And from here, the Clinton administration is being seen — even by its closest friends — as a muscle-bound naif, lacking the courage of its own often-stated political convictions to secure a true and lasting peace.

Arabs have not forgotten America’s pledge in 1991, after being helped by Arab allies to subdue a belligerent Iraq, to make an evenhanded effort toward an Arab-Israeli settlement. Here in Morocco, one of America’s oldest and closest allies in the region, that promise was symbolized by the 1994 Middle East Economic Summit in Casablanca, a gathering of Israeli and Arab leaders and business people that translated the hopeful rhetoric of regional peace and economic cooperation into something tangible.

Three years after the Casablanca summit, Arab expectations lie dashed. The only tangible result of the Gulf War victory seems to be the unrelieved suffering of the Iraqi people. No Arab leader trusts or supports Saddam Hussein, but a strong sense of Arab and Muslim solidarity compels them to side with their powerless Iraqi brethren. As a result, President Clinton’s bid for support for the use of military force to punish Saddam for his noncompliance with United Nations weapons inspectors is getting a very cool reception here. Even Kuwait, the victim of Saddam’s 1990 aggression, will not support the use of more U.S. force against Iraq.

Instead, Arabs are asking, where is the American president’s outrage over Israel’s dismal record of noncompliance in the Middle East peace accords? Ever since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assumed power in 1996, the U.S.-sponsored process has faltered and stalled, largely as a result of Israel’s continued construction of Jewish settlements, the wholesale demolition of Arab houses and other provocative acts. Netanyahu’s botched attempt to assassinate a Hamas political leader in Amman last month outraged Jordan’s moderate King Hussein, once Israel’s staunchest defender in the Arab world.

What has the Clinton administration done to protect its investment in Middle East peace, Arabs ask, other than to slap Israel with the mildest of rebukes? It should have come as no surprise to the White House that despite its best efforts only a smattering of low-level Arab officials attended this month’s Middle East Economic Summit in Qatar. Such regional gatherings, with all their attendant political symbolism, cannot be divorced from the glaring absence of any meaningful peace process, Arab officials say. To attend, they add, would have just given Netanyahu another concession he could pocket without offering anything in return.

Here in Morocco, the prevalence of such anger and frustration toward the United States is noteworthy. In 1777, before the outcome of the American Revolution was clear, Morocco became the first country in the world to recognize American independence, the foundation for the longest alliance with the United States in the entire Arab world. Before Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made his historic journey to Jerusalem in 1977, it was Morocco’s King Hassan who hosted the secret Israeli-Egyptian talks that made the visit possible. In addition to hosting the first Middle East economic summit, Hassan established low-level diplomatic relations with Israel and welcomed a permanent Israeli representative in Rabat. Other than the U.S. ambassador, no other foreign envoy enjoys such access to the Moroccan monarch.

The man who put together the Casablanca summit is Andre Azulay, Hassan’s top economic counselor, an elegantly tailored, French-speaking Morrocan Jew with close friends and family in Israel. “Today, I feel like all my work has been in vain,” he told Salon. “You can see the distance from where we were before, how everything has been broken and hurt. Today, because of Israel’s policies, there is no more momentum.” Azulay pauses, then adds: “We have special credentials in this matter. When we say that the peace process is in trouble, people have to listen to us.”

King Hassan places the blame for that lack of momentum squarely at Clinton’s feet. During a meeting last month in which U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis Ross urged the king to send a delegation to the Qatar economic summit, Hassan angrily accused the Clinton administration of blithely standing by while Netanyahu was allowed to backslide on one commitment after another, and of violating Washington’s solemn promise to remain evenhanded.

“This is a guy who went out on a limb for peace long before any other Arab leader,” departing U.S. Ambassador Marc Ginsberg told Salon. “He can’t understand why the United States won’t protect its own investment in the region, why it’s letting Netanyahu change the rules of the game. This is a guy who doesn’t like the look of the limb anymore. It’s a limb where he can get shot.”

