New York Media Get Close-up of Israel’s Tough Top Diplomat

By Ella Bancroft

U.S. Jewish journalists had a private interview with Israel’s tough new foreign minister, Gen. Ehud Barak, during his first visit to New York in late January since taking over from Shimon Peres, who in turn had taken over as prime minister from assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. Describing his advice to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat on how to deal with dissent from Islamist opposition groups, Barak said: “We suggested to the Palestinians that they look at how [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarrak tried to deal with it, or how [Syrian President Hafez Al-]Assad tried to deal with it 10 or 20 years ago. We didn’t mention, of course, how King Hussein dealt with it.” (The Syrian regime’s 1982 assault on Muslim fundamentalists in the city of Hama cost an estimated 10,000 lives, most of them civilians. King Hussein’s battle with Palestinians for control of Jordan in September 1970 cost an estimated 20,000 lives.) Barak also was introduced to a friendly and largely Jewish selection of New York’s media and business elite at a dinner given in his honor by Israeli consul general in New York Colette Avital. Among guests, according to staff writer Larry Cohler of The Jewish Week of New York, were CBS’s Dan Rather, ABC’s Barbara Walters, The New York Times’ Jack Rosenthal, PBS’ Charlie Rose, New York Daily News (and U.S. News and World Report and Atlantic Monthly) owner Mort Zuckerman, and Home Box Office vice president Richard Pletler. Business and philanthropic figures included Wall Street billionaire George Soros and Lorillard (and former CBS) chairman Lawrence Tisch. The following morning Barak had an on-the-record breakfast with CBS’s Leslie Stahl, CBS’s Mike Wallace, Washington Post columnist (and daughter of Post publisher Katherine Graham) Lally Weymouth and New York Times staff writer Judith Miller. In subsequent separate meetings with Henry Kissinger and New York Governor George Pataki, Barak expressed astonishment that, while channel surfing the evening before on New York community access cable television, he had come across a program by U.S. Jewish radicals calling for the murder of Israeli officials. Informed by Pataki liaison to the Jewish community Jeff Wiesenfeld that such extremists obtain the public access channel time without charge under cable television regulations, Barak exclaimed, “My God, this is unbelievable...We as a nation absolutely cannot afford the assassination of another prime minister. We can’t prevent the presence of extremists we have raised domestically. But we must do whatever we can to prevent the entry of those who come not to engage in civil debate but to engage in verbal or physical violence.”

Two diplomats, Karl F. Inderfurth of the U.S. mission to the United Nations and Emilio J. Cardenas of Argentina, took matters into their own hands late last year and delivered 185 aging Moroccan prisoners of war from a Polisario Liberation Front prison camp near the Algerian border, where they had been held since before the end of the Western Sahara war that was fought from 1975 to 1991, back to the homeland that had refused to negotiate for their release. Inderfurth declined to discuss the rescue but Cardenas filled in the details.

“We were told in June when we were there for the Security Council, spending the night with the Sahrawis, that these prisoners were 45 minutes away by jeep. So we went out at 4:30 in the morning and we saw them and they broke our hearts...They had spent 17 years in the desert, and we had to get them out. And we did.” Diplomats said the government of King Hassan II of Morocco would not negotiate a prisoner exchange because that would mean acknowledging the Polisario Front. However, on Nov. 12, a U.S. C-130 and an Argentine Boeing 707 arrived at the Algerian airbase at Tindouf. There they picked up 185 men who said they wanted to go home, and took them to a Moroccan base at Ben Gurir, near Marakkesh. Cardenas said there are perhaps 2,300 more Moroccan prisoners being held by the Polisario Front in Algeria, and about 100 Polisario prisoners being held in Morocco.

During President Clinton’s March visit to Israel after the “counter-terrorism summit” in Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh Red Sea resort, a “senior administration official” said that CIA director John Deutch wants to expand the U.S. intelligence sharing with Israel that was cut off after discovery that a U.S. naval counter-intelligence analyst, Jonathan Jay Pollard, was turning over U.S. military secrets to Israel.

At a Jan. 31 luncheon at the National Press Club, outgoing Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Richard Holbrooke gave the Bosnia accords he negotiated a score “in the mid-90s” for compliance on the military side and an “incomplete” for compliance on the civilian side. Asked by a questioner how Americans “will know if we succeed in Bosnia,” Holbrooke replied: “You’ll know. You’ll tell us.” Asked “why didn’t we act sooner...we could have saved thousands of lives,” Holbrooke replied with one sentence: “I agree completely with that.” Asked whether his reputation for being confrontational would preclude his selection as a future secretary of state, Holbrooke, who has resumed an investment banking career in New York, answered: “The reputation isn’t true, but the answer is yes.”

