Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 1998, pages 60-62

People Watch

Israel’s President Calls for New Elections To Thwart Netanyahu and Save Peace

By Lucille Barnes

Israeli President Ezer Weizman expressed dismay on June 29 at the stalemate in the Middle East peace process and called upon Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to hold early elections. Netanyahu dismissed the idea, saying not he but the Palestinians are responsible for the 16-month impasse in peace talks. His Likud Party allies then criticized Israel’s outspoken president, the country’s most popular public figure, for breaking the unwritten rules of his office by intervening in political matters. In a long television interview responding to that criticism, Weizman pointed out that Netanyanhu had asked him to persuade Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and U.S. mediators to give Israel more time to make progress toward peace. “If [Netanyahu] asks me to do these things that are certainly political, why can’t I recommend that there should be early elections?” Weizmann asked. Journalists reported that Weizman, who revealed that he and the prime minister had not spoken to each other for four weeks, also was miffed that he had tried to enlist support for whatever deal Netanyahu was prepared to make from Jordanian King Hussein and from the Israeli Labor party only to learn later that Netanyahu was not prepared to make any offer at all.

Weizman, who a year ago privately urged U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to “knock heads” to force an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, also criticized the reluctance of U.S. mediators to do so. “The Americans are very, very careful,” he said. “I believe they are too careful.”Then, on July 1, Weizman and Netanyahu agreed in a 70-minute meeting to keep future quarrels private “for the good of the country.” By the end of July, however, Weizman again was calling for early elections.

Responsible Israelis like Weizman may be coming to the conclusion that there will be no peace with any Arab neighbors so long as Netanyahu is Israeli prime minister. But Netanyahu’s American admirers have chosen to blame failure of the peace process not on Netanyahu but rather on America’s First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, because of her casual statements in a televised conversation with Israeli and Palestinian students that the Palestinians should have a state of their own.

USA Today columnist Richard Benedetto wrote that “analysts such as John Bolton,” assistant secretary of state in the administration of President George Bush and now a pro-Israel Middle East specialist with the American Enterprise Institute, “say the first lady’s statement, followed by tougher U.S. rhetoric against Israel, helped set up last Tuesday’s dramatic pro-Palestinian vote in the United Nations.”

Florida businessman Monti Friedkin, whose immediate family has donated more than $650,000 to Democratic political candidates and the Democratic Party since 1994, was among major Democratic donors who had advised Clinton that his pro-Israel reputation would cushion him from a backlash from the American Jewish community if he pressured Netanyahu to be more forthcoming toward peace with the Palestinians. However, when the backlash began even before Clinton had made any such move, Friedkin told The Washington Post, “nobody anticipated Hillary…There are just a lot of people who didn’t want to hear what she said. The fact is she sleeps with the president and is involved in the administration. She went beyond the red line. I think the fallout is worse than I anticipated.”

Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton is enjoying new popularity in the Middle East. Shereceived the 1998 prize of the United Arab Emirates Health Foundation in Geneva in May. The foundation was created through the donation of $1 million by Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, deputy commander of the UAE armed forces, for a special fund administered by the World Health Organization. The prize, consisting of a certificate and a financial award derived from the endowment, rewards persons, institutions or organizations who have made contributions to development extending far beyond the call of normal duty. Previous winners have included the Child Survival Project of Egypt and Dr. Abdul Rahman Abul Aziz Al Swailem of Saudi Arabia in 1995, Dr. Adnan Abelhalim Abbas of Jordan and KhalifaAhmed Al Jaber of Qatar in 1996, and Dr. A.R.A. Al Awadi of Kuwait and Dr.R. Salvatella Agrelo of Uruguay in 1997.

Meanwhile, Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) president Morton A. Klein, who makes the rest of the crazies in Netanyahu’s Amen Corner sound almost sensible, sent out a news release “urging Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to formally reprimand State Department spokesman James Rubin for making a derogatory comment about the Talmud.” According to Klein’s release, at a State Department noon briefing a questioner alleged that Palestinian President Yasser Arafat had failed to change passages in the Palestinian National Covenant calling for the destruction of Israel. The release quoted Rubin as responding: “The State Department’s view, unless I misunderstand it, is that they’ve kind of done it already. I mean, you know, they’ve said they disavow it. I mean, let’s not be so Talmudic about it and try to tear it apart.”

