March 1997, pg. 41

People Watch

Former AIPAC Chairman Takes Over Democratic National Committee

By Lucille Barnes

In 1992 an embarrassed American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) chairman David Steiner was forced to resign after a contributor, Harry Katz, taped him boasting that AIPAC was “negotiating” with the incoming administration of President-elect Bill Clinton over who would be the next U.S. secretary of state.

Steiner’s successor at AIPAC was Massachusetts Democratic activist Steve Grossman. In January of this year Grossman was named national chairman of the Democratic National Committee. But friends of AIPAC no longer seem embarrassed to acknowledge that the organization has progressed from “negotiating” to dictating. As The Jewish Week of New York modestly put it in its Jan. 17 issue, “another top Jewish activist will be playing a new role as Clinton II shifts into high gear.”

And who might some of those other activists be? The Washington Post’s Al Kamen reported in one of his “In the Loop” columns that Reginald Bartholomew, currently U.S. ambassador in Italy, “is being talked about for Israel, where he was headed four years ago but didn’t quite make it.” If he gets there, he will be the second U.S. Jewish envoy to the Jewish state, replacing the first one, Martin Indyk. Indyk, according to Kamin, “is leading the mix for assistant secretary of state for Middle East matters.” But you read that in this column last month. Kamen also reported that U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Marc Grossman is looking to expand his portfolio to the rest of Europe as assistant secretary for that region. Also looking for a job in the State Department is James Rubin, an outspoken friend of Israel who left his post as press spokesman for Madeleine Albright’s U.S. Mission to the U.N. to serve as foreign policy spokesman for the Clinton-Gore campaign. One of his jobs was to tell fellow friends of Israel that anything Bob Dole promised to do for them, Clinton could do better. He’ll fit right in.

It makes you wonder whatever happened to those State Department “Arabists,” who speak the language of 90 percent of the people of the region, and embarrass Clinton administration officials by pronouncing the names of Arabic people and places correctly, and warning accurately about aspects of American made-in-Israel policies that aren’t going to fly in the Islamic world. One of the last of them just left, with the January retirement of former Asst. Secretary for Near East Affairs Robert Pelletreau.

But don’t worry, there still are lots of people in the State Department who can pronounce someplace names correctly. After Palestinian Minister of Education Hanan Ashrawi suggested recently that the U.S. no longer qualifies as an honest broker in the peace process, State Department official Aaron David Miller, who serves as deputy to peace talks czar Dennis Ross, who also is Jewish, remarked angrily, “I challenge her to produce one good reason why we’re not qualified to broker an agreement over Hevron!”

Officials of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s current cabinet all would agree on putting a “v” into the name of the city Americans call Hebron and Palestinians call Al Khalil, but not on much else these days. Israeli state prosecutor Edna Arbel announced an investigation into Netanyahu’s short-lived appointment of Roni Bar-On as attorney general. Israeli Television had reported that Bar-On, formerly a lecturer with the semi-cult “I Am” movement in Israel and a reputed big-time gambler, was appointed by Netanyahu in return for a promise by cabinet member Aryeh Deri, leader of Israel’s Shas party, to support Netanyahu’s Hebron withdrawal agreement.

Bar-On, in turn, was to use his position to drop charges against Deri, who is standing trial for fraud and embezzlement. Bar-On resigned after 12 hours in office but Netanyahu, who branded the report “a complete fabrication,” next demanded that the state-operated television station reveal the source of the report. Other members of the Netanyahu cabinet were not so dismissive. “I don’t believe it’s correct,” said Tourism Minister Moshe Katzav. “But if it is correct, the government does not have the right to exist.”

Industry and Trade Minister Natan Sharansky said, “If there was any kind of deal, I recommend to everyone involved to admit it and resign, because this is an unprecedented crime. If these allegations are true, I’m very concerned about our whole democratic regime.” Said Internal Security Minister Avigdor Kahalani, “If the affair is in fact as it appears, undoubtedly there is no place for this government.”

The matter is more significant than the average government scandal because advocates of “Greater Israel” are said to be looking for a way to invalidate the Hebron withdrawal agreement by alleging corruption in the government that signed it. If Netanyahu really feels threatened, he might take up his Labor Party opponents on their overtures for forming a “national unity” government to carry out the final stages of an agreement with the Palestinians.

