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It is also worth mentioning that in his book, Satloff doesn't focus solely on the Arab "heroes." In order to provide context, he devotes a large section to a discussion of the official mistreatment of Jews by the colonial governments of the time. He then lists the ways in which some Arabs helped the Nazis and other occupiers—working at labor camps, harassing Jews in public, informing on them in private. It is only with this context established that he begins to investigate the stories of Jews who were saved by Arabs, and the stories of the Arabs who saved them. His explicit message of tolerance and bridge-building is that Arabs can begin to embrace their role as heroes. But implicit in the work also seems to be a counter-argument directed at Arabs, especially Palestinians, who claim that they have, through the creation of Israel, been forced to do penance for what was an entirely European crime.
Robert Satloff will be the first to tell you that he is not a Holocaust historian by training. Until the release of Among the Righteous, he was known primarily for his role in guiding the Washington Institute.
The institute is generally regarded as one of the city's more influential foreign-policy think tanks. Former staffers, fellows, and board members have gone on to play prominent roles in each of the last three presidential administrations. "You can see just by browsing a list of staff members, people who have been fellows, visiting scholars, it's kind of a 'Who's Who' of Middle East policy advisers and even policy makers," says Chris Toensing, executive director of the Middle East Research and Information Project. The institute hosts weekly, invitation-only luncheons attended by executive-branch staff members, diplomats, journalists, and other policy experts. Every four years it forms a Presidential Commission on Middle East Policy to put together policy recommendations for the incoming president.
"We made a decision early on that we were never going to be deeply in bed with any administration," Satloff says. "But we never want to be in the wilderness. We never want to be irrelevant. Being relevant is the most important thing." The task has been made easier by the nature of Middle East discussions. Unlike other hot-button political issues, Middle East debates do not fall easily along partisan lines.
Even so, some observers refer to the institute as an arm of the "Israel lobby." This characterization is not completely inaccurate. Martin Indyk, the institute's founding director, was a former research director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and even today the institute's experts often support the policies of the Israeli government.
But while Satloff says he doesn't mind the institute being viewed as pro-Israeli--"among the principles that I think [are] very important and this institute has advanced is that a strong U.S. relationship with Israel is in America's national interest," he says--he argues that the situation is not the zero-sum game that some make it out to be.
"There is no contradiction between having strong relations with Israel and having strong relations with Arab states in the region," he says, pointing out that in the previous two weeks, the institute hosted the Bahraini foreign minister, the Egyptian foreign minister, and the Israeli deputy defense minister.
The decorations in Satloff's office, while understated, also testify to multi-national relationships and interests. On one wall, alongside photos of his children, hangs a tapestry depicting the old city of Tunis, a gift from the Tunis foreign ministry. Nearby is a framed draft of the Israeli Constitution, written in the early days of statehood but never ratified. On a shelf under the window sit trinkets that include a letter opener from the foreign minister of Jordan and a commemorative photo of the minister's family, evocative of the signed George W. Bush photos that hang in many other offices around the city. A coffee table from Morocco stands next to a rug from Iran.
Satloff rummages through his desk, in search of his "prized possession." After a few minutes of searching, he finds it: a signed autobiography of the late King Hussein of Jordan, who almost twenty years ago gave Satloff, then a graduate student conducting research for his dissertation, special access to the state archives.
The policy expert's ability to forge relationships in the Middle East was among the reasons he was tapped to create and host Dakhil Washington, a weekly news and interview program on the U.S. government's Arabic-language television channel, al-Hurra. (He is the only non-Arab to host a program on an Arab satellite channel. For archived episodes: alhurra.com/archive.aspx.)
Satloff was initially critical of the U.S. government's plan to start the station; but once it was approved, he put his considerable weight behind it. "If you're going to do it, do it well," he says. "That's one of my basic principles." The stated purpose of the show is to help Arab viewers get a better understanding of how Washington works. During one segment, Satloff talked with Kenneth Wollack, president of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, about how the U.S. can aid democracy worldwide without forcing the American model on others.
As an undergraduate at Duke, Satloff was already thinking seriously about Middle Eastern issues, studying Arabic and majoring in comparative area studies. Outside class, he served as an editor for The Chronicle, writing, among other things, an investigative piece about a local branch of the Ku Klux Klan and reporting on secret faculty meetings about the proposed Nixon library. He went on to earn a master's in Middle Eastern studies from Harvard University in 1985, then joined the staff of the recently formed Washington Institute. After three years in Washington, he enrolled in a D.Phil. program at the University of Oxford, studying modern Middle Eastern history.
In 1990, he married Litvack, and moved with her to Cameroon, where he wrote his dissertation--he received his D.Phil. in 1991--while she completed her own doctoral research. "I like to say we had a honeymoon in Cameroon," he says.
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