“That was a derogatory reference to the Talmud…and insulting to American Jews,” Klein’s release charged. But it turned out that it wasn’t Rubin who made the reference to “Talmudic” nitpicking. Instead, as the State Department transcript made clear, it was Associated Press State Department correspondent Barry Schweid, who made the reference to “Talmudic” questioning, a trait he might justly have been accused of himself in his earlier years when he conducted himself as the self-appointed dean of pro-Israel political correctness monitors at the State Department briefings he has been attending for more than a generation. Klein apologized to Rubin June 17 for the mistake. According to Washington Post government affairs columnist Al Kamen, Klein also said he had issued a correction and “ did everything I could short of suicide to make it right.”

Rubin probably upset Klein all over again when he announced on July 13 that the U.S. felt it was up to Israel, not the Palestinians, to save the peace process. “Let me make this very clear, “ Rubin said. “The Palestinians have said yes in principle to these ideas. So…the ball is not in the Palestinian court…The ball is in the court of the Israelis to try to work with the Palestinians and work with us to come to a second yes.”

On the same day Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC that Israel already had accepted a Palestinian state by recognizing the Palestinians as a people and the PLO as their sole representative in the Oslo accords.

New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman reported July 11 that Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki of the Center for Palestinian Research in Nablus told him, “Last year only a small percentage of Palestinians were in favor of declaring a Palestinian state, no matter what. Now the number is 57 percent and it will get to 90 percent by May 1999 if there is no agreement.”

Into a lengthy and generally sympathetic word portrait of Leon S. Fuerth, long-time national security adviser to Vice President Al Gore, Washington Post State Department correspondent Thomas W.Lippman inserted an interesting paragraph that is worth reading simply because Fuerth is almost certain to become White House national security adviser if Gore becomes president. It read: “Several colleagues said Fuerth is manic on the subject of security and leaks of information. In one recent conversation with a journalist, under ground rules specifying there would be no direct quotations and no attribution, Fuerth insisted no tape recorder be used, saying, ‘It makes me very nervous.’ He sputtered with anger upon being told that some officials in the State Department believe he is the conduit by which inside information is passed to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and dismissed the allegation as ‘ridiculous.’”

If that made Fuerth “sputter,” we have to wonder what he would have done if he had heard from the same retired U.S. government employees who have asked this writer if Fuerth, a 59-year-old former foreign service officer who, because of his White House position, presumably sees every sensitive document sent for the vice president’s perusal, could possibly be “Mega,” the code name Israel’s Washington, DC Mossad station chief was overheard discussing in an unscrambled telephone conversation with his Mossad superior in Israel. The conversation, probably intercepted by the FBI or by U.S. National Security Agency monitors, indicated that “Mega” was so highly placed that the Israeli government has decreed that he is only to be used for matters of top importance to Israel in order to protect him from detection by U.S. counter-intelligence spy-catchers. Which brings to mind “Mr. X” who, well before Fuerth’s time, was the putative highly placed U.S. government official from whom Israeli intelligence handlers of renegade U.S. naval counterintelligence analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard received descriptions of the thousands of highly classified documents that they then instructed Pollard to steal. Let’s make it clear here that this writer has no idea who “Mega” is or Mr. X was, but presumably no U.S. secrets or U.S. agents overseas will ever be safe until both are exposed either by U.S. counterintelligence work or by pressuring America’s so-called “strategic ally” in the Middle East.

Mordechai Vanunu, who is serving an 18-year prison sentence in Israel for revealing the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons program to a British newspaper, came up for his first parole hearing after serving 11 years in solitary confinement. After two days of meetings a three-member prison parole board announced May 4 that Vanunu remains a security risk and would therefore have to serve the remainder of his sentence.

It’s a matter of more than passing interest that the American-born female Mossad agent, aka “Cindy,” who lured Vanunu from London to Rome, from where he was kidnapped and smuggled in a packing crate to Israel, is said now to be living with her husband, also a Mossad agent, in Orlando, FL. Considering how some of their Mossad colleagues recently tried to poison Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Amman, it doesn’t exactly contribute to peace of mind for critics of Israel in Florida, or in Washington, DC either. (Excuse me while I go check the locks on my windows.)

Obviously America’s “anti-terrorism” act only applies to foreign-born suspects who lead prayers in mosques in nearby Tampa, like Gaza-born Mazen Al-Najjar, who has spent 14 months in a Florida jail without being charged with a crime, and not to American-born Israeli agents known to have been involved in a political kidnapping in Western Europe like “Cindy.”

Before Vanunu’s parole hearing, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter joined other world leaders including Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Mayor Takashi Hiraoka of Hiroshima, Japan, and British physicist Joseph Rotblat, winner of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize, in calling upon Israeli President Ezer Weizman to use his executive powers of clemency to free Vanunu.

