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02-11-2008, 02:46 PM
Two differing views on Obama: First, Justin Elliott in Mother Jones, introduced by Rela Mazali. Second, Mitchell Plitnick from The Third Way blog, introduced by Sarah Anne Minkin.
Rela:
As an activist from Israel, working for a humane and just Israel/Palestine, I invariably scan U.S. elections for some sign of hope. To quote the (extensively supported) words of writer and activist Arundhati Roy, "Israel's staunchest political and military ally is and always has been the U.S. goverment. The U.S. government has blocked, along with Israel, almost every UN resolution that sought a peaceful, equitable solotion to the conflict. It has supported almost every war that Israel has fought. When Israel attacks Palestine, it is American missiles that smash through Palestinian homes. And every year Israel receives several billion dollars from the United States." ("Come September", War Talk, Cambridge: South End Press, 2003, p. 61.)
If the below report by Justin Elliott is anything to go by, the upcoming U.S. elections don't seem to hold out much, or any, hope for Palestine/Israel.
Sarah Anne:
In his newest blog post, former Jewish Peace News editor Mitchell Plitnick reads Barack Obama differently than Justin Elliott does, recognizing the ways in which Obama now sounds like AIPAC, but finding reason for hope nonetheless. Mitchell calls Obama's 2007 AIPAC speech a "master stroke," saying that while Obama secured his position as "friend of Israel," he simultaneously "made it clear that he recognized the need for relief for the Palestinians and the abject failure of the politics of force." Mitchell takes heart from Obama's advisors, who come from the Jewish mainstream as well as more critical analysts and scholars and include Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group (who co-authored with Hussein Agha this critical analysis of the 2000 Camp David Accords: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14380 and who has written numerous articles of late advocating for Israel and Hamas to negotiate and end to the rocket fire and a lifting of Israel's collective punishment of Gaza; one
example is here: http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=5269).
Mitchell's post is a call to action for activists: he says that Obama's ability to use the presidential office to move the situation out of the status quo and towards workable solutions will require "political space" that activists in the grassroots and Capitol Hill, and particularly in the Jewish community, need to work to create. Raising one's voice for justice, for an end to the occupation and most immediately for an end to the siege on Gaza (where Israel is currently reducing the supply of electricity, with the blessing of Israel's Supreme Court) is one important way we can all increase that political space, which will be crucial for any president or politician to take positive steps towards a fair and just political solution.
***
Obama's Israel Shuffle
By Justin Elliott
In Mother Jones , Opinion
February 1, 2008
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2008/01/obamas-israel-shuffle.html
Last week, when Barack Obama became the first major candidate to break the silence on the situation in Gaza, he didn't criticize Israel, whose blockade of a civilian population has been roundly condemned by human rights organizations, nor did he call for restraint from the United States' top ally in the Mideast. Instead, he fired off a letter to U.N. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad with a resounding message—one that could have been mistaken for words straight from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC) website. "The Security Council should clearly and unequivocally condemn the rocket attacks against Israel.… If it cannot...I urge you to ensure that it does not speak at all," Obama wrote, adding he understood why Israel was "forced" to shut down Gaza's border crossings.
The letter was notable not only because Obama had distinguished himself from the rest of the field (John McCain later sent a similar letter to Condoleezza Rice), but also because it was a far cry from the Obama of last March, who let slip a rare expression of compassion for Palestinians by an American politician: "Nobody's suffering more than the Palestinian people" he famously said at a small gathering in Iowa. What ensued in the 10 months between then and now is an object lesson in the intense pressure under which presidential candidates stake out ground on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the extraordinary effectiveness of the self-styled "pro-Israel" movement. This high-pressured atmosphere goes a long way to explaining why the candidate with the most liberal foreign policy views went out of his way to take a hard line on Gaza.