The same goes for other moderate Arab leaders who realize that the future depends on their ability to lift their people out of the crushing poverty that fuels Islamic extremism. How do they explain the lack of dividends from what is being seen in the coffeehouses and bazaars as a blatantly unfair peace process — a point the extremists are quick to exploit?

They are also looking with increasing scorn at Clinton’s apparent reluctance to get tougher with Netanyahu. According to a recent poll, more than 80 percent of American Jews support further Israeli withdrawals from the occupied West Bank land to further the peace process. Moreover, American Jews, 90 percent of whom belong to the Reform or Conservative denominations, are outraged over Netanyahu’s plans to support a proposed religious law that will effectively disenfranchise them in Israel. And when the chairman of the congressional appropriations committee warned Netanyahu’s government that the $3 billion of U.S. aid would be cut unless it handed over an American Jew suspected of a murder outside Washington, D.C., there was barely a peep of protest either in Congress or among American Jewish groups. So, goes the thinking here, isn’t it time for Clinton to take on an Israeli government that not only inspires contempt almost everywhere, but even speaks for less and less Jews?

A tougher U.S. posture toward Netanyahu would be greatly welcomed in the dispirited Arab world. There are risks: American Jews and Congress could circle the wagons (and hurt Al Gore’s chances in 2000). But after President Clinton’s constant reminders about the need for the Arabs to take risks for peace, he would be well-advised to take a few of his own. Lest the kind of sideshow seen this week in Luxor become the main event.

Are we about to see more and even more violent terrorist attacks in Egypt, which has been a relative model of political stability in the Arab world? Salon spoke with Judith Miller, former Cairo bureau chief for the New York Times, and author of “God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting From a Militant Middle East” (Touchstone, 1997).

Who is this group, the Gama’a al-Islamiya, which reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack, and what does it want?

They very much want what most of the militant Islamic groups want: They want power; they want Sharia (Islamic holy law) as the law of the land. They want an end to the peace treaty with Israel, they want an end to American aid, and to any American presence in the country. They want a “radical Islamic state,” like Sudan or Iran. It’s your standard Islamic militant movement.

Why attack foreign tourists? That alone won’t bring down the government, will it?

Tourism is one of Egypt’s biggest industries. Their thinking is, if they can bring tourism to its knees, that will make the poverty in the country more unbearable than it is, so the people will rise up against the state. This attack strikes at the heart of the system, no doubt about that.

The Egyptian government is reported to be “in shock” about the attack. Why?

Because the group had been pushed out of Cairo to the “periphery” of the country. But as you can see from this astonishing operation, they have deep roots, in the south, in Upper Egypt, or they wouldn’t have been able to pull anything like this off.

What does the group have “deep roots” in?

They are rooted in the kind of misery and poverty of the villages surrounding these great monuments, like at Luxor. The militants have always been strong in Upper Egypt, which is more tribal and just about every family has one member who has some kind of Islamist connection. It’s much harder for the police to root them out than in Cairo.

President Mubarak’s cabinet went into emergency session Monday night. How are they going to explain what happened?

Obviously, Gama’a al-Islamiya is not under control, like the government has claimed. But let’s be clear here. As terrible as this attack is, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to the situation in ’93 and ’94, when they were operating at will, blowing up cafe drinkers in Cairo. As terrible as this attack was, and I don’t mean to diminish it, it’s not a systemic problem, like the wave of terrorism that gripped the country in 1994. As far as we know, at this point, it’s a tragic, but isolated incident.

So we’re not looking at an Algerian situation here?

No. In Algeria, you have a kind of civil war. This is not a civil war in Egypt. Most Egyptians do not support this kind of terror. They are appalled by it. And much of their livelihood depends on tourism. In that sense, this was a counterproductive attack.

Don’t they have any support outside the south — in the military, or in schools?

