washington | As the waters of biblical proportions recede, Israel and its American allies are delicately flying olive branches into tsunami-devastated regions.
Israel is delivering its services to a region where it has long sought recognition. By dint of its own experience with years of terrorism, the Jewish state has become a rescue and relief powerhouse, and even more so in this instance when it is working with an array of U.S. Jewish groups.
Israel sees its efforts as a humanitarian gesture, but the prospect for contacts with Indonesia — the world’s largest Muslim democracy — would be a prized outcome. Indonesia was also the country hardest hit by the Dec. 26 tsunami, claiming more than two-thirds of the 153,000-plus dead.
An El Al airliner delivered 80 tons of aid to Indonesia this week, and Ron Prosor, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s director general, met with Indonesian officials.
“It’s not the kind of opportunity we seek to further promote bilateral relations with Muslim countries, but I think it’s a natural thing,” said Daniel Ayalon, Israel’s ambassador to Washington.
Ayalon appeared Jan. 9 with a senior Indonesian diplomat at a synagogue fund-raiser for tsunami relief in Washington. It was a rare event for the representative of a nation that until now has shunned ties with the Jewish state.
Paul Wolfowitz, the Jewish undersecretary of defense who was ambassador to Indonesia in the 1980s and 1990s and who has lobbied hard since to draw the Muslim nation into the fold of the West, also appeared at the fund-raiser.
“This kind of tragedy knows no religion,” Wolfowitz said.
Such signs of warmth notwithstanding, it was significant that the Indonesian Embassy sent its second in command rather than its ambassador. And although Soehardjono Sastromihardjo thanked American Jews, he pointedly did not mention Israel.
Several days later another Indonesian diplomat appearing at a Jewish event downplayed any diplomatic significance.
“That’s not relevant,” Sanga Panggabean, the first secretary of the Indonesian mission to the United Nations, said at a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations this week, when asked about the political significance of Israel’s aid. Humanitarian assistance is “nonpolitical,” he said.
Others suggested that it would be hard to separate the humanitarian from the political significance of the giving — a factor that probably is leading at least some Jews to funnel their donations through Jewish organizations.
The American Jewish Committee calculated the benefits for Israel into its actions; much of the money it raised went specifically to Israeli emergency personnel in Thailand and Sri Lanka.
Thailand, India and Sri Lanka have diplomatic ties with Israel.
“We are trying to make these dollars go as far as they can and as effectively as they can in terms of relief, but also in terms of Israel’s good will,” said Jason Isaacson, the director of governmental and international affairs for the AJCommittee.
The AJCommittee had raised about $500,000 from its donors.
So far, a coalition of Jewish groups has raised more than $13 million, said Josh Berkman, a spokesman for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
The JDC alone has raised nearly $6.5 million dollars. The American Jewish World Service, which met with President Bush on relief efforts on this week, has collected $6 million so far.
Israel has sought support in the region since its birth, when founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion felt kinship with many of the new democracies in Southeast Asia. Egypt’s domination of the Non-Aligned Movement at the time and the large Muslim populations in the region scuttled those dreams. But in the wake of the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestinians ties became closer.
Still, there are leftover sensitivities about the decades of distance, and these contributed to a misunderstanding about Israeli tsunami aid to Sri Lanka.
The island nation accepted one planeload of Israeli experts but asked another, larger team to wait a few days while it organized infrastructure for relief workers.
That led to a stream of false stories that Sri Lanka had rejected Israeli aid, and the Sri Lankan Embassy in Washington scrambled to get the true story out. It flooded the media with a statement that “the generous assistance readily given by the government and people of Israel at this hour of need is highly appreciated by the government and people of Sri Lanka.”
Devinda Rohan Subasinghe, the Sri Lankan ambassador, said he was taken aback by the vehemence of the anger at what was a misconception. On the day he welcomed a reporter into his office, he was still fielding calls from conservative talk shows eager to play up the “ungrateful Third World” story.
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