Obama's shuffle with the pro-Israel lobby follows in a long tradition of Democratic candidates facing a litmus test on the issue. Hillary Clinton, for her part, has enjoyed wide support among pro-Israel advocates, having made her peace with them back in 1999 after a controversy involving the lobby hurt her Senate campaign. And as Super Tuesday approaches—the day when many Jewish Democrats vote, in states like New York and California (where respectively 17 and 6 percent of primary voters identified themselves as Jewish in 2004)—Obama has aggressively moved to shore up his pro-Israel credentials, dispatching Jewish supporters to drum up support and hosting a lengthy conference call with Jewish reporters Monday. In part, the call was to counter chain e-mails, which have intensified in recent weeks, painting Obama as a "secret Muslim," but he also used a chunk of the time to make it known that he was a friend of Israel: "I want to make sure that we continue to strengthen the enduring
ties
between our people and pledge to give real meaning to the words 'never again,'" he said.
From the beginning, Obama has received more scrutiny on the issue of Israel than any other presidential candidate—something of a paradox given that he shares a uniformly pro-Israel record and policy platform with the major contenders from both parties. The suspicion of pro-Israel advocates for Obama was most recently captured in a January 23 Jerusalem Post op-ed in which Danny Ayalon, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., called the senator's candidacy cause for "some degree of concern." A memo by a top official at the American Jewish Committee, recently leaked to the Jewish Daily Forward, neatly outlined the roots of this concern: In the late 1990s Obama reportedly called for an even-handed approach to the conflict; his pastor had praised Louis Farrakhan; he has called for diplomacy with Iran; and, of course, he was once photographed breaking bread with the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said.
There are plenty of other theories for why Obama has been so closely scrutinized on the issue Israel. "One, he is black, and in general it would be expected that black people are more sympathetic to the Palestinian people," Ziad Asali, president of the American Task Force on Palestine, a group that advocates for the creation of a Palestinian state, told me in trying to explain the scrutiny on Obama. M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum, a dovish advocacy group, echoes Asali: "The more right-wing segments of the Jewish community are the least likely to be comfortable with an African-American president." Two, Asali said, Obama is young and perhaps open to new interpretations of the conflict, and, "thirdly, his middle name is Hussein, so he's more suspect than a John Smith."
And no media outlet has done more to pressure Obama on the issue than the New York Sun, the de facto house organ of the pro-Israel lobby. Since its creation in 2002, the newspaper has been practicing a unique brand of gotcha journalism concerning Israel and Palestine. And Obama has consistently responded, no matter how trivial the issue. In March, after George Soros wrote an article calling for negotiations with Hamas, a Sun reporter took it upon himself to seek comments from several Democrats, including Obama. A spokeswoman issued a dissent from Soros and reiterated that the senator shared AIPAC's position on the issue. A few months later, in response to a Sun query, the campaign distanced Obama from some members of his national church who had passed resolutions critical of Israel. Then, last September a Sun reporter noticed a small barackobama.com (http://barackobama.com/) ad on the Amazon page of The Israel Lobby, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's book that critiques the lobby's role in U.S. policymaking
.
Within hours of being contacted by the Sun, the campaign issued a statement slamming the book and had the ad—although it had been completely unintentional—pulled from Amazon's site.
"[Pro-Israel advocates] have him in a position where he has to keep demonstrating his pro-Israel bona fides," says Rosenberg. "This is done every four years, pretty much in every election. Whoever is deemed to be the most liberal candidate is put on the defensive on Israel."
No one knows this better than the candidate deemed most liberal in 2004—Howard Dean. Like Obama, Dean was relatively new on the national scene and possessed liberal-leaning foreign policy views—parallels that help explain why in 2003 Dean faced an Israel problem all too similar to Obama's today. But Dean went further on Israel, at least rhetorically, than any of the candidates have this cycle, saying the U.S. should be "even-handed," that "it's not our place to take sides," and that "enormous" numbers of Israeli settlements would have to be dismantled. That talk prompted a barrage of negative press coverage and earned him a pair of scolding letters, one from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League and another from 34 congressional Democrats. And, yet, strangely, Dean's actual position on Israel was expressly in line with President Bush and his Democratic rivals. His campaign was co-chaired by former AIPAC president Steve Grossman. Nevertheless, as Grossman later acknowledged, Dean
lost support over those comments.
Sound familiar?
Obama experienced a mini-version of the Dean treatment after his statement about Palestinian suffering in March. When David Adelman, a prominent Iowa Democrat and AIPAC member, shot off a letter to Obama calling the comment "deeply troubling," a spokesman scrambled to run damage control, telling the AP that Obama believes "in the end, the Palestinian people are suffering from the Hamas-led government's refusal to renounce terrorism." Aides met personally with Adelman, who told the Des Moines Register he was "satisfied with their response."
