Washington: Jewish and Arab Lobbyists

Four years ago, Fred Dutton admits, “I couldn’t have stuck a pin in a map to identify the emirates.” Today, he speaks of the Arabian peninsula as if the turf were as familiar to him as his own back yard, and the names of sheiks, oil ministers, and Arab princes roll off his tongue with ease. That is because Dutton—former Kennedy Administration official, onetime fund-raiser and campaign organizer for Robert Kennedy and George McGovern, liberal Democratic Washington lawyer extraordinaire—now represents the government of Saudi Arabia and its state oil company in Washington. Registered with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act as a provider of “legal and other services,” Dutton says he spends about half of his time on the Saudi account; his fee for the first six months of 1977 was $270,490.

Other prominent Washington lawyers who draw handsome retainers from the Arab world include Democrats Clark Clifford (a former secretary of defense and frequent presidential emissary and confidant) and J. William

Fulbright (a former senator from Arkansas and former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and Republican Linwood Holton (a former governor of Virginia).

But for those who tote up Arab and Israeli influence in the capital, the entry of Dutton into the field has special significance. He is a shrewd behind-the-scenes operator, a man who has often raised money for Democratic candidates from Jewish political activists and has long associated himself with the cause of Israel. Although his work for the Saudis largely involves drafting humdrum contracts with American corporations and briefing the ambassador from Riyadh on rudimentary matters of American politics, Dutton’s involvement—and that of others like him—is bound to have an impact in the tight world of Washington policymakers. It helps put a stamp of respectability on the representation of Arab interests.

The competition for influence over U.S. policy in the Middle East is a tense one, a high-stakes Washington game that is never very far from the surface, not even in moments when peace seems about to break out between Israel and Egypt. The game has many assumptions and a few rules. One assumption is that the Israeli government really has to do very little, because the highly politicized, well-organized, and articulate American Jewish community will take care of things. On the Arab side, the converse is true: the ArabAmerican community is essentially docile, and the Arab nations themselves more active—with the corollary that the major oil companies, protecting their own interests, make expensive, subtle efforts on behalf of the Arabs. Another assumption is that the Departments of State and Defense have a strong pro-Arab bias, while Capitol Hill leans far in the direction of Israel; the National Security Council and White House staff can go either way.

A third assumption is that there is always extreme sensitivity, particularly in the Jewish community, to any official statement or action concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Carter White House has been learning about this ever since the President’s “town meeting” in Clinton, Massachusetts, last year, when he made his first public reference to the need for a “Palestinian homeland.” He was inundated by expressions of protest and concern. Six and a half months later, the controversial Soviet-American joint declaration of principles for a Middle East settlement drew scores of immediate denunciations from Congress and 3500 spontaneous, differently worded telegrams to the White House for several days.

Notwithstanding these facts, one of the important rules of the game is that members of Congress who value their seats and other officials who are subject to public pressures do not complain about the efforts of the “Jewish lobby” or the “Israeli lobby.” Those are code words, terms that often conjure up the specter of anti-Semitism and play into the hands of conspiracy theorists who recite the old canards about Jewish control of the media and the banks.

Yet the undeniable fact is that the American Jewish community has for years deployed an extraordinary arsenal on Israel’s behalf in the capital. At the heart of the arsenal are old-line, tried-and-true organizations such as the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, which originally made their mark fighting discrimination and prejudice and only later turned to mobilizing support for Israel. Recognizing that Jews make up only about 3 percent of the U.S. population, they worked to create a secular constituency on behalf of the Jewish state. (Their success was notable; public opinion polls have consistently shown widespread popular backing for the continued existence and security of Israel.) As Hyman Bookbinder, longtime Washington representative of the AJC, recently told a CBS television interviewer, “We know that the Jewish interest cannot be pursued, cannot be protected, unless at least half of the American people and half of the American Congress believe that our concerns are appropriate concerns . . . unless we get another 48 percent added to our 3 percent—51 percent, in other words—we cannot protect our interests.”

