by Gil Hoffman
NJJN Israel Correspondent

August 6, 2009

JERUSALEM — President Barack Obama’s administration is putting too much pressure on Israel regarding building in the West Bank and the eastern half of Jerusalem, United States Rep. Leonard Lance (R-NJ Dist. 7) told New Jersey Jewish News this week on a visit to Jerusalem.

The freshman member of Congress came to Israel for the first time with 20 Republican colleagues on a week-long tour sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, a nonprofit charitable organization affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (see sidebar).

The group met with top Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and opposition leader Tzipi Livni.

Lance concluded that this, his first visit to Israel, would help him develop his views on foreign policy, which, he said, he would articulate to his constituency upon his return to New Jersey.

While Lance was respectful of Obama, he criticized his policy of “tough love” for the Jewish state, exemplified by American pressure for a complete halt to all construction in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. He noted the State Department’s condemnation, in a meeting last month with New Jersey-raised Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, of a building project on the site of the former Shepherd Hotel in eastern Jerusalem.

“I certainly don’t think the president of the United States should be the zoning officer here in Jerusalem,” Lance said in an Aug. 3 interview at Jerusalem’s David Citadel Hotel. “It’s inappropriate, to put it mildly, for him to get involved in a building project on a small parcel of land over here. I disagree with the president’s statements.”

Asked about an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that resulted in two Arab families in eastern Jerusalem being forcibly removed from their homes earlier this week, Lance said that the Israeli Supreme Court was extremely well-respected and had a reputation of being fair to Arab citizens.

Lance, who told NJJN in March that he was somewhat optimistic about the chances of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians during Obama’s term in office, said he still remained optimistic, despite the downturn in relations between Jerusalem and Washington.

“The Israeli people recognize that President Bush was an extremely strong supporter of Israel, and I hope Obama will be as well,” Lance said. “I hope Obama becomes as strong a supporter of Israel as Bush has been. But the president was mistaken regarding east Jerusalem, and I think we have to be extremely concerned about his administration’s policies on Iran.”

‘Time is of the essence’

Lance endorsed the views of Netanyahu’s administration that Iran was an existential threat to Israel and that allowing it to obtain a nuclear capability should not be an option.

Lance noted that he is a cosponsor of the Iran Petroleum Sanctions Act, which would significantly expand economic sanctions on Iran. He said the recent controversial election in Iran only enhanced the urgency to deal with the issue.

“Iran is attempting to build a nuclear weapon and therefore time is of the essence,” Lance said. “A nuclear Iran would be destabilizing not only to the region, but to the entire world. We need to move to the economic approach as quickly as possible.”

Asked about the possibility of an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities if all other approaches failed, he said he supported Israel’s June 1981 attack on a nuclear reactor that Saddam Hussein was building in Iraq, and that Israel retains the right to take steps to maintain its security.

“I take nothing off the table,” the congressman said, using what has become an international euphemism for supporting a last-resort Israeli attack on Iran.

Lance will visit Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey headquarters in Scotch Plains on Tuesday, Aug. 11, to discuss his trip to Israel. He will also announce that funding has been approved for an expansion of the NORC ageing-in-place program run through the federation and Jewish Family Service of Central New Jersey.

Beauty and spirituality

The Iranian issue was the focal point of his group’s meetings with Israeli leaders. Lieberman used his meeting with his visitors from the United States to insist publicly on Israel’s maintaining the Golan Heights in any prospective peace deal with Syria.

Asked about Israel’s legally embattled and internationally controversial foreign minister, Lance said, “He seemed extremely knowledgeable” and that his remarks in the half-hour meeting were “general in nature.”

Lance did not meet with Israel’s internal security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, who is a close ally of Lieberman’s, nor with any other Israeli law enforcement officials, despite speculation in New Jersey that he might use his Israel trip to foster cooperation on the investigation into the alleged money-laundering scheme that the FBI says operated among suspects in Israel, Brooklyn, and Deal, NJ. Five rabbis were among those arrested in the corruption probe.

“Guilt is not collective in the United States or here,” said Lance, whose district includes parts of Hunterdon, Middlesex, Somerset, and Union counties. “The trial will determine guilt or innocence. The situation is irrelevant to the indispensible relations between the United States and Israel and between Israel and New Jersey.”

Asked what New Jersey could learn from Israel, Lance said that as one of America’s most diverse states, New Jersey could learn from the birthplace of the world’s three great monotheistic religions. He said Jerusalem was one of the great cities of the world and called it “breathtaking in beauty and in spirituality.”

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Courting Congress

Rep. Leonard Lance visited Israel as part of what organizers said was the largest delegation of Republican members of Congress ever to visit the Jewish state.

The mission was led by Jewish House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia. The GOP legislators were received well in a country where 88 percent of Israelis considered former President George W. Bush pro-Israel and just 6 percent define Obama that way, according to a recent Smith Research poll sponsored by The Jerusalem Post.

A larger delegation of some 30 Democratic members of Congress led by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland will visit Israel next week under the auspices of the same organization, the AIPAC-affiliated American Israel Education Foundation.

— GIL HOFFMAN

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