Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1997, Pages 61-63

People Watch

Maryland Murder Case Prompts Threats to Cut U.S. Aid to Israel

By Lucille Barnes

Sol Sheinbein was six years old when his family brought him to the United States in 1950, and Israeli citizenship laws were not passed until 1952. So, according to U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin, that means Sheinbein was never an Israeli citizen. Not so, according to Israeli lawyer Nitzana Darshan Leitner, because Sheinbein's mother took him back in 1955 to Tel Aviv, where he briefly attended primary school before returning to the U.S. for good. Since then, according to Leitner, Sheinbein has visited Israel about 15 times, carrying an Israeli passport and identity card along with a U.S. passport.

All this has become a matter of more than passing significance in U.S.-Israeli relations because Sol Sheinbein is accused of aiding his son, 17-year-old Samuel Sheinbein, to flee the U.S. for Israel after Samuel and a friend from Jewish day school, Aaron B. Needle, 17, murdered and then dismembered and burned the body of a third youth, Alfredo Enrique Tello Jr., in a Maryland suburb of Washington, DC. All three youths apparently had been involved with drugs.

After the Sheinbeins claimed protection in Tel Aviv under a law that bars extradition of Israeli citizens to any foreign country, regardless of the charges against them, in the U.S. capital things began heating up. First, protesters of Latin American origin, as was Tello, whose grandmother came to the U.S. from Costa Rica, appeared outside the Israeli Embassy and the State Department.

As Israeli stonewalling in a simple case of murder just outside the U.S. national capital began to sink in, journalists on a nationally televised talk show asked what the U.S. was going to do about 1998 aid to Israel (all of which normally is turned over by the end of October of the preceding year) if the Israelis didn't send the Sheinbeins back. Responded Rep. Bob Livingston (R-LA), "We haven't signed the check yet."

Asked to elaborate, he said the U.S. might cut aid to Israel by $50 million (which is less than four days' worth). Asked later to comment on that, Rep. Sonny Callahan (R-AL) said the U.S. might withhold the whole $1.2 billion economic aid portion of Israel's more than $3 billion in annual foreign aid. Rejoined Rabbi Jack Moline, president of the Washington, DC Board of Rabbis, the case puts into conflict "two very solid Jewish values," the search for justice and Israel's role as a haven for Jews worldwide. Israel could not automatically return Samuel Sheinbein to the U.S. to face trial for the murder he committed there without setting a "potentially dangerous precedent," Moline explained.

Regardless of how the flap affects U.S. aid to Israel, which has amounted to some $84.8 billion over the years, or $14,630 for every man, woman and child in Israel, it's clear how the Sheinbeins expect things to turn out. After first seeing son Samuel off to Israel, Sol Sheinbein dropped into a Maryland health club to cancel his $30 a month membership before embarking himself.

Israeli President Ezer Weizman, whom most Arabs consider the best of a bad lot, schmoozed his way through some rough patches on a visit to Washington scheduled before but held after the botched Israeli assassination attempt on Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal in Amman. Asked by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs at a National Press Club conference if he thought it made sense for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to appoint personally the Israeli government commission that is going to investigate whether Netanyahu or Mossad chief Danny Yatom should be blamed for the fiasco (which resulted in a swap of quadriplegic and nearly blind Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin,jailed for eight years by Israel, and 70 jailed Hamas supporters in exchange for the two Mossad triggermen in the hands of Jordanian authorities and the rest of the Mossad hit team holed up in Israel's Amman embassy), Weizman replied, "Maybe it doesn't make sense by your standards, but it does by ours."

Asked by Associated Press State Department correspondent Barry Schweid whether he had told Secretary of State Madeleine Albright she would have to "knock heads" (meaning Netanyahu's) during her recent visit to Israel, Weizman said he thought it was "rude" for State Department spokesman James Rubin to have quoted in public remarks from a private conversation. Pressed by Schweid as to whether he meant "it was rude of Rubin to quote you correctly or to quote you incorrectly," the president of Israel asked for the next question.