But the lion’s share of the burden of protecting those interests in Washington today is assumed by the only Jewish group that is actually registered to lobby on Israel’s behalf, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Started in 1954 as an outgrowth of the American Zionist Council, AIPAC has representatives of every other major Jewish organization on its board and draws on their resources at the grass roots. For more than three years, the hard-driving force of AIPAC has been Morris J. Amitay, the forty-oneyear-old executive director, an intense and ingenious man who trained for his assignment during seven years as a Foreign Service officer and five years as a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill.

Amitay runs an office a few blocks from the Capitol that is widely envied and increasingly imitated. He uses an annual budget of $700,000 to create an impact that others could not achieve with millions more. AIPAC’s research library is one of the best in town on the subject of the Middle East; many journalists, and even the State Department, regularly call upon it for assistance. (One of its rare commodities is a set of bound volumes containing every single statement or document on a Middle Eastern topic that has appeared in the Congressional Record during the past twenty-six years.) The office’s printing and processing facilities are as up-todate as any in Washington, and it also buys and gives away hundreds of copies of any newly published book that is favorable to Israel.

AIPAC monitors every piece of legislation in the United States Congress that arguably affects Israel’s security and diplomatic interests. In a moment of perceived crisis, it can put a carefully researched, well-documented statement of its views on the desk of every senator and congressman and appropriate committee staff within four hours of a decision to do so. For credibility’s sake, AIPAC’s four lobbyists now include one Republican and one gentile. Whenever a member of Congress in a key position hires a new staff person to handle Middle Eastern questions, one of the first phone calls the staffer receives is invariably from AIPAC, offering friendly help and consultation.

Operating as he does, Amitay has become a controversial figure in his own right. (Last summer his house in the Maryland suburbs was bombed at 3 A,M., in an incident that was possibly linked to the assassination of an Israeli military attaché in 1973.) Some congressmen complain —rarely for quotation—that he has become too demanding and uncompromising in his quest for support of Israel. During the debate on last year’s foreign aid bill, for example, which contained $1,785 billion in military assistance and credits for Israel, Amitay and his staff upbraided many legislators who announced they would vote against the measure because of their objections to money included in the bill to fund international institutions that lend to Vietnam, Angola, Cuba, and Uganda, among others. (When the conference report on that legislation finally did clear the House on a 229-195 vote, it was in part because of the widespread support for Israel, and White House officials called Amitay to thank him for AIPAC’s crucial help on the issue.)

One young congressman who has reluctantly spoken up about AIPAC’s overreach is Toby Moffett, thirty-three, Democrat of Connecticut, who is of Lebanese origin but has generally pleased his large Jewish constituency in the Hartford suburbs by voting in line with Israeli interests, despite his resistance to some aid bills and military appropriations. (He cosponsored a resolution with Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, calling attention to the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union.) “To question is in [AIPAC’s] view to oppose, and that is considered traitorous,” complains Moffett. “There has been an attempt to portray a perfect consensus of American Jews on every issue, and everyone knows that can’t be true.”

Moffett worries lest his criticism be misunderstood. “Admittedly,” he says, “I’m not a Jew. I’ve only read about the Romans and the pogroms in czarist Russia and the Nazi Holocaust. I may not be capable of appreciating this feeling . . . but I think we’d all be better off opening a dialogue. ... You have to resist voting for something just because it has a particular country’s name on it.”

At the same time, Moffett complains about the better-disguised pressures from the other side. “Oil has a whole lot to do with the Administration’s [Middle Eastern] policies,” he insists. “Whenever we’re talking about energy policy, the State Department constantly sticks its head in the door and says, ‘Oh no, we have to be nice to the Saudis.’ So we can’t do anything that puts a dent in OPEC.” Say what he might, Moffett seems doomed to get himself into trouble. Militant Arab-American activists routinely attack him for failing to do enough to redeem his heritage, and yet his Republican opponent in 1976 meticulously exploited every remark Moffett had ever made calling for evenhandedness or moderation in the Middle East; before he won his second term in the House that year, Moffett eventually had to run a newspaper advertisement headlined “LET’S SET TOBY’S RECORD STRAIGHT” and signed by eight Jewish congressmen from around the country.

Given the growing discontent with AIPAC, one might have expected the increasingly self-aware ArabAmericans to develop an effective counterforce on Capitol Hill. But that is far from the case. Unlike the Jewish members of Congress (five senators and twenty-two congressmen), the ArabAmericans have tended to regard their ethnic background as a political liability. Among them, only Senator James Abourezk, Democrat of South Dakota, has been outspoken on behalf of the Arab nations and the Palestinians— and that only after years of supporting Israel and after deciding (if not announcing) that he would not run for a second Senate term.

