Christopher Finds Israel's U.S. Lobby Tougher than Israeli Government

"I reminded him that any deviation on policy, any deviation of that, would be of serious concern to the Jewish community. He assured me there was no change in policy. He made abundantly clear that any effort to prejudge the status of Jerusalem would be met with opposition from the U. S. government."

—Chairman Lester Pollack of the Council of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, describing a telephone conversation with Secretary of State Warren Christopher during his Far East trip at 7 a.m. Tokyo time, March 11, 1994.

Following some very low points toward the end of the Bush administration and after the return to power of a Labor government in Israel, Israel's American lobby is on a power trip in President Bill Clinton's Washington. As the U.S. heeded an alarm from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin not to veto passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution designed to get PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat back to the peace table, it was Likudists, among America's Jewish establishment who seemed to be blocking the way.

The issue was the reference in the resolution to East Jerusalem as occupied territory. This has been standard U.S. diplomatic boilerplate, just as have been references to Jewish settlements in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem as "illegal and obstacles to peace," through the administrations of six Clinton predecessors, although Ronald Reagan confused matters by off-the-cuff statements that he personally didn't think the settlements were illegal. (Under any conceivable interpretation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which the U.S. is a party, they are.)

Now the Clinton administration has gone vague about the settlements, and has taken to describing East Jerusalem as "disputed" rather than "occupied" territory whose final status is to be determined in negotiations based upon U.N. Security Council Resolution 242's land-for-peace formula.

All this is because Clinton administration Middle East policy starts and ends with keeping American friends of Israel (FOIs as America's weekly Jewish newspapers call them), who played pivotal media and funding roles in his 1992 presidential election campaign, aboard for the 1996 election. Most of these FOIs were strong supporters of the "not one inch of land for peace" policies of Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is well aware of this, and both hates and fears the Jewish Americans who undercut his political policies in the White House, but keep the sluice gates for U.S. aid to Israel open and in good repair. Rabin knows he needs the FOIs, but believes the Likudniks among them have more clout with the Clinton administration than he does.

Thus the extraordinary series of phone calls to and from the Far East during what was proving to be Christopher's most disastrous overseas trip to date. U.S. officials accompanying him joked, off the record, that Christopher was having more trouble with Israel and its fractious American friends than with the Japanese bashing him over trade, and the Chinese bashing him over human rights.

He was receiving late-night and early morning calls from Israeli government officials begging the U.S. to save the "Gaza Jericho first" plan solemnized last Sept. 13 on the White House lawn by relenting on the Jerusalem language in the U.N. Security Council resolution, and warnings against relenting from America's hard-line FOIs. In the end, diplomacy prevailed.

Said Pollack, "The consensus view among Jewish groups is that if the resolution facilitates the prompt resumption of negotiations, I think the community would accept the results, particularly with the assurances from the administration."

President Steven Grossman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAQ, which is undergoing a smiley-face metamorphosis to put it more in tune with Rabin while trying not to cut ties to its big-money, pro-Likud past presidents, was even more conciliatory.

"The language referring to Jerusalem as occupied territory is deeply disturbing to the Jewish community. But then you have the goal of enhancing the peace process."

Changing AIPAC's Public Face

The external transformation of AIPAC from a Likud-oriented hard-line lobby that took Democrats in Congress for granted and concentrated much of its efforts on a Republican-occupied White House, is complete. After Prime Minister Rabin made it clear he wanted AIPAC to concentrate on Congress and leave negotiating with Clinton to the Israeli government, AIPC’s former president, vice president, and executive director all were forced to resign over different issues.

In the talent search for a new executive director to replace Thomas Dine, who held the position for 12 years, AIPAC's new president, Steven Grossman, a former Massachusetts Democratic Party official, took on the "gang of four" former AIPAC presidents, all with deep pockets and identified with Republican politics in the U.S. and Likud politics in Israel.

Their candidate was long-time deputy director Howard Kohr, a low-key operator well-liked by AIPAC staffers personally, but a former director of the National Jewish Coalition, a Republican Party group. More in tune with the current administration was Democratic political consultant Mark Mellman. Best known to the general public was Neal M. Sher, employed by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations for 14 years, and its director for the past 11 years.

