imra.org.il
The 'Jewish' President Don't believe Obama when he says he has Israel's
back.
By BRET STEPHENS the Wall Street Journal March 6, 2012.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970203458604577263382407488986-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwODEwNDgyWj.html?mod=wsj_share_email_bot#articleTabs=article
Should Israelis and pro-Israel Americans take President Obama at his word
when he says—as he did at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
policy conference in Washington, D.C., on Sunday—"I have Israel's back"?
No.
Here is a president who fought tooth-and-nail against the very sanctions on
Iran for which he now seeks to reap political credit. He inherited from the
Bush administration the security assistance to Israel he now advertises as
proof of his "unprecedented" commitment to the Jewish state. His defense
secretary has repeatedly cast doubt on the efficacy of a U.S. military
option against Iran even as the president insists it remains "on the table."
His top national security advisers keep warning Israel not to attack Iran
even as he claims not to "presume to tell [Israeli leaders] what is best for
them."
Oh, and his secretary of state answers a question from a Tunisian student
about U.S. politicians courting the "Zionist lobbies" by saying that "a lot
of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of
attention." It seems it didn't occur to her to challenge the premise of the
question.
Still, if you're looking for evidence of Mr. Obama's disingenuousness when
it comes to Israel, it's worth referring to what his supporters say about
him.
Consider Peter Beinart, the one-time Iraq War advocate who has reinvented
himself as a liberal scourge of present-day Israel and mainstream Zionism.
Mr. Beinart has a book coming out next month called "The Crisis of Zionism."
Chapter five, on "The Jewish President," fully justifies the cover price.
Mr. Beinart's case is that Mr. Obama came to his views about Israel not so
much from people like his friend Rashid Khalidi or his pastor Jeremiah
Wright. Instead, says Mr. Beinart, Mr. Obama got his education about Israel
from a coterie of far-left Chicago Jews who "bred in Obama a specific, and
subversive, vision of American Jewish identity and of the Jewish state."
At the center of this coterie, Mr. Beinart explains, was a Chicago rabbi
named Arnold Jacob Wolf. In 1969, Wolf staged a synagogue protest in favor
of Black Panther Bobby Seale. In the early 1970s, he founded an organization
that met with Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization—this being
some 20 years before Arafat officially renounced terrorism. In the early
1990s, Wolf denounced the construction of the Holocaust Museum in
Washington.
And, in 1996, the rabbi "was one of [Mr. Obama's] earliest and most
prominent supporters" when he ran for the Illinois state Senate. Wolf later
described Mr. Obama's views on Israel as "on the line of Peace Now"—an
organization with a long history of blaming Israel for the Arab-Israeli
conflict.
Mr. Obama had other Jewish mentors, too, according to Mr. Beinart. One was
Bettylu Saltzman, whose father, developer Philip Klutznick, had joined Wolf
in "his break with the Israeli government in the 1970s." Ms. Saltzman,
writes Mr. Beinart, "still seethes with hostility toward the mainstream
Jewish groups" and later became active in left-wing Jewish political groups
like J Street. Among other things, it was she who "organized the rally
against the Iraq War where Obama proclaimed his opposition to an American
invasion."
Ms. Saltzman also introduced Mr. Obama to David Axelrod, himself a longtime
donor to a group called the New Israel Fund. For a flavor of the NIF's world
view, a WikiLeaks cable from 2010 noted that an NIF associate director told
U.S. embassy officials in Tel Aviv that "the disappearance of a Jewish state
would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more
democratic."
Other things that we learn about Mr. Obama's intellectual pedigree from Mr.
Beinart: As a student at Columbia, he honed his interests in colonialism by
studying with the late pro-Palestinian agit-Prof. Edward Said. In 2004, Mr.
Obama "criticized the barrier built to separate Israel and its major
settlements from the rest of the West Bank"—the "barrier" meaning the
security fence that all-but eliminated the wave of suicide bombings that
took 1,000 lives in Israel.
We also learn that, according to one of Mr. Beinart's sources, longtime
diplomat Dennis Ross was brought aboard the Obama campaign as part of what
Mr. Beinart calls "Obama's inoculation strategy" to mollify Jewish voters
apprehensive about the sincerity of his commitments to Israel. Not
surprisingly, Mr. Ross was a marginal figure in the administration before
leaving last year.
In Mr. Beinart's telling, all this is evidence that Mr. Obama is in tune
with the authentic views of the American Jewish community when it comes to
Israel, but that he's out of step with Jewish organizational leadership.
Maybe. Still, one wonders why organizations more in tune with those "real"
views rarely seem to find much of a base.
But the important question here isn't about American-Jewish attitudes toward
Israel. It's about the president's honesty. Is he being truthful when he
represents himself as a mainstream friend of Israel—or is he just holding
his tongue and biding his time? On the evidence of Mr. Beinart's sympathetic
book, Mr. Obama's speech at Aipac was one long exercise in political
cynicism.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared Mar. 6, 2012, on page A17 in some U.S.
editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The 'Jewish'
President.
back.
