Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1998, pages 31-32

People Watch

Negotiations End at Wye, But Hawks and Doves Battle on

By Lucille Barnes

In verbally blasting the Wye River agreement, outgoing Lebanese President Elias Hrawi skewered both Palestinians and Israelis. “Save the peace from Israeli intentions and save Arab rights from the hands of some Arab negotiators,” Hrawi, a Maronite Christian, said in a speech to Arab engineers in Beirut. Noting that some 350,000 Palestinian refugees have lived for more than half a century in Lebanon, where they fled in 1948 when Israelis seized their homes in northern Palestine, Hrawi charged that “they destroyed our state, forcing us to work for years to rebuild it.” Now, he complained, “they accept a ‘statelet’ in compensation without concern for south Lebanon, invaded by Israel because of them, nor for the Golan, lost by Syria because of its commitment to Arab rights and dignity...In Lebanon we reject any type of settlement while they don’t even raise their little finger against the Israeli settlements built in the heart of their remaining territory.”

For Americans who were following the peace talks at Wye Plantation in Maryland, statements by current Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Zalman Shoval may have seemed like déjà vu all over again. Shoval, who completed an ambassadorial assignment in Washington in 1993 after the fall of Yitzhak Shamir’s previous Likud government, returned in mid-1998 to resume the post under Binyamin Netanyahu’s current Likud government. He spent the interval out of government but not out of politics, since he was a backer of Netanyahu’s campaign to head the Likud Party, and of Netanyahu’s successful 1996 campaign for election as prime minister. Shoval revealed to The Washington Post that although Netanyahu campaigned against the land-for-peace formula upon which the Oslo accords were based, Shoval advised him against renouncing the agreement “not as a matter of principle but as a matter of political wisdom.” Reporting the conversation with Shoval, Post diplomatic reporter Nora Boustany described him as “a Meister at hasbara—Hebrew for propaganda.” This will beuseful to him as he pursues the twin goals he described to the Post’s Arab-American diplomatic columnist of “making sure there is good understanding between Israel and the U.S. and of repairing divisions over Israel in the U.S. Jewish community.”

Another returning diplomat who attracted brief U.S. media attention was Sudanese Ambassador to the U.S. Mahdi Ibrahim Mohammed, who was in Sudan when the U.S. destroyed the El Shifa pharmaceutical factory in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum with cruise missiles on Aug. 20. To protest the attack, the Sudanese government withdrew its diplomats from Washington. Ambassador Mohammed returned to pack up, but before leaving for good he held a press conference at the National Press Club to protest that U.S. charges the plant was producing a precursor chemical for poison gas were false, and challenge the U.S. to produce evidence to the contrary. As everyone knows by now, the U.S. didn’t produce the evidence, and also voted against empowering a U.N.-sponsored mission to investigate the facts. While the U.S. media wonder why, we hope the ambassador won’t wait for the administration of President Bill Clinton to apologize, or to investigate why when National Security Adviser Samuel Berger presented the case for bombing to the president, he not only neglected to include contrary opinions by U.S. officials, but even failed to invite officials who were likely to dissent to the meeting at which the evidence was considered. Persons present said Berger conducted himself like the corporate lawyer he used to be, mustering all the evidence that supported the case for bombing, and rejecting any evidence to the contrary. Did he think he was representing Americans who believe Third World countries shouldn’t be allowed to manufacture their own medicines?

Domestically, Maher Hathout, prayer leader for the Islamic Center of Southern California in Los Angeles, was one of the first American leaders to condemn “retaliatory” U.S. missile attacks in both Sudan and Afghanistan. On Aug. 21, one day after the attacks, Hathout called them “hate crimes” and “terrorism,” according to the Los Angeles Times, and added that they were “illegal, immoral, inhuman, unacceptable, stupid and un-American” and would make Muslims in the U.S. targets of the “deranged, the hypnotized, the uneducated and the gullible” who mistakenly believe that Islam supports terrorism. Among others who condemned the attacks on the same day were officials of the National Council of Churches; the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group; and Pax Christi, USA, a Roman Catholic peace group.

For anyone who thought the last word was contained in news reports from London and New York that the Iranian government was lifting its reward posted for the killing of Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, “moderate” Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi set things straight Oct. 2 upon his return from the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York. “In my meeting with the British Foreign Secretary [Robin Cook]about the apostate Salman Rushdie, I did not take any new stance,” Kharazi said. “My position was exactly what officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran had repeatedly underscored.” In case that isn’t perfectly clear, the Iranian News Agency reported that in a meeting with Iranian groups in Britain, Iranian chargé d’affaires Gholamreza Ansare described reports about a Cook-Kharrazi agreement as “misleading.” He explained that “the fatwa was not essentially raised in negotiations between Kharrazi and the British foreign secretary for it was obvious that it could not be rescinded.”

