WASHINGTON, 19 February — Who would have believed it? When then President Bill Clinton appointed Martin Indyk as US ambassador to Israel, Arabs protested over who was representing whom. (Indyk is Jewish, non-American (Australian) and a long-time AIPAC (a strong Jewish lobby in the US) associate — and Clinton had hurriedly provided him with a post-nomination passport.)
Many in Washington were surprised when complaints started coming in from the Israeli right-wing lobby in the US when Indyk did not toe their line.
That was then. Surprisingly, things have not changed much with the Bush administration. Now it is Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer, an Orthodox Jew, who has become the target of the Israeli right.
When Kurtzer failed to support Israeli settlements, ex-AIPAC head Morris Amitay wrote an open letter to President Bush calling on him to “never again appoint a Jewish American as our ambassador to Israel.”
Morton Klein — president of the Zionist Organization of America, a group of questionable motives but with supportive voices in conservative US newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal — has called for Kurtzer’s dismissal.
Now Kurtzer has further enraged the Israeli right. He had the audacity to tell an Orthodox Jewish conference last month that Israel’s budget crisis was not necessarily helped by spending state funds on settlements in the (occupied) territories instead of on the social needs within Israel’s borders.
In his speech Kurtzer did not discuss the settlements in relation to international law or Palestinian rights, he simply referred to them in terms of social justice in Israel itself.
Nonetheless, his intrusion into Jewish affairs, even in a strongly Zionist speech, provoked Zvi Handel, a right-wing Knesset member, to call the ambassador “Yehudon”, the Hebrew equivalent of “Kike.”
Kurtzer, a former US ambassador to Egypt, is regarded as an “Arabist” by the right wing. They opposed his nomination last year, so it comes as no surprise that they were waiting for, what one observer called, “an opportunity to ambush him.”
Where and how Israel spends its $3 billion in US aid is a sensitive question these days. An Israeli Finance Ministry team is due to visit the US later this month and — although it is denied by the Israeli Embassy — the Israeli press claims that the delegation is asking for an additional $800 million that Clinton allegedly promised Barak to cover the costs of Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon.
There is even some grousing in the pro-Israeli Congress on the standard $3 billion aid package regarding the use of existing funds on the settlements, which even if they are no longer termed “illegal” by the administration are still, at least, considered “unhelpful”.
