Principals Inject High Drama Into Crumbling of the Peace Process

By Lucille Barnes

As the peace process crumbled in mid-March, the principal personalities injected moments of moving, high drama into the vast, underlying tragedy. On March 9 King Hussein of Jordan wrote Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu a white-hot letter expressing his loss of confidence in the latter’s dedication to Middle East peace. Netanyahu responded in kind on March 10 and only three days later, on March 13, a deranged Jordanian bedouin soldier murdered seven 12- and 13-year-old Israeli schoolgirls visiting Israeli-leased land inside Jordan. King Hussein on March 16 visited each of the bereaved Israeli families in turn in their homes, along with a wounded girl and a teacher in Hadassah hospital near Jerusalem.

Since some of the Orthodox Jewish families who had lost their daughters were from Arab countries, some conversations were in Arabic. But accompanying King Hussein, often arm-and-arm with him and translating when necessary between the English-speaking monarch and the Hebrew-speaking families, was the Israeli prime minister. King Hussein also visited Israeli President Ezer Weizman, hospitalized with a hip broken while he climbed out of his helicopter.

Ironically, however, even as this moving series of visits was taking place, and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat took time out to telephone his own condolences to Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister never relented in his determination to begin ground-breaking for the construction of 6,500 Jewish homes at Jebal Abu Ghneim, near Bethlehem, which would complete the encirclement of Palestinian East Jerusalem with Jewish settlements, cutting it off from the West Bank.

Asked what would be the response to this obvious Israeli attempt to pre-empt the final-status talks called for in the Oslo agreements, Arafat said it was up to “the Palestinians,” implying that he neither could nor would attempt to curb resulting violence. Israeli Justice Minister Tzahi Hanegbi responded with an ominous Israeli threat of “war to the finish” aimed directly at the Palestinian leader: “Our response will reach Arafat himself,” Haneghi said to Likud party activists March 15 and reaffirmed the following day. “He can not continue to sit quietly in his villa on the coast with Suha and give orders for operations…Nobody who comes to wipe us out is immune, neither the engineer [Israeli-assassinated Palestinian bombmaker Yehya Ayash]nor somebody in a villa…Whoever opens up his bag of weapons may find himself packing his bags and going back to traveling the Tunis-Baghdad route, as he once did.”

Reacting to the threat, U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns told the Washington Report, “We do not think anyone, I mean anyone, should make remarks like that at this time…Chairman Arafat’s place is right where he is, negotiating these differences.”

Arafat, meanwhile, sought to rally international support against the Jebal Abu Ghneim housing plan and Israel’s offer of a minuscule pullback from only 2 percent of the West Bank at a March 15 meeting in Gaza with diplomats. The U.S. sent its consul general in Jerusalem, Edward Abingdon, over Israeli protests. As it turned out, however, only the presence of the U.S. representative in Gaza prevented the emergence of a unanimous resolution protesting the Israeli actions.

The U.S. unwillingness to condemn Israel at Gaza mirrored the bizarre performance by the new U.S. ambassador to the U.N., former Congressman Bill Richardson, in the U.N. Security Council where the U.S. vetoed a binding resolution calling upon Israel to halt the Jebal Abu Ghneim project, and then in the U.N. General Assembly, where the same resolution was passed by a vote of 130 nations, including the European Union members, with only the U.S. and Israel voting no.

This column generally makes light of charges of “anti-Semitism,” which 9 times out of 10 are leveled not at critics of Jews but at critics of Israel by apologists who can’t think of any other defense for a nation whose laws exude racism and bigotry. Loose use of such a portentous word makes about as much sense as calling someone who thinks Albania is in a state of disarray “anti-Illyrian,” someone who thinks the feuding Kurds bring some of their troubles on themselves “anti-Median,” and someone who thinks Americans are stronger on pop than on culture “anti-meltingpotian.” Now, however, we’ve discovered for ourselves an authentic, shiny, new mint-quality anti-Semite. He is a retired general serving in his country’s legislature, who referred in an interview to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk with an ethnic slur.

Two weeks later Indyk encountered the legislator in person at a memorial service for the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “The last time someone called me a ‘Jew boy,’” Indyk told retired Israel Gen. Rehavam Zeevi, “I was 15 years old and he got a punch in the face.”