We haven’t heard that they have support in the military. They did have tremendous support among teachers, but one of the things that Mubarak has been doing — quietly — is to go after Islamists within the school system. The government realized that they could be winning the battle against the armed group but losing the war if you have Islamic militants teaching your young people. About a third of Egypt’s children still go to school in a kind of religious separate school system where they get a much stronger dose of Islamic orthodoxy. That tends to be a problem.

The other, bigger Islamist group is the Muslim Brotherhood. How does it relate to Gama’a al-Islamiya?

Gama’a al-Islamiya is a spinoff group from the Muslim Brotherhood — which is the largest Islamist movement in the world. I am certain that the Brotherhood will condemn this action. They are not the same people who did it.

How influential is the Muslim Brotherhood?

They have to be very careful how they operate. They are not really permitted to function politically on their own; they have to ally themselves with other parties in order to gain a voice. But if there were a real, free election, the Muslim Brotherhood would do very, very well. Some people say they would even win.

Apart from stoking the fears of tourists, what effect could this attack have on foreign investment. Do the Japanese, for example, have significant holdings in Egypt?

Yes, especially in oil and gas. Amoco is bigger. But I don’t think foreign businesses will be especially shaken by this attack. I mean, Amoco has even gone into Algeria.

American and U.N. weapons inspectors have a different view: Not only were American inspectors improperly barred by Iraq, but lights were turned out to prevent sites from being monitored, inspectors were prevented from replacing air samplers that monitor the production of components used to make chemical and biological weapons, and when the Iraqis finally turned the lights back on, suspected weapons-making equipment had vanished.

If these charges are true, what is the regime of Saddam Hussein hiding? “Hot Zone” author Richard Preston, in last Friday’s New York Times, wrote that the U.S. and U.N. have evidence that Iraq, courtesy of a new international black market, possesses genetically engineered strains of anthrax, bubonic plague, the Ebola virus, the botulinum toxin and smallpox. Painting a scenario in which Iraqi terrorists use such “bioweaponry” against a defenseless American city, Preston writes of “terror in slow motion, an unrolling horror with a death toll equivalent to dozens of Oklahoma City bombings occurring day after day.”

Is this threat real? Or did U.S. intelligence co-opt Preston, who has just written a novel called “The Cobra Event,” to create a scare that will solidify support for military action against Iraq? Salon spoke with Jonathan B. Tucker, a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq and director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a private graduate school in Monterey, Calif.

Do we know for sure that Iraq has these genetically engineered toxins the Preston describes?

No. I read Preston’s article, and it knocked my socks off. But he doesn’t say who his sources are; I’d love to know who they are. Iraq does have a genetic engineering center in Baghdad, but as far as I know, it has a very limited capability.

Do we know what biological weapons Iraq does have?

U.N. inspectors have determined that the Iraqis manufactured three biological agents before the Gulf War: anthrax, botulinim toxin and aflatoxin, which is produced by a fungus.

Where did Iraq get them from?

They got the biological seed cultures from the United States and France before the Gulf War. One company involved in providing these materials to Iraq was American Type Culture Collection in Rockville, Md. They are a major supplier to research laboratories for disease-causing agents around the world. They have since tightened up their controls on sales of these materials. As for the original sale, they said at the time the Commerce Department issued them a license to ship these materials to Iraq.

Preston is alleging that rogue Russian scientists who had been involved in the Russian biological weapons program provided these genetically engineered strains to Iraq. Is that possible?

Yes, it’s within the realm of possibility, but again, I’d love to know his sources. I don’t know on what he’s basing his allegations because his sources are not very specific. These are very sensational allegations, and it’s irresponsible for him to make them unless he has really solid evidence for them.

How are genetically engineered biological weapons produced?

They involve cutting or splicing DNA molecules to move toxin genes from one type of microorganism to another. Or you could take, say, even a cobra toxin, which is produced by a snake, and splice it into a bacterium so that the bacterium starts producing that toxin. One also can use genetic engineering to transfer antibiotic resistance to microorganisms. So one could make a resistant strain of plague or anthrax that normally could no longer be treated with available medications. And you could clone these strains. You take a gene for a toxin and transfer it into a bacterium such as E-coli, which is widely used in genetic engineering, and then clone the gene. That would be one way of generating large quantities of otherwise hard-to-produce toxins.