The campaign let the quote stand for six weeks. Then, in the first debate, before a televised audience of around two million, Brian Williams asked the senator if he stood by his comment. Obama bailed. "Well, keep in mind what the remark actually, if you had the whole thing, said.… [N]obody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognize Israel..." For the candidate who is selling hope, it was a fairly cynical move.
John Edwards, who has always hewed to the AIPAC consensus on Israel, received little sustained scrutiny on the issue. Hillary Clinton, for her part, settled her debts with the Israel lobby years ago. On a Mideast trip in 1999, the First Lady hugged and kissed her Palestinian counterpart, Suha Arafat, at an event where Arafat had accused Israel of using poison gas on civilians. The incident was pumped into a media firestorm and memorialized in a commercial taken out by the Republican Jewish Coalition. Hillary went on to win her Senate seat in 2000 with an unusually slim majority of New York's Jewish vote. "The whole purpose of manufacturing that controversy when there was none was to put Hillary in a place where she would have to be hawkish on Israel," Rosenberg says." And Hillary has gone for it completely. She's been compensating for it ever since." Clinton now effectively outflanks Obama on the right with her call in September for "an undivided Jerusalem as [Israel's] capital."
It's unsurprising, then, that Hillary is clearly the favored Democrat of the pro-Israel establishment. Since 2004 when Obama first ran for Senate, he has received $93,700 of pro-Israel PAC money, while Hillary has gotten $349,073 during the same period. In the 2008 cycle, while the numbers are still quite low, Hillary has attracted five times more pro-Israel money than Obama.
All the same, the Obama campaign's loud protestations of support for Israel have been enough to placate the New York Sun's editors, who penned an editorial in early January noting "he has chosen to put himself on the record in terms that Israel's friends in America…can warmly welcome." That piece, Politico reported, was "promptly and widely" circulated by Obama's people.
Even if Obama has allowed himself to be painted into a corner on Israel, some hold out hope that his natural inclinations on the conflict are more moderate than his pronouncements. "Based on my conversations with Obama, I have a very strong belief that he shares the Tikkun perspective, which is pro-Israel and pro-Palestine both," says Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the progressive Jewish journal Tikkun. "I'm cautious in saying I'm 100 percent sure because there was a time when Hillary Clinton said, 'Michael I'm totally with you and Tikkun on Israel/Palestine.' That was when I was supposedly her guru in 1993. Now, she went a very far distance from that later on."
Lerner's likely right to approach the issue with a degree of skepticism. This Thursday Marty Peretz, the pro-Israel New Republic editor, devoted an article to vouching for Obama, declaring he could be trusted by "friends of Israel." And if the conduct of his campaign has shown anything, it's that what Obama might believe "in his heart" and how a President Obama would approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are two very different matters. "Will he have the courage to stand up to the Israel lobby and push Israel toward peace?" Lerner asks. "I sincerely doubt it. I see no reason to believe that he will take on that struggle."
Justin Elliott is an editorial fellow at Mother Jones.
***
Making Sense of Barack Obama
Mitchell Plitnick
The Third Way: Finding Balance In Mideast Analysis
http://mitchellplitnick.com/2008/02/08/making-sense-of-barack-obama/
While the right wing has been engaging in a shameful smear campaign against Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, the hard left has been slamming him for "kowtowing" to AIPAC.
I get a lot of e-mail, from all different points of view. I'm on a lot of lists. The words I've seen used to describe Obama include "maggot," "toady," "hypocrite," "worm," "traitor," "opportunist," and "supporter of war crimes."
These were all from people on the so-called left.
One has to pause and wonder what planet these folks are living on. They have not forgiven Obama since he made his speech to the AIPAC convention a year ago. The intensity of their anger toward Obama has only increased as the pressure Obama has faced from AIPAC has increased. A recent Mother Jones article details the kind of heat the so-called "pro-Israel" community has been putting on Obama.
The left, apparently, would have preferred that Obama disqualify himself from the running by launching a broadside against Israeli policy. This is not about the alleged "omnipotence" of the "Israel Lobby" in the Walt-Mearsheimer vein. This is simply about realities in American politics.