Throughout, Weizman made a point of engaging in friendly banter with Egyptian and Palestinian correspondents attending the press conference, and the opposite with a Tass correspondent, for whom Weizman listed the kinds of Soviet planes (MiGs, Yaks, Tupelovs) he and fellow Israeli fighter pilots had flown against.

Early in the press conference Weizman also noted that the fighting in Israel's war of independence "began in November 1947," the same month the United Nations voted to partition Palestine. U.S. apologists for Israel generally claim the war broke out on May 15, 1948, the day the British withdrew, Israel proclaimed its independence, and military units from Egypt, Jordan and Iraq crossed the borders into Palestine.

Weizman's statement, however, squares with those of the Arab military commanders, who said they came not to push Jews into the sea, but to stop the rout of Palestinians who were being ejected at gunpoint by Jewish militias from villages deep in the zones the U.N. had awarded to the Palestinians. (Subsequently it turned out that Jordan's Arab Legion had strict orders not to enter any area awarded in the U.N. partition plan to Israel.)

The night before the press conference things had gone a little better for Weizman (who was kicked out of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's Likud cabinet a few years ago for meeting with then-PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat before it was Kosher) at a dinner he hosted at Washington's Capital Hilton Hotel which was attended by Egyptian Ambassador Ahmed Maher Al Sayed and Jordanian Ambassador Marwan Muasher. Weizman told his guests that "the other day [Arafat] called to wish me Shana Tova [happy Jewish New Year]. I don't say we hug and kiss every morning, but these changes are an opening."

Between the main course and dessert, Weizman strolled over to Muasher and said, "I hope the fog will clear." Replied Muasher, who was Jordan's first ambassador to Israel before returning to Washington, where he previously had served as head of the Jordan Information Office, "I hope so too, but it will take some time because the element of trust has been broken."

Lest we forget, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) attended a dedication ceremony for the Living Legacy Institute in Washington, DC in memory of the late "Lubavitcher Rebbe," Menachem Schneerson, at whose urging his American followers used to fly en masse to Israel to vote the Likud ticket during Israeli elections. Speakers included current State Department Assistant SecretaryStuart Eizenstat, a long-time Jewish political activist from Maryland; Vice President Al Gore, whose love for any Israeli political leader knows no bounds, especially in U.S. election years; and, inevitably, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, a certified deplorer of every case of religious or racial persecution in world history except the one involving Palestinians.

Daschle holds the Senate seat once occupied by Arab-American Sen. James Abourezk, for whom Daschle formerly served as legislative assistant. When Abourezk retired, Daschle asked him if he thought Arab-American donors would help Daschle's run for the Senate. "Not as much as the other side would," Abourezk replied bitterly. Daschle obviously is a good listener. While in the Senate he has received $392,630 in donations from pro-Israel political action committees, according to filings by those PACs with the Federal Election Commission.

Delving further into U.S. domestic politics, this summer 100 prominent Jewish executives and potential political donors from Montgomery County, Washington, DC's most affluent Maryland suburb, sent a letter to Democratic Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, who represents the Baltimore area, warning him to stay out of the 1998 Maryland gubernatorial race. The signers said they feared a race by Cardin, who is Jewish, would weaken the re-election campaign of incumbent Democratic Governor Parris Glendening, who is not Jewish but who traditionally has enjoyed strong Jewish support, against likely Republican nominee Ellen R. Sauerbrey. "I would expect that Ben would look for financial support from people in the Jewish community," Rockville lawyer Stanton Gildenhorn told The Washington Post. "This letter would suggest to him that most of the contributions on that list would go to Governor Glendening." Will American Muslims, who actually outnumber American Jews, ever learn how to work together like that, and thereby put themselves on the American political map?

UPI correspondent Helen Thomas, dean of the White House press corps who asks the first or second question at every presidential press conference and brings every session to an end with her "Thank you, Mr. President," has received a six-figure advance to write her second book. The durable Arab-American reporter published her first book, Dateline White House, in 1975, but says it "didn't sell well." Neither will the next one, she predicts, because "there isn't going to be any sex in it." Golly, Helen, if there's no sex there will be no movie contract. So how will we ever be able to hit you up for a donation to the Washington Report?