It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie.

This can be done today with conventional selection techniques. This is not science fiction.

But could its actual existence also be a kind of “X-Files” “bogus revelation” — a scare planted by U.S. intelligence?

I don’t know. It’s a possibility. Richard Preston has written extensively on these issues. It’s conceivable that he has sources within the intelligence community. But it could also be speculation that Preston has presented as fact. I’m skeptical until he provides evidence that his sources are credible.

Have U.N. inspectors suggested that Iraq possesses such genetically engineered weapons?

Not that I’m aware of. Nothing has appeared in any public report for the U.N. weapons inspection commission. But we do know that Iraq was engaged in extensive research and development on a wide range of agents, including fungal toxins and viral agents, both lethal and incapacitating. They did extensive experiments with animals. They put a number of these agents into weapons and tested them. So we know that Iraq had a very sophisticated biological weapons program.

How do we know that?

From U.N. investigations and from declarations that Iraq itself has made to the U.N. They initially denied that they had any such program, and over the years they’ve admitted more and more. First they maintained they had a strictly defensive program, then they said they only had a small research program for offensive weapons. Then they admitted that they had larger quantities, and then they admitted that they had weaponized these agents. So Iraq has proven itself to be totally untrustworthy.

Apart from what Iraq has admitted to, what else do we know, and how do we know it?

One big breakthrough occurred in 1995, when Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected to Jordan and spilled the beans on a lot of these programs. U.N. inspectors also have discovered another huge discrepancy in the amount of growth medium for bacteria that Iraq had imported — about 40 metric tons. Iraq claims it was used in medical clinics for diagnostic purposes, but that would only account for only 200 kilograms. We’re talking about 40 tons. There are strong indications that they still have a stockpile of dried anthrax hidden somewhere in the desert.

What do you make of Preston’s allegations about a black market in genetically engineered weapons?

It’s shocking. It’s particularly shocking, if true, that smallpox is part of this international black market.

Why?

Because smallpox is supposed to have been eradicated, except for small quantities that are stored under very high security at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and in a comparable facility in Moscow. A couple of years ago, there was a debate about whether to destroy these last samples and eradicate the virus from the earth once and for all. There was a great reluctance in the U.S. government to destroy them because of fear that elements of the Russian military might want to develop smallpox as a biological weapon. The U.S. wanted to hedge its bets until it had a better idea of what’s really going on in the Russian biological weapons program.

And now it looks like we know.

Yes, if true. But I’m not entirely persuaded that it is true. Smallpox is an extremely virulent and deadly virus. But it’s not a particularly good biological weapon because it’s uncontrollable and so contagious; it would spread through a population like wildfire. Most biological weapons are not contagious like that. So it could only be used as a genocidal weapon.

The same goes for Ebola. It could be used as a terror weapon, but I can’t see its military utility. We know the Aum Shin Rikyo (the Japanese cult that used sarin nerve gas on unsuspecting subway riders in Tokyo) was also interested in Ebola. We know they went down to Zaire, probably to get a sample of the Ebola virus to develop into a biological weapon. In that case, they just wanted to kill a lot of people and wreak havoc. It would be a good weapon for that purpose. But it doesn’t have any military utility. You could use it strategically to threaten a city, sort of a slow-motion Hiroshima, but it wouldn’t be effective on a battlefield against troops.

Wasn’t Saddam’s biological weapons capability supposed to have been pretty much eliminated when the biological weapons facility at Al Hakem was destroyed?

No, it’s not true. I was at Al Hakem before it was destroyed, and it was a pretty impressive facility. It was clearly designed as a dedicated biological weapons production facility. But Iraq has dozens of vaccine and pharmaceutical plants around the country that could be used to make biological weapons. This is all dual-use equipment, and the Iraqis have legitimate uses for it. With anthrax endemic in Iraq, they do have a need to make an anthrax vaccine. And to make the anthrax vaccine, you have to make anthrax. But the facilities could easily be diverted to make illicit agents.