The five acknowledged Arab-American members of the House (there is rumored to be a sixth, but he has thus far refused to come out of the closet) rarely identify themselves that way and, apart from Moffett, seldom talk about the Middle East. They and Abourezk have never even met to discuss the issues, and the joke is told that when John P. Richardson, the newly appointed public affairs director of the National Association of Arab-Americans (NAAA), recently went calling on each of them, he had to enter their offices by the back door.

Richardson, thirty-nine, is the first official Washington lobbyist of the Arab-American community, and his initial efforts are very low-key and modest compared to those of AIPAC. He himself is not of Arab background, but became involved in the field through academic interests and then worked for years in Beirut and Washington for a group called American Near East Refugee Aid. As an outsider he has a certain advantage, because of the bitter differences in belief and emphasis among the subdivisions of the Arab-American community (mostly Lebanese or Syrians, with a growing and increasingly vocal component of Palestinians). Indeed, after a delegation of Arab-American leaders from NAAA went to see President Carter last December, they could not agree on a single spokesman to report to the press, but issued individual statements and competed with each other for attention.

The current president of the six-yearold NAAA, Joseph D. Baroody, a member of a prominent Republican family, points out that it would be impossible for his organization —a composite of some 1600 small local churches, social, cultural, and charitable groups—to focus on a single cause the way AIPAC can claim to represent Israel. “How could we ever represent everyone from Colonel [Muammar] Qaddafi of Libya to the [conservative] rulers of Saudi Arabia?” he asks.

Richardson says that his first goal on Capitol Hill is merely to supplement NAAA’s general effort “to build respect for Americans of Arab background,” much in the way that the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee did their bestknown work years ago. From that base, the new lobbyist hopes to move on to “become a source of credible information and a valid point of view” —so that eventually a letter of protest going from Capitol Hill to the White House on behalf of Israel will not automatically obtain the signatures of seventysix senators, as did a notorious one in 1975. As part of his own educational process, Richardson early on had lunch with Amitay,

Moffett warns that despite possible recent shifts in American attitudes toward the Middle East, the ArabAmericans will not win credibility in Washington overnight. “The American Jewish community has gained respect over the years because of its record on social issues like civil rights and the antiwar movement,” he points out; “the fact is that Arab-Americans have not been progressive on social issues. Generally, when they got over here they were in a hurry to become wealthy and Republican.”

Indeed, the White House is still playing by the old assumptions and rules. Relations with Arab-Americans, like those with most other ethnic groups, are assigned by Carter’s political staff to the Office of Public Liaison, headed by an upstate New York politician, Midge Costanza. The Jewish community, on the other hand, takes up at least half the time of Mark Siegel, deputy to Carter’s chief political adviser, Hamilton Jordan. (Siegel, once an aide to former Democratic National Chairman Robert Strauss, describes his only other major assignment as “the party.”) His own views, Siegel acknowledges, are “terribly sympathetic to Israel,” and he regards the Jewish organizations that are frequently in contact with him as his “constituents.” All of this makes sense in a Democratic White House, he argues, given the fact that American Jews are very heavily registered as Democrats, especially in ten major urban states, and produce an estimated 90 percent turnout in most national elections. They contribute about half of the money in Democratic politics, and, as Siegel puts it, “as individuals they can articulate a policy. People will go to the synagogue and talk about F-15s” (the American fighter jets that Arab states have wanted to buy).

Recently, with Carter sometimes appearing to have separate positions on the Palestinian issue for the odd and the even days of the month, Siegel has had his hands full. Although about 75 percent of American Jewish voters are believed to have voted for Carter, many of his original supporters are now disaffected, and they bombard Siegel with complaints. The White House aide happened to be in Israel at the time of Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem, and he is now convinced that “American Jewish opinion is more hard-line and less pluralistic than Israeli public opinion.” Although there is an obvious “lag time in opinion transformation,” Siegel believes that the Sadat peace initiatives are bound to have a softening effect on that American Jewish hard line.