Under the long shadow of nuclear weapons in both India and Pakistan, Americans are poking around in Kashmir again. This time maybe they’ll be more successful in bringing about a peaceful settlement than they have been in the Middle East, since the Indian lobby isn’t quite so vicious as the Israel lobby (though they’re now working together, in case you’ve been frozen into a Himalayan glacier for a few years and hadn’t noticed). U.S. Ambassador to India Richard Celeste made a two-day tour of Kashmir in late October and then said the dispute must be settled “in a way that respects the will of the people.” Exactly. Maybe this time the U.S. means it, because during his visit Celeste met Muslim separatist leader Shabir Shah, who was imprisoned by India for 20 years, as well India’s chief minister for Kashmir, Farooq Abdullah.

Very well-heeled Slim Fast diet aid founder Daniel Abraham is also the co-chairman, with former Utah congressman Wayne Owens, who once was high on the list of pro-Israel PAC beneficiaries, of the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation. They were regular visitors to Arab countries in the post-Oslo years, where they didn’t hesitate to lean on U.S. ambassadors to get them appointments with Arab dignitaries. They even gave a very well-attended reception recently in Washington’s top-of-the-line Willard Hotel for Palestinian President Yasser Arafat during a recent visit. However, if between now and next May the Wye agreement goes pffft, like Oslo before it, there may be 21 fewer Arab capitals on the Middle East peace circuit.

But Danny Abraham has other friends. In October he hosted a fund-raiser in Palm Beach, FL that netted $500,000 for the Democratic Party. President Clinton was supposed to attend but instead Vice President Al Gore showed up not only for the fund-raiser, but for a Simchat Torah service beforehand at Palm Beach’s Conservative Temple Emmanuel. There Gore joined the congregation for a tradition that, according to the Washington Jewish Week, involved balancing a shot glass of vodka in his left hand and a pickle and piece of pumpernickel in his right hand. “What a way to start a day,” Gore commented. “A shot of vodka taken in a synagogue.” It probably beats lunch in a California Buddhist Temple with all those tattle tale nuns pressing century notes into his hands.

Sometimes the media may give AIPAC too much credit for its lobbying on behalf of Israel. At least American Jewish Committee executive director David Harris seems to think so. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that during the annual U.N. General Assembly session this fall the AJC met with the prime minister of India and foreign ministers from 48 other countries in New York. Harris was anything but subtle in explaining what it was all about. “Countries, in meeting with us, feel that they are creating a conduit or vehicle for reaching” the U.S. government, he said.

Adding that “garnering greater U.N. support for Israel was a common denominator in all of the AJ Committee’s meetings,” the JTA explained that “some countries—the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus, for example—wanted the meetings because of what they perceive as the power of the Jewish community in lobbying Washington.”

It’s not a bad deal: Member nations who support Israel at the United Nations get paid in U.S. aid. However, since the only countries that seem to vote with the U.S. on Israeli matters are the Marshall Islands and Micronesia, which probably have their own lobbyists in Washington, maybe all the others have to do to earn U.S. aid is abstain from votes against Israel.

There was Israeli and Jewish lobbying on both sides of the issues being discussed at the Wye Plantation in October. Mark Indor, chairman of Israel’s Terror Victims Association and four other members set up camp with leaders of Jewish settler groups to, in Indor’s words, keep “on the tail” of Netanyahu to stand up to U.S. and Palestinian pressure. Netanyahu ignored U.S. requests to avoid contacts with pressure groups and met with the group at Wye.

The Israeli prime minister also ignored U.S. suggestions that participants in the negotiations leave spouses at home. Sara Netanyahu arrived with her husband, not to mention her hairdresser, who was allowed onto the grounds only after negotiations at the highest level. Washington Post columnists Ann Gerhart and Annie Groer noted that a joke making the rounds of delegates was that if the hairdresser had been a man, he could have slipped in as part of a minyan, the 10-man quorum needed for Orthodox Jewish services. (We fear they meant the other nine would come from among the U.S. negotiators, since most of Netanyahu’s crowd, like most Israelis, are secular Jews.)

Anyway, it may have been Sara Netanyahu’s packed suitcases that made such an impressive display on the Wye Conference Center lawn when the prime minister made the first of two threats to leave the conference without reaching an agreement. (We’re just kidding. In fact, Netanyahu made the Israeli journalists accompanying him pack their suitcases to be part of the bluff, and they then disappeared, supposedly on their way to the airport. One later told the Washington Report, however, that they knew all along they weren’t really leaving.)