So at least we know about them.

There have been surveillance cameras placed at such facilities, but now the Iraqis are tampering with them. If you lose surveillance over these facilities for even a few hours, the Iraqis could start producing agents. So there are enormous problems with verification and compliance.

How could U.N. inspectors determine if the Iraqis are engaged in the production of these genetically engineered bioweapons?

You have to take samples to determine the genetic structure of a particular microorganism using techniques like genetic analysis and gene probes. Preston mentions that inspectors took such samples, but until his article, the discovery of such genetically engineered biological agents in Iraq has never been in the public domain. Garth Nicholson, at the University of California-Irvine Medical Center, claims that Gulf War illness is the result of a genetically engineered Iraqi microorganism, but I don’t find his evidence particularly compelling.

Let’s say it’s all true. If the U.S. were to bomb Iraqi sites suspected of producing such bioweapons, isn’t there a danger of germ-laden fallout from such an attack?

There is an enormous danger unless they use weapons that incinerate the agent. I’m talking about fuel-air explosives or some other incendiary that would burn up the agent. They couldn’t use regular bombs: The biological agents, once released into the air, could kill or infect hundreds of thousands of people. It could drift over to Iran, or south into Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, even to our ships in the gulf. I think the Kamasiya incident during the war, in which Army engineers blew up an Iraqi depot containing nerve gas bombs and exposed 100,000 troops, has taught the Pentagon the dangers of collateral damage from blowing things up with conventional explosives.

Mandela has earned such reverence. After 27 years in jail, he led a remarkably peaceful transition to democracy in South Africa. He initiated a Truth and Reconciliation Committee whose purpose was to expose apartheid’s injustice, without the aim of retribution, so that his country could purge itself and move forward. Though one may argue with the outcome — and the progress that the new South Africa has achieved — Mandela has undertaken a remarkably generous and farsighted attempt at healing a nation.

Which makes it all the more dismaying to see photographs of this great man embracing one of the world’s most loathsome, Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi. Calling him “my brother leader,” Mandela ignored the U.N. boycott of Gadhafi in retaliation for harboring two Libyans suspected in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. In Tripoli last week, Mandela rejected U.S. criticism of his visit. “Those who say I should not be here are without morals,” he declared. “I am not going to join them in their lack of morality.” Of Gadhafi, he said, “This man helped us at a time when we were all alone.”

As disturbing as Mandela’s remarks may be, they are not really surprising. Mandela has repeatedly demonstrated strident loyalty to those who supported him in what South Africans refer to as “the Struggle” against apartheid. In addition to Gadhafi, Yasir Arafat, Fidel Castro and a dream team of late 20th century villains have basked in the great man’s glow.

At the same time, for a man who appears to be the very epitome of human rights, he is enigmatic at best on the subject. For almost seven years following his release from prison, he begged off of human rights issues elsewhere in Africa, saying he had matters to attend to within South Africa itself. It was an ironic position for a man who had relied so heavily on international activism, especially on a continent so badly in need of moral guidance. Mandela’s stepping onto the international stage came about only late last year after urging by Daniel Arap-Moi, the heavy-handed Kenyan leader whose prisons teem with political opponents and whose human rights record is no better than the government that imprisoned Mandela.

Mandela has also shown, in brief glimpses, a residue of bitterness toward those whom he believes did not support him loudly enough. A few days after the 1993 U.N. address, I was one of five reporters invited to meet him at his hotel in New York. I asked Mandela whether the U.S. investors he was courting would have any guarantees that their money was safe from nationalization, a policy that communists in his African National Congress had yet to repudiate. An offended Mandela lectured me on how it was communists, not Americans, who were in the vanguard in the fight against apartheid, and Americans had no right to expect him to denounce them.

