Martin Indyk: Wrong Man, Wrong Job

(Washington, D.C.): Tomorrow, the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee will
consider the nomination of Martin Indyk
to serve as Assistant Secretary of State
for Near East Affairs (NEA). In his
previous capacities as the National
Security Council’s Mideast specialist
and, most recently, as U.S. Ambassador to
Israel, Indyk has been one of the
architects of the Clinton
Administration’s policy toward the
so-called “peace process.” Indyk’s
defective policy judgment, contemptuous
attitude toward Israel and disdain for
U.S. statutes with which he does not
agree have contributed to the evident
failure of that “process” and
make him undeserving of promotion.
The Senate could cut the Nation’s losses
— and maximize the chances that its laws
will be faithfully executed — by
defeating the Indyk nomination.

Accountability for a ‘Peace
Processor’

It has been clear for some time that
the Mideast “peace process” was
a house of cards, an edifice built on
wishful thinking about the intentions and
reliability of Yasser Arafat.⁽¹⁾
Among senior U.S. officials, few — if
any — have done more than Martin Indyk
to ignore and, when that is impossible,
to make excuses for Arafat’s refusal to
embrace genuine, permanent peaceful
coexistence with Israel.

This practice has contributed greatly
to the misplaced popular belief that a
just and durable peace could be achieved
if only the United States pressed Israel
— especially the government of Benjamin
Netanyahu — to make territorial
concessions to Arafat’s PLO. (A similar
misconception underpinned the Clinton
Administration’s ill-advised and,
fortunately, thus far abortive efforts to
encourage Israel’s surrender of the Golan
Heights to Syria.⁽²⁾)

To be sure, successive Israeli
governments bear responsibility for much
of the conceptualization and execution of
policies that have contributed to the
present, increasingly dangerous situation
— in which the Palestinian Arabs have
been armed and emboldened to seek the
realization of their ambitions for the
liberation of all of
“Palestine.”⁽³⁾
U.S. policy-makers like Indyk
have, however, compounded the risks by
dismissing legitimate concerns about
Arafat’s non-compliance with his
obligations under the Oslo Accords and
insisting that Israel scrupulously
fulfill all those it had
assumed, while urging that it take on
ever more risky ones in the name of
“moving the peace process
forward.” For example, as
noted in a critical analysis of
“Martin Indyk’s Record on
Israel” compiled by the Zionist
Organization of America (ZOA),
“Reuters reported [on 11 March 1997]
that Indyk gave the Israeli government a
list of concessions it should make,
including allowing the opening of a PLO
airport and seaport in the Gaza
Strip” — facilities that Israel is
properly concerned can be used to bring
in weapons and to return so-called
“refugees.”

Toward this end, Indyk has, as
Ambassador to Israel, gone so far as to meddle
personally and repeatedly in the domestic
affairs of a democratic ally. As
Uzi Landau, chairman of the Knesset
Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee,
put it on 15 March 1997, Indyk “has
been pressuring members of the
government” and “interfering in
Israel’s internal political
affairs.” As documented in the ZOA
study, the Ambassador has helped to block
Israeli Cabinet appointments and lobbied
against the enactment of legislation by
the Knesset (for example, 1995
legislation that would have made it more
difficult for Israel to surrender the
Golan Heights). Indyk was also one of the
U.S. officials who blatantly sought to
ensure the election last year of Shimon
Peres, a deplorable and risky
intervention in the domestic processes of
a fellow democracy.

Indyk’s Moral Equivalence

Central to Indyk’s commitment to the
“peace process” is the
proposition that the United States must
be seen to be an honest broker, taking
neither the Arab nor Israeli side.
Inevitably, such
“even-handedness” obliges its
practitioners to engage in moral
equivalence between the parties at the
expense of the America’s unique strategic
relationship with Israel. In fact, Indyk
has been regularly critical of Israel,
almost never of the Arabs.

Interestingly, while Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright was at pains
last week to deny that acts of terror
involving the murder of innocent
civilians can be equated with the work of
bulldozers, Martin Indyk has done just
that. For example, as the influential American
Israel Public Affairs Committee Near
East Report noted on 2 June
1997:

“U.S. Ambassador to Israel
Martin Indyk stated on 19 May:
‘The core bargain of Oslo has
broken down. Israelis were
promised security; Palestinians
were promised self-governments
and a credible pathway to
negotiating their rights in a
final status agreement. Terrorism
on the one side, and unilateral
actions which have created the
impression that the final status
issues are being preempted on the
other, have combined to break
this trust on which the
partnership for peace is based.‘”
(Emphasis added.)

The AIPAC newsletter correctly observes:

“…The Palestinian
Authority’s failure to carry out
its most fundamental obligation
under the Oslo Accords —
combating terrorism — is in an
entirely different category from
Israeli policies that are fully
consistent with Oslo and merely
objectionable to Palestinians.
The one is a violation of a
signed agreement, and involves
bloodshed; the other, though it
may be politically controversial,
is legal and peaceful.”
(Emphasis added.)

Unfortunately, Indyk has not confined
himself to besmirching Israel’s
reputation — and lending legitimacy to
Arab violent responses to “legal and
peaceful” Israeli actions. On
occasion, he has compounded such an
odious practice by displaying contempt
for the Jewish State. For example, in an
interview with the Washington Post
on 24 February 1997, Indyk compared both
the Israelis and Arabs to circus animals.
“The image that comes to mind is a
circus master. All these players [are] in
the ring. We crack the whip and get them
to move around in an orderly
fashion.”

