Frank Maria

By Andrew I. Killgore

In the US foreign service, career officers are on a first-name basis. Between 3,000 and 4,000 officers are Bill, Joe, Bob, Norm and now Mary, Sally or Barbara. Exceptions are ambassadors, who from their first such appointment become Mr. or Madame Ambassador, even after they leave the position which earned them the title. This "first name club" was borrowed long ago from the British, whose officers overwhelmingly were alumni of such elitist citadels as Oxford and Cambridge Universities.

There is another very special club, both inside and outside America's foreign service, made up of "Middle East hands." These people who, for one reason or another, have become and remained involved with that fascinating part of the world. Foreign service "Arabists," those with the drive and perseverence to learn a challenging language and the intellectual acumen to study the culture associated with it, certainly are part of that club.

So are American professors, preachers, military officers, authors, scientists, technicians and businessmen who have functioned successfully and knowledgeably within and between the two cultures. Deep inside this group is a tiny club whose members are so well known among other Middle East hands that reference to Elmer, Al or Frank produces instant recognition.

Elmer is Dr. (Rabbi) Elmer Berger, lecturer, author, and intellectual pioneer who for five decades has argued convincingly and on the highest moral plane that Judaism is a universal religion rather than the narrow tribalism within which political Zionism has tried to confine it.

Al is Dr. Alfred Lilienthal, journalist, lecturer and prolific author (What Price Israel?, The Other Side of the Coin, Israel's Flag is Not Mine, The Zionist Connection) for 45 years, whose inextinguishable outrage at the counterfeit Israeli history invented by Zionists led to his creation of a uniquely pejorative term for it: "mythinformation."

Frank is Francis Maria, who has labored just as long as his aforementioned colleagues in this tiny club, but in different vineyards. He has served alternately as conscience and scold at the state and national levels in church affairs and inside such civic and political organizations as the American Legion and the Republican Party. His goal has been to persuade members to overcome the sense of shock over unspeakable Nazi crimes against European Jews that has kept otherwise concerned people in the United States from acting like Christians or Americans in matters affecting the Palestinians.

Frank Maria was born into the Antiochian Orthodox Church of his Syrian parents, but raised and educated as a Methodist in Lowell, Massachusetts. As a teenager, he taught Sunday school and as an adult he coached successful athletic teams and directed the personnel department of a large manufacturing company. Never married, his life has been defined largely by the church.

Everything Frank says and writes betokens his love for the Methodist church and his affection for his original mentors. Gradually, however, he has felt pulled back to his Antiochian roots. Perhaps he looked back to his mother's birthplace in Syria near a village where Aramaic, the language of Jesus, still is the everyday tongue. Or perhaps it was the proud heritage of Antioch where, so the Bible says, followers of Jesus were first called Christians.

Dominant, however, was his unarticulated unhappiness with the guilt-laden evasions of mainline American churches on the touchy questions aroused by the 20th-century migration of European Jews to the Middle East. So Frank Maria, too, migrated back to the Antiochian church, and eventually to representing that church on the National Council of Churches.

There, quietly but with unrelenting persistence, he nudged the establishment on Middle East-related issues. When the head of the council was asked some years ago what accounted for the unaccustomed shaking and stirring inside that organization he replied, "Oh, you're talking about Frank Maria. You know, he's a Methodist in disguise."

As an active leader of his church, the New Hampshire state Republican organization, and the American Legion, Frank Maria writes letters to everybody: his own representatives and members of key House and Senate committees, the president of the United States, and, of course, former New Hampshire governor and current White House chief of staff John Sununu.

Every year since George Bush entered the White House, Frank has dispatched a long letter from "Pumpkin Hill, " his retirement home in Warner, New Hampshire, urging the president to find real peace in the Middle East by bringing justice to the Arabs. In always measured terms he recommends that the president stick to American ideals and make good on America's stated policy of land-for-peace to settle the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Frank Maria was particularly distressed by the US media's seeming exultation over deadly Israeli military victories in the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967. He complained in letters and articles at the time that photos of Arabs who had died merely defending their own lands against attack in Sinai and the Golan Heights reminded him of friends and relatives back in Syria.

Even in those anguished circumstances, however, Frank Maria never abandoned his restrained and measured tones. Emotional confrontation would be out of character for this Syrian-American Yankee.

Now, in his words, "getting along in years," Frank is one of the soft drops of water that has finally worn away granite hard American stones. When he returned from Methodism to Antioch, mainline Christian churches were still wrestling with "guilt" over the Holocaust. American Christian leaders attempted to expiate that guilt by overlooking the present government of Israel's systematic displacement of Muslims and Christians in Israel, and the brutal maltreatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

If all that is changing, as revealed by restatements of their positions by mainstream American churches, and new position papers and resolutions adopted by the civic and political groups in which he has played leadership roles, Frank Maria can truthfully conclude that he had something to do with it. He can also take personal satisfaction in the fact that, increasingly, American Jewish and Muslim leaders share the dais with Christian clerics at church conclaves.

If evidence is scarce that such American exercises in ecumenism have advanced Arab-Jewish understanding in the Middle East, Frank Maria nevertheless has the satisfaction of knowing that he has never stopped trying to set examples in America that will help defuse tensions in the lands of his ancestors.

When Arabs starting coming to the United States in large numbers a century ago, they set out like other groups to establish their families financially, to educate their children and to join the American mainstream. They succeeded, overwhelmingly. As a result, more as individuals than as an ethnic group, they have become local and regional leaders from coast to coast. And, increasingly, they have participated in efforts to realign US policy in the Middle East to conform with traditional US tolerance of diversity and support for fair play and self-determination. Frank Maria was one of the first Arab Americans to plunge into such leadership roles on the non-ethnic, community level.

Today, torn between apprehension and, exultation, he watches the drama in Washington as US policy swings back toward evenhandedness after the generation-long tilt toward Israel, right or wrong, that has played such an obvious role in destabilizing the entire Middle East. As George Bush confronted, and in less than two weeks humbled, the vaunted "Israel lobby," Frank Maria could have congratulated himself by saying, "Well, I've been telling him and his predecessors for years to do exactly that."

Instead of resting on his laurels, however, Frank is writing more letters to members of Congress and, especially, to the president. This time, he's telling the president, you're on exactly the right track. But don't stop now until the comprehensive Middle East peace that has eluded all of your predecessors is firmly in your grasp.

Andrew I. Killgore, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, was US ambassador to the State of Qatar at the time of his retirement from the career foreign service.