Clinton Uses Ex-Advocates for Israel as Bearers of Bad News

By Lucille Barnes

Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat was a Jewish community activist in the national capital area before his appointment to the administration of President Bill Clinton. Now he is undersecretary of state for economic affairs. Likewise, London-born Ambassador Martin Indyk grew up in Australia and worked in Israel before coming to the U.S. and a position with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel’s principal lobby in Washington, DC. Clinton appointed him White House Middle East adviser, then U.S. ambassador to Israel, and now he is assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, the State Department’s top Middle East policymaking job.

Ironically, both now are labeled by the Israeli media as part of a pre-election campaign by Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to signal to Israeli voters that another Likud government could have negative consequences for U.S.-Israeli relations.

For years, the conventional Israel lobby wisdom, pressed stridently on U.S. presidents by advocates like Indyk and Eizenstat, was that U.S. pressure only makes Israelis “circle the wagons” and become more intransigent. Then, in August 1991, President George Bush halted Israeli Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s lobbying campaign for $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees by tying them to Israeli participation in the Madrid peace talks, which Shamir had vowed not to attend. Bush’s defiance of The Lobby garnered an 85 percent U.S. public approval rating, an Israeli delegation showed up in Madrid, and Shamir resigned. In 1992 Israeli voters rejected Shamir’s Likud for Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor Party, which signed the land-for-peace Oslo accord in 1993. But then Binyamin Netanyahu’s 1996 Likud election victory ended land-for-peace withdrawals. Now, with Israel’s voters again headed for the polls in May, the Israeli media discerns not-so-subtle Clinton administration gestures to signal a preference.

According to the Tel Aviv daily Ha’aretz, Eizenstat arrived in Israel in March to explain that since the territorial withdrawal to which Netanyahu agreed last October at the Wye Plantation had been delayed, the $1.2 billion in special aid the U.S. promised Israel would likewise be delayed. In fact, Congress will not even deliberate on the funds promised both Israel and Palestine until July, after Israeli elections, but it is expected to go ahead with special funding for Jordan, which is not holding up the peace process, and is virtually bankrupt.

Eizenstat also partially blamed Israel for Jordan’s economic plight, according to Ha’aretz. He pointed out that although Israel and Jordan have signed a peace treaty, Israel is finding myriad bureaucratic ways to prevent the Jordanians from exporting their products to the West Bank and Gaza, while keeping those markets for itself. At present Israel exports about $1 billion in goods to the occupied territories annually, while Jordan’s exports to the same market do not exceed $25 million, according to Ha’aretz.

Indyk was Israel’s outspoken champion when he lobbied for it professionally, and also during his first two years in the Clinton White House. However, Israel’s press now points out, by the end of March Yasser Arafat will have met twice with Clinton in Washington this year, while Netanyahu has not been invited. And, although both Albright and Indyk were criss-crossing the Middle East in February and March, neither scheduled any time in Israel.

Nor, for that matter, has First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, although she and daughter Chelsea scheduled Egyptian, Moroccan and Tunisian visits in March. If Hillary Clinton is considering a run for the U.S. Senate from New York in November 2000, it’s a curious beginning, notes Ha’aretz. New York candidates typically kick off an election campaign with the “three-I” tour to Israel, Italy and Ireland. In fact, in a Clinton senatorial campaign, her seemingly casual remarks to a mixed group of Israeli and Palestinian teenagers a year ago would be a problem with Jewish voters, according to Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, who won New York’s other Senate seat from Republican incumbent Alfonse D’Amato in a closely contested 1998 election. “If she were for a Palestinian state it would definitely hurt her” among Jewish voters, Schumer told The Jewish Week of New York. He said he would try “to persuade her to come to my view, which is that the parties ought to decide that issue, and Americans ought not interfere.”

If Hillary Clinton does not run, the Senate race likely will be between Democratic New York Rep. Nita Lowey, who is both Jewish and outspokenly pro-Israel, and Republican New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who several years ago went out of his way to snub Yasser Arafat who was in New York to address the United Nations. Before Clinton does any restating of her position, therefore, she had better check whatever figures are available on the percentage of New York’s huge and growing Muslim community who are registered voters. Few of New York’s Jewish voters are likely to switch from a Democrat to a Republican, no matter how loyal Giuliani is to Israel. On the other hand, New York Muslims and Christian Arab Americans certainly would turn out en masse to support Hillary Clinton if she sticks to her statement that all people ought to be citizens of a state of their own.

Staff writer Tim Weiner wrote an interesting article in The New York Times of Feb. 1 about Richard Clarke, whom he described as “the White House terrorism czar.” It seems that when Clarke was serving in the Reagan administration he authored a 1986 plan to destabilize Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi which backfired when the Reagan National Security Council was caught trying to plant a false accusation of terrorism against Libya in the Wall Street Journal. In 1992 when Clarke was the Bush administration’s assistant secretary of state for political and military affairs he was accused by then-State Department Inspector General Sherman Funk of looking the other way when Israel transferred American technology to China. (At the time Funk, who is Jewish, charged Israel had transferred secret American Patriot missile technology to China.) Funk told Weiner that “almost all the people in [Clarke’s] own office disagreed with him. In the end he had to leave the State Department.” But Clarke found a home in the White House and, Weiner writes, “was one of the only holdovers embraced by the Clinton administration. After seven years he has placed protégés in key diplomatic and intelligence positions, creating a network of loyalty and solidifying his power.” So, now that you know what kind of guy is in charge of counter-terrorism at the Clinton White House, will you sleep better tonight?

When a Likud-leaning group called the Committee for a Secure Peace ran a full-page ad in The Washington Times echoing a Netanyahu charge that Arafat’s Palestinian Authority had released five Islamic militants “involved” in the deaths of Americans, State Department spokesman James Rubin said the U.S. government had no evidence that would link any of the five to the American deaths. FBI spokesman Frank Scafidi put it more succinctly when he said of the five Palestinians, “They’re no more suspect than you or I.”

Another memorable exchange took place at a Jan. 23 press conference by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, who is of Lebanese ancestry, to discuss Clinton administration plans to combat possible bioterrorism. Gadfly ABC television reporter Sam Donaldson asked her, “What is this story that [Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussain] is trying to perfect some sort of [biological] agent that won’t attack Arabs but attacks Westerners?” With a wink at veteran United Press correspondent Helen Thomas, also of Lebanese ancestry, Shalala deadpanned: “That actually would make it pretty good for Helen and me. And Sam, you’re in big trouble.”