PROFILE

Making
Israel's
Case

Zalman Shoval, Israel's
Ambassador to the United
States, has managed to keep
an even keel.

JAMES D. BESSER

Washington Correspondent

W

ashington's em-
bassy row is full of
diplomatic hard-
luck stories.
But Zalman Shoval,
Israel's emissary to the
United States, may be in a
class by himself when it
comes to the incessant and
daunting challenges of his
job.
On the day of Mr. Shoval's
official appointment, the
Persian Gulf crisis blew up
in the world's face; when he
arrived in Washington, he
was immediately pummeled
by the diplomatic fallout
from the Temple Mount
crisis. In one of his first
efforts at serious diplomacy,
he provoked an unusually
harsh public rebuke from
President George Bush.

Mr. Shoval — who publicly
supports the right of Israel to
settle Jews in the West Bank
— stirred up a hornets' nest
at home when he issued a
blunt warning that new set-
tlements might frustrate
efforts to find additional
U.S. aid to help Israel absorb
hundreds of thousands of
new arrivals.
Still, a year after his
rough initiation as a diplo-
mat, Mr. Shoval has become
a stable, steady presence in
U.S.-Israeli relations.
According to his admirers,
he has brought to his ardu-
ous job a new level of media
savvy and an impressive
ability to stay out of the
crossfire of Israel's domestic
political wars.
"I think he's done a very
solid job of representing

Israel's perspective on issues
to the American public,"
said Rabbi David Sapers-
tein, director of the Re-
ligious Action Center of
Reform Judaism. "He
speaks very well to the
public at large. He's been
very good with Jewish
leaders, and he gives the im-
pression that he's really
hearing our concerns; he
really listens."
That quality has not
always been characteristic of
Israel's ambassadors to
Washington.
Even to his detractors, he
is someone to be reckoned
with.
"Objectively speaking,
he's just about perfect for
this job," said an official
with a group that lobbies for
the Arab cause in Washing-
ton. "He is much more for-
midable an opponent, be-
cause he knows how to use
the television, the radio. He
understands the American
way of doing things, and he
doesn't condescend."

Image Conscious
Zalman Shoval looks like
what he is — a prosperous
businessman now turned to
government service, a man
with a wide range of inter-
ests and a calm, reasonable
manner that conceals a
fierce devotion to Israel's
cause.
Before an interview, the
impeccably groomed ambas-
sador retreats to another
room to make himself even
more presentable for the
camera. This is a man who is
endlessly aware of ap-
pearances, of the image he
presents to an image-
conscious America.

Shoval has been given high marks for making Israel's case to the American public.

Mr. Shoval was born in
Danzig, and his family
emigrated to Israel when he
was six years old. His edu-
cation was American and
European. He received a
bachelor's degree in interna-
tional relations from the
University of California at
Berkeley, where he de-
veloped his facility for the
American idiom.
He began his career in
Israel's foreign service in
1955, but left in 1957 to
work with his father-in-law
as an international banker.
That experience, he sug-
gested, provided excellent
training for his current role
as Israel's representative on
Washington's Embassy Row.

"Being a diplomat is not
an attribute of nature," he
said in a recent interview.
"The sort of banking I was
engaged in — international
banking — is not too diff-
erent from diplomacy. More
and more countries, as a
matter of fact, believe that
in this day and age, it is not
such a bad idea to appoint to
the more important diplo-
matic posts people whose
training and knowledge and
experience are more rounded
than just in one field."
He returned to public life
in the early 1970s. He served
in the Knesset from 1970 to
1981, representing the Rafi
party, the slightly left-of-
center party that he helped

create; he began a second
stint in the Knesset in 1988,
this time representing'
Likud.
He was appointed to the
critical Washington post last
summer, and officially took
over the embassy in Wash-
ington at the end of October.
From the beginning, his
days were occupied by fran-
tic crisis management, not
the calm, methodical diplo-
macy that is his natural
style.
"We were then still in the
throes of a certain coolness
in Israel-American relations
as a result of the breaking
down of the diplomatic pro-
cess that followed Israel's
peace initiative of May

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

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