The flurry of Egyptian-Israeli negotiations has probably already had an impact on the lives and attitudes of all of the Washington players except Amitay. Even though it has produced anything but unanimous admiration in the Arab world itself, Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem, according to Richardson, “overnight changed the conventional wisdom in this country about the kind of people that Arabs are. The assumption went from irrationality to rationality.”

One obvious beneficiary of the fallout has been Ashraf Ghorbal, the Egyptian ambassador, who has always enjoyed good relations in Washington but now seems to have a special status as a symbol of the prospects for Middle Eastern peace. (Ghorbal is now permitted to be sociable with his Israeli counterpart, Simcha Dinitz, and the two of them were the guests of honor at the much-gossiped-about dinner party sponsored by Barbara Walters.)

Other, more subtle shifts are in the works. On Capitol Hill, for example, the traditional role of Senators Jacob Javits, Republican of New York, and Abraham Ribicoff, Democrat of Connecticut, as spokesmen for Israel and the American Jewish community may be transferring to new actors—among them Senator Dick Stone, Democrat of Florida, who is also Jewish but prides himself on his contacts with Arab leaders both in their own countries and in Washington. (He displays prominently in his office an autographed picture and a long, discursive letter in Arabic from a Saudi prince.) A conservative on a number of foreign policy issues, Stone was disregarded by many in his party when he first, arrived in Washington in 1975, but last year he became chairman of the Near Eastern and South Asian Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and people began to take notice.

But Stone is not the only congressional supporter of Israel who, having traveled widely in the Arab world, seems ready to broaden his point of view. With Ghorbal’s encouragement, 338 members of Congress have visited Egypt since 1973, and all but one had a personal talk with Sadat.

That fact, combined with other developments, has some of Israel’s strongest American advocates running scared. A major strategic crossroads is faced by Amitay, who has shown no signs that he will let up on the pressure, even if the Egyptians and the Israelis sign a peace agreement. Some of his friends, as well as his detractors, argue that he should. If the atmosphere of confrontation eases for Israel, they suggest, AIPAC may discover more skepticism toward its alarms about Israeli security. Already there are indications that while Amitay and others continue to stimulate fervent statements of support for the Jewish state from the usual quarters, those statements are in some cases mere lip service, and true congressional sentiment, expressed privately, is a different matter.

Would a more moderate approach produce more realistic results? Abourezk claims that several of his Senate colleagues have told him confidentially that they are chafing under the pressure to renew their pro-Israeli pledges at regular intervals, and the South Dakotan says there are several possible candidates to take over his role as chief Senate spokesman for the Palestinians when he retires at the end of this year.

Leaders of the American Jewish community are worried over other trends in Washington. A more evenhanded representation of Arab and Israeli interests before the U. S. government could be a good thing for all, discouraging the unfounded allegations that conspiratorial Jewish interests are somehow pulling the strings of foreign policy. And the increase in U. S. exports to Arab nations to a level of about $7.2 billion in 1977 (as compared to $1.2 billion in 1972) could actually produce economic benefits for vast numbers of Americans, regardless of their ethnic background. But if Fred Dutton and his colleagues are successful in their efforts and the Arab financial stake in this country increases substantially, alarms of an entirely different nature may be sounded. The Treasury Department keeps the exact statistics secret at the Saudis’ request, but the Saudi government is believed to be the largest single holder of special Treasury notes; and the Saudis are known to have a huge investment in the securities of, among other quasi-official agencies, the Federal National Mortgage Association (“Fannie Mae”). For the moment, this is generally interpreted as a use of surplus oil revenues to shore up the weak American dollar. But what the result might be if the Middle Eastern crisis should be seriously aggravated again is anyone’s guess.

Meanwhile, liberal Jewish political activists are beginning to change their minds about some old articles of faith. Worried that the recently secure 3 percent of the population could be threatened after all, they are not so sure that it is a good idea to extend the federal campaign finance reform to congressional elections (thus putting a limit on individual contributions to Senate and House races) or to abolish the electoral college (thus limiting the ability of cohesive voting blocs to throw all of the electoral votes of large states into the column of one candidate or another). They are concerned, in short, about something that has come to be called the “Arab lobby.”

—SANFORD J. UNGAR