COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Israel Works to Stop Flow to Palestinians : Cases in Israel and California show determination to cut off funds from U.S.

Partly to offset the bad international publicity surrounding its expulsion of more than 400 Palestinians, the Israeli government is now claiming that Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist group of which the deported Palestinians were supposedly leaders, is financed from the UnitedStates.

On Jan. 27, Ehud Yaari, an Israeli with longstanding contacts with that country’s intelligence organizations, published an article in the New York Times alleging the Hamas/Arab-American ties. Two days earlier on the West Bank, Israeli police had arrested three Arab-Americans, charging them with being organizers and bag men for Hamas. Two are still being held. Their captors claim that they have substantiated the notion that the United States is central to Hamas’ organization and funding.

Palestinians in the occupied territories do indeed rely on financial remittances from Arab-Americans. Such monies are of course a tiny echo of the very large sums sent to Israel by American Jews, but successive Israeli governments have long sought to block outside contributions to Palestinians as part of their overall objective of making life so wretched that these Arabs will move elsewhere.

Two cases now unwinding in California attest to the lengths to which Israel and its supporters here will go to inhibit Arab-Americans from sending money home, a practice embedded in the very idea of the United States, populated as it is with immigrants from often beleaguered and desperate parts of the world.

Since 1987, the case of the “Los Angeles 8” has been working its way through the courts. Seven Palestinians and one Kenyan were arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and charged with being members of a PLO subgroup--the Popular Front for the Liberationof Palestine. The INS sought to deport them.

No evidence has ever been introduced that any of the eight was involved in unlawful activity, but with the original charges thrown out as unconstitutional, the case has become a government test of the Immigration Act of 1990. Under this law, the government claims that Khader Hamde and Michael Shehadeh, the two lawful permanent residents among the original eight, were somehow lending material support to the PFLP, which has been charged with terrorist activity.

Israel has taken an extraordinary interest in the case, declassifying top-secret documents and rushing them to the Los Angeles courtroom. The stakes are high. If all support for organizations such as the PFLP--which also operates schools and clinics--can be classified as terror-sponsorship, then Israel will have secured as important a victory as if the South African government had similarly gotten Washington to outlaw all U.S. contributions to the African National Congress.

In San Francisco, the anti-Palestinian campaign has taken a sinister twist. The San Francisco district attorney and the local police department are investigating a former city police officer, Tom Gerard, for having privately and illegally maintained on his Sausalito houseboat thousands of police intelligence files, including records of surveillance of Arab-American functions in the Bay Area.

The allegation is that Gerard sold material from these files to foreign intelligence agents; also that he shared information with Roy Bullock, an undercover investigator for the Anti-Defamation League of the B’Nai B’rith. A search warrant has been issued for the ADL offices in San Francisco. In 1991, Gerard was one of a group of U.S. peace officers who traveled to Israel as part of an ADL mission. At the time of the original arrests of the Los Angeles 8, the ADL’s western regional director, David Lehrer, noted that investigative material published and distributed by his organization had been made available to the FBI. (In a letter to the Los Angeles Times published Sunday, Lehrer insisted that all ADL investigations and contacts in the Gerard affair were lawful and appropriate to the ADL’s mandate.)

Israel’s security services are in possession of the Gerard-Bullock material. If the Los Angeles 8 prosecution prevails, innocent public functions of emigre life could be classifiable as terrorist activity.

The San Francisco disclosures have already rocked the Los Angeles courtroom where, last week, Immigration Court Judge Bruce J. Einhorn refused a defense request that he quit the case on grounds that he is an ADL official. The Clinton Justice Department could drop the case and thus end an ugly affair whose bottom line is whether the Israeli government can reach into U.S. courts and use illegally maintained files to inhibit basic rights of U.S. citizens and residents in this country.