By BRET STEPHENS the Wall Street Journal March 6, 2012.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970203458604577263382407488986-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwODEwNDgyWj.html?mod=wsj_share_email_bot#articleTabs=article
Should Israelis and pro-Israel Americans take President Obama at his word
when he says—as he did at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
policy conference in Washington, D.C., on Sunday—"I have Israel's back"?
No.
Here is a president who fought tooth-and-nail against the very sanctions on
Iran for which he now seeks to reap political credit. He inherited from the
Bush administration the security assistance to Israel he now advertises as
proof of his "unprecedented" commitment to the Jewish state. His defense
secretary has repeatedly cast doubt on the efficacy of a U.S. military
option against Iran even as the president insists it remains "on the table."
His top national security advisers keep warning Israel not to attack Iran
even as he claims not to "presume to tell [Israeli leaders] what is best for
them."
Oh, and his secretary of state answers a question from a Tunisian student
about U.S. politicians courting the "Zionist lobbies" by saying that "a lot
of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of
attention." It seems it didn't occur to her to challenge the premise of the
question.
Still, if you're looking for evidence of Mr. Obama's disingenuousness when
it comes to Israel, it's worth referring to what his supporters say about
him.
Consider Peter Beinart, the one-time Iraq War advocate who has reinvented
himself as a liberal scourge of present-day Israel and mainstream Zionism.
Mr. Beinart has a book coming out next month called "The Crisis of Zionism."
Chapter five, on "The Jewish President," fully justifies the cover price.
Mr. Beinart's case is that Mr. Obama came to his views about Israel not so
much from people like his friend Rashid Khalidi or his pastor Jeremiah
Wright. Instead, says Mr. Beinart, Mr. Obama got his education about Israel
from a coterie of far-left Chicago Jews who "bred in Obama a specific, and
subversive, vision of American Jewish identity and of the Jewish state."
At the center of this coterie, Mr. Beinart explains, was a Chicago rabbi
named Arnold Jacob Wolf. In 1969, Wolf staged a synagogue protest in favor
of Black Panther Bobby Seale. In the early 1970s, he founded an organization
that met with Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization—this being
some 20 years before Arafat officially renounced terrorism. In the early
1990s, Wolf denounced the construction of the Holocaust Museum in
Washington.
And, in 1996, the rabbi "was one of [Mr. Obama's] earliest and most
prominent supporters" when he ran for the Illinois state Senate. Wolf later
described Mr. Obama's views on Israel as "on the line of Peace Now"—an
organization with a long history of blaming Israel for the Arab-Israeli
conflict.
Mr. Obama had other Jewish mentors, too, according to Mr. Beinart. One was
Bettylu Saltzman, whose father, developer Philip Klutznick, had joined Wolf
in "his break with the Israeli government in the 1970s." Ms. Saltzman,
writes Mr. Beinart, "still seethes with hostility toward the mainstream
Jewish groups" and later became active in left-wing Jewish political groups
like J Street. Among other things, it was she who "organized the rally
against the Iraq War where Obama proclaimed his opposition to an American
invasion."
Ms. Saltzman also introduced Mr. Obama to David Axelrod, himself a longtime
donor to a group called the New Israel Fund. For a flavor of the NIF's world
view, a WikiLeaks cable from 2010 noted that an NIF associate director told
U.S. embassy officials in Tel Aviv that "the disappearance of a Jewish state
would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more
democratic."
Other things that we learn about Mr. Obama's intellectual pedigree from Mr.
Beinart: As a student at Columbia, he honed his interests in colonialism by
studying with the late pro-Palestinian agit-Prof. Edward Said. In 2004, Mr.
Obama "criticized the barrier built to separate Israel and its major
settlements from the rest of the West Bank"—the "barrier" meaning the
security fence that all-but eliminated the wave of suicide bombings that
took 1,000 lives in Israel.
We also learn that, according to one of Mr. Beinart's sources, longtime
diplomat Dennis Ross was brought aboard the Obama campaign as part of what
Mr. Beinart calls "Obama's inoculation strategy" to mollify Jewish voters
apprehensive about the sincerity of his commitments to Israel. Not
surprisingly, Mr. Ross was a marginal figure in the administration before
leaving last year.
In Mr. Beinart's telling, all this is evidence that Mr. Obama is in tune
with the authentic views of the American Jewish community when it comes to
Israel, but that he's out of step with Jewish organizational leadership.
Maybe. Still, one wonders why organizations more in tune with those "real"
views rarely seem to find much of a base.
But the important question here isn't about American-Jewish attitudes toward
Israel. It's about the president's honesty. Is he being truthful when he
represents himself as a mainstream friend of Israel—or is he just holding
his tongue and biding his time? On the evidence of Mr. Beinart's sympathetic
book, Mr. Obama's speech at Aipac was one long exercise in political
cynicism.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared Mar. 6, 2012, on page A17 in some U.S.
editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The 'Jewish'
President.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.