There’s Less Than Meets the Eye in Gingrich, Hillary Clinton Remarks

By Lucille Barnes

A careful examination shows little evidence that U.S. First Lady Hillary Clinton’s statement that Palestinians need a state of their own was anything other than a spontaneous expression of an opinion she shares with most of the rest of the world. She made the statement May 7 while she was speaking via satellite under U.S. Information Agency auspices with Arab and Israeli teenagers holding a meeting in Villars, Switzerland, as part of a program called “Seeds of Peace” sponsored by a private U.S. foundation.

Asked about whether Palestinian women should participate in political leadership, she responded, “I would hope that women in the Palestinian state, just as throughout the Middle East, would be given the opportunity to demonstrate their talents and make their contributions.” An Israeli teenager later asked whether there might not be consequences “for your declaration a few minutes ago of Palestine” given that “right now this country does not exist.” Mrs. Clinton replied: “Well, I think that it will be in the long-term interests of the Middle East for Palestine to be a state and for it to be a state that is responsible for its citizens’ well-being, a state that has the responsibility for providing education and health care and economic opportunity to its citizens, a state that has to accept the responsibility of governing.”

Noting that such a state was important not only for the Palestinians but for peace in the Middle East, she added that the territory the Palestinians “currently inhabit” and whatever land they gain through peace negotiations “should evolve into a functioning modern state that is responsible for the well-being of its people and is seen on the same footing as any other state in terms of dealing responsibly with all of the issues that state governments must deal with.”

Inadvertent or not, her remarks clearly contributed to the enthusiastic welcome given President Bill Clinton the next day by an Arab American Institute banquet audience of some 800 people. “The applause you hear makes it clear that this is an audience that really loves you,” AAI founder-president James Zogby said in introducing Clinton. Zogby added that “there is a little bit of love here for Hillary Clinton.”

President Clinton responded, “I understand that I am the first sitting president to address an Arab-American audience.” However, he did not attempt to interpret or elaborate on his wife’s remarks, and his own comments remained general. He said the stalemated peace process was “frustrating” to Americans, Israelis and Arabs alike. His assertion that “we can’t impose a solution” undoubtedly disappointed his audience, since the Palestinian Authority has accepted a U.S. plan so far rejected by Israel to get the peace process moving again.

Earlier on the day he spoke, President Clinton’s press spokesman, Mike McCurry, had said the “view expressed personally by the first lady is not the view of the president.” McCurry added, “I expect that she will always continue to express her views, but I doubt that she will venture into the Middle East peace process anytime soon.”

Few elected U.S. officials, or national Jewish leaders, showed similar restraint. “The timing couldn’t have been worse,” said American Jewish Committee executive director David Harris. “If Israelis conclude that Hillary Clinton is a stalking horse for the administration, in sort of testing the water on this issue, then it’s going to undermine their confidence in the American role.”

Said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, “It is impossible to believe in such a critical week, when the president is trying to get Bibi to come to Washington and accept the [U.S. plan], that the first lady would address such a subject without checking with White House experts.”

New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, with a history not only of pandering to Jewish voters but also of insulting Yasser Arafat during a previous visit to the United Nations by the Palestinian president, called Mrs. Clinton’s remarks a possible “Freudian slip” that reflected her husband’s foreign policy. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that they were a very big mistake, but they are somewhat an outgrowth of the approach that the Clinton administration has taken, which is part of the romanticizing of Yasser Arafat,” the Republican mayor said.

Running neck and neck with the New York mayor in the pandering sweepstakes during May was Republican speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who seems to have a tin ear when it comes to personal popularity, and to be arithmetically challenged when it comes to ethnic or religious voting blocs. Traditionally about half of Democratic Party financial contributions come from Jewish donors, and for as long as there have been exit polls much of “the Jewish vote” has gone to Democratic candidates—from a high of about 88 percent for Clinton’s second term to a low of 65 to 70 percent for President Jimmy Carter when he ran for re-election in 1980.

Yet, ignoring the existence in the U.S. of 6 to 8 million Muslim Americans in such key electoral states as California, New Jersey, Michigan and Illinois, and another 1.5 to 2 million Christian Arab Americans, none with established party preferences, Gingrich and one or two other southern Republicans such as Sen. Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi and Sen. Connie Mack of Florida (all three of whom have in their districts large numbers of Christian fundamentalists who tend to be soft on Israel and ignore Israeli persecution of Palestinian Christians and Muslims) seem to have set out to antagonize Arab Americans, apparently in hopes of attracting large pro-Israel donations to their personal campaign funds, regardless of the effect on the fortunes of the Republican Party as a whole.

Early in May, Gingrich accused the Clinton administration of seeking to “blackmail” Israel “on behalf of Yasser Arafat.” This prompted praise from Morris Amitay, a former hard-line director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), who now heads a pro-Israel political action committee, that “Gingrich...has been the most pro-Israel speaker since I’ve been here.”

