[Peace-discuss] The friends of Joe Biden

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Other things being equal (they aren't), Pallin would be preferable to Biden, 
the clapped-out creature of the military, the credit-card industry, and the 
Israel lobby.  If AWARE is serious about its anti-racism, it should start with 
the anti-Arab racism of people like Peretz, the former owner of the liberal 
journal The New Republic.  --CGE]


> 	Biden is more than just 'a friend of Israel'
> 	Sep. 4, 2008
> 	Marty Peretz, THE JERUSALEM POST
>
> If one examines the formal records of American politicians - votes  
> in Congress, speeches to Jewish groups - almost all of them can be  
> called "friends of Israel." Especially near election day. Still,  
> this shows (and it is confirmed by exhaustive polling data over the  
> decades) that the United States as a polity and as a people has  
> little sympathy for the Palestinians whose at once whining and  
> belligerent politics has worn thin, very thin.
>
> The endemic violence of the Arab world and within various (but,  
> let's make clear, not all) Muslim states has not only distanced but  
> actually repelled the American people from the cultural and  
> psychological fantasies of their actual politics. Blood flows  
> easily among them.
>
> Then, of course, there is the legacy of Old Testament Protestantism  
> that has in its heart a love for "God's people," out of which love  
> emerged America's steadfast support over its history for the Jewish  
> return to the ancient land.
>
> All of this is to the good, very much to the good. But it is not  
> exactly strategic thinking. I've been pondering this in recent days  
> since rumors have been circulating that Joe Biden once got into a  
> verbal spat with Menachem Begin (chas v'challileh, a verbal spat  
> about settlement policy, no less. Who ever heard of that?) and that  
> Biden had pondered whether Israel might actually have to live with  
> an Iranian bomb.
>
> The first story has a long history and goes back no less than a  
> quarter century, 26 years, to be exact. The exchange was supposed  
> to have occurred at an utterly undocumented (and therefore most  
> unlikely) Senate hearing but was reported only in 1992 and now  
> repeated in 2008 by Norman Podhoretz's son, John. The second urgent  
> report is now widely accepted as being false, a sheer invention.
>
> I go through these tawdry details because if ever there was a true  
> friend of Israel in the United States Senate it is Joe Biden. Oh  
> yes, there were also Owen Brewster, Republican from Maine, and Guy  
> Gillette, Democrat from Iowa. But that goes back to the very  
> founding of the state.
>
> This is not hyperbole about Biden. It is true. And it is so not  
> just on a philosophical basis but in deeds, too. Biden is a true  
> friend on both a higher and a deeper level, and he has been that  
> for three and a half decades. It is reckless for Jews to trifle  
> with such allies. We have, as I've said, many friends. But what we  
> do not have is many such allies - formidable, expert, truly  
> passionate.
>
> A basic distinction between an ideological friend and a  
> conscientious ally is in how the politician in question views the  
> present predicament over negotiations. The ideological friend  
> believes that with a bit more goodwill, perhaps a lot more energy  
> and a decent amount of good luck in a tight corner the parties will  
> all come to agree.
>
> US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice seems to go one step  
> further, maybe two: She thinks that Israel is simply obstructing  
> the road to peace. Desperate as her last months and weeks go by,  
> she been pressing Israel ever more to give up vital territory  
> around Jerusalem and along the Jordan River that is absolutely  
> necessary to the security of the state and for which Israel has  
> shown that it will give other land in exchange. I wonder what John  
> McCain and, for that matter, Joe Lieberman think of the secretary's  
> record on this matter.
>
> Why am I cosseting George W. Bush from the meaning and consequences  
> of what is, after all, his policy? Perhaps because we need to  
> sustain the sense that he doesn't know what is really going on.  
> But, then, he surely knows what, in his name, the secretary did  
> about Lebanon at the United Nations in 2006. She forced Israel to  
> accept United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, whose  
> slippery terms allowed the rearmament of Hizbullah and guaranteed  
> that the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (which has been  
> "interim" since 1978) neither does its job nor know what its job is.
>
> To the Bush administration belongs the calamity that now has Iran  
> on both of Israel's northern borders and the collapse of Lebanon as  
> even the figment of an independent state. So what does Bush's  
> aspiring successor say about that? And why didn't he say it earlier  
> when it might have counted?
>
> JOE BIDEN is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  
> Barack Obama is a member of that body. In a way their roles have  
> now been reversed. But, sitting on the committee, Obama actually  
> was a student of Biden's. And so he heard Biden say on Meet the  
> Press, for example, "I find it fascinating [when] people talk about  
> has Israel gone too far. No one talks about whether Israel is  
> justified in the first place."
>
> This is a punch at the solar plexus of Israel's adversaries.
>
> Biden said Thursday in Florida that he would not have agreed to be  
> Barack Obama's running mate had he not been certain that he and the  
> Democratic candidate were in the same place on Israel.
>
> Well, I, too, would not be supporting Obama were I not convinced  
> that he understood the real underside of Israel's conflict with the  
> Arabs or, more to the point, the Arabs' conflict with Israel. It is  
> mostly about history, and Obama is a student of history. The Arabs  
> simply would not accept the Jews' renaissance in their historic  
> homeland, no matter how small their homeland would be. Recall that  
> Chaim Weizmann once said that he would accept a tablecloth for a  
> state.
>
> What was the essence of Obama's grasp of Israel's dilemma as people  
> from every side push it to give up this and give up that and then  
> give up another thing? In Iowa, where no one pressed him to speak  
> about Israel, in Cleveland and Philadelphia, where many did, he  
> expressed the crux of the issue. It was not the particulars that  
> mattered. It was the general principle.
>
> He knew, Biden said, that Israel wanted peace. About the  
> Palestinians it was yet to be shown.
>
> That is the case for Israel in a nutshell. Everybody knows that  
> there is a consensus in the Jewish state around giving up much of  
> the nation's historic heart and heartland. Nobody knows what the  
> Palestinians, the fratricidal Palestinians, are truly willing to  
> cede to Israel. Maybe from Tel Aviv's Rehov Ibn Givrol east. Maybe,  
> in truth, not even that. And the Bush administration is color- 
> coding the back roads of Jerusalem. Folly.

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