WASHINGTON – The Iraqi National Congress has demoted a spokesman for the organization after he told an Israeli newspaper that it was in Iraq’s interest to have diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

The episode involving the head of the INC’s de-Baathification committee further exposes rifts between INC leader Ahmad Chalabi and many of his supporters in Washington who favor stronger ties between post-Saddam Iraq and Israel.

In an interview yesterday, the INC’s Mithal al-Alousi told The New York Sun that the Israeli government asked him if he wished to keep his visit to a counterterrorism conference in Hertziliyah from the press. “Why keep it secret?” Mr. al-Alousi said he told the Israelis. “I have nothing to be ashamed of. I have done the first interview before the conference. I am sad to say that many other Arab intellectuals and leaders have come to Israel and have kept it quiet. I am transparent.”

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz quoted Mr. al-Alousi as saying, “Many intellectuals in Iraq know that Israel must be taken into account as an existing fact and that generations of people have been born here. It is in Iraq’s interests to have diplomatic relations with everyone, and that is what we want.”

A Washington adviser to Mr. Chalabi, Francis Brooke, told the Sun yesterday that Mr. al-Alousi was demoted because he made unauthorized statements to the press. “We don’t want to leave the impression that we are involved in diplomacy independent of Iraq’s interim government,” Mr. Brooke said. “We support Iraq’s interim government and diplomatic negotiations with our regional partners.”

In Baghdad, a spokesman for the INC, Haidar Mousawi, however, told the Associated Press that the INC held an emergency meeting and decided to fire Mr. al-Alousi. Mr. Brooke, however, said that his party does not have the authority to fire people. “We are a free association of democratic individuals, you can’t fire people.”

American officials have been largely silent on whether Iraq should recognize Israel, although they have quietly asked the Israelis not to press the matter. On March 19, 2003, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, Marc Grossman, said in response to a question of whether the new Iraqi state would recognize Israel: “In terms of whether the first thing they do will be to recognize the State of Israel, I have no idea. But I certainly hope it’s among the very first things that they do.”

Mr. al-Alousi’s statements to Israel’s leading newspaper are very much in keeping with what the head of his party, Mr. Chalabi, has said before. On June 10, 2003, Mr. Chalabi told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, “Regarding the recognition of Israel – that is for the future Iraqi government. My own belief is that Iraq should engage Israel in every way and should work to establish peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians based on what the Palestinians have agreed with the United States and Israel on. Iraq cannot be more royalist than the king, and Iraq will not be working to incite Palestinians against peaceful settlement. On the contrary, Iraq will be working to encourage them to come to a peaceful settlement. My own belief is that we should have relations with Israel.”

In his address to a conference of exile leaders in London in 2002, Mr. Chalabi said that Jews who had been kicked out of Iraq would be welcome in a new Iraq.

At that same conference, Mr. Chalabi was playing a key role in bringing the principal Iranian-supported organization into the fold of opposition groups, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. In the last year, Mr. Chalabi’s ties with Iran have grown much stronger than when he was in exile and the INC maintained an office in Tehran.

Iran sponsors, trains, and funds Hezbollah, a southern Lebanon-based organization that has committed terrorist attacks against Israeli positions there and conducted operations against Jewish targets in such far-flung places as Buenos Aires. In January 2002, the Israelis intercepted a ship, the Karine A, filled with heavy weapons from Iran. The Israeli Navy said the weapons were destined for the Palestinian Authority.

Mr. Chalabi has in the last six months aligned himself with members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, among other Shiite politicians, as part of his Shiite Political Council, a political bloc aimed at securing rights for this majority religious sect in the new Iraq. The Mahdi Army has recently occupied the holy city of Najaf and is believed by Western intelligence officials as well as the Iraqi government to be receiving supplies and funding from the Iranian government. In May, the National Security Council privately charged that Mr. Chalabi had supplied the Iranians with information about how its codes were broken by the Americans, a charge Mr. Chalabi has denied and offered to face his accusers in front of Congress.

The director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Middle East Policy, Meyrav Wurmser, told the Sun, “It is very surprising that the INC, a body that was so supported by Israel’s friends in Washington, would give in to pressure from Iraq’s neighbors to discipline a man who seems to have only attended a conference.”