At least part of the credit for this change in attitude must go to an effective effort by Arab-American groups to combat prejudices in both politics and society. But on one crucial issue -- the stagnating Middle East peace process -- the Arab lobby has yet to exert any real influence.

This failure of influence has had real, and often absurd, consequences for the peace negotiations. In April, 81 Senators and 220 members of Congress signed letters accusing the Clinton Administration of "undermining Israel's confidence" and "putting public pressure on Israel." What this so-called pressure amounted to was repeatedly asking Benjamin Netanyahu to attend a summit conference and setting a flexible schedule for negotiations -- making it clear that Netanyahu would lose nothing if he failed to meet the deadline. On this evidence, Senator Al D'Amato asserted that "the Clinton-Gore administration has chosen to align itself with the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat against the people of Israel," and is "the most anti-Israel" administration of the past 50 years. This weekend Newt Gingrich traveled to Jerusalem to lay a symbolic cornerstone for a proposed, and highly controversial, US embassy in the holy city. (Gingrich came under fire a few weeks ago for calling Secretary of State Albright an "agent of the Palestinians.")

Like most effective lobbies, AIPAC exerts its full power on a single issue. What the Palestinians are lacking is a single-issue lobby of their own. Arab-Americans can boast of a handful of advocacy groups, but only two of these -- the Arab American Institute and the National Association of Arab Americans -- are registered as lobbyists, and there is no lobby devoted exclusively to representing the Palestinian side in the peace process. The total budget for all D.C.-based Arab-American special interest organizations -- lobbyists and grassroots groups combined -- is slightly over \$1 million, according to the PLO's Washington office.

Still, that's been enough to generate scare stories about the growing power of the Arab lobby, and even fanciful tales of a State Department packed with secret Arabists, but it hasn't generated much in the way of either spending clout (the National Association of Arab Americans estimates Arab PACs spend less than \$100,000 per election cycle) or face time (according to NAAA's web site, the group's most recent testimony before a House committee was in 1996).

"We are a community that's still developing," says James Zogby, president of the Arab American Association, one of the most active Arab-American groups. "Our organization is only 20 years old, and we don't even pretend to be a full-fledged lobby."

Nevertheless, the Institute has taken the lead in making Arab issues public. Arab American Institute representatives were present at a recent House Transportation Committee hearing on airport profiling -- the practice of singling out for special scrutiny individuals who fit a "terroristic" (more often than not, Arab) profile. This issue proved to be something of a breakthrough in terms of the AAI's public visibility. "Our situation is not as bad as it might seem, but neither is our organization as powerful or scary as people would lead you to believe," Zogby says.

Zogby even counts the recent House peace process letters as a small victory. "When we saw the Senate version of this letter, we and several Jewish groups -- most prominently Peace Now -- were very concerned, and we made our own efforts to meet with or write to as many House members as possible," he says. "Our efforts on the House side stopped a great number of people from signing on to the House version of the letter. AIPAC had to work hard to get those 220 signatures, and that's a smaller percentage of the total than on the Senate side." But this effort indicates the limits of Arab lobbying power. "We can't win this kind of fight, and we don't pretend we can win it," Zogby says.

More important, Arab organizations have a host of issues that need to be addressed beyond peace process positioning. The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, for example, takes on a range of domestic fights from airport profiling to media stereotypes to use of secret evidence in deportation hearings.

But the mere fact that Arabs are still fighting negative stereotyping indicates how early they are in the struggle for political clout. The anti-defamation battle is one that American Jews fought and won decades ago (though the rash of jokes about Jewish political clout from "Saturday Night Live" to Bulworth indicates this particular genie may be sneaking back out of its lamp. "If we were going to react to every negative event," says ADC spokeswoman Ghada Khouri, "we'd have no time left for pro-active efforts."

This mix of domestic concerns, coupled with the fact that Arab organizations represent a range of nationalities, means AIPAC has no Palestinian counterpart. "For the Arab-American groups, Palestine is one item on the agenda," says Said Hamid, head of the PLO's office in Washington D.C. "When Jim Zogby holds a conference, he's addressing Iraqi issues, Syrian issues, Lebanese issues, and any number of domestic issues. He's dealing with a wider agenda than just the Palestinian groups."

The Palestinian Liberation Organization, which would logically represent Palestinian interests in the US, has failed to fill this void. "The PLO does not understand the importance of lobbying," Hamid says flatly. "I feel it is very important for the Palestinian National Authority to engage in lobbying Congress, whether through an Arab or an Arab-American organization, and I push for that within the PLO. Some people feel that because of the Administration's positive attitude toward the PNA, this might bring pressure on Congress. I try to explain the differences between the Executive and Legislative Branches when it comes to Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We should concentrate our efforts on Congress."

IF ANY ORGANIZATION seems likely to rise to that effort, it is the three-year-old Palestinian American Congress, which has about 6,000 members but no definite timetable for registering as a lobbying organization. "We're hoping that in the future our main job will be to lobby Congress," says PAC president Fuad Ateyeh. At this point, however, the organization is still in its nascent stages, and must first organize at the national level before it can begin to bring pressure in Washington.

But it is in the Legislative Branch, with its budget approval powers and 535 bully pulpits, that the struggle for political leverage has the most consequence, and the Arab political community is just waking up to this fact.

"The PLO never paid attention to how important Congress can be," says PLO's Hamid. "We did not communicate with the American public. We let the Israeli lobby have the field and never worked to offset their work." It's in this vacuum that Hillary Clinton's suggestion of a Palestinian state can be considered controversial, and misinformation about the PLO and its bloodthirsty charter flourishes.

How powerful Arab political lobbying can be is not clear. The US Census Bureau estimates the Arab-American population at slightly over a million people. The Arab American Institute's Zogby says these figures are too low, and the number is nearly three million. Even at this rate, however, Arab-Americans constitute a little more than one percent of the US population -- mostly clustered around Detroit and a few other large cities.

More crucially, a lobby devoted specifically to representing the Palestinian side would be structurally strapped for cash -- and the people with money in the Arab world are not forthcoming where political action is concerned. The PLO's Hamid says Gulf Arabs have been "very supportive" of Palestinian political activity; others are less enthusiastic. "We wish the wealthier people from the Gulf States would help us out more than they do," said an employee at one Arab-American organization. "But they don't." In this sense, the history of lobbying for the Middle East is the Arab-Israeli conflict writ small -- one side organized, unified and adroit, the other working to get up to speed, but facing diffuse interests, unsure whether it even wants to get into the game. At this delicate stage in the peace process, the Palestinians need to learn that the road to even a divided Jerusalem runs straight through Capitol Hill.