In fact, Yossi Beilin, the Israeli Labor Party’s dovish contender for leadership, may already be pushing events in that direction. Beilin, Likud legislator Michael Eitan and six other senior leaders from both parties already have worked out what they call a common plan for the remaining phases of negotiations. The approach jibes with Netanyahu’s remark to U.S. Jewish donors recently that he is seeking “to bring the majority of the Jewish people of Israel” to agreement on “the best balance between Palestinian needs and Israeli needs.”

Ehud Barak, Beilin’s rival for Labor Party leadership, objected, saying the “destructively ambiguous” plan gives Netanyahu political cover from Labor. He suggested, too, that Netanyahu will use the ostensible Israeli consensus to “set dictates to the Palestinians” and then blame them for the breakdown in negotiations. Actually it may turn out to be hard to blame the Palestinians for a breakdown that may occur before either the Israelis or the “honest brokers” see fit to offer them a place at the negotiating table.

America’s Jewish weekly press seems to be having a hard time deciding “who is a Jew” in the case of new U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Korbel Albright. The Washington Jewish Week,whose pages were confidently counting her in just a few weeks ago, ran this puzzler by staff writer Jordana Willner in its Jan. 2 issue: “In 1948, 11-year-old Albright, whose father, Joseph Korbel, was a Czech diplomat, arrived with her family in Colorado, fresh from a European childhood in Prague, London, Belgrade and a Swiss boarding school. Korbel had been sentenced to death in absentia for alleged crimes against the communist-controlled state. Because of their flights—first from Nazism, then from Communism—there is speculation that Albright is Jewish. Other reports indicate that she was born Roman Catholic and became Episcopalian when she married ex-husband Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, a newspaper heir.”

The WJW’s biographical sketch ends right there. So is she or isn’t she?

We guess it won’t depend on what the hard-nosed rabbinate in Israel would decide, but instead on WJW’s consultant on political correctness. When so many of the incoming officials at the Clinton State Department are Jewish, is it PC to have a Jewish secretary of state as well, just to be sure the Arabs are thoroughly intimidated. Or would such piling on stir up the great American unwashed and thus not be PC after all? We’ll have to renew our subscription to theWJW to find out.

Actually, if there were any “Arabists” left at the State Department, they could help by pointing out that the generally accepted anthropological definition of an Arab is “anyone whose language of choice is Arabic and who considers himself an Arab.” Maybe the simplest thing to do would be to ask the lady—or wait and see how she pronounces “Al Khalil.”

All the world’s problems aren’t confined to Washington or Hevron. Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi has gotten himself in a pickle with nearly everybody. Many Arab heads of state consider him an incorrigible reprobate who gives the whole neighborhood a bad name. Now the radical Islamists who would like to overthrow those same Arab heads of state are said to be calling him a modernizing moderate. The problem is said to be that when Qaddafi mixed some Islam with some Marxism to produce his Green Book, he didn’t please either extreme and may have produced a home-grown Islamist resistance among Libyan tribesmen who (like most Americans) never had much use for people living in the capital anyway. Fortunately for the Libyan strongman, he still has the right enemies in the United States. Israel-leaning Peter Rodman of the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom in Washington, DC told the Washington Times that Qaddafi is “marginalized and isolated…a shrunken Qaddafi.” Daniel Pipes, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, which is recommended reading by AIPAC, told the Washington Timesthat “in Islamic terms, [Qaddafi] has virtually left the faith by denying the validity of the hadith in his passion to get back to the original purity, as he sees it, of the Qur’an itself.” Sounds good, and we’ll be completely convinced when we hear a little more of this from Muslims themselves. Meanwhile, with enemies like the ones he’s made in Washington, maybe the Libyan big guy can start making new friends in the Middle East.

One, of course, is Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who arrived in Tripoli this January for his third visit in 12 months. Qaddafi awarded Minister Farrakhan a $250,000 human rights prize during his previous Libyan visit in August 1996. So far the U.S. Treasury Department has denied Farrakhan’s applications to accept the money, and an earlier $1 billion that Qaddafi pledged to the Nation of Islam during Farrakhan’s first visit in January 1996.

