Washington Report, June 13, 1983, Page 4

Lobby Activities

For Arabs:

Beginning June 5, Arab Americans from across the country held a week-long series of events to commemorate the suffering and destruction resulting from Israel's invasion of Lebanon which took place one year ago.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which organized many of the activities held in Washington, began the week with a panel discussion at which several speakers recounted the events leading up to the invasion and those that have followed. Participants included ADC Chairman James Abourezk, a former Senator from South Dakota; Daniel Amit, an Israeli physics professor and a founding member of an Israeli peace group called the Committee Against the War in Lebanon; Hala Maksoud, Executive Secretary of the Arab Women's Council; and Hassan Abdul Rahman, Director of the Palestine Information Office in Washington.

ADC also organized demonstrations at the State Department, the Pentagon, and at a site near the Israeli Embassy. Attending the Embassy demonstration were some Americans whose relatives are in the Israeli prison of Ansar in southern Lebanon. Mahmoud El-Youssef, whose brother Samih is a prisoner, recently hired human rights lawyer Richard Arens to help seek his release. Arens is the brother of Israel's Defense Minister, Moshe Arens. The lawyer Arens has been a sharp critic of his brother's views and of what he says is Israel's "galloping annexation" of the West Bank.

For its part, the Arab Women's Council sponsored a vigil in front of the White House, with those who participated dressing in black in a symbolic gesture for the thousands that were killed last summer.

In West Roxbury, Massachusetts, 10 Arab American organizations sponsored a commemorative program which included a memorial service, the showing of the ADC film Report from Beirut: Summer of 1982, as well as speeches by former Illinois Congressman Paul Findley and a Lebanese journalist Hisham Milhem.

The Council of Arab-American Organizations of Southern California organized a dinner at the Arab Community Center in Los Angeles to mark the one year anniversary. A total of 19 groups took part. And a demonstration was held at the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles on June 7, sponsored by the Palestine Arab Fund. The event was marred by a scuffle when approximately 30 members of the Jewish Defense League arrived and shoved some of the demonstrators, grabbed their posters, burned a Palestinian flag, and otherwise tried to disrupt the event.

Coinciding with these events was an unprecedented, three-hour program on Capitol Hill that presented various aspects of Palestinian culture. "Palestinians and Their Land: An Evening Celebration With Music, Dance, Dinner, & the Arts in the U.S. Congress," was sponsored by nine ArabAmerican groups and organized by the Palestine Aid Society. An estimated 400 persons jammed into a banquet room in the Rayburn building to attend the event, which was hosted by Congressmen John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mi.), George Crockett, Jr. (D-Mi.), Mary Rose Oakar (D-Ohio) and Nick J. Rahall (D-W.Va.).

For Israel:

The Washington, D.C. chapter of the New Jewish Agenda (NJA) was denied entrance recently into the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington, an umbrella organization for 260 Jewish groups.

The NJA is a national Jewish organization which addresses a whole range of social, economic and political issues affecting Jews. But basically both its supporters and critics agree that it was the group's view that self-determination for the Palestinians is necessary for permanent peace in the Middle East which resulted in its exclusion. The vote was 98 to 70 against admittance.

The two groups which openly campaigned to exclude the NJA were the local chapter of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and a group called Americans for a Safe Israel. Washington's ZOA president Irwin Stein charged that NJA's "whole program is pro-Arab. They stand for Palestinians before they stand for the Jewish state." Peter Goldman, executive director of Americans for a Safe Israel has said that "the basis of the New Jewish Agenda is to undermine credibility of Israel in the U.S."

These charges were denied by Deborah Goldman, a local NJA member and co-chairman of its national task force on the Middle East. "We are first and foremost lovers and supporters of Israel" she said, during a discussion period prior to the Council's vote on June 3. Some Jews who opposed the outcome suggested the Council was using a standard of "loyalty" to the Israeli government in determining eligibility for membership.

The NJA's platform—adopted last November—states that a comprehensive Middle East peace must embody "self-determination for the Palestinian people" and an Israeli withdrawal to borders it maintained prior to the 1967 war.

NJA's 2,500-plus members are currently trying to obtain signatures on a petition which endorses a freeze on the construction of new Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Organizers are hoping that the petitions will generate enough concern within the Jewish community so that it will address the topic at the next meeting of the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations—at which almost all Jewish organizations in the U.S. will be represented. The Washington NJA chapter also sponsored a talk recently on West Bank settlements that was given by Danny Rubenstein, an Israeli journalist.