“Try me,” replied Zeevi, who is chief of Israel’s ultranationalist Moledet party. Then he used the same slur again, twice: “yehudon, yehudon.” The Hebrew term, according to The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman, who reported the incident, can be translated “Jew boy,” “yid” or “kike.” Since Zeevi used the term three times in all, perhaps he meant all three. In any case, Indyk then switched the conversation, held two seats away from Israel’s chief rabbi Meir Lau and only a few seats further away from Leah Rabin, to English. “You are a disgrace to the state of Israel,” Indyk told the member of the Knesset. “And you,” responded Zeevi, “are a son of a bitch.”

At the end of the memorial service, Zeevi apologized at the urging of fellow Knesset member Binyamin Ben Eliezer. Asked about the incident later, Indyk told Gellman, “I’m not interested in getting into the details, but what’s important here is that a member of the Knesset, leader of a political party, is attacking with an anti-Semitic slur the representative of the United States of America in Israel.” Said labor MP Ephraim Sneh, who witnessed the incident in which the two men nearly came to blows, “I’m not a psychologist, but it seems to me the ambassador used the utmost of his self-restraint not to do it.” So we stand corrected. Anti-Semitism is alive and well in Israel.

If he has his way, Indyk won’t be there much longer, anyway. He’s been rumored since last December to be first in line to be assistant secretary for Near East Affairs in the second Clinton administration’s State Department, a job for which he’s been lobbying hard. The problem is that his predecessor, Ambassador Robert Pelletreau, retired at the end of 1996 to go into private law practice, but two and a half months later his replacement still hadn’t been announced.

The first explanation popped up in the Reporter, an English-language newspaper in Jerusalem. It turned out that the top candidate or one of the top two candidates for every one of the six regional assistant secretary positions in Madeleine Albright’s State Department is Jewish, according to the Israeli newspaper, which should know, since Israelis seem to know about everything that happens in the U.S. government.

Picking up the theme, the Washington Times, citing anonymous sources, said some appointments have not been filled partly because “there are too many ‘white Jewish males’ in senior State Department positions.” This, the newspaper said, was inconsistent with President Bill Clinton’s pledge to seek “diversity” in government.

The report prompted an angry letter to Clinton from Long Island Republican Rep. Benjamin Gilman, chairman of the House International Affairs Committee, who wrote: “For such a statement to appear, even anonymously, in this day and age, is outrageous…I hope you will personally repudiate this statement and change any personnel policies which discriminate on the basis of religion…We will be watching your administration’s personnel decisions closely on this matter.”

In reporting Gilman’s letter, Washington Times staff writer Ben Barber pointed out that “several senior State Department officials involved in Middle East policy are Jewish men. The two top officials in the National Security Council are also Jewish.” Actually we’d reported all that too, and were thinking about writing a letter ourselves. Nice of Gilman to do it for us.

Reprimanding the president for the poor quality of anonymous statements emerging from his administration isn’t the weirdest thing Gilman has done recently. Last May retired U.S. Ambassador Andrew I. Killgore, publisher of this magazine, was awarded the Foreign Service Cup, an honor bestowed annually on an outstanding retired foreign service officer by his peers who are members of DACOR (Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired). The award was presented at the State Department along with another award, the Director’s Cup, which goes to a foreign service officer on active duty, on “Foreign Service Day,” when retirees come back to see if anyone’s still minding the store

Subsequently Gilman wrote to then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher pointing out that the magazine Killgore publishes frequently criticizes Israel and asking Christopher, “How could you let this happen?”

Fortunately Christopher was retiring at that point so he didn’t have to write back to ask whether Gilman was holding him responsible for “letting” a retired foreign service officer criticize Israel, or “letting” a group of retired foreign service officers choose for themselves whom to honor last year. We have the feeling that Representative Gilman would be happier chairing a committee in that big meritocracy in the sky run by Josef Stalin, who certainly never would have “let” anything like that happen.

There’s more. In mid-December Gilman and his Senate counterpart (in more ways than one) Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent what The Jewish Week of New York called a “gushy" letter to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu taking issue with a letter criticizing him by a group of former top U.S. foreign policy officials. Gilman and Helms’ letter praised Netanyahu’s “pursuit of peace.” Pro-Likud groups immediately seized on the letter by the two congressional foreign policy chairmen as proof that the U.S. Congress supports Netanyahu’s policy on settlements (which can be expressed in three words: more, more and more). This sent a Republican staffer on the International Affairs Committee scrambling to announce that “it would be inaccurate to read this letter as support for any particular policy [because] the letter never mentions the word settlements.” “America’s Funniest Videos” is a big hit on television. Maybe Representative Gilman could do a syndicated column entitled “America’s Funniest Letters.”

