James Abourezk

When James Abourezk moved to Washington more than a decade ago—first as a congressman and then as the first Arab-American to be elected to the United States Senate—his knowledge of what was going on in he Middle East was modest, to say the least. "It wasn't an issue that anyone talked about very much back home in South Dakota," he explains. Having been brought up by his Lebanese immigrant parents on a Sioux Indian reservation there, he was in fact far more concerned with the welfare of American Indians than he was with the problems of his fellow Arab-Americans or with Middle East affairs.

One year into his Senate term, however, he decided to visit his father's birthplace in Lebanon for the first time, and made a swing through other countries of the Middle East. It was an eye-opener for him. "What I heard there about the problems of the Middle East didn't seem to fit in at all with what I had been hearing in Washington," he says. "I discovered I had been hearing just one side of the story. There was really no debate going on in Congress—because just about everyone had already taken the position that Israel was always in the right, and that was that."

Fighting on Many Fronts

Despite these strong feelings, Senator Abourezk did not become a "one-issue" legislator, however. Until he retired voluntarily after one Senate term in 1978, he was busy on a lot of fronts: trying to reform the laws governing Indians: fighting deregulation of fuel; pushing anti-trust legislation and supporting environmental safeguards, to name just a few. He was also a severe critic of the Vietnam war and a proponent of U.S. recognition of the People's Republic of China. But to many Americans he became best known for his fierce advocacy of a "more even-handed" U.S. government policy on Arab-Israeli problems.

"It was tough going," he says. "The supporters of Israel tried just about everything they could think of to get rid of me. Naturally, they accused me of selling out to the Arabs. You know—if you were pro-Israeli, well, that was a matter of conscience. But if you were pro-Arab, it had to be because you got paid for it."

Senator Abourezk says his decision to retire had nothing to do with such pressures, or with any fear that his views could cost him re-election noting that even the Israeli lobby had not made any such claim. "If they had, I'd still be there," he adds with a chuckle. So why did he retire?

He puts on a straight face. "Lots of personal reasons. But the main thing, I think, was that I just got tired of listening to so many boring speeches."

Senator Abourezk did not retire, though, from the battle to influence government policy and public opinion on the matter of Arabs and Arab-Israeli issues. In May, 1980, he founded the Arab-American Anti -Discrimination Committee (ADC), primarily to combat the unfair stereotyping of Arabs in the media. After the invasion of Lebanon, ADC broadened the scope of its action by playing the major role in organizing demonstrations, marches, press conferences and other public events aimed at protesting the invasion. Asked if the new activities were not a departure from ADC's original stated purposes, Senator Abourezk answers: "It's all really part of the same problem. If Arabs were not portrayed by stereotyping as being less than human, some of the things that the Israelis do to them over there would not be so easily accepted by public opinion here."

ADC's membership now tops 11,000, and Abourezk believes it is making a big impact. "When we started up," he says, "people used to ask us why we did. Now they ask us for our opinion on things. We get an enormous amount of mail and telephone calls."

In the Public Interest

As unpaid chairman of ADC, Senator Abourezk spends about half his time involved with its work—fund-raising, organizing new chapters, giving speeches. He also serves on the board of a number of other "public interest" organizations, such as the National Consumers League and the Rural Housing Coalition, and has kept up his love affair with the Indians. Right now, he says, he is serving as the unpaid chief legal officer for the Navajo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico, while he helps set up a new legal department for the tribe, which has large holdings in coal, oil, uranium and other resources.

As a lawyer, Senator Abourezk keeps up a practice in Washington and in Sioux City, South Dakota. Most of his legal work, he says, does not relate to Middle East issues, but he acknowledges that he does provide advice to some U.S. companies which do business in the Arab world.

Now 51, Senator Abourezk began his career as an engineer, after getting a degree in civil engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines. Later, he worked his way through law school at the University of South Dakota, and practiced law in his home state until 1970. In that year, he became the first Democrat since the landslides of President Roosevelt in the 1930s and 1940s to win South Dakota's Second District Congressional seat, and was elected to the Senate in 1972.

He is married and has three children.