state of AIPAC," executive director Thomas Dine cited record amounts of U.S. aid to Israel and the signing April 22 of a free trade agreement between the two countries as examples of how relations between the U.S. and Israel have grown stronger in the past year. "For one bright moment," Mr. Dine said, "it appears that an American Administration has come to understand the realities of the Middle East, and fashioned its policies accordingly." But as he has done in previous years when giving this speech, Mr. Dine shifted quickly from highlighting Israel's victories in the U.S. to describing goals that lie ahead. "Our objective," he said, "is nothing short of a full-fledged political, economic, and military alliance between the U.S. and Israel."

In the second half of his talk, Mr. Dine said the President's decision to visit the Bitburg cemetery and to lay a wreath there was "appalling." He prayed, he said, that the "bipartisan, citizen protest will spur White House reappraisal and reversal." In opening the three-day conference on April 21, AIPAC president Robert Asher read aloud a letter from AIPAC to President Reagan urging him not to go to the cemetery, where German SS troops are buried. Prior to its conference AIPAC had not spoken out so loudly on the matter, and by the time it did the controversy already had reached its peak.

A total of 33 senators and 67 congressmen attended the banquet on April 22. Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Howell Heflin (D-AL) were guest speakers. Among the other legislators who addressed the conference were Representative Dante Fascell (D-FL), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Representative Jack Kemp, who is the ranking minority member of the House Appropriation's Subcommittee on Foreign Operations.

Both AIPAC leaders and members expressed pleasure at the heavy turnout at the meeting of 450 student activists from 120 campuses in 45 states. Total attendance came to some 1,400 persons, the largest AIPAC conference ever.

Other Voices:

Charles Fischbein, former executive director of the Jewish National Fund's Washington office, is charging the Israeli government with violating Palestinian human rights by impeding the flow of needed medical equipment and supplies to a West Bank hospital.

Mr. Fischbein returned to Washington, D.C., in mid-April following a week-long fact-finding trip to Amman, Jordan. In a meeting there with the medical director of the regional hospital in Nablus, he learned that the Israeli-administered hospital in Nablus had virtually no diagnostic equipment—such as heart monitoring devices—and that it was frequently without gauze. The medical director came to the U.S. about one year ago, Mr. Fischbein reported, and obtained approximately $100,000 worth of cardiac equipment. However, when this equipment arrived at the Israeli port of Haifa several months ago the Israeli government levied a value added tax on it that was roughly equal to the cost of the equipment—making it financially impossible for the director to claim it.

Mr. Fischbein has been explaining these problems in meetings with several prominent Jewish physicians, and he hopes to get their endorsement before taking his case to the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

In March, 1984, Mr. Fischbein resigned from the Jewish National Fund because, he said, the funds it was raising in the U.S. were being used by Israel to build settlements in the West Bank and to fight its war in Lebanon.

George F. Smalley is the managing editor of The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.