Which reminds us, the world’s funniest elections are about to take place in Yemen, according to the editors of Yemen Human Rights Report, Dr. Mohammed A. Zabarah and Dr. Abdu Al Sharif, both of Sana’a University. Yemen held multi-party democratic elections, a noteworthy event, in 1993. Unfortunately, the two human rights activists told the Washington Report, the elections were full of irregularities, but “we accepted the results because it was a start.” Since then Yemen has had a civil war in which the incumbent government of Gen. Ali Abdullah Saleh in the north made short work of rival forces in the south. So with elections due again but the country still a bit unstable, President Saleh met in advance of the elections with the opposition parties, assigned each the number of parliamentary seats they were to win, and gave his own political allies a commanding majority. Voters then were cordially invited to meet at polling places all over the country to confirm the results. (Incidently, don’t worry about the future of our informants. They have prudently decided to publish Yemen Human Rights Report from P.O. Box 183, Vienna, VA 22183-0183. And, dear readers, please don’t write to inform us that it is impossible for a Muslim to have “Abdu” as a first name. In Yemen, Arabia Felix or Happy Arabia to the Romans, anything is possible including pre-election polls that are 100 percent accurate.)

We’ll bet you didn’t read the sequel to the warning about two bombs placed in a conservative synagogue last February in Jacksonville, FL. The warning was telephoned to 911 a few hours before former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres was to speak there, by a caller who identified himself as “the American fringe of Islamic Jihad.” Police swept the synagogue with bomb-sniffing dogs and his Israeli bodyguards took protective positions around Mr. Peres as he spoke to an audience of 1,500 people. Nine days later someone saw children who were in the synagogue to attend a bat mitzvah playing with what appeared to be a pipebomb with a timer—although it was not clear whether it could actually have exploded. The bomb, which the children had found behind a pillar in a room adjacent to the one in which Peres spoke, was disarmed and, thanks to a rabbi with whom he spoke, the man who telephoned the bomb threat was identified on Feb. 27 as Harry Shapiro, a 31-year-old former Kosher butcher turned rabbinical student, who apparently has helped to support himself over the years by filing workmen’s compensation claims for accidents he suffers on the job. A family friend told Associated Press that Shapiro was “ultra right…He didn’t want to kill anybody, but he did not want to make peace with the Arabs and Peres was leaning that way.” We’ll bet that when “terrorism expert” Steven Emerson reports this latest example of “Jihad in America,” he doesn’t mention the mad bomber’s name.

Some of the Israeli press is less reluctant to give credit where credit is due. On inauguration day for his second term, Tel Aviv daily Ma’ariv called President Clinton “the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House. “Another Israeli daily, according to The Jewish Week of New York, noted that Clinton “has acted with friendly coordination” with Israel “during his entire first term.”

Heeeee’s back! Richard Schifter, who while he was State Department human rights coordinator in the Reagan administration was accused by anonymous colleagues of soft-peddling criticism of Israel in State’s annual human rights roundups, also held a job in the White House during the administration of George Bush. He left it to protest Secretary of State James Baker’ s pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s government to attend the Madrid Conference that launched the peace process. Schifter then campaigned for Bill Clinton and was rewarded with a title (special assistant) in the first Clinton administration White House, where he last worked on the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative while campaigning on his own to be U.S. ambassador to Israel. Now Schifter’s going back to the State Department as a special adviser to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. It’s a political appointment, of course, for Republican-turned-Democrat Schifter, but it’s not clear whether the party he currently represents is Likud or Labor. In any case, Congressman Gilman should be pleased.

