Clifford Sobel was barely finished with one job when many insiders began speculating about his interest in another.

Sobel — who last month finished his four-year tour of duty as United States ambassador to the Netherlands — is often mentioned as a possible GOP contender in the 2006 New Jersey race for the U.S. Senate seat now occupied by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jon Corzine.

But as he relaxed last week in his Short Hills living room and contemplated his future, Sobel did not appear ready to make any official announcements.

“I would like to continue in some way to stay engaged, to continue perhaps in public service some way in the future,” he told NJ Jewish News. “It doesn’t exclude” running for elective office, “but I’m back for one week, and it’s premature.”

A successful corporate executive, prominent Republican contributor, and long-term supporter of President George W. Bush, Sobel said he “would not speculate at this point” on what role, if any, he would seek in public service.

Instead, he debriefed a reporter on his time in the Netherlands, touching on the country’s absorption of Muslim immigrants, its role in the war on terrorism, and his advocacy of administration positions on Israel and the Middle East (see sidebar, page 21).

Raised in South Orange, Sobel has been a longtime supporter of Jewish causes and was a board member of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey between 1998 and 2002.

He entered the political sphere through his support for James Courter, a Republican from Warren and Sussex counties who served as a member of the House of Representatives from 1987 to 1991 and ran for governor in 1989. Both later became senior officers of the Net2Phone Corporation in Newark, leading to Sobel’s 10-year stint as finance chair of the NJ GOP.

Sobel, a founder of Norcrown Bank of Roseland, said he met the president on a trip to Israel when Bush was governor of Texas and considered an unannounced candidate for president. “After that, I volunteered that if he made the decision to run, I would like to support him, and I became his finance chairman for the state of New Jersey.”

According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign contributions, since 2000 Sobel and his wife, Barbara, have made more than $400,000 in donations to Republican campaigns and another $100,000 to the president’s first inaugural.

When Bush tapped him as the administration’s chief representative in The Hague, Sobel was serving as chair of Net2Phone, a company with which he is no longer connected.

War on terrorism

His mission as ambassador, he said, was “to represent our interests, to protect our citizens, to protect our assets, to take care of the one million tourists who travel to the Netherlands every year on vacations. That is our primary focus — to make people understand our attitudes and our foreign policy in these challenging times, build coalitions, and to support our common policies.”

Uppermost on his agenda was seeking support and alliances for the administration’s war on terrorism. While opposition to the war was often fierce in Holland and many other parts of Western Europe and believing that “all countries do things that are in their best interest,” Sobel said, “Soon after we got into Iraq, the Dutch were one of the first countries to send in forces on the ground. At one time they had almost 1,500 troops there. They extended those troops twice and still today they have NATO trainers on the ground. They are leading our naval task force in the Persian Gulf. They have assets in the Persian Gulf. They have worked with us extensively in many other places in the world, including the Balkans.”

In June 2005, the Dutch government withdrew all but 350 of its soldiers from Iraq.

Sobel said their support proved invaluable, especially during one incident when another European government refused to give the United States permission to run military supply trains across its borders en route to Iraq.

“Within four days the Dutch came through for us — expediting the shipments through the port of Rotterdam.”

Concerns about terrorist attacks confronted Sobel within moments after he arrived in Holland. An attaché’s cell phone rang with news of what became the ambassador’s first crisis.

“Somebody called in a bomb threat,” he said. “I was just off the plane, and they said the concern was that it could go off at the time I was addressing the mission later that afternoon.” The embassy brought in bomb-sniffing dogs and Marines to search for an explosive device that proved to be nonexistent.

But two deadly incidents focused world attention on tensions between Western democracies like the Netherlands and followers of Islam, Europe’s fastest-growing religion. The assassinations of Pym Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh intensified ethnic and political conflict inside the Netherlands — a nation that has had a traditionally open-minded attitude toward racial diversity, immigration, and gay rights, as well as legalized marijuana and prostitution.

Fortuyn, a far-right politician who called for an end to all immigration and regularly assailed Islam as a “backward culture,” was murdered in Rotterdam in May 2002, nine days before Dutch elections. Although his killer turned out to be an animal rights activist, Fortuyn’s rise and bloody end raised the question of whether liberalism and tolerance themselves could withstand ideologies opposed to them.

Sobel, who had met Fortuyn along with other candidates for office, called his murder “a time for deep reflection in the Dutch society. Pym Fortuyn was able to put into the political debate issues of assimilation that were just not issued prior to the campaign,” said Sobel.

Two years later, in November 2004, Van Gogh’s murder “also left a horrible mark,” said the ambassador.

Like Fortuyn, Van Gogh, a provocative documentary filmmaker whose great-grandfather’s brother was painter Vincent Van Gogh, had been critical of what he called “political Islam,” and had made a 10-minute film, Submission, which dealt with violence against women in Muslim societies.

Van Gogh’s confessed killer, a Dutch-born Muslim, has been linked to an Islamist terror cell called the Hofstet Group. To Sobel, it was a “wake-up call” that “struck a very deep mark within the psyche of Dutch people.”

“Europe has awakened to the fact that terrorism knows no borders, that they are as vulnerable as we and in some ways even more vulnerable,” said Sobel. “The Dutch, as well as many other European countries, have been satisfied with waves of immigration over the decades and have pretty much left the immigrants alone. They haven’t really integrated them into society, and the recent events have underscored the need for integrating these new immigrant communities into the Dutch society, and they are very focused on it,” he said.

Sobel said his job, and the job of other American ambassadors, “is to help where we are asked to help, and in fact we have many programs that focus more on the Middle East than on Western Europe. But we are now rethinking some of those programs.”

Among them, he said, is one that takes Arab- and Muslim-American leaders from such communities as Jersey City and Dearborn, Mich., to trouble spots around the world.

“We send them as ambassadors of good will to let them know how, as Americans, [the American Muslims] are putting together social structures. So, we are really learning and exchanging and listening to each other, because none of us are immune to the problem,” he said.

Even as he acknowledged that Bush administration policies have divided European politicians and voters, Sobel said he is optimistic about the future of relations between the superpower and the continent. “We want to accomplish the same things, and we really do work well together. In the Middle East, I know we are seeing progress. I think the road map [peace plan] is part of that program, and it is important that Europe and the United States work together.

Speaking “as a private citizen, and no longer a member of the government,” he predicted “it has been slow but I think you’ll see progress in [North] Korea, more so in the next few weeks.”

Sobel may not be ready to say what his next step will be, but he is clear on what he learned from his latest stint.

“After representing the United States for four years and seeing the opportunity to do good and be involved,” he said, he feels especially “good to be an American.”