JEWISH ARABISTS at the STATE DEPARTMENT

...Even as a simplification for children, this job description fails...

...Instead of Arabists who were anti-Zionist or even anti-Jewish, the Bush administration as it took shape in 1989 had a number of Jews, including Ross, Haass, Wolfowitz, Kurtzer and Miller, in important policy-making jobs...

...More than a year later, in a November 1, 1990, talk at a suburban Washington, D.C., synagogue, Kurtzer was still promulgating the administration line, blaming Israel for the collapse of the U.S.-mediated effort to get Israeli-Palestinian talks going the year before—not on Bush's ante-upping equation of new Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem with West Bank (Judea and Samaria) settlements...

...The old Arabists have left government for foundations, universities and public relations...

...We don't support statements by either side that are excessive...

...Haass said once the confrontation with Iraq was resolved, "in our view there might be opportunities by the United States, the United Nations, indeed the world...to extend the peace process" to Lebanese, Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian issues...

...matic mob scene of a conference and the s multiple vetoes inherent in the compre-~ hensive approach...

...But State Department spokesman Margaret Tutwiler did refer reporters to President Bush's remark last September in Helsinki that the Palestinian issue "has been on the agenda of many countries for many years, and it is very important that the question be resolved...hopefully sooner than later...

...Kissinger's "distrust of the Soviet Union and his blind support for Israel" would influence Bush and Baker in the persons of Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and National Security Adviser Lt...

...The institute is a think tank spun off by AIPAC supporters in the mid-1980s and with which Eagleburger, Ross and Haass had been associated...

...they'll drop the murder charge...

...Arafat made" to start the U.S.-PLO dialogue...

...Brent Scowcroft, U.S.A.F...

...Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Dwight D. Eisenhower depriving Israel of any gains from the 1956 Sinai campaign...

...This belief automatically assigns at least half the blame for all wrong-doing to Israel and the Jews and automatically casts the Arabs as plaintiff as well as accused...

...Baker, reflecting the false Palestinian-Israeli symmetry underlying administration policy, claimed that the United States would have censured Israel even if there had been no Arab partners in the anti-Iraq coalition to appease...

...He quoted an unnamed Arab envoy as saying "with so much talk going on about the Bush-Baker even-handed approach to the Middle East, there is no doubt that the pro-Israeli lobby has mobilized its forces in Washington to install their own moles within the administration in key sub-cabinet positions to prevent a further tilt towards the Arabs...

...As for the Arabs and Israelis and Israelis and Palestinians, a department official maintained: "All along it's been our policy to push for peace with the Arab states and Israel....Whether that takes precedence over the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I can't say...

...Haass, in a 1986 Commentary' article, violated the Arabist catechism by suggesting that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) could only obstruct peace, not contribute to it, and that continuing Arab hostility to Israel undermined chances for a land-for-peace settlement...

...They know well the history of the Arab conflict with Israel—who started it, who prolongs it—but they formulate policy as if mediating a labor-management dispute in which the two parties should split the difference...

...The traditional Arabist belief was a creation of Whitehall and British diplomats long before Israel's independence...

...According to KUNA, they included not only Dennis Ross, head of policy planning at the State Department, and one of his top deputies, Aaron David Miller, but also Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense for policy...

...The new Arabists, often Jewish, took their place...

...The old Arabists have left government...

...What is impossible is imagining the Palestinian Arabs reaching, let alone keeping, a settlement with Israel absent agreements between Israel and the other major Arab states after Egypt—certainly Syria and probably Iraq as well...

...As for the others fingered by Calis as Zionist moles, quite simply, none were...

...For more than three decades, Israel's American supporters had inveighed against "Arabists"—real even if sometimes overdrawn—in government and especially at the State Department...

...Kurtzer, whose example has been pointed to repeatedly, was the youngest man to become a dean at Yeshiva University and, while serving in Egypt, had kosher meat brought to the embassy in Cairo...

...Middle East policy...

...For example, Haass, speaking on a United States Information Agency Worldnet broadcast on October 2, 1990, to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, rejected one questioner's assertion that the United States ignored Israel's denial of a Palestinian Arab state on the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza Strip while it focused on Iraq's conquest of Kuwait: "I don't think the two situations are in any way identical or even similar....What one is overwhelmed by is the differences," Haass said...

...They work for a president who still speaks occasionally of the "Palestine problem" instead of the Arab problem with Israel...