Iranian President Mohammed Khatami acknowledged on July 1 that the U.S. is adopting a different tone toward Iran in its public statements, but that it should also demonstrate its good intentions through deeds. “We hope this change of tone is a sign of better understanding by American politicians of the status of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Khatami said.

Nissim Zvili, an Israeli Labor Party Knesset member, has accused Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu of improperly interfering in the trial of Israeli businessman Nahum Manbar, convicted of selling poison gas-making material to Iran. Zvili said July 13 that Netanyahu initiated and held discussions with the presiding judge in which they “spoke about the trial, the process and perhaps other elements.” Israeli media said they could not publish further details of the charge because of a court gag order relating to the closed-door case.

During a private visit to the United States en route to a checkup at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota regarding his previous cancer problem, King Hussein of Jordan met with President Bill Clinton at the White House June 15. (The King then stayed for a time in Minnesota for treatment.) The White House did not release information about the meeting but at the same time the King was in Washington Jordanian Foreign Minister Jawad Anani told an Australian parliamentary delegation visiting Jordan that “the justifications Binyamin Netanyahu gives for shirking the peace process are unacceptable.”

Meanwhile Queen Noor of Jordan opened a July 11 conference of Middle East land mine survivors in Amman by pledging her support to a world-wide campaign against land mines. The 46-year-old American-born wife of King Hussein, who is the daughter of former Pan American Airways chairman and Federal Aviation Agency administrator Najib Halabi, also praised the “courageous humanitarian contribution” made by Britain‘s late Princess Diana, who visited mine victims around the world before her death a year ago.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak flew to Libya July 9 with a team of five physicians to examine Libyan leader Muammer Qaddafi, who broke a hip while exercising in his residence in the mountain town of Beida, traditional summer capital of the Libyan government. Slovenian Ambassador to the United Nations Danilo Turk, who heads the U.N. sanctions committee for Libya, said in New York that the committee had approved the flight for humanitarian reasons. Qaddafi had several other visitors in Beida in the same week, including delegations from 23 African countries who joined the Libyan leader in prayer July 6 on the Prophet’s birthday. While most of the leaders traveled overland from Tunisia, two of the African leaders flew into Libya in defiance of the U.N. flight ban. The two, Idriss Deby of Chad and Ibrahim Bare Mainassara of Niger, appeared with Colonel Qaddafi at a news conference televised from his hospital in Beida.

Pakistani Iftikhar Khan Chaudhry, who apparently was merely seeking asylum in the United States, hired New York attorney Michael Wildes to tell the world on July 1 that Chaudhry was a nuclear scientist who had defected after he attended a meeting on April 25 (before either India or Pakistan had tested five and six nuclear devices, respectively) at which Pakistan’s military high command authorized a pre-emptive nuclear attack on New Delhi within 48 hours. The story attracted sensational media coverage in the U.S. and in India, and might well have set off a nuclear strike by India if it had been believed. Fortunately, Pakistani scientists in the U.S. who were given access to Chaudhry were able to label the story a hoax. “Talking to him, in the first few sentences, it was clear his story was not quite credible, said Dr. Abdul Nayyar, professor of physics at Pakistan’s prestigious Quaid-I-Azam University in Islamabad, who is a visiting research fellow at Princeton University. “He gave either no answers or very wrong answers. He completely bowled out.” Pakistani physicist Zia Mian, a research fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, who interviewed Chaudhry in Urdu, said that “he just had no comprehension.” Professor of public and international affairs at Princeton Frank von Hipple, who helped set up the interviews along with the Federation of Concerned American Scientists, said that “when we got into specifics, it was clear he didn’t know anything about physics or nuclear weapons.” Authorities said later that Chaudhry was an accountant in a bathroom tile factory who did not have even an undergraduate university degree.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic branded as “arrogant” and “insulting” a eulogy for deceased Croatian Defense Minister Gojko Susak by Jacques Klein, the second-ranking U.S. mediator in Bosnia. The harsh words from Izetbegovic, who normally is reserved in public, in contrast to the outspoken Klein, reflected resentment at Klein’s regard for Susak and also for Croatia’s hard-line nationalist President Franjo Tudjman, whom Bosnian Muslims blame for the deaths of thousands of Bosnians in a year-long Croat-Muslim war at a time when the Muslims also were besieged by the Serbian army in Sarajevo and other Bosnian cities.