Also, it definitely was not Sara Netanyahu’s long black limousine that was pictured on the front page of the Easton Maryland Star Democrat parked outside the Easton Wal-Mart store. Out of it popped Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai, guarded by secret service agents (his, ours, who can tell?—They all wear black with little brass things in their buttonholes, cellular phones in their hip pockets and bulging shoulder holsters just inside their jackets). Mordechai stopped there to buy a winter coat, some shirts and, who knows, maybe a present for the boss, Netanyahu, who celebrated his 49th birthday during the negotiations.

Nor were all the Jewish lobbyists at the peace negotiations hawks. On the other side was a publication handed out by founder and policy director Mark Rosenblum of Americans for Peace Now to reporters who went into the White House for the opening of the talks before participants reassembled at Wye Plantation. Americans for Peace Now spokesman Lewis Roth said his group’s publication, which was issued in July, shows there are Israelis who have been personally affected by terrorism and as a result support the peace negotiations instead of opposing them. Among them is Margalit Gordon, who said she didn’t think much about the peace process at all until her 24-year-old daughter, Tali, who supported it, was killed in a suicide attack at Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Center in 1996. “Now I believe in and support the peace process,” she said, according to the Washington Jewish Week. “For me, this has been a very difficult and painful lesson to learn.”

The Peace Now brochure also quotes Dalia Rabin-Pelossof, daughter of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who said: “American Jews must understand that we have an emergency here in Israel, and that although it may not appear to be the case, the majority of people in Israel do believe in peace.”

Meanwhile, back in Israel, Netanyahu is considering some official budget support for a plan suggested to him by two Jewish philanthropists, Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt, for a “birthright project” to fund a trip to Israel for every Diaspora Jew between the ages of 15 and 16. Netanyahu’s adviser for Diaspora affairs, Bobby Brown, said “what we’re talking about is really an earthquake of change.” Forward, a New York Jewish weekly, said that the importance of such projects “lies in the precedent they set at a time when there is a growing awareness that Israel is becoming a rich country while the American Jewish community is facing a crisis of identity and dwindling numbers.”

There also is Israeli lobbying against Jewish lobbying. Yossi Beilin, a likely foreign minister in any future Israeli Labor Party government, said in an Aug. 4 interview in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s Washington, DC lobby, often serves as an obstacle to U.S.-Israeli relations. In a follow-up Aug. 6 interview with Defense News, a U.S. publication, Beilin said, “AIPAC sees itself as the super-embassy of Israel, and on many issues AIPAC doesn’t see eye-to-eye with the government of Israel.”

He explained, “It’s one thing to work on Capitol Hill. It’s another thing to work the White House, State Department, Department of Defense and other agencies, which in my mind can be construed as meddling.” As an example he cited the Iran Missile Proliferation Sanctions Act, passed by Congress but vetoed by President Clinton. “These matters often are best resolved through quiet government-to-government channels...rather than head-to-head confrontation with the White House,” Beilin told Defense News.

Labor Party leader Ehud Barak distanced himself from Beilin’s comments, telling Israel Radio on Aug. 4 that AIPAC “is doing very important things in the sphere of the security of the state.” Although AIPAC has seemed zealously supportive of Israel’s Likud government, AIPAC spokesperson Toby Dershowitz said Barak and other Israeli opposition leaders also have expressed appreciation for AIPAC. Morris Amitay, an AIPAC executive director in the late 1970s, said Beilin reflects a fringe minority in the Israeli government and “an abysmal ignorance of AIPAC’s role over the years.”

We seldom close this column without an update on the pressure campaign by mainstream American Jewish leaders to free convicted American spy for Israel Jonathan Jay Pollard; the lack of such a campaign among the same mainstream Jewish leaders to free Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli-Australian who is in an Israeli prison for revealing to a London newspaper secrets of Israel’s nuclear weapons program; and the strange case of 18-year-old Samuel Sheinbein, whose grandparents brought his father to the U.S. as a child, but who is claiming Israeli citizenship to avoid prosecution for the murder of another Maryland teenager, since under Israeli law Israeli citizens cannot be extradited for trial abroad.

Pollard remains incarcerated in North Carolina, despite the fact that his case was the final stumbling block at Wye. Nothing happened again in the case of Vanunu. And Sheinbein remains in Israel where the Jerusalem District Court upheld his claim to Israeli citizenship. But wait, the court also said he has no right to stay in Israel because he has not maintained close ties to the country. Sheinbein’s attorneys are appealing the ruling.