Pro-Israel journalists went further, comparing Gingrich to Rep. Gerald Weller (IL), co-chairman of the House Republican Israel Caucus, and former pro-Israel House Republicans Jack Kemp (NY), Vin Weber (MN) and Bill Paxon (NY), all of whom ignored reputations for fiscal conservatism to go all-out to support ever-increasing U.S. foreign aid to tiny Israel, which for more than a generation has been by far the largest recipient of American foreign aid.

Gingrich, whose wife has been an employee of an Israeli-American company selling (on commission) to U.S. companies sites in a proposed Israeli duty-free zone (Gingrich’s office refuses to confirm her salary, commissions, or even the fact of her employment), and whose chief of staff is Arne Christenson, a former AIPAC legislative director who once lived on a kibbutz in Israel, then inadvertently reminded voters of the definition of “McCarthyism,” named after the late Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, also a Republican, a discredited political smear artist of the 1950s whose specialty was witch hunts for communist sympathizers—especially in the U.S. government and in the film industry.

Gingrich referred in Washington to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as “an agent for the Palestinians,” and subsequently said in a May 26 speech before the Israeli Knesset that the U.S. Congress supports Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s reasons for rejecting the U.S. plan for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. Later, according to published reports, Gingrich went even further in a private meeting in Netanyahu’s office, urging the Israeli prime minister to defy the U.S. peace plan.

Asked to comment on the latter report, State Department Spokesman James Rubin said, “If true, those would be rather stunning comments that would undermine the efforts we’re trying to make to advance America’s national interest.” He added, however, that the Clinton administration had been unable to verify the report.

Commenting on Gingrich’s remarks concerning Albright, White House spokesman Mike McCurry said, “His suggestion that the secretary of state is loyal to anyone but the people of the United States is offensive—and highly offensive. I think it’s unfortunate that the speaker, in a range of matters related to foreign policy, has injected a high degree of partisanship into his comments.”

On the same subject, Rubin said Albright was stunned by Gingrich’s remarks. “She is an agent for the American people, and any suggestion that’s she’s an agent for anyone else is extremely provocative, unjustified and outrageous.”

Lewis Roth, a spokesman for Americans for Peace Now, a U.S. affiliate of the Israeli peace group, said Gingrich should not have made his comments to a foreign audience. “There is a very good reason why the United States has only one State Department.”

That view was not shared by Morton Klein, a figure on the far-right fringe of the U.S. Jewish community who is president of the extremist Zionist Organization of America. Klein commended Gingrich, saying, “Clinton should not be demanding that Israel follow the advice of the policy wonks ensconced in the State Department instead of experienced Israeli generals who know far more clearly what Israel’s needs are”

In a June 2 column headlined “Brainless in Gaza,” New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman said Gingrich’s “utterly and ridiculously over-the-top...trip to Israel...was to pandering what a triple lutz is to ice skating.” Explained Friedman, “Mr. Gingrich’s pathetic performance was typical of this moment, when the illusion is widespread that the peace process is just about domestic U.S. politics, and who can mobilize Congress and the Jews the best.”

Commenting on Netanyahu’s wrecking of the peace process, Friedman wrote in the same column, “Though the U.S. plan protects Israel’s security needs, it does not satisfy every fantasy of every extremist in Bibi’s Cabinet. Therefore, Mr. Netanyahu has to choose: Go with the U.S. and Palestinians, and advance the process but lose part of his coalition, or hold his whole coalition and lose the process.”

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government took a formal step toward securing the release of former U.S. Navy counter-intelligence agent Jonathan Jay Pollard, serving a life term for spying on the U.S. on behalf of Israel, by admitting formally in May, after years of denials, that Pollard “acted as an Israeli agent handled by those serving as senior officials of the Bureau for Scientific Relations.” The move came 13 years after Pollard and his former wife were denied sanctuary in the Israeli Embassy in Washington, and followed formal visits to Pollard by Israeli cabinet ministers in a federal prison in North Carolina earlier this year during which he complied with another U.S. government requirement by expressing “profound sorrow and remorse” for passing thousands of classified U.S. documents to Israel. Earlier Israel granted Pollard Israeli citizenship.

In Israel, Mordechai Vanunu, 42, who was kidnapped by Israeli Mossad agents in Rome and sentenced to 18 years in solitary confinement in Israel on charges that he gave photographs of the interior of Israel’s nuclear weapons plant in Dimona to the Sunday Times of London, was denied a request for parole on grounds that he still posed a danger to Israel’s state security.

Abdul Hakim Murad, 30, a commercial pilot who was born in Kuwait and lived in Pakistan, was condemned in New York in May to a life sentence without parole plus 60 years for plotting with Ramzi Ahmed Yousef to blow up 11 U.S. airliners and murder some 4,000 passengers returning to the U.S. from the Far East. Although the plot against the U.S. jets failed, Yousef did succeed in placing a bomb on a Philippine Airlines flight from Manila to Tokyo on Dec. 11, 1994, which exploded under the seat of a Japanese passenger, killing him and injuring 10 other people. Prosecutors charged that Yousef recruited Murad and another co-defendant, Wali Khan Amin Shah, who has not yet been sentenced. The plot was detected when a bomb Yousef was mixing set off acrid smoke and attracted police to an apartment Yousef and Murad shared in the Philippines. Yousef has been separately convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, for masterminding the World Trade Center bombing in which six people were killed in New York in 1993.