AIPAC does not call the shots all by itself. The fact is that American public opinion is decisively with Israel, and to the extent that it isn't, it is still not with the Palestinians. Consider this… In August 2006, with the Lebanon War in full swing, with Israel having recently pounded Gaza, destroying the airport there and severely damaging its power plant, with Israel's image taking some serious hits, Americans were asked whether they sympathized more with Israel or with the Palestinians. 52% said Israel, and only 11% said the Palestinians. These findings, from the Pew Research Center, also reflect a consistent pattern. Since 2003, support for Israel has fluctuated between 37% and 52% while that for the Palestinians between 9% and 13%.
That does mean that an awful lot of Americans don't much care one way or the other. But where they do, they favor Israel decisively. Thus, there is nothing for a candidate to gain from anything less than agreement with the AIPAC line, and much to lose. AIPAC is a very effective lobby. The Jewish community is home to a good many major political donors, particularly to the Democrats. These are factors, to be sure, but in the end, they would amount to very little if the overwhelming majority of Americans were not either neutral or taking Israel's side.
But the response of the mainstream Jewish community to the right-wing smear campaign against Obama is telling. A wide swath of groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, United Jewish Communities, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, National Council of Jewish Women, and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs issued an open letter decrying the campaign against Obama.
The issuing of the letter, in and of itself, is merely a reaction to the campaign. But the fact that the letter includes no qualification of the defense of Obama reflects the fact that the Illinois senator has a good deal of support in the Jewish community.
This was reflected in the Super Tuesday voting, where Obama and Hillary Clinton were very close among Jewish voters. Clinton won the Jewish vote going away in New York, but Obama won by a similarly significant margin in Connecticut, with the other four states with large Jewish populations that were examined showed very close results.
Lest too much of this be credited to "almighty AIPAC" it should be noted that, as reported in the Mother Jones article, "pro-Israel" PACs have contributed something like five times as much to Clinton as they have to Obama. Another blow to the populist and completely erroneous theory that AIPAC controls American elections, is the fact that, despite the disparity I just mentioned, Obama has been more successful raising funds overall than has Clinton, who was recently reported to have loaned her own campaign $5 million of her own money.
In fact, Obama's handling of the issue of Israel has been skilled and bodes well for his behavior when and if he takes over the White House. His speech before the AIPAC convention, so widely criticized by the left, was in fact a master stroke. He completely blunted the tools any in that group hoped to use against him by establishing himself as a friend of Israel, yet he also made it clear that he recognized the need for relief for the Palestinians and the abject failure of the politics of force. While radicals would have preferred that Obama either shun AIPAC or declare war on it, it should be obvious that it is preferable to have someone in office who is going to repudiate the failed neo-conservative approach (something neither Clinton nor John McCain seem inclined to do) and who recognizes the suffering of the Palestinians than it is to have a marginal presidential candidate make such a statement.
Such is not obvious to the left, unfortunately. This explains something of why the radical right can so often find a candidate it can support while the radical left wrings it hands and whines about how the system ensures that no one they can support can emerge (we'll leave aside the point that many on the left have, preposterously, embraced Ron Paul because of his intention to cut all foreign aid, including aid to Israel, despite the fact that his politics are strongly on the right wing side of libertarianism).
That Obama has surrounded himself with a wide range of advisors is also a good sign. His point person on Mideast issues is Dan Shapiro, a veteran political insider who had worked in the past for Rep. Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and has strong ties to the Jewish community. Shapiro himself is a bit enigmatic, but he played a key role in Nelson's activities around the Syrian Accountability Act and similar legislation that worked against peaceful resolutions to Mideast problems. Dennis Ross is also an advisor to Obama, and these two men go a long way toward reassuring Jews that Obama will not seek to harm Israel's interests.
And well it should. As Daniel Levy points out, it is precisely the strong bond between Israel and the US that creates the possibility, which has not been exploited of late, of the US being able to convince Israel to compromise. The flip side is visible in the words of Martin Indyk, Bill Clinton's ambassador to Israel: "…the US is not an even-handed mediator. We have our interests and allies, and Israel is an ally of the US. " (From The Camp David Summit – What Went Wrong? edited by Shimon Shamir and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, 2005, Sussex Academic Press, p. 103)
Having people like Shapiro and Ross around helps solidify Obama's relationship with both the American Jewish community and with Israel. That he is also getting advice from people like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Clarke, Rob Malley and Samantha Power means there is a real possibility that Obama will work to find workable solutions, not futile ones that seek to maintain the status quo.
