New U.S. Envoy to Egypt Works to Overcome Prejudice, Distrust

Other American officials had said as much before, but the reaction to a comment by new U.S. Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer was swift and vehement: How dare he say that?

At Kurtzer’s debut news conference here, the career diplomat was asked about Egypt’s decision to boycott a U.S.-sponsored regional economic summit to protest Israel’s alleged foot-dragging in peace talks. He answered that the decision was, in his opinion, a “serious mistake.”

“Apparently Israel has two ambassadors in Egypt now,” the government newspaper Al Akhbar said in a front-page editorial the next day. Its criticism took on an unusually personal tone, suggesting that Kurtzer should hold his tongue if he could not escape the influence of the “Jewish and Zionist lobby.”

Kurtzer, a 48-year-old native of Elizabeth, N.J., is the first Orthodox Jew to serve as U.S. ambassador in a major Arab country, and the furor over his remarks last month underlined the distrust that he faces. Many Egyptians presume he will automatically be biased in favor of Israel.

In a country where Jews are absent from public life--nearly the entire Jewish community having left Egypt in the 1940s and ‘50s after the founding of modern Israel--tongues are wagging about the observant Kurtzer’s kosher diet and his former deanship at a Jewish college in New York.

But so far, Kurtzer--who says that he and his wife, Sheila, relished the prospect of their second diplomatic stint in Egypt--has shown that he is more than willing to confront such prejudices head-on.

“I think I have to address the issue as I have for the last 20 years, which is to do my best to pursue American policy,” he said. Such prejudice “is not unfamiliar to me. It is a shame.”

He said that he was surprised by the reaction to his comments and that he found it a useful lesson: “It taught me something important about the depth of feeling here.”

Kurtzer has faced preconceptions about himself at other stages in his 20-year diplomatic career, including suggestions that he was too open to the Arab cause when he served as a staff member and speech writer for secretaries of State George P. Shultz and James A. Baker III.

In 1989, he said, he was “fingered” by the New York Times as having been the initiator of the then-controversial dialogue between the United States and the Palestine Liberation Organization while he was a member of Shultz’s policy planning team.

Kurtzer has long been captivated by the Middle East, an obsession that he dates to a pivotal summer he spent as an 18-year-old in Israel. He arrived “literally two weeks” after the June 1967 Mideast War that defeated Arab forces and left Israel in possession of East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula and the West Bank up to the Jordan River.

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To a large extent, the present peace process is about agreeing to a final outcome to that lightning rout. Kurtzer recalls being overwhelmed by the juxtaposed emotions: For Israelis, it was a “period of tremendous euphoria,” but Palestinians faced “incredible demoralization and depression.”

“Walking around for an eight- or nine-week period, it just became a fascination of mine,” he said. “I guess I just got hooked on trying to figure out a better way for the people in this region to live together.”

When he got home, he majored in political science at New York’s Yeshiva University and went on to acquire two master’s degrees and a doctorate at Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation concerned the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Kurtzer joined the Foreign Service in 1976. The next year, he accepted the post of dean at Yeshiva College, the undergraduate men’s college at his alma mater. But that flirtation with academia did not last--he rejoined the State Department in 1979 and was sent to Cairo, initially as second secretary in the U.S. Embassy’s political section.

It was a trailblazing assignment, coming as it did right after the Camp David accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt. Kurtzer was believed to be the first Jewish diplomat to serve in a U.S. embassy in a major Arab country.

Robert D. Kaplan, writing on America’s Middle Eastern diplomacy in his 1993 book, “The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite,” counted Kurtzer among a new school of diplomats: Foreign Service officers who specialized in neither the Arab countries nor Israel but who moved easily in both worlds.

“The Egyptians might have still been uncomfortable with the idea of a Jewish diplomat. But hell, it was our embassy and thus none of their business,” Kaplan quotes Hermann F. Eilts, the former U.S. ambassador to Egypt, as saying of him.

Kurtzer followed his Cairo posting in 1982 with a four-year tour as political secretary in the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, and then he returned to the State Department to handle a variety of assignments, mainly involving the push for Middle East peace.

Although Kurtzer has had a brickbat welcome from some quarters since his return to Cairo this year, one high-ranking Egyptian has gone out of his way to publicly praise his appointment and to dispel the doubts aroused by his religious beliefs.

“We have . . . watched him operate both here in Cairo and in Washington several times,” said Osama Baz, a political advisor to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. He “never hesitated to tell his superiors that they were wrong in advocating some Israeli policies,” Baz told the leading newspaper Al Ahram.

But such tolerance is not shown elsewhere.

“First thing he does, before even saying hello, he criticized the Egyptian position” on the economic conference, complained Adel Hammouda, the editor of Egypt’s popular Rose al Youssef magazine. “Second, we heard that the ambassador was preoccupied for a long time by the problem of finding himself a kosher cook. You cannot say this has no significance!”

Hammouda said that after he first wrote about Kurtzer, he got calls from intellectuals and public figures who said they would boycott an iftar--the evening meal that breaks the daily Ramadan fast--being given by Kurtzer. “I told them: ‘No, we should go and meet this guy. At least if we cannot change his views, maybe we will learn more about him,’ ” Hammouda said.

The betting among those who already know him is that Kurtzer soon will win friends. One nine-year diplomatic veteran of the region called the new ambassador a “class act.” Jordan’s foreign minister, Fayez Tarawneh, praised him as “impartial” and “highly credible.” Kurtzer is “universally described as brilliant and likable,” according to Kaplan.

Kurtzer, who takes classes twice a week to resuscitate his rudimentary Arabic, speaks with affection about Cairo--its history, its culture and its fascinating layers. It was long a dream of his to come back as ambassador, he said. Moreover, he believes the United States’ relationship with Egypt is one of its most important in the world.

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At a time when Egypt has been dismissed by some in Washington as no longer helpful in the peace process, or even as an irritant because of the support it gives Palestinian territorial demands and its criticism of the current Israeli government, Kurtzer argues that the Arab world’s most populous country retains a key role in helping to solve the wider Arab-Israeli dispute, because of its unwavering commitment to bringing peace and stability to the region.

“If one is hooked on the Middle East,” he said, “there is only one place one would ever want to serve, and that is Egypt.”