There are differences among directors of Washington, DC’s Holocaust Museum as to whether the museum deals with only one genocide or can touch on others as well. One thing that is never mentioned there, however, is what’s been happening to the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis over the past half-century. Yet a speech during the first week of March by Ian Eliasson of the Swedish Foreign Ministry did veer dangerously close to the unspeakable. It happened at a Holocaust Museum program recognizing former Swedish Red Cross president Count Folke Bernadotte’ssuccessful rescue from Nazi death camps during World War II of 21,000 persons, including 6,500 Jews. What the Swedish diplomats attending, along with Bernardotte’s two sons, Folke and Bertil, didn’t dwell upon was the fact that after World War II Count Bernadotte became the United Nations mediator in Palestine, and made some suggestions the Israelis didn’t like. As a result, in the summer of 1948, future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Lehi (Stern Gang) terrorists murdered Bernadotte and his French military aide as their United Nations motorcade passed through an Israeli-controlled part of the city. To make sure that no one dwelled upon any such awkwardness, Holocaust Museum board chairman Miles Lerman said firmly: “Tonight we shall not talk about people that were murdered. Instead we will talk about the highest qualities of human behavior.” And certainly not about hypocrisy.

In Israel attention once again is focused on Sara Netanyahu, third and reigning wife of the prime minister, who is being sued by former nanny Tanya Shaw for $36,000 in back pay she says she is owed for overtime and for work on the Sabbath during her six months of employment in the Netanyahu family. Her employment came to a halt last July when she claims she was literally tossed into the street by Mrs. Netanyahu for burning a pot of soup. Sara Netanyahu blamed the lawsuit on spite, and also accused a weekly Israeli television show, “The Cameri Quintet,” of “crossing a red line” when in a satirical skit it portrayed her son, Yair, telling his government bodyguard to beat up a kindergarten classmate who was bothering him.

In case you thought that outside Israel itself the media and other purveyors of the printed and electronic word sometimes touch a mite lightly on Israeli foibles, Hadassah, the national Zionist women’s organization, is prepared to show how wrong you are. It established a Curriculum Watch in 1991 and, says Sandra Alfonsi, a professor of French language and literature at Fordham University and a third-generation member of Hadassah, it has its work cut out for it. According to correspondent Jane Linker of The Jewish Week of New York, some of the things Alfonsi told a faculty and students luncheon at Queens College in New York were indeed “chilling.” For example, she found maps used in eighth grade classrooms in Islip, Long Island, that were color coded to show the United States, Canada and Europe as Christian areas. Worse, they found a textbook called Exploring World Cultures which “is used in 8th grade classes around the country.” But, it turns out, the book “began Jewish history with the Exodus and not Genesis.” Explaining the heinous nature of this transgression, Alfonsi said: “You can’t eliminate the story of Abraham and call it an oversight. This textbook is basically feeding into the pro-Palestinian slant to the history of the region.” Just shows you that, after all, anti-Semitism isn’t confined only to Israel.

At the March 15 annual Gridiron Club dinner in which Washington, DC correspondents roast reigning politicians with updated lyrics to familiar tunes, Arab-American dean of White House correspondents Helen Thomas of United Press International sang about Madeleine Albright to the tune of “Pistol Packin’ Mama”: Strolled right in to the U.N. bar/When things were getting rough/Walked right up to Boutros Boutros/I said, ‘Enough’s enough’.

Submitted to the Gridiron Club, according to The Washington Post’s Linton Weeks, was another song about Madeleine Albright sung to the tune of “Am I Blue,” but with a new title, “Am I a Jew?” It was rejected by the Gridiron Club’s music police, even though the would-be performer was Gannett News Service reporter Ronald Cohen, presumably no anti-Semite.

The funniest speech at the Gridiron bash was delivered by Vice President Al Gore, who was filling in for his incapacitated boss, the president. Gore started by saying that before Bill Clinton dislocated his knee, when Gore had asked him if he was looking forward to the Gridiron dinner, Clinton replied, “I’d rather fall down stairs.”

Actually, the vice president does have a gift for comedy. Early in March in a written response to a letter he expressed his concern about “the civil conflict in Khalistan.” Sikh separatists cited Gore’s letter to them as proof that the U.S. “recognizes the Sikh homeland Punjab as sovereign and independent.” Not amused, members of the Indian parliament launched tirades against American perfidy, and they weren’t joking either. Asked to comment on the contretemps at the State Department briefing, press spokesman Nicholas Burns prudently decided not to stretch credibility by citing the vice president’s newly discovered sense of humor. Instead he said bluntly, “Well, you know, sometimes we have a perfect foreign policy and sometimes we have minor mistakes. In this case there was a mistake…We apologize to the government of India because, of course, we do not recognize a republic of Khalistan. We recognize the Punjab to be part of India. There’s no mistaking that.”