Whether he can or not will depend, as always, on the ability of reasonable and moderate forces in the US, and particularly in the Jewish community, to create the political space for him to do so. The Jewish support for Obama reflects a desire for change among Jews. Yes, a lot of that has to with domestic policies, but a lot of it is also based in a recognition for a new approach to foreign policy and that the recent American policies of following Israel's lead rather than developing and executing its own policy in the Middle East have been disastrous for the US, for the Palestinians, for the Arab world and not least of all for the United States.
But Obama's ability to change that will depend on more than simply answering polls, it will require the work in the grassroots and on Capitol Hill to create the space to allow him to take strong leadership in rectifying the mistakes of both the Bush and Clinton administrations. That means sensible peace forces must work to create that political pressure despite the obstacles that will be erected by the rejectionists on both the right and the left. The latter may prove even more dangerous, as it has in recent years.
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Jewish Peace News editors:
Joel Beinin
Racheli Gai
Rela Mazali
Sarah Anne Minkin
Judith Norman
Lincoln Shlensky
Alistair Welchman
-------
Jewish Peace News sends its news clippings only to subscribers. To subscribe, unsubscribe, or manage your subscription, go to www.jewishpeacenews.net (http://www.jewishpeacenews.net/)
Rela:
As an activist from Israel, working for a humane and just Israel/Palestine, I invariably scan U.S. elections for some sign of hope. To quote the (extensively supported) words of writer and activist Arundhati Roy, "Israel's staunchest political and military ally is and always has been the U.S. goverment. The U.S. government has blocked, along with Israel, almost every UN resolution that sought a peaceful, equitable solotion to the conflict. It has supported almost every war that Israel has fought. When Israel attacks Palestine, it is American missiles that smash through Palestinian homes. And every year Israel receives several billion dollars from the United States." ("Come September", War Talk, Cambridge: South End Press, 2003, p. 61.)
If the below report by Justin Elliott is anything to go by, the upcoming U.S. elections don't seem to hold out much, or any, hope for Palestine/Israel.
Sarah Anne:
In his newest blog post, former Jewish Peace News editor Mitchell Plitnick reads Barack Obama differently than Justin Elliott does, recognizing the ways in which Obama now sounds like AIPAC, but finding reason for hope nonetheless. Mitchell calls Obama's 2007 AIPAC speech a "master stroke," saying that while Obama secured his position as "friend of Israel," he simultaneously "made it clear that he recognized the need for relief for the Palestinians and the abject failure of the politics of force." Mitchell takes heart from Obama's advisors, who come from the Jewish mainstream as well as more critical analysts and scholars and include Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group (who co-authored with Hussein Agha this critical analysis of the 2000 Camp David Accords: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14380 and who has written numerous articles of late advocating for Israel and Hamas to negotiate and end to the rocket fire and a lifting of Israel's collective punishment of Gaza; one
example is here: http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=5269).
Mitchell's post is a call to action for activists: he says that Obama's ability to use the presidential office to move the situation out of the status quo and towards workable solutions will require "political space" that activists in the grassroots and Capitol Hill, and particularly in the Jewish community, need to work to create. Raising one's voice for justice, for an end to the occupation and most immediately for an end to the siege on Gaza (where Israel is currently reducing the supply of electricity, with the blessing of Israel's Supreme Court) is one important way we can all increase that political space, which will be crucial for any president or politician to take positive steps towards a fair and just political solution.
***
Obama's Israel Shuffle
By Justin Elliott
In Mother Jones , Opinion
February 1, 2008
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2008/01/obamas-israel-shuffle.html
Last week, when Barack Obama became the first major candidate to break the silence on the situation in Gaza, he didn't criticize Israel, whose blockade of a civilian population has been roundly condemned by human rights organizations, nor did he call for restraint from the United States' top ally in the Mideast. Instead, he fired off a letter to U.N. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad with a resounding message—one that could have been mistaken for words straight from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC) website. "The Security Council should clearly and unequivocally condemn the rocket attacks against Israel.… If it cannot...I urge you to ensure that it does not speak at all," Obama wrote, adding he understood why Israel was "forced" to shut down Gaza's border crossings.