Lebanese Ambassador to the United States Mohammad Chatah told participants in the annual conference of the Arab American Institute in Washington, DC in May that “if the Israeli government wants to extricate itself from southern Lebanon, it can do so without further delay.” He added that “the fact of the matter is that our strong desire to see Israeli troops out of south Lebanon is only matched by our doubts about the new Lebanon pitch we hear from [Israel’s] Likud government...If we sound skeptical about the motives of Netanyahu, that is because we are.” Chatah said that Israel’s desire to incorporate “Israel’s proxy militia, the South Lebanese Army, into security arrangements to be negotiated between Lebanon and Israel...and other conditions...as the Israeli government knows very well are simply unacceptable to Lebanon.”

Rep. Cynthia McKinney, an African-American congresswoman, received a White House apology for the second time since 1996 because of “disparate treatment” she said she received while visiting the White House. In the most recent incident the Georgia Democrat said she and two Pakistani-American constituents, Haji Agad, and his daughter, Henna, were treated rudely after they accepted invitations to attend welcoming ceremonies for Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

Blame Monica Lewinsky. Everyone else does. When Los Angeles Times writer and Iran expert Robin Wright asked Iranian Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Ayatollah Mohajerani in a May interview about a law pending in his country’s parliament banning publication of photos of women without full hijab covering, Mohajerani replied that “our problem started with Mr. Clinton’s girlfriends. Pictures of them that ran in an Iranian tabloid were the root of the idea that came up in parliament. There were color pictures of Monica and the other two. Mr. Clinton, in addition to creating problems for his society, is creating problems for our society too.”

Mohajerani was not so quick to assign blame, however, for the beating of popular Iranian religious philosopher Abdel Karim Soroush, who was beaten when he tried to lecture before a university audience. “We need time to make these groups understand that their violent actions will not be useful or have positive results,” Mohajerani responded.

Asked by Wright whether “there is any prospect of resolution on the death sentence pronounced in 1989 by [Ayatollah] Khomeini” on Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, Mohajerani answered: “Yes, there is one way: for you to forget it. Nobody from our side will carry out this death sentence. You Americans and Europeans, you should not make so much noise about him.”

Rushdie spoke for himself in a surprise appearance at a Berlin conference on persecuted writers in May where he criticized the European Union for being “hypocritical” with a soft policy toward Iran but a hard-line stance toward Iraq.

It’s not so clear how Iranian editors might apply the law in the case of photographs of the Israeli transsexual who began life as a man, Yaron Cohen, but who changed gender four years ago and, as Dana International,” went on to win, in London, this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, the World Cup of pop music whose annual television gala draws audiences in the millions, with a song in Hebrew called “Diva.” It’s customary for the winner’s country to host the next year’s event, but in this case things seem murky. Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, a Likud party member, said his city would host the event. Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Haim Miller, an Orthodox Jew, called it “a shame and an embarrassment” and added, “I promise you Eurovision won’t take place in Jerusalem...Let it stay in the land of the goys (Gentiles).”

Christians in Pakistan gathered to mourn after a leading Catholic bishop, the Rev. John Joseph, took his own life in the courthouse where a Pakistani Christian, Ayub Massih, had been convicted of blasphemy against Islam. After the bishop’s death, Massih’s death sentence, like the death sentences of other Pakistanis previously convicted under the same law, which goes back to the military dictatorship of the late Gen. Zia ul-Haq, was commuted.

A Turkish court ordered former Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan to stand trial on charges of insulting the judiciary. Erbakan stepped down last year to avert a military takeover of his democratically elected government.

Former Kurdish guerrilla leader Semdin Sakik said in April in a Turkish prison where he had been held since his capture in northern Iraq earlier in the month, that Kurdish revolutionaries were responsible for the unsolved assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme on a Stockholm street in 1986. Sakik said the Kurdish guerrillas feared Palme was about to declare them a terrorist group and forbid them from using Sweden as a base for recruiting and information activities. Because the statements by Sakik, who had defected from the Kurdish group before his capture, were made from a Turkish prison, Swedish officials said there was “a fair amount of skepticism” about the report.

Israel paid $2 million in bail on behalf of a still unnamed Mossad agent caught by Swiss authorities trying to bug telephone wires in an apartment building in a suburb of Bern, the Swiss capital, last February. The agent was one of five Israelis caught by Swiss authorities, but the others were released without charges.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was reported to have held secret discussions with his Labor party opponents about the possibility of early elections this fall, Israel radio reported. Analysts said the early elections would be a strategy to avoid alienating the Clinton administration, whose pressure to yield 13 percent of the West Bank he had been resisting.

Suspicion fell on Russian neo-Nazis for a bomb explosion that injured two people and heavily damaged a Moscow synagogue in mid-May. Russian communists attributed the blast to popular anger over the selection by Russian President Boris Yeltsin of 39-year-old Sergei Kiriyenko, who is half Jewish, as his prime minister, and the naming of several Jews to Kiriyenko’s government.

Lucille Barnes covers Washington, DC for U.S. and Middle East publications.