[Peace-discuss] (no subject)

[Brussel Morton K.]

On the same topic of my previous post…
		

March 10, 2008 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative

Obama’s Israel Test

Is the lobby losing its grip?

by Scott McConnell

Laying the groundwork for a bold presidential bid, the young  
Democratic senator set up a meeting with a key leader of the Jewish  
community. He had won substantial Jewish support in his home state,  
but as a first termer, he was not yet well known nationally. Sitting  
down with a prominent Chicago developer, the senator averred that he  
hoped to make progress on the Palestinian refugee situation.

The rebuke to John F. Kennedy came instantly. Philip Klutznick told  
him, “If you are going to run for the presidency, and that is what  
you are going to say, count me out and count a lot of other people  
out too.” Kennedy counted Klutznick in, shortly thereafter giving a  
speech lavishly praising Israel and dropping the refugee question for  
the duration of his campaign.

Once elected, he did broach the issue during a state visit with David  
Ben-Gurion, and subsequently floated a plan that would allow some  
Palestinians to return home. The Israeli prime minister was not  
enthusiastic, calling the Kennedy proposal “a more serious danger to  
Israel’s existence than all the threats of the Arab dictators and  
kings.” Leaders in the American Jewish community campaigned  
vigorously against the initiative, which was quietly dropped.  
Disappointed in his effort to reach an entente with Egypt’s Nassar,  
Kennedy offered high-tech Hawk missiles to Israel, beginning the  
process of turning the United States into Israel’s chief arms  
supplier and laying the foundation for the present bilateral  
relationship.

Several wars and many billions of aid dollars later, the politics of  
Israel-Palestine are not exactly the same as 50 years ago but not  
that different either. Israel is more powerful and more dependent on  
American largesse. Americans are far more deeply engaged in the  
Middle East and for the most part are not happy about it. And  
American Jews still play a large, perhaps preponderant, role in  
Democratic Party fundraising.

On the surface, the tie between Barack Obama and Israel’s  
establishment supporters is warm and comfortable, as it would be for  
almost any major Democratic candidate. Last year the Illinois senator  
spoke at AIPAC’s annual conference—“a small group of friends” by his  
description—and described a recent trip to Israel, his ride in an IDF  
helicopter, the horror of Hezbollah rockets, the great threat to the  
United States and Israel posed by Iran. Israel was America’s  
“strongest ally” in the region. Obama mentioned the peace process,  
but assured his listeners that he would neither “drag” Israel to the  
negotiating table nor “dictate” what would be best for the Jewish  
state’s security. The speech, if not the paean to right-wing Zionism  
delivered by John Hagee or Dick Cheney, was still well received.

Nonetheless, there is a sense among the Jewish establishment that all  
is not as it seems—and if the view has not yet crystallized that  
Obama has a less Israelocentric perception of the Middle East than  
any major party nominee since Eisenhower, there is foreboding that  
the times are a-changin’.

That Obama has an Israel issue is not only being stressed by smear  
artists anonymously circulating emails that the senator is a “secret  
Muslim.” It’s also a worry percolating at the highest levels of the  
Jewish establishment. Listen to Malcolm Hoenlein, head of the  
Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, at a press  
conference last month in Jerusalem: “All the talk about change, but  
without defining what the change should be, is an opening for all  
kinds of mischief.” It’s not Obama himself, Hoenlein assured. He has  
plenty of Jewish supporters and advisers. But, he added, “there is  
legitimate concern about the zeitgeist of the campaign.” Obama, he  
worried, had criticized Hillary for putting Iran’s Revolutionary  
Guard on the list of terrorist organizations. Overall support for  
Israel is broad yet thin, he warned, adding that an increasing number  
of Americans see the Jewish state as a “dark and militaristic place.”

Israel’s former ambassador to Washington Danny Ayalon added his  
concern, chastising Obama for failing to clarify how he would ensure  
Israel’s “Qualitative Military Edge” if elected. Abe Foxman of the  
Anti Defamation League called on Obama to either change the views of  
his pastor Jeremiah Wright (anti-Israel, Foxman says with apparent  
evidence) or leave his church. Thus far Obama has done neither. A  
confidential memo circulated inside the American Jewish Committee  
asserted that Obama’s Mideast views “raise questions.” Singled out as  
worry points were Obama’s call for diplomacy with Tehran and the fact  
that in 1998 he attended a dinner keynoted by the now deceased  
Columbia University professor Edward Said, a Palestinian whose  
prestige has long irritated neoconservatives. (On the Web one can  
find a photo of Obama, in a black shirt and sports jacket, chatting  
amiably with the more conventionally business-suited Columbia don.)