The letter was notable not only because Obama had distinguished himself from the rest of the field (John McCain later sent a similar letter to Condoleezza Rice), but also because it was a far cry from the Obama of last March, who let slip a rare expression of compassion for Palestinians by an American politician: "Nobody's suffering more than the Palestinian people" he famously said at a small gathering in Iowa. What ensued in the 10 months between then and now is an object lesson in the intense pressure under which presidential candidates stake out ground on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the extraordinary effectiveness of the self-styled "pro-Israel" movement. This high-pressured atmosphere goes a long way to explaining why the candidate with the most liberal foreign policy views went out of his way to take a hard line on Gaza.
Obama's shuffle with the pro-Israel lobby follows in a long tradition of Democratic candidates facing a litmus test on the issue. Hillary Clinton, for her part, has enjoyed wide support among pro-Israel advocates, having made her peace with them back in 1999 after a controversy involving the lobby hurt her Senate campaign. And as Super Tuesday approaches—the day when many Jewish Democrats vote, in states like New York and California (where respectively 17 and 6 percent of primary voters identified themselves as Jewish in 2004)—Obama has aggressively moved to shore up his pro-Israel credentials, dispatching Jewish supporters to drum up support and hosting a lengthy conference call with Jewish reporters Monday. In part, the call was to counter chain e-mails, which have intensified in recent weeks, painting Obama as a "secret Muslim," but he also used a chunk of the time to make it known that he was a friend of Israel: "I want to make sure that we continue to strengthen the enduring
ties
between our people and pledge to give real meaning to the words 'never again,'" he said.
From the beginning, Obama has received more scrutiny on the issue of Israel than any other presidential candidate—something of a paradox given that he shares a uniformly pro-Israel record and policy platform with the major contenders from both parties. The suspicion of pro-Israel advocates for Obama was most recently captured in a January 23 Jerusalem Post op-ed in which Danny Ayalon, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., called the senator's candidacy cause for "some degree of concern." A memo by a top official at the American Jewish Committee, recently leaked to the Jewish Daily Forward, neatly outlined the roots of this concern: In the late 1990s Obama reportedly called for an even-handed approach to the conflict; his pastor had praised Louis Farrakhan; he has called for diplomacy with Iran; and, of course, he was once photographed breaking bread with the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said.
There are plenty of other theories for why Obama has been so closely scrutinized on the issue Israel. "One, he is black, and in general it would be expected that black people are more sympathetic to the Palestinian people," Ziad Asali, president of the American Task Force on Palestine, a group that advocates for the creation of a Palestinian state, told me in trying to explain the scrutiny on Obama. M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum, a dovish advocacy group, echoes Asali: "The more right-wing segments of the Jewish community are the least likely to be comfortable with an African-American president." Two, Asali said, Obama is young and perhaps open to new interpretations of the conflict, and, "thirdly, his middle name is Hussein, so he's more suspect than a John Smith."
And no media outlet has done more to pressure Obama on the issue than the New York Sun, the de facto house organ of the pro-Israel lobby. Since its creation in 2002, the newspaper has been practicing a unique brand of gotcha journalism concerning Israel and Palestine. And Obama has consistently responded, no matter how trivial the issue. In March, after George Soros wrote an article calling for negotiations with Hamas, a Sun reporter took it upon himself to seek comments from several Democrats, including Obama. A spokeswoman issued a dissent from Soros and reiterated that the senator shared AIPAC's position on the issue. A few months later, in response to a Sun query, the campaign distanced Obama from some members of his national church who had passed resolutions critical of Israel. Then, last September a Sun reporter noticed a small barackobama.com (http://barackobama.com/) ad on the Amazon page of The Israel Lobby, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's book that critiques the lobby's role in U.S. policymaking
.
Within hours of being contacted by the Sun, the campaign issued a statement slamming the book and had the ad—although it had been completely unintentional—pulled from Amazon's site.
