February/March 1994, Page 33

People Watch

Israel's U.S. Supporters Fund Packwood's Senate “Masada”

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Jews have always supported Packwood because of his consistent and effective leadership in the Senate on issues important to our community, most particularly Israel. This is no time to forget his considerable contributions or to abandon a friend. "

So wrote political columnist Douglas M. Bloomfield, a former legislative director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, in the Dec. 30 Washington Jewish Week. In a column lauding Sen. Bob Packwood's "good judgment, superb political and legislative skills, energetic leadership and friendship," Bloomfield noted that the Oregon Republican "has been part of the pro-Israel forces in the Senate since the days of Sens. Jacob Javits (R-NY), Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA), Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and Clifford Case (R-NJ). To him it was a matter of 'we' and 'us,' not 'you folks.'"

The latter comment refers to Packwood's practice of using the pronouns "we" and "us" in fund-raising appeals to members of Jewish organizations and the largely Jewish subscriber lists of highly partisan pro-Israel publications such as the New Republic, Commentary, Atlantic Monthly, Near East Report and the Jerusalem Post. The senator, who is a Unitarian, apparently does this to indicate to the prospective donors that he, too, is Jewish, or considers himself Jewish.

"He will go out fighting," Bloomfield predicted at the end of a column obviously intended to line up support for Packwood. "That's the nature of a man whose license plate reads 'MASADA."'

To generate more funding for Packwood, who seems determined to take on the entire Senate in a doomed battle that will bring that already publicly reviled institution into even further disrepute, Bloomfield didn't really have to cite the historic mass suicide of Jews and their families facing imminent defeat by besieging Roman legions. In fact, much of the funding for Packwood's dogged campaign to hold his Senate seat already has come from lobbyists for Israel and their well heeled donors. Packwood has used it to hire lawyers and private investigators to dig up dirt on the Senate staff members and other women who have accused him of acts of sexual harassment over many years.

Among contributors to Packwood's legal defense fund are Edward C. Levy, Mayer Mitchell, Robert H. Asher and Lawrence Weinberger. All are former presidents or chairmen of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Another contributor is Lester Pollack, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Clinton Administration Reassures Israeli Officials and Lobbyists

Secretary of State Warren Christopher took pains between his November Middle East trip and President Bill Clinton's Jan. 16 meeting in Geneva with Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad to brief AIPAC president Steven Grossman and AIPAC acting executive director Howard Kohr in Washington and leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in New York. Then White House Middle East adviser Martin Indyk and State Department peace talks coordinator Dennis Ross left the Clinton entourage after the Geneva meeting for talks in Israel with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel (for eight years) Samuel Lewis is relinquishing "by mutual agreement" with Secretary Christopher the position of State Department director of policy and planning, the same job held in the Bush administration by Dennis Ross. Lewis a retired career foreign service officer, last year resigned the presidency of the semi-official U.S. Institute of Peace to accept the position in the Clinton State Department.

Also poised in the revolving door between Clinton administration Middle East policy-making jobs and lobbying groups for Israel and their offshoot think tanks, like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which Indyk headed prior to his White House appointment, is former AIPAC executive director Thomas Dine. Dine has become a USAID consultant in the State Department pending confirmation hearings on his appointment to head AID's economic assistance programs for newly independent countries of the world, including the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union.

Dine, a former staff assistant to Sen. Edward (Ted) Kennedy, took over the AIPAC directorship in 1980 and greatly expanded its staff and budget. His resignation from AIPAC resulted from publication by an Israeli writer of an apparently off-the-record Dine remark that many of the mainstream Jews he associates with consider their Orthodox Jewish co-religionists "smelly." Writers for the Jewish weekly press speculated, however, that AlPAC's board of directors accepted Dine's resignation to convince Israel's Labor Party Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that the organization is purging top officers who collaborated closely with Likud party leaders in the 15 years they directed or participated in Israel's government.

AIPAC Purge Continues

AlPAC's former president, David Steiner, resigned in the fall of 1992 after publication of a tape recording in which he was heard boasting that he was "negotiating" with the Clinton campaign over who would be the new administration's secretary of state. AlPAC's vice president, Harvey Friedman, was forced to resign early in 1993 when a journalist recorded his remark that dovish Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin in Israel's Labor government was a "little slimeball."

That was only the beginning. In August, current AIPAC chairman Steve Grossman announced that AIPAC was cutting its staff by nine positions because of a "modest shortfall" of between $100,000 and $150,000 a month in its annual budget of approximately $15 million.

The cuts included two employees in AlPAC's Los Angeles office, one in its nine-person Chicago office, and a political division employee and an administrative employee in Washington, DC. That, according to the Detroit Jewish News, brought the total as of Sept. I to 11 dismissals and two resignations, leaving the AIPAC payroll at some 140 employees. Other departures included Mitchell Bard, hard-line former editor of Near East Report, AlPAC's weekly newsletter, which has a separate organizational identity.

In December, new changes were announced with the departure of AIPAC administrative director Bob Dietz and Roy Rosenbaum, AlPAC's director of development, to take a similar fund-raising job with the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. His successor at AIPAC is Joseph M. Brodecki, who helped develop the fund-raising strategy for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

AIPAC political director Elizabeth Schrayer has left her full-time position to become a part-time adviser to AlPAC's executive director. Schrayer will be remembered by Washington Report readers for her 1986 memorandum to a subordinate directing political contributions by supposedly unaffiliated pro-Israel political action committees around the nation. The memorandum (reproduced on page 221 of the third edition of Richard Curtiss's Stealth PACs: Lobbying Congress for Control of U. S. Middle East Policy, published by the American Educational Trust and obtainable from this magazine's Book Club) was described by Mike Wallace on CBS's "60 Minutes" and in the Washington Post.

It also was submitted as prima facie evidence of illegal AIPAC steering of such contributions in a complaint submitted to the Federal Election Commission by a group of former U.S. government officials, including the publisher and executive editor of this magazine. Schrayer's transfer, however, results from a personal choice. It may be virtually the only change unrelated to AlPAC's effort to remold its hard-line image and put space between itself and Israel's Likud party, at least until the next Israeli election.

The decision by Israeli Prime Minister Rabin and Foreign Minister Peres to just go through the motions at the U.S.-brokered peace talks while Israeli representatives negotiated directly and secretly with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat's aides in Oslo was a blow both to AIPAC and to its former employees, directors and volunteer workers in the Clinton administration. In addition to Indyk and Ross these include White House political adviser Rahm Emmanuel and U.S. special trade representative Mickey Kantor.

All were kept in the dark about the yearlong Oslo negotiations until Christopher was alerted just days before the resulting agreement was made public. Both Clinton and Christopher saw Rabin's action as a resounding vote of no-confidence, not only in the management of Israel's Washington lobby but in its "friends" in the Clinton administration who, Rabin apparently feared, would alert Likud leaders if they learned that he and Peres were negotiating directly with the PLO.