Two Israeli policy analysts differed over the question of Jerusalem at the Sixth International Conference of Jewish Media, held in Jerusalem in January. In dealing with Jerusalem, said Prof. Ruth Lapidot of Hebrew University, Israelis and Palestinians must deal with three issues: sovereignty, municipal administration and the holy places. She said that the Arabs of East Jerusalem could be divided into boroughs and run their own affairs, and the holy places could be administered by their own communities with international observers stationed at the sites. However, on sovereignty, with little chance of compromise, she recommended that Israel freeze the matter for 30 years.

Dr. Dore Gold, director of Tel Aviv University’s Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies, said a “limited understanding” over administrative matters and holy places would not solve territorial differences. He said Israel should never have agreed to discuss Jerusalem during final-status talks, which begin in May 1996 and are to be concluded by May 1999. “Israel must lower its expectation if it wants to keep the peace process alive,” Gold said. He predicted that the Jerusalem issue will not be solved by the year 2000.

At an interfaith meeting in Istanbul during the visit of U.S. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and daughter Chelsea to Turkey in April, Muslim religious scholars praised Mrs. Clinton for hosting a White House observance at the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. When one of the admiring Turkish religious leaders said he and his colleagues would like her to remain in Turkey as a hostage, Mrs. Clinton quipped that she might not be missed at home. “You know we’re having an election year back in the United States and sometimes I wish I could be kept away,” she explained.

Justifying the continued operation of the Office of Special Investigations of the Department of Justice, Director Eli Rosenbaum told the Washington Jewish Week that “there are still people living in this country who took part in Nazi-sponsored persecution and other Nazi crimes against humanity.” Although anyone over 21 years old when Nazi Germany was defeated 51 years ago would be at least 72 years old now, Rosenbaum told the newspaper’s managing editor that “we’re now in one of the busiest periods in our history. The number of cases is increasing dramatically.” OSI, which recently recommended the deportation of a Hungarian writer for Radio Free Europe because he allegedly made pro-Nazi propaganda broadcasts during World War II, when Hungary was an ally of the Axis powers, helps maintain a “watchlist” of 60,000 names with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services. The office, which employed 51 people at its peak 10 years ago, has since its creation in 1979 removed by means of deportation or voluntary emigration 45 people. Fifty-three people have been denaturalized and 87 banned from entry into the United States.

Israeli media accused the organization American Friends of Bar-Ilan University of deliberately using photos of Bar-Ilan student Yigal Amir, assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in fund-raising material for the university. The organization’s public relations director, Hedy Shulman,denied it, saying that “would be the equivalent of suicide” for the organization. Nevertheless, she had to admit she subsequently was “horrified” to learn that photos of Amir were included in a promotional journal distributed at the organization’s Jan. 21 dinner in New York which, ironically, was a “tribute to Yitzhak Rabin.” Bar-Ilan president Moshe Kaveh said inclusion of Amir’s photos, taken the previous year on the university campus, was “an egregious error of oversight, not an act of intent or malice.” Former Bar Ilan president Shlomo Eckstein said the chance of Amir being chosen for the brochure was one in 20,000 and of appearing in the journal after the assassination was one in a million. Israeli Education Minister Amnon Rubinstein said steps should be taken against those responsible for the brochure.

Film producer Steven Spielberg, maker of “Jurassic Park,” has set up a “Righteous Persons Foundation” funded entirely by his personal profits from the film “Schindler’s List.” By the beginning of 1996 the film had earned $350 million worldwide, of which Spielberg’s personal share is between $30 million and $40 million. The foundation has given a $3 million contribution to the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and has made a $1.6 million grant to Brandeis University to create a program for teen-agers to link their secular interests to studies in Jewish values and traditions.

Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer, daughters of murdered Achille Lauro passenger Leon Klinghoffer, have signed an agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization “to create an institution designed for peace studies, including the prevention of terrorism,” according to lawyers for both sides in a lawsuit they filed against the PLO. PLO attorney and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said the daughters “support this agreement in principle” and called it “a constructive example of conflict resolution.”