"[Pro-Israel advocates] have him in a position where he has to keep demonstrating his pro-Israel bona fides," says Rosenberg. "This is done every four years, pretty much in every election. Whoever is deemed to be the most liberal candidate is put on the defensive on Israel."
No one knows this better than the candidate deemed most liberal in 2004—Howard Dean. Like Obama, Dean was relatively new on the national scene and possessed liberal-leaning foreign policy views—parallels that help explain why in 2003 Dean faced an Israel problem all too similar to Obama's today. But Dean went further on Israel, at least rhetorically, than any of the candidates have this cycle, saying the U.S. should be "even-handed," that "it's not our place to take sides," and that "enormous" numbers of Israeli settlements would have to be dismantled. That talk prompted a barrage of negative press coverage and earned him a pair of scolding letters, one from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League and another from 34 congressional Democrats. And, yet, strangely, Dean's actual position on Israel was expressly in line with President Bush and his Democratic rivals. His campaign was co-chaired by former AIPAC president Steve Grossman. Nevertheless, as Grossman later acknowledged, Dean
lost support over those comments.
Sound familiar?
Obama experienced a mini-version of the Dean treatment after his statement about Palestinian suffering in March. When David Adelman, a prominent Iowa Democrat and AIPAC member, shot off a letter to Obama calling the comment "deeply troubling," a spokesman scrambled to run damage control, telling the AP that Obama believes "in the end, the Palestinian people are suffering from the Hamas-led government's refusal to renounce terrorism." Aides met personally with Adelman, who told the Des Moines Register he was "satisfied with their response."
The campaign let the quote stand for six weeks. Then, in the first debate, before a televised audience of around two million, Brian Williams asked the senator if he stood by his comment. Obama bailed. "Well, keep in mind what the remark actually, if you had the whole thing, said.… [N]obody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognize Israel..." For the candidate who is selling hope, it was a fairly cynical move.
John Edwards, who has always hewed to the AIPAC consensus on Israel, received little sustained scrutiny on the issue. Hillary Clinton, for her part, settled her debts with the Israel lobby years ago. On a Mideast trip in 1999, the First Lady hugged and kissed her Palestinian counterpart, Suha Arafat, at an event where Arafat had accused Israel of using poison gas on civilians. The incident was pumped into a media firestorm and memorialized in a commercial taken out by the Republican Jewish Coalition. Hillary went on to win her Senate seat in 2000 with an unusually slim majority of New York's Jewish vote. "The whole purpose of manufacturing that controversy when there was none was to put Hillary in a place where she would have to be hawkish on Israel," Rosenberg says." And Hillary has gone for it completely. She's been compensating for it ever since." Clinton now effectively outflanks Obama on the right with her call in September for "an undivided Jerusalem as [Israel's] capital."
It's unsurprising, then, that Hillary is clearly the favored Democrat of the pro-Israel establishment. Since 2004 when Obama first ran for Senate, he has received $93,700 of pro-Israel PAC money, while Hillary has gotten $349,073 during the same period. In the 2008 cycle, while the numbers are still quite low, Hillary has attracted five times more pro-Israel money than Obama.
All the same, the Obama campaign's loud protestations of support for Israel have been enough to placate the New York Sun's editors, who penned an editorial in early January noting "he has chosen to put himself on the record in terms that Israel's friends in America…can warmly welcome." That piece, Politico reported, was "promptly and widely" circulated by Obama's people.
Even if Obama has allowed himself to be painted into a corner on Israel, some hold out hope that his natural inclinations on the conflict are more moderate than his pronouncements. "Based on my conversations with Obama, I have a very strong belief that he shares the Tikkun perspective, which is pro-Israel and pro-Palestine both," says Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the progressive Jewish journal Tikkun. "I'm cautious in saying I'm 100 percent sure because there was a time when Hillary Clinton said, 'Michael I'm totally with you and Tikkun on Israel/Palestine.' That was when I was supposedly her guru in 1993. Now, she went a very far distance from that later on."
Lerner's likely right to approach the issue with a degree of skepticism. This Thursday Marty Peretz, the pro-Israel New Republic editor, devoted an article to vouching for Obama, declaring he could be trusted by "friends of Israel." And if the conduct of his campaign has shown anything, it's that what Obama might believe "in his heart" and how a President Obama would approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are two very different matters. "Will he have the courage to