Contempt for U.S. Laws

If the foregoing is not enough to
disqualify Martin Indyk from a promotion
to the position of Assistant Secretary of
State, his cavalier attitude toward U.S.
statutes should do the trick. In the past
two years, the Congress has enacted and
the President has signed legislation
directing that the U.S. Embassy be moved
from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and that
American financial assistance stop
flowing to the Palestinian Authority.

As the New Republic put it in
a harshly critical editorial on the Indyk
nomination in its 11-18 August edition,
the Ambassador “ridiculed the
legislatively mandated congressional
intention that Jerusalem at last be
recognized as Israel’s capital.”
Interestingly, the same magazine reported
on 20 November 1995, that
“Indyk…lobbied frantically against
the law….His every move is calibrated
to prove he can be as indifferent to
Israeli sensibilities as any State
Department Arabist.” Indeed, Indyk
even refused to attend Yitzhak Rabin’s
Jerusalem 3000 celebration.

So serious has the stonewalling on
implementation of the Jerusalem
Embassy Relocation Act of 1995
been that two of its most respected
co-sponsors, Sens. Jon Kyl
(R-AZ) and Joseph Lieberman
(D-CT) have felt obliged to write Senate
Foreign Relations Committee Chairman
Jesse Helms to urge that the fact that
State Department officials are
“show[ing] such contempt for the
American people as to utterly flout the
law” be made a focus of Indyk’s
nomination hearing. The Senators
correctly declared that “it
is critical that Martin Indyk state for
the record his support for and intent to
implement the law.”

While Senators are at it, they should
explore efforts being made to circumvent
the clear intent of the Congress in
allowing the Middle East Peace
Facilitation Act (MEPFA) to
lapse last month. With Martin Indyk’s
knowledge, the United States is
continuing to funnel tens of millions of
tax dollars to various Palestinian
Authority projects despite the absence of
authority to do so. Such aid is
not being supplied directly, but via
third-party, non-governmental
organizations and other cut-outs. This
practice is especially insupportable in
light of revelations from the Palestinian
legislative council confirming the immense
corruption that is causing vast sums
to be diverted from even worthy
development and humanitarian projects in
the Palestinian-controlled territories.

The Bottom Line

Given his past record and policy
predilections, Martin Indyk should not be
confirmed to the sensitive position of
Assistant Secretary of State for Near
East Affairs. Even those disposed to give
the President wide latitude in choosing
the senior personnel to staff his
Administration should oppose this
nomination on the grounds that the
candidate must not be given an
opportunity to compound strategically
portentous problems his past conduct has
already done too much to create. Doing
otherwise would only serve to enhance the
Arabs’ expectations of further official
American moral equivalence, strained
relations between the United States and
Israel and Administration disregard for
U.S. laws they oppose. Nothing could be
less conducive to real progress towards a
durable and secure peace in the Middle
East.

Clearly, part of the problem with
Indyk’s nomination arises from the nature
of the President’s policies. It will be
assumed that whoever ultimately fills
this position will bear a similar burden.

That said, Indyk is not just an executor
— to say nothing of a reluctant one —
of policies which Congress and the
American people increasingly appreciate
disserve U.S. interests and the cause of
true peace. To the contrary he is one of
the most aggressive practitioners of
moral equivalence, and a prime mover
behind the strategy of “peace”
through Israeli territorial concessions.

Congress has limited opportunities to
express its displeasure with
Administration policy — especially when
the executive chooses to ignore or
circumvent the law. Consequently it
should take that afforded by the Indyk
nomination simultaneously to prevent the
promotion of an unworthy nominee and
display the need for a new, more
principled and prudential approach to
seeking real peace in the Middle East.

– 30 –

1. For example,
see the Center for Security Policy’s Decision
Briefs entitled ‘The
Triumph of Hope Over Experience’: Israeli
Weariness Begs Strategic Peril
(No. 93-D
78, 13 September 1993); What
‘Peace Process’? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_109″>No. 97-D 109, 31
July 1997); and Blood On Our
Hands: Concessions Demanded By U.S.
‘Peace Processors’ Are Endangering
Israeli Security, Lives ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_126″>No. 97-D 126, 4
September 1997).

2. Martin Indyk
has been among the champions of the idea
of placing U.S. forces on the Golan as a
lubricant to the proposed Israeli
withdrawal from that strategic high
ground. For an analysis of this benighted
idea, see the Center’s blue-ribbon study
as described in its Press Release
entitled Center’s Blue-Ribbon
Study Warns Against Use Of U.S. Forces On
The Golan Heights ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-P_105″>No. 94-P 105,
24 October 1994).

3. The use being
made by the Palestinian Authority of maps
showing a “Palestine” comprised
not only of the entirety of the West Bank
and Gaza Strip, but also all of pre-1967
Israel is but one manifestation of
Arafat’s unchanged aspirations. For more
on these maps, see the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled The
Map Is On The Wall: Arafat Wants No Part
Of ‘Peaceful Co-Existence’ With Israel,
Must Get No More U.S. Aid Until He Does
(No. 97-D 93, 8
July 1997).