And who can forget the legendary assassin Abu Nidal, whose real name is Hassan Al Ban'a. He defected in his youth from the PLO and his gang of killers subsequently was said to be working, consecutively and at top wages (which he invested in enterprises behind the former iron curtain), for Saddam Hussain, Hafez Al-Assad and Muammer Qaddafi. Somehow, however, no matter what flag he thought he was serving, his bloody deeds always seemed to further the long-term interests of Israeli extremists. Abu Nidal was said to have been behind the assassinations of moderate PLO figures. Most recently he was believed to have engineered the killing of Sabri al Khalaf (Abu Iyad), Yasser Arafat's deputy in Tunis before the PLO moved to Gaza and became the Palestinian Authority.

This September Palestinian police in Hebron arrested four suspects in what they described as an Abu Nidal-organized plot to kill Yasser Arafat. Few Palestinians believed it. Director Bassam Eid of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group said it sounded like a repeat of the detention in Jericho of Sarih Hussein Mahamid in April 1995, when he crossed the Allenby Bridge from Jordan and was immediately accused of plotting to kill Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon and even fanatical, American-born Rabbi Moshe Levinger of the Kiryat Arba settlement near Hebron. In March 1997, Mahamid wrote to Palestinian Authority Justice Minister Freih Abu Medein saying that "the interrogators swore to me that I am not the one they want, but there is a conspiracy to kill President Arafat and they want me to testify against them, even though I don't know any of them. If I would testify against them, then President Arafat will forgive me." Maybe it's whenever Middle East leaders take a dip in public opinion polls that they discover an "Abu Nidal assassination plot." Stand by, Abu Nidal, for a letter from Binyamin Netanyahu.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu spokesman David Bar Ilan has told editor Gary Rosenblatt of The Jewish Week of New York that the Palestinians had better lower their expectations. They assumed, he said, from their dealings with Netanyahu's Labor predecessors that the Oslo accords would result in an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and from half of Jerusalem. However, "these negotiations will only have a happy ending," Bar Ilan said, if the Palestinians view Oslo in a new light and "accept what they get after hard bargaining" with Netanyahu.

Then, Bar Ilan complained to Rosenblatt that, "There is a refusal to believe that this prime minister wants peace, and it is difficult to overcome that impression." For that he blamed the "totally irresponsible" Israeli media. It's a good thing he straightened us all out on that, or we might have gone on being irresponsible too.

In the fall of 1990 U.S. President George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker appointed career U.S. foreign service officer and veteran Arabist Edward "Skip" Gnehm as U.S. ambassador to Kuwait's government-in-exile, then headquartered in Taif, Saudi Arabia. In 1991, only hours after coalition forces serving under Saudi and U.S. commanders chased Iraqi occupation forces out of Kuwait, Gnehm descended from a military helicopter to reopen the U.S. Embassy there.

Therefore, after Gnehm, whose name is Dutch, not Arabic, as most Middle Easterners assume, completed his tour in Kuwait and was proposed as the next U.S. envoy to Saudi Arabia, no one was more surprised than Clinton administration Secretary of State Warren Christopher when the Saudi government said it would prefer a political appointee, preferably a friend of Bill Clinton. Gnehm therefore was shunted off to New York to work as a top assistant to the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a Clinton campaign worker from academia named Madeleine Albright.

Just how successful that four-year collaboration turned out to be was demonstrated by Clinton's appointment of Albright as his second-term secretary of state. She, in turn, appointed Gnehm foreign service director general, the State Department's director of personnel, at a ceremony attended by his wife, two children, and a few hundred of his closest friends from previous assignments in Vietnam, Nepal, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

Whether the outspoken secretary of state, who played a major role in bringing about Clinton administration intervention to support the Muslim-led multi-sectarian government of Bosnia, can save the peace process depends less upon her own diplomatic skills than upon whether Clinton decides to ignore the leaders of major American Jewish organizations who strongly support Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's deliberate defiance of the Oslo accords.