We’re not quite sure why it’s illegal for Farrakhan to accept money to do good things for his followers in the U.S., presumably as a gesture to get Americans to say good things about Libya, when it’s legal for former Pentagon official Richard Perle, who has built his clout with friends of Israel in Congress into a vocation, to accept fees from the Turkish government to lobby for Turkey and Turkish causes in Bosnia and Cyprus. We happen to be for the Bosnians ourselves, but we’re also for drug-free housing projects in inner cities, in one of which we happen to live.

In fact, the U.S. government had Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam followers on contract to provide security to the residents of several housing projects until recently when Rep. Peter King, who represents a heavily Jewish district in Long Island, NY, decided to get a life for himself and his re-election prospects by demonizing Farrakhan on a full-time basis. Now Farrakhan’s got more followers because he has enemies like King, but it isn’t paying very well. Perle’s only followers are members of Congress like King, but it pays very well indeed. As for us, we wonder why the Treasury Department doesn’t lighten up. The balance of payments could use such an enormous shot in the arm. It would help cover 20 percent of this year’s taxpayer gift to Israel. And, we’ll give you dollars to shekels, if Treasury called his bluff, Qaddafi might pay the quarter-million but welch on the billion. Guess we’ll never know.

While on the subject of visits between North Africa and the U.S., the U.S. has embroiled itself in Algeria’s bloody politics by arresting Anwar Haddam who, since his arrival in the U.S. in 1992, has served as an American-based spokesperson for Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front. Haddam has a home in Northern Virginia where, one day after his “parole” status in the U.S. expired, the Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested him.

Haddam is one of 188 Islamists who won seats in Algeria’s 430-member legislature in the first round of a December 1991 election. The second round, scheduled for January 1992, was never held because Algeria’s military-backed government cancelled it after seeing the Islamists were going to win a majority. Haddam initially fled to France, from which he was expelled in 1992. The French say he will be arrested if he returns to France, and we know what will happen to him if he returns to Algeria. The Clinton administration says the U.S. “remains committed to talking to anyone who can make a contribution to reconciliation in Algeria” and that Haddam’s arrest was “not a policy decision.” So what kind of a decision was it? And where does Haddam go now? And what do his American-citizen wife and three children, two of whom are U.S. citizens, do next? Clearly the problem-making positions in the Clinton II administration have been filled, but maybe the candidates for problem-solving slots are still awaiting their security clearances.

Meanwhile, lawyers said to represent 1,500 French and Algerian plaintiffs have filed a class-action suit against Haddam seeking damages for “crimes against humanity.” If he’s been responsible for any of the many atrocities that have taken place in Algeria while he’s been living in the U.S., or any of those that continue to take place while he sits in a detention cell in Virginia, the plaintiffs have a point. But Eric Goldstein of Human Rights Watch/Middle East says Haddam is being punished for making statements that, if made by a U.S. citizen, would be protected as free speech. If dialogue between the Algerian government and Islamic militants is the only thing that is going to end the slaughter of innocents in Algeria, we hope officials of the INS detention center in Manassas are prepared to issue visiting privileges to Algerian diplomats.

No “People Watch” column is complete without an update on 42-year-old former U.S. Naval counterintelligence specialist Jonathan Jay Pollard, now serving a life sentence in federal prison in Butner, NC, for espionage on behalf of Israel. The Jewish Week of New York reports that Pollard has reprimanded newly arrived Israeli Ambassador Eliahu Ben-Elissar for not doing enough for his release. In a Dec. 16 letter to Ben-Elissar criticizing him for failing to respond to requests made Dec. 3, Pollard asked the ambassador to “instruct” AIPAC to send to all Jewish members of Congress a copy of a pro-Pollard article by Holocaust writer Elie Wiesel,and to ask these legislators to call for Pollard’s release.

Seems to us Pollard has one thing right and one thing wrong. Clearly he understands where AIPAC gets its orders. What he doesn’t understand is that AIPAC might as well send those articles not just to the Jewish members but to all members of Congress. They’ll all obey their master’s voice.

