Monday, Sep. 29, 1997
THE POWER OF MONEY
By Michael S. Serrill
Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State of the world's only superpower, visits the Middle East and manages to accomplish nothing for the peace process. Irving Moskowitz goes to the region after her, and the next thing you know, the process is threatened anew with riot and rupture. Of course, it's easier to hurt than help the onerous business of negotiating peace, but that's what makes Irving Moskowitz arguably the most pivotal player in the Middle East at the moment.
Irving Who??
Irving Moskowitz is no household name. Even in Miami Beach, where the 69-year-old doctor lives most of the time, he is barely known, except perhaps as the husband of the nice lady who runs the Judaica shop over on Lincoln Road. In Los Angeles, where he made a considerable fortune, Moskowitz is renowned--in the tiny, working-class town of Hawaiian Gardens, that is--for taking over its bingo parlor and turning it into a multimillion-dollar money machine.
But last week Moskowitz was boldly demonstrating what a mess a fistful of dollars, strategically spent, can make of Arab-Israeli relations. It was his foundation's bingo-parlor proceeds that financed the Jewish zealots who set up house in an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem, nearly provoking violent confrontation with the Palestinians and casting more blight over the peace process. It was not the first time his philanthropy had set off seismic reverberations. His money helped prompt the opening of a new exit to an archaeological tunnel in East Jerusalem a year ago that sparked a bloody three-day gun battle between Israeli and Palestinian security forces in which 76 people died. Trust between Israeli and Palestinian leaders has never recovered.
To those on Israel's far right who have benefited from his dollars, Moskowitz is a hero dedicated to restoring all the biblical land of Israel to Jewish possession. He has called the 1993 Oslo peace accords part of a "slide toward concessions, surrender and Israeli suicide" that he is determined to stop. But to many other Israelis he is a meddling, unwelcome outsider, hurling matches, as one local commentator put it, into the Israeli-Palestinian tinderbox, while living safely himself in the U.S. And to the Palestinians, he is one more example of why their hopes for a homeland are going nowhere.
The soft-spoken Moskowitz does not seem to care, as he determinedly follows his own conscience. One of 12 children of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he was born in New York City and moved as a child to Milwaukee, Wis. His intense Zionism grew out of immense loss: by his count, 120 of his relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. After earning a medical degree, he migrated to California, where he got into the business of buying and building small private hospitals, then selling them to large conglomerates.
By 1968 he was wealthy enough to start the Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation, which he has used ever since to funnel grants to groups dedicated to expanding Jewish settlements in the territories occupied by Israel after the 1967 war. His donations rose sharply after 1988, when officials in Hawaiian Gardens asked his foundation to take over a failing bingo hall that was a crucial source of local tax revenue. Within three years, the take of the nonprofit gaming operation had jumped to $33 million a year. Some of the proceeds went into city coffers and to charities, but much more made its way to the settlers. Moskowitz prefers to donate to specific projects rather than finance organizations blindly. "He says he wants to see results on the ground," says Yisrael Medad, a settler activist. According to some sources, as much as $18 million has come from his foundation to underwrite the budgets of settler organizations, build college dorms in the territories and support an Orthodox yeshiva critical of peace proposals. It even brought in American students to bolster Israeli morale during Scud-missile attacks in the Gulf War.
Some say Moskowitz has bought quite a few politicians in Israel as well. Although a 1994 law prohibits foreign contributions to political parties, big donors can find ways around the restrictions. Moskowitz was a legal contributor to a movement called the Third Way, which subsequently became a political party that is today part of Netanyahu's ruling coalition. The head of the Third Way, Public Security Minister Avigdor Kahalani, was the man Moskowitz negotiated with last week in the East Jerusalem crisis.
It has been widely reported that Moskowitz gave money to Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, though Olmert denies receiving so much as "a penny" from Moskowitz. In a rare Israeli newspaper interview in August, Moskowitz confirmed that he had helped Netanyahu financially. "Yes," he said, "not much, and in the framework of the law, from my private funds." His main support, he added, was consultation. "Every time Netanyahu asked for advice, I helped. We are friends."
Moskowitz's most drastic impact, though, has been in Jerusalem itself. Since the mid-1980s he has used his personal fortune, the size of which is unknown, to buy up Arab-owned properties in East Jerusalem and pay for settlers to live in them. Janet Aviad, a leader of the group Peace Now, says, "Moskowitz is the biggest backer of Jews moving into East Jerusalem." She counts at least 10 buildings he has bought from Arabs there and estimates that he has invested nearly $20 million in the enterprise altogether.
The current controversy erupted when Moskowitz sent four families to live in apartments he had bought in the Arab neighborhood of Ras al-Amud, where he wants to build some 70 units for Jewish residents. The Netanyahu government, already under intense pressure to freeze building in Arab areas, because it has helped bring negotiations with the Palestinians to a halt, tried to squelch the project, but Moskowitz would not take no for an answer. After a tense week of demonstrations, he agreed to remove the settler families, but only if he could replace them with 10 yeshiva students who are supposed to act as security guards. Netanyahu, who wanted neither to provoke another round of unrest nor to evict Jews from any part of Jerusalem, went along. Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat denounced the deal as "a trick, not more than that," and warned that "patience has its limits."
Moskowitz is unrepentant about the new blow he has dealt the fading peace process. He maintains that his goal is not to displace anyone but to return Jews to all parts of their biblical birthright. But this is not a fight about a few old houses. It is a battle over the ownership of Jerusalem, particularly East Jerusalem, and about using Jewish settlements to strengthen Israel's claim to these areas. Says Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi, the Palestinian Minister for Higher Education: "It is unconscionable that one individual can singlehandedly hijack the peace process." Defending his original plan for the Ras al-Amud settlement in a letter to the Washington Post, Moskowitz wrote, "If the peace process is incapable of digesting the presence of 50 Jewish families 860 yards from the Western Wall and barely a mile from the King David Hotel, then its fragility is indeed beyond repair." As he personally nailed mezuzahs to the doors of the new Jewish homes, Moskowitz was perhaps helping make that prediction come true.
--Reported by Lisa Beyer, Jamil Hamad and Eric Silver/Jerusalem and Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles
With reporting by LISA BEYER, JAMIL HAMAD AND ERIC SILVER/ JERUSALEM AND ELAINE LAFFERTY/LOS ANGELES