Despite Saudi Arabia’s official policy of refusing entry to Jews, the Pentagon says Jewish soldiers and chaplains are being sent there with U.S. forces to repel any Iraqi invasion.
“No one is taken out of a unit because of religion. Units go as units,” Pentagon public affairs spokesman Tom Green said in Washington.
Another Pentagon official, who requested anonymity, said there are “no restrictions on religious services” for U.S. troops inside Saudi Arabia.
The official, however, said he had no information on the number of Jewish chaplains being sent to the vicinity of the Kingdom.
Rabbi David Lapp, director of the JWB Jewish Chaplains Council, said Wednesday that no U.S. Jewish military chaplains are currently in Saudi Arabia, but that the nearby U.S. Sixth Fleet and the USS Saratoga, a battleship, have Jewish chaplains.
Jewish chaplains in the Marines and infantry units have been placed on alert, but have yet to leave the United States, he said.
200 JEWISH SOLDIERS MAY BE THERE
Lapp said that if Jewish chaplains did land in the Saudi kingdom, “that would be history,” marking the first such deployment in an Arab country.
According to Lapp, roughly I percent of U.S. armed forces personnel are Jewish. If that same ratio applied to the contingent of U.S. troops dispatched to the Persian Gulf, that would mean approximately 200 Jewish soldiers are now stationed in or near Saudi Arabia.
Until the late 1970s, the Pentagon screened out Jews from participation in military contracts with the Saudis, according to Steven Emerson, author of the “American House of Saud.”
Congressional hearings in 1975 revealed that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had agreed to Saudi demands that all American military personnel serving in Saudi Arabia submit certificates of religious affiliation and other background material, says Emerson.
“These actions effectively barred Jews from participation in Saudi projects.”
At Saudi Arabia’s insistence, American blacks also were not given military assignments.
The Saudis relaxed their policy of excluding Jews, however, in November 1973, when American journalists accompanying Henry Kissinger, a Jew who was then secretary of state, made his first trip to the Arab country after the oil embargo.
Offended by the Saudi visa application, most of the journalists refused to indicate their religion. The Saudis, says Emerson, “were forced to look the other way.”
Despite that incident, though, scores of American companies — and a few universities — have been weeding out Jews from their projects in Saudi Arabia for years.
NO OPEN VISA POLICY YET
In the late 1970s, for example, the Vinnel Corp, in California insisted that no personnel with “contacts or interest in any country not recognized by Saudi Arabia” be assigned to the kingdom. Saudi Arabia does not recognize Israel.
In addition, Baylor College of Medicine in Texas refused to send Jews to Saudi Arabia for its lucrative cardiovascular surgical contract with King Faisal Hospital.
About the same time, however, the Saudis quietly started ignoring the fact that Americans with Jewish surnames were working on military or industrial contracts in the kingdom.
And starting in the mid-1980s, Jewish members of congressional delegations were allowed into the kingdom.
Nonetheless, the Saudis still maintain they will not allow “Zionists” into the country, and many American companies still comply with the anti-Jewish restrictions.
Things have changed since the early ’80s “but not that much,” says Emerson. “The Saudis still don’t have an open visa policy. If you write ‘Jewish’ on the visa application, you’re asking to be rejected.”
(JTA correspondent Howard Rosenberg in Washington contributed to this report.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