But how does one explain last week’s photo-op with an outcast like Gadhafi? Is Mandela losing his political touch — or was the move shrewdly calculated? By thumbing his nose at the U.S. and the U.K., he asserted South Africa’s independence while repaying old political debts. Perhaps he also considered the fact that people in the West have short memories and that, in any case, he has so many faithful followers, he could afford to spend a day being the bad guy. By couching the visit in personal terms, he avoided committing South Africa to Libya.

Such calculation may be savvy enough, but can’t be very comforting to the families of the Lockerbie victims. In Mandela’s case, it also qualifies as a foolish misuse of his hard-earned moral power. Gadhafi hopes the South African’s embrace will uplift him in the world’s eyes. For those looking for an excuse to resume business relations with the terrorist state, it may be just enough to get him over the bar.

We live in a time when great people, willfully or through lack of will, tarnish their reputations through acts of stupidity. By hugging Gadhafi, Mandela showed that he is indeed a man, not a saint, of our times.

Prominent among them are people like Dr. Irving Moscowitz, a millionaire physician and bingo king from Miami, who, along with other like-minded American Jewish right-wingers, has given tens of millions of dollars over the past decade to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Their money also finances virulently anti-Arab religious seminaries, some of which are affiliated with Jewish terror groups banned in Israel and the United States, and helps to buy up land in Arab East Jerusalem, thereby scuttling any chance of a compromise agreement over the disputed city.

Such armchair warriors rarely leave their American desks. Arthur Finkelstein, the gay Republican political consultant — better known in the U.S. as an organizer of Sen. Jesse Helms’ viciously anti-gay electoral campaigns — uses a secure phone to Jerusalem to counsel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on matters such as how to spin the disastrously misconceived assassination attempt against a Hamas leader in Jordan. Others merely point their browser to certain places on the Internet:

“A new apartment building in memory of Nachum Hoss from Hebron and Yehuda Partush from Kiryat Arba, who were murdered last year outside of Hebron. Includes 6 apartments and a public area. Total cost for building: $1,500,000, Cost per apartment: $200,0000,” says one notice on the Web site of the Hebron Fund, a New York foundation that raises money for the ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron. The settlers’ presence in the overwhelmingly Palestinian city has caused constant friction and unrest, the latest example of which occurred a few months ago when a settler put up posters in the town depicting the prophet Mohammed as a pig.

The Web site of the Jerusalem Reclamation Project, a New York foundation that focuses on moving Jews into the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem, tells its visitors: “Only through the support of folks like yourselves can we continue our important work of reclaiming the Old City on behalf of the Jewish people.”

The Jerusalem Project has funded the purchase of the Ateret Cohanim Yeshiva in the Muslim Quarter, as well as some 50 nearby Arab homes, which now house extremist Jewish religious students and teachers. Located close to the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, the yeshiva’s stated mission is to prepare for the day when the mosque is replaced by a reconstructed Jewish temple atop the biblical Temple Mount. “This is our campus,” says Dr. Joseph Frager, a New York physician who is head of the foundation. “It’s the oldest and certainly the holiest campus in the history of the world.”

It has also been used as a battlement from which the campus’s rabbis and students have hurled human feces at protesting Palestinians and Israelis. They have also thrown shit at Jewish men and women who have committed the unpardonable sin of praying together at the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism.

In an interview, Frager refused to disclose how much the Jerusalem Reclamation Project has raised since its inception 10 years ago. Last year, he said, 1,500 American supporters paid $250 each to attend a dinner at the New York Hilton jointly sponsored by the Jewish Reclamation Project and the One Israel Fund, which raises money for West bank settlements, grossing $375,000 on one night alone.

“This is not a basketball game,” says Frager, referring to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s call for a “time-out” in Jewish settlement construction. “For her to call for a time-out creates a moral equivalency between building and terrorism.” As for Jerusalem, says Frager, “There is nothing to talk about. It belongs to the Jews. Period. End of story.”

No one has been able to track exactly how much American money goes to such organizations. The Associated Press recently scrutinized the tax records of a dozen U.S. organizations that support Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied territories and East Jerusalem and found that the groups received more than $11 million in tax-deductible contributions in 1995, the latest year for which full tax records are available.

