Four of Bush and Baker’s top six Mideast-policy advisers are Jewish, and this is a rough time for them. Despite–or perhaps because of-Baker’s success in bringing Arabs and Israelis to the peace table, State policy-planning chief Ross, deputy assistant secretary Daniel Kurtzer, policy-planning analyst Aaron Miller and National Security Council official Richard Haass find themselves attacked on three sides: by Arabs, Israelis and American Jews. A column in Saudi Arabia’s Arab News warned darkly that the administration’s peace-process team is “primarily composed of four ardent Zionists!” Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s inner circle derides them as “Baker’s Jew boys,” the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth reported. An American Jewish magazine called them “Jewish Arabists.”
Few Israelis or Arabs confront the men directly. But many American Jews, wondering how these aides can work for an administration that some Jews consider hostile to Israel, if not outright anti-Semitic, don’t hesitate. When Miller spoke to one Jewish group in New York recently, he got 45 questions-44 of them hostile. The lone exception came from a woman who said she didn’t agree with Miller either, but knew that he was trying hard to promote a policy he believed in. “Thank you,” he told her. “My mother would love you.” Haass has received scrawled letters that simply say “Shame!” and others enclosing pictures of Holocaust death-camp victims. When Ross spoke at San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Shalom over the Passover holiday last April, he was asked about former New York mayor Ed Koch’s column alleging that Baker had used a profanity in dismissing American Jews and their concerns. Ross replied that he had asked Baker directly about the report. “I didn’t say that. You know me better than that,” Ross quoted Baker as telling him. “I do know him better than that,” Ross added. “If I thought that was what he thought, I’d be out of there in two minutes.”
The paradox, as Baker’s men see it, is that this administration has done more to improve Israel’s security than any American administration in memory. Bush crippled Israel’s most threatening neighbor, Iraq; won repeal of the United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism; prodded the Soviets, Chinese and others to open diplomatic relations with Israel, and helped tens of thousands of Ethiopian and Soviet Jews immigrate to Israel. Most of all, the Baker-generated peace talks have brought Israel what it had sought for 43 years: face-to-face talks with all of its Arab neighbors. But Shamir is furious at Bush’s refusal to support $10 billion in loan guarantees to settle Soviet Jews without an Israeli settlement freeze in return. And American Jewish leaders are still seething over Bush’s comments last September, when he seemed to question the loyalty of American Jews who dared to lobby Congress for the guarantees.
The attacks are especially frustrating for the four men because, while they concede that Bush and Baker feel no emotional commitment to Israel, they themselves do. “[They] came to this with a sense of mission-on top of their commitment to America’s interests-about trying to achieve a secure peace for Israel,” says a friend. “They believe it’s the greatest thing they could do for the Jewish people.” But, Miller points out, they also came to believe long ago “that the Arab-Israeli conflict is not a morality play, not a conflict between good and evil. It is a conflict between competing claims and competing justices.” Their hardheaded, distinctly American approach to the Arab-Israeli blood feud raises suspicions in both camps. “I have probably engendered as much animosity on the Arab side as on the Israeli side because I don’t work on the basis of sentiment-theirs or mine,” says Kurtzer. “What matters to me is, can you construct a process in which interests can be mediated?”
In pursuit of that process, the four aides are just as steely as Bush and Baker. They wrote the two administration statements that most angered Israel’s Likud government and American Jews. Kurtzer, Ross and Haass composed the speech Baker gave in May 1989, calling on Israel to “lay aside the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel.” Haass wrote Bush’s comments last September attacking Israel’s congressional push for loan guarantees (but not Bush’s remark about being “one lonely guy against 1,000” pro-Israel lobbyists). Ross also advised Baker on how to draw Israel into the peace process despite Shamir’s opposition to trading land for peace. The secret, Ross said, was to design a process so tailored to Israel’s needs that Shamir politically couldn’t afford to refuse. “Those four guys helped Baker construct a political box from which Shamir couldn’t escape,” says an Israeli government adviser. “The Likud ideologues resent them for it.”
Other, subtler concerns led Shamir and his Likud colleagues to distrust Baker’s Jewish aides even before the battle over the loans. “Many Israeli officials, particularly of the older generation, prefer to do business with American Gentiles,” says Shimon Sniffer, a noted Israeli columnist. “They suspect that Jewish U.S. officials, in their eagerness to prove their objectivity, may actually bend over backwards to work against Israel’s interest.”
The four men would never agree with that assessment. They come by their toughness naturally. Born after the birth of Israel, they were inspired as teenagers by Israel’s stunning victory in the 1967 war. “Suddenly Jews weren’t just victims; they could be victors, too,” says a friend of one of the aides. But during a trip to Israel right after the Six Day War ended, Kurtzer saw the cost of war as well-the burned-out tanks and bloated bodies strewn along the roadside in Sinai.
Today these men, in their early 40s, are part of a vanguard of Jewish-American policymakers. They were able to crack the Arabist monopoly on Washington’s foreign-policy bureaucracy during the Reagan years after Camp David. It wasn’t easy. Many in the foreign-policy establishment reacted with alarm to the birth of Israel, fearful that it would undermine America’s relations with oil-rich Arab states. For decades, Arabists dominated the State Department, Pentagon and National Security Council. They resented-and many still do-the political influence that American Jews exerted through Congress, and they maintained that American Jews certainly couldn’t be trusted to be impartial in Mideast policymaking jobs. Kurtzer, an Orthodox Jew, was told on joining the Foreign Service in 1976 that he could never serve in an Arab country, nor in Israel. He subsequently served in both.
Free from any dewy-eyed romanticism about Israel’s prospects in its hostile neighborhood, these four men believe it’s a dangerous delusion to think that military strength alone can guarantee Israel’s security. They are convinced that the Jewish state will never be secure without a negotiated peace, and that such a peace cannot be achieved without American firmness toward both sides. They do concede that the Bush administration might have done a better job publicly stroking American Jews and reassuring Israel. “People have an uneasy feeling because of words,” says Kurtzer. “But the bottom line is, you have to watch what Bush and Baker have done. What they’ve done has been good for Israel.”
The last thing the aides want is to be seen as victims. Says one: “Don’t portray us as guys who wanted to get into the kitchen and are now complaining about the heat.” But the kitchen is very hot indeed, and their stoicism is tested often. At a Yom Kippur service last October, Haass was startled out of his seat by his rabbi’s harangue against the administration. And when he spoke to a Miami Jewish group at the White House in April, one man challenged him angrily, “After just coming from a Seder, how can you justify a policy that inhibits even one Soviet Jew from coming to Israel?” The aides understand the passion. “The prospect of taking risks for peace naturally makes Israel anxious,” said one, “and American Jews always feel anxious when the United States and Israel are at odds, and they feel under pressure to choose.” Still, the distrust hurts and occasionally angers them. “There’s a nasty edge to the criticism that’s pretty hard to take,” said another. Said a third, “You don’t mind taking hits over policy, but when people question your integrity and commitment as a Jew, it’s very tough.”
The reaction isn’t all abuse, of course. After Ross parried angry questions at the San Francisco synagogue, with his mother, wife and son looking on, the rabbi sent Ross’s 11-year-old son, Gabe, a letter to reassure him. All those questions, the rabbi wrote, simply reflected the great respect our congregation has for the work your father is doing. Baker’s men only hope that someday all their critics will see it that way.