...They forgot America's earliest impulse toward the conflict: Warren Austin, Truman's first ambassador to the UN, recommended that Moslems and Jews sit down and settle things like good Christian gendemen...

...So how did the Bush-Baker administration come to be indifferent to what Israel claimed as vital interests and undiplomatically hostile to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir...

...New Arabists, often Jewish, took their place...

...It would be impossible, Miller said, to imagine progress in settling the Arab-Israel conflict without solving Palestinian-Israeli issues...

...Kurtzer himself voiced this premise, telling his three sons, according to the January 13, 1989, New York Times, that his job meant "grabbing an Israeli and grabbing an Arab and bringing them together and then holding them until they talk to each other...

...who had been associated with the former secretary of state in both the Nixon and Ford administrations and in Kissinger's international consulting firm...

...They can be found on television talk shows, newspaper op-ed pages and before congressional subcommittees, explaining why Saddam Hussein should be allowed to save face, why Israeli intransigence threatens more war, why the latest hint of PLO moderation is genuine...

...They believe that what is going on is an Arab-Israeli conflict, not an Arab conflict with Israel...

...And after the war with Iraq ends, they will revive their symmetrical view of Arab-Israel matters repackaged but intact...

...A few days later Syria snuffed out the last meaningful Maronite Christian resistance in Lebanon, routing presidential claimant General Michel Aoun and murdering several hundred of his backers...

...Who were these moles...

...The United States can't and will not base its peace process policy...on public statements made by either side...

...Key staffers embrace a fundamental Arabist tenet—that in the Middle East, the Arabs are at least as aggrieved as the Jews...

...That sounded like a lawyer advising a client, "We know it was self-defense...

...Kurtzer exemplified the false symmetry which speaks of an Arab-Israeli conflict and highlights the Palestinian-Israeli struggle instead of focusing on enduring Arab hostility in a talk to the National Association of Arab Americans in 1989...

...They assume that the Palestinian Arab problem is the core of the struggle rather than its much-manipulated symbol...

...Not because White House Chief of Staff John Sununu is of Lebanese descent—an explanation some friends of Israel might find plausible—but because Calis's sources saw Zionist conspirators where none existed...

...This underlying conceit explains why more than one leader of major Jewish organizations have come away from meetings with the Jewish Arabists worried that the latter believe they will con the PLO into making peace on American terms, as if American officials are diplomatic foxes while men who have fought for more than 30 years as terrorist revolutionaries are mere political chickens...

...Touchstone examples of the "Arabist" influence in Middle East policy included: • Secretary of State George Marshall's staffs effort to prevent President Harry S Truman from recognizing the new Jewish state in 1948...

...The administration also suggested that Israel should have been grateful, since Washington had headed off even harsher anti-Israel moves...

...There is something schizophrenic about the position of the Jewish Arabists...

...Not surprisingly the New York Times also described Kurtzer as a leader in the Reagan administration's valedictory move to open talks with the PLO...

...Many Israelis, and their American supporters, mistook the hurried delivery to Israel of Patriot anti-missile missiles and their crews for an end to disagreement over Washington's view of a symmetrical Arab-Israel conflict starring the Palestinians...

...The National Security Council's chief Middle East expert also said, "There's quite a bit of appreciation in the United States for what Syria has done" by becoming a "stalwart" member of the anti-Iraq coalition...

...So plead guilty to manslaughter...

...AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft) sale to Saudi Arabia, both in 1981...

...Part of the answer is that the president and secretary of state's key staffers, while hardly traditional Arabists, unconsciously or uncritically embrace a fundamental Arabist tenet—that in the Middle East, the Arabs are at least as aggrieved as the Jews...

...Never mind that the invasion of Kuwait spotiighted the security danger that threatens Israel or that support for Saddam among West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinians may say something important about how they view their conflict with Israel...

...In other words, the administration will hear what it wants to hear, will weigh pronouncements from PLO and Israeli officials equally, and—in a century in which radical leaders, from Hider to Pol Pot to Khomeini have carried out their excessive public statements once they gained power—it will condescend to the PLO, pretending it is not serious...

...Ret...

...Among lesser but still telling examples of Arabism at work were: • President Jimmy Carter's 1977 agreement to join the Soviet Union in pursuit of Aaron David Miller Member of Policy and Planning Staff, State Department i an international conference and "compre-I hensive settlement" of the Arab-Israeli ° problem...