These sallies were couched in the always well-modulated language of  
the Jewish establishment, written by people inclined to persuade  
Obama, not criticize him. The tried and true Philip Klutznick method.  
Not so, however, the more polemical wings of the lobby. The  
neoconservative webzine American Thinker has turned unmasking what it  
deems Obama’s hostility to Israel into a central editorial focus.  
Editor Ed Lasky cautions readers not to make too much of Obama’s pro- 
Israel speeches. “I was there,” he wrote of the AIPAC address, “just  
a few yards in front of Barack Obama. His speech was desultory ...  
lacking the spirit and energy that are ... [his] trademark. He  
clearly seemed to be going through the motions.”

The root of the concern, echoed by The New Republic’s Marty Peretz  
and others, is that some members of Obama’s foreign-policy team are  
not full-fledged Israel partisans. Those most frequently cited are  
former top Carter aide Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samantha Power, and  
Robert Malley. The latter, who has at most a tangential tie to the  
campaign, was a member of Bill Clinton’s negotiating team at Camp  
David in 2000, who later claimed in a much-noted essay in the New  
York Review of Books that the famous best offer ever given to Yasser  
Arafat was flawed and was not even a solid offer. Power has become  
famous as the prize-winning author of a book on the Rwanda genocide  
and as an advocate of muscular “humanitarian” intervention.  
Brzezinski, in his late seventies, is still a Washington wise man and  
one of the few in the Beltway establishment to have come away from  
the Iraq debacle with an enhanced reputation. He and the Obama  
campaign say his role is minimal, though that has not stopped Alan  
Dershowitz from demanding that Zbig be dropped, counsel that Obama  
has ignored. Brzezinski draws fire because for three decades he has  
quietly advocated that the United States take the initiative in  
outlining its vision of a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, an  
arrangement more difficult to envision now, after Israel has moved  
400,000 settlers into the West Bank, than when he first recommended it.

Malley and Brzezinski really do believe in a two-state solution to  
the Israeli-Palestinian mess—they aren’t merely, in the manner of the  
Bush administration, paying lip service to the idea while ignoring  
Israeli actions that effectively strangle Palestinian statehood in  
its cradle. Whether Obama would appoint people of like mind to key  
policy positions or listen to their advice is anyone’s guess. He  
probably has not thought much about it. Still, it is undeniable that  
he actually knows people who embrace the Palestinian cause: there is  
that dinner with Edward Said, and one of his colleagues at the  
University of Chicago was Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian scholar now  
at Columbia. This may be a first for a major party nominee.

These elements alone will probably ensure that if Obama is the  
nominee, Israel-Palestine will be a topic in the general election.  
Those already attacking his advisers—Marty Peretz, The American  
Thinker, the Commentary blog—will raise the volume on their efforts.  
Obama and his allies will initially try to deflect the blows but will  
eventually be forced to argue back. Jews who support a two-state- 
solution—who have long taken a backseat to AIPAC and the  
neoconservatives—will find their voices amplified through a major  
presidential campaign. So will Arab-Americans who support Obama. For  
the first time in a presidential race, the Israel-Palestine issue  
will consist of something other than two men squabbling over who will  
more rapidly overrule the State Department and absolutely positively  
move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

A welcome corollary will be realization that there are different ways  
for Americans to be “pro-Israel” and push back against the view that  
being pro-Israel means supporting the right of the Jewish state to  
lord it over 5 million Palestinians in conditions increasingly seen  
as resembling South African apartheid. The alternative view won’t  
sweep the country, but it will migrate from its present home on  
university campuses and liberal Protestant churches into the wider  
body politic.

Finally will come recognition that the Israel lobby’s power to  
dominate the American debate is beginning to weaken. It remains  
considerable, but two of its pillars are cracked: the ability to  
successfully intimidate and the capacity to plausibly threaten a cut- 
off of campaign funds. Obama ignored requests of Messieurs Dershowitz  
and Foxman and the world didn’t stop. His internet fund-raising has  
already generated anxious murmurings. “It’s easier to get credit as a  
community if there’s a Jewish fundraising event or a bundler who is  
known to reach out to our community,” one Clinton backer told the  
Forward. “Online it’s harder.” Especially, one might add, when the  
new method is wildly outperforming the traditional approach. . 
  
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