Incomplete tax records for the past four years showed these U.S. groups received at least $23 million in tax-deductible contributions, according to the AP. In other words, while Washington policy makers insist a halt to settlement construction is crucial to the peace process, the U.S. government provides tax breaks to those who are actually funding the settlements.

By far, the biggest individual donor to these organizations is the 70-year-old Moscowitz, who made a fortune buying and selling hospitals and old-age homes in California and from a bingo parlor in the Los Angeles suburb of Hawaiian Gardens. Moscowitz sees himself as part of a divine mission to protect Israel’s survival, which he believes depends on Jewish control of Jerusalem. “After 2,000 years of sacrifice for the dream of returning to Jerusalem, we cannot allow it to be taken away,” he told the Los Angeles Times last year.

To that end, he has purchased an estimated $20 million in land and property in Arab East Jerusalem, including the Ateret Cohamim Yeshiva complex, another yeshiva on Mount Scopus, a large house on the Mount of Olives, the Shepherd Hotel in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, St. John’s Hospice and a building in the Christian Quarter of the Old City close to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Moscowitz also donated the money for the controversial restoration of an ancient tunnel leading from the Temple Mount to Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter and pressured the Netanyahu government to open it in Sept. 1996. The opening provoked gun battles that left 70 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers dead.

Controversy also surrounds Moscowitz’s most recent purchase — several houses and three and a half acres of land in Ras al-Amud, a Palestinian neighborhood on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, and a small plot of land in Abu Dis, a Palestinian town straddling Jerusalem’s eastern border. Just one day after Secretary of State Albright ended her visit to the Middle East last month, a group of Jewish families moved into the Ras al-Amud houses and planted the flag of a new Israeli settlement. Under U.S. pressure, Netanyahu opposed the move, but Moscowitz challenged the Israeli leader in court, staying any government expulsions. Under a compromise, the three Jewish families subsequently moved out, to be replaced by 10 yeshiva students who now guard and maintain the property.

According to Yossi Kaufman of Ateret Cohamim, Moscowitz plans to start building several dozen apartment units for Jews at the site within three months. He also plans to build more housing for Jews on his land in Abu Dis. Under Israel’s previous Labor government, there had been considerable progress in talks with the Palestinians to turn Abu Dis into the future Palestinian capital. A Jewish presence there would clearly thwart that option.

Other foundations support Jewish seminaries that espouse the political beliefs of Kach, the ultra-nationalistic party of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, which has been linked to numerous terror attacks against Arabs and left-wing Israelis and is officially listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. “Most yeshivas (in the West Bank) have their own fund-raising foundations in the United States,” Steven Orlov, president of the One Israel Fund told Salon.

Such involvement infuriates more moderate Israelis. “People like this Moscowitz are some of the most dangerous people in Israel today, and they don’t even live here,” says Israeli writer Meir Shalev. “They make these settlements possible with their money, and then when there’s violence, they’re fat and safe in Miami. They should stay there and spend their money at home. We don’t need it.”

Orlov of the One Israel Fund insists that all of the $2 milltion to $3 million his organization raises annually goes for humanitarian purposes, such as hospitals, schools, ambulances and emergency medical equipment. By way of example, he recounts an incident in the West Bank involving an accident in the middle of Bethlehem. A United Nations ambulance with Arabic writing on the side arrived to assist the injured Jewish driver. “We couldn’t have that,” Orlov said. “We couldn’t allow a Jew to go into what amounted to an Arab ambulance.” Orlov got on his cell phone, and within a few minutes another ambulance arrived on the scene. “And you know what was written on the side?” Orlov said. “‘Donated by the One Israel Fund.’”

“If we donate an ambulance in Judea and Samaria (the biblical names for the West Bank) to make people’s lives safer, why is that political? Are we supposed to let their lives become so miserable that they have no choice but to abandon their homes? I don’t see how that is political. It just escapes me.”