...ERIC ROZENMAN Early in 1989, as the Bush administration filled its key Middle East policymaking posts, Arab diplomats and reporters did not like what they saw...

...But Calis was onto something...

...They were not marginal Jews but men whose careers showed they did not suffer from the "bend-over-back-wards" syndrome...

...As a basis for policy, it invites disaster...

...And, he added, according to the Washington Jewish Week, "if it were not for Saddam Hussein, I believe we would have found a way to find another formula to bridge the gap...

...In a sense, the new Arabists still do...

...If not quite what he feared, it would not be what some at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the registered pro-Israel lobby, or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy anticipated...

...Those afflicted feel compelled to bash Israel or spurn Jewish concerns to prove professional objectivity...

...My response to them in that audience is the same as my response to you...

...It became apparent, as former Ambassador to Israel Samuel Lewis has observed, that Washington could enjoy close bilateral relations with Israel and important Arab states simultaneously and advance regional peace prospects as well...

...We don't support public statements by either side that are designed not to advance the peace process, and we don't react to those kinds of public statements...

...Recall that on January 29, 1991, 13 days into the U.S.-led war with Iraq, the State Department—with the Soviet Foreign Ministry—suggested that Moscow and Washington work for a comprehensive Middle East settlement featuring "real reconciliation for Israel, Arab states and including the Palestinians" if Baghdad would commit to withdrawing from Kuwait...

...It held that great powers in the Middle East had to choose between Arabs and Jews: Since Arabs had numbers and oil, there really was no choice...

...State Department sources insisted that represented no change in U.S...

...A January 25 article by Raphael Calis, a correspondent for the Kuwait News Agency (KUNA), summed things up...

...Headlined "Bush Appointments Cause 'Concern' Among Arabs," Calis' report said that "despite the favorable impression that President George Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker have left in the Arab world, there is some growing concern" over the Americans' new Middle East team...

...Anwar Sadat and Menachem | Begin's decision to make peace was spurred z in part by their need to thwart the diplo...

...He noted that he had recently spoken to a synagogue audience in New Jersey and "someone had done his homework...and brought me a vast array of quotes from PLO spokesmen, which seemed to undercut the kind of commitments [to recognition of Israel and to halt terrorism] that Mr...

...The imponderables of war obscured post-war diplomacy, the official noted...

...Even worse, from the Arab viewpoint, the specter of Henry Kissinger hovered over the new administration...

...Israelis still remember Kissinger's policy to let them bleed early in the 1973 Yom Kippur War so Israel would be more malleable in negotiations, and pro-Israel lobbyists hardly toasted Scowcroft's return to the White House as Bush's national security adviser...

...Had the KUNA correspondent waited a bit longer, until Daniel Kurtzer was promoted to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs (focusing on Palestinian-Israeli matters) and Harvard University's Richard Haass had become Middle East Affairs Director for the National Security Council, the "concern" he found in Arab circles might have been panic...

...They speak of the "Palestine problem" instead of the Arab problem with Israel...

...But thanks to the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace and the 1983 memorandum on U.S.Israeli strategic cooperation, the Arabist premise lost ground...

...That is because Arab states and their armies continue to embody the reality of Arab intransigence toward Israel and the possibility of aggression against it as has become so graphic since Iraq's "scudding" of Tel Aviv and Haifa...

...Miller too showed the influence of policy by schizophrenia or role-reversal, telling an American Jewish Congress seminar in Washington last September that the administration hoped to push the Arab-Israeli peace process as soon as the Persian Gulf crisis was resolved...

...The United States was too busy then to criticize Syria— it was orchestrating two anti-Israel UN Security Council resolutions for the killing of 19 Arab rioters on the Temple Mount...

...When Egypt, Saudi Arabia and even Syria indicated early in the Persian Gulf hostilities that they would countenance limited Israeli retaliation for Iraqi attacks, it became clear that the United States could work with both Israel and Arab states in war as well as in peace...

...j • Washington's condemnation of Israel's i destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor and ^ its $8.5 billion "Reagan or Begin...

...And so on...

...How did the Bush administration—before Iraq began firing missiles at Israel— become the least sympathetic American government toward Israel in that country's 43 years...

...Then he erased the differences, echoing Bush's UN speech the day before, which implicitly accepted Saddam Hussein's linkage of Kuwait and the territories...