After Grossman failed to broker a power-sharing compromise with Kohr, Sher, 43, an effective public speaker, was selected to be the organization's fourth executive director after I.L. " Sy " Kennen, Morris Amitay, and Dine. Sher's appointment from outside the organization should make reconciliation among badly split members easier. In his words, "I am neither Democrat nor Republican; neither Labor nor Likud." He also pronounced himself "absolutely" supportive of the Sept. 13 Declaration of Principles.

On the downside, however, Sher brings with him unanswered questions about the methods of his Nazi-hunting office within the Justice Department on such cases as that of John Denijanjuk. The Ukrainian born Cleveland auto worker was deported to Israel to stand trial on charges originating within the U.S. that he was a sadistic Nazi concentration camp guard called by the inmates "Ivan the Terrible," who slashed and mutilated victims as he forced them into a gas chamber he operated at the Treblinka death camp.

Evidence that might have exonorated DemJanjuk from the charges leading to his deportation later was found in a trash can near the Justice Department, throwing into question whether the goals of Sher's unit were to serve justice or just get as many deportations as possible.

The case ultimately proved a major embarrassment for the Justice Department and for Israel, which sentenced Denijanjuk to death and then, after he had spent seven years in solitary confinement, threw out his conviction altogether. Now that Demjanjuk is back in Ohio, a U.S. federal appeals court has ruled that the Justice Department committed "fraud on the court."

Not only is there proof from the trash can and other sources that he was not "Ivan the Terrible, " there seems to be no conclusive evidence that Denijanjuk was anything other than a Ukrainian draftee in the Soviet army who spent most of World War H as a German prisoner of war-just as he told Sher's Nazi hunters all those years ago. While Sher is cleaning up the mess at AIPAC,therefore, others will be cleaning up the bigger mess he left behind in the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations.

Yossi Beilin's Unkind Cut

AIPAC Vice President Harvey Friedman was forced to resign last year after he told an AIPAC delegation he led to Israel that Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Yossi Beilin was a "little slimeball. " Perhaps exasperated at the way the lobby is using its clout in Washington to undercut the Declaration of Principles of Peace which he personally godfathered, Beilin fired back in a January meeting in Israel with members of the Women's International Zionist Organization.

"If our economic situation is better than in many of your countries, how can we go on asking for your charity?" he asked his visitors. Beilin answered protests by members of the organization, whose raison d'etre is to collect help for Israel ' with a blast calibrated to be heard by FOIs in America.

"You want me to be the beggar and say we need money for the poor people? Israel is a rich country, I'm sorry to tell you!"

In fact, according to the United Jewish Appeal which, together with scores of local Jewish federations, is the major Jewish fund-raising organization in the United States, of $841 million it raised in the U.S. in 1992, 40 percent, totaling $313 million, went to Israel. This amount probably is doubled by other groups, including Israeli political parties and leaders, that raise funds directly in the U.S. outside of UJA.

Although Beilin's words echoed the thoughts of most Israelis, Rabin described his deputy foreign minister's remarks as "completely moronic." What Rabin remembered, and perhaps Beilin forgo, is that much of the American money raised "for Israel" stays in the U.S. to help lubricate the machinery of groups like AIPAC, with a $15 million budget, B'nai B'rith with a $45 million budget, and other U.S. Jewish groups that lobby Congress for the billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer aid and the special military and economic perks that Israel does need to continue living at the standard to which it has become accustomed.

Bomb Alert for Peace Groups

Jewish peace groups have been on alert since two unexploded bombs were found on Jan. 5 outside Manhattan office buildings housing Americans for Peace Now and the New Israel Fund. The Israeli Consulate General also took added precautions after receiving threats and after Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Itamar Rabinovich was pelted by eggs and tomatoes during a New York speech and Israel's New York Consul General Colette Avital was verbally harassed by hecklers who were ejected from the meeting she was addressing.

The activities and threats were believed by many to originate with Kahane-influenced groups of the kind outlawed in mid-March in Israel. Handwritten notes found with the bombs attacking the Israeli government for being too liberal were signed by "Maccabee Squad" and "Shield of David, " names of groups that claimed responsibility for killing Palestinians in the West Bank.

Binyamin Zev Kahane, son of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, denied responsibility for the two bombs, but refused to condemn the act of planting them. Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said in a radio interview that the damage done to Israel by Peace Now exceeds the damage that would have been done by the bombs, had they exploded. Later, however, he retracted his remarks which he said had come out "backward. " Instead he described the bomb planting as "an insane act by insane people."—RHC