However, in the unlikely event that Clinton does authorize Albright to do whatever she has to do to hold Netanyahu to the agreements signed by his two predecessors as Israeli prime minister, Shimon Peres and the late Yitzhak Rabin, it won't hurt to have one lone Arabist in whom she has great confidence among the solidly Jewish assistant secretaries in charge of all six State Department regional bureaus—which are the places where day-to-day U.S. foreign policy is conducted.

By coincidence, just a week after her return from the Middle East and only four days after Albright presided over the ceremony elevating Gnehm, her former husband, Cox newspapers heir and former Moscow correspondent Joseph Albright, and his second wife and fellow correspondent, Marcia Kunstel, themselves presided over a Washington, DC party celebrating the release of their new book: Bombshell: the Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy. It's about Ted Hall who, as an 18-year-old physics genius, was hired from the graduating class at Harvard University in 1944 to work in New Mexico on America's top-secret World War II atomic bomb project. While there he managed to slip the bomb's major technical secrets to Soviet agents independently of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (who later were executed), Mrs. Rosenberg's brother, David Greenglass, who turned state's evidence, and Klaus Fuchs, who escaped to East Germany.

After he was drafted into the army as a private while working on the bomb in New Mexico, Hall aggravated his military superiors by discarding his army cap and wearing a yarmulke in the atomic bomb laboratories. But he got away with it, and also continued his clandestine meetings with Soviet couriers Saville Sax, his Harvard roommate, and Lona Petka Cohen, both of whom made trips to New Mexico to pick up the technical drawings and explanations Hall provided.

While his Soviet code name was "Mlad," meaning "youth," in fact his correct name turned up in a November 1944 Soviet diplomatic cable intercepted by the U.S. National Security Agency. However, the FBI chose not to arrest and prosecute him because it did not want to reveal that the U.S. had broken Soviet diplomatic codes.

Hall, who now is 71, and his wife, Joan, left the U.S. in 1962 when he was offered a position at Cambridge University in England, where they have lived ever since. It was there that the Halls were interviewed for many hours by the Albrights to gather material for their book.

In case you were wondering, Joseph Albright did invite first wife Madeleine to the Sept. 23 book party. She thanked him for the invitation but said she would be in New York with President Clinton during the opening week of the U.N. General Assembly. Joseph Albright also had a role in U.S. media confusion over Madeleine Albright's religion earlier this year.

Madeleine Albright's parents, Czech diplomat Joseph Korbel and his wife, were themselves born to Jewish parents and therefore had to flee after Nazi troops occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938. (All three of Madeleine Albright's then-living grandparents died in Nazi concentration camps.) Later Madeleine's parents converted to Catholicism, presumably to avoid further persecution as Czechoslovakia went from German occupation to Soviet satellite, and they took refuge in the United States. Daughter Madeleine was raised a Catholic but became an Episcopalian after she married Joseph Albright.

In mid-September, Washington attention shifted from the secretary of state's adventures in the Middle East to Egypt-raised Lebanese American Roger Tamraz's adventures in Washington, Tamraz, who had donated some $300,000 to the 1996 Clinton presidential campaign, provided some of the bluntest and most colorful testimony in the ongoing congressional investigations into corruption in the U.S. campaign finance system, and possible violations of the law by both President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.

Tamraz, who allegedly used the Kuwait and Doha branches of Lebanon's Intrabank to illegally divert funds belonging to Gulf investors, got into the White House for five different social occasions, despite a report by U.S. National Security Council aide Sheila Heslin that he should be denied access to the president.

Tamraz was seeking both U.S. and Russian support for exclusive rights (which he planned to sell to major petroleum companies) to a pipeline route to transport Azerbaijan's share of Caspian Sea petroleum to Western markets. Tamraz apparently used recommendations by an undercover U.S. intelligence official referred to in declassified government documents only as "Bob of CIA" to try to get around Heslin's objections.

According to "Bob's" lawyer, former Justice Department official Victoria Toensing, the CIA official informed Heslin that Tamraz had an "occasional" relationship, still classified, with the U.S. intelligence agency. Since Tamraz still is wanted on criminal charges in Lebanon, from which he escaped by ship, allegedly with the help of Druze leader Walid Jumblat, more information about that CIA "relationship" may surface as the U.S. scandal expands.