Pollard’s Canadian current wife, Esther Zeitz Pollard, meanwhile has attacked an Israeli plan not to insist on Pollard’s freedom, but instead to make a deal with the Clinton administration to have Pollard transferred to an Israeli jail. Maybe it’s one thing to spy for the place but something else altogether to have to live there. Nevertheless, the Israeli Knesset has passed a law authorizing the government of Israel to make the deal. Mrs. Pollard’s Citizens for Justice for Jonathan Pollard, Canada, states, however, that the plan “is obscene in conception and an insult to Israeli National Honor.”

The Washington Jewish Week reports that two prominent American Jewish leaders, Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, past president of the Jewish Reform movement’s Union of Hebrew Congregations, and Israel Singer, secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress, visited Pollard recently and then called for commutation of his life sentence.

“His crime of spying on the United States, a nation that has been so good to the Jewish people and to Israel, cannot be justified on any grounds; it has rightly earned the condemnation of the vast majority of the Jewish community,” the two leaders said. “But enough is enough…After more than a decade of imprisonment, Mr. Pollard, who is now eligible for parole, deserves to have his sentence commuted.”

Schindler told the Washington Jewish Week that his meeting with Pollard shows that Jews who are associated with the political center and left support Pollard’s release just as much as do Jews on the right.

“The American Jewish community is just a cheering section on one side or the other,” Schindler said. “It is up to the governments of Israel and America to work out the situation.”

Rabbi Schindler didn’t add that a lot of Americans, this writer included, were under the impression that it all had been worked out, with a promise that Pollard would be released sometime after November 1996 if the American Jewish community would become a cheering section for Clinton’s reelection in that same month. So far nothing’s happened except for some anonymous press leaks that Clinton was down on U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno for not being “a team player.”

Washington Report readers will recall that we told you at the beginning of Reno’s term four years ago that her top assistant, Philip Heymann, was fired after he tried to route a recommendation for clemency for Pollard around her and directly to the White House. So was she not a team player then, or does Clinton mean she’s not being a team player all over again? Or both? Anyway, it appears she’s now trying to join the team by bashing the Saudis. At least it’s a start.

Every now and then we’re surprised at the freedom of expression exercised in the weekly Jewish press, which is written for the faithful, and not for skeptics. Describing the problems in Hebron between its 400 Jews and 150,000 Palestinians, Ina Friedman, The Jewish Week of New York’s Israel correspondent, wrote in the Jan. 10 issue: “Long used to free movement throughout Hebron, the settlers used to lash out at Palestinians quickly when they felt threatened, vandalizing property and assaulting people. But now they are already bunkered down, rarely leaving the compound and then only accompanied by soldiers.” Compared to what’s gone before, that sounds like the peaceable kingdom to us. Let’s hope this new order is extended to those dozens of additional West Bank settlements in the next year and a half.

Even more intriguing was the Dec. 20 statement to the Jerusalem Post by Binyamin Netanyahu’s communications director, David Bar Illan. “I think in general he [Netanyahu] is no longer [in favor of] a whole-land-of-Israel movement,” Bar Illan said. “I don’t think he feels that there is any chance of the Land of Israel remaining completely under the exclusive rule of Israel. I think that what has made him realize that the Land of Israel dream is no longer viable at this point is just the facts on the ground.”

Equally significant was Bar Illan’s statement that “Netanyahu is making demilitarization a condition for the existence of any entity. Whether you call it a state or not is not the important thing. 4" Then, speaking for himself, Bar Illan added, “I want a state, but I want it to be limited here and there.”

Netanyahu said the next day that he was “very angry” with his spokesman, according to Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest daily, which reported that Netanyahu demanded Bar Illan make clear that the remarks were his “private assumptions.” On the other hand, Bar Illan wasn’t fired. In fact, he had one more thing to say on the subject. “It’s quite frightening to see the power your words have once you’re in a government position,” he confessed.

We’ll certainly agree that it’s been “quite frightening” ever since Netanyahu stepped into his present governmental shoes. In fact, sartorially speaking, it seems to us that although he’s clearly too big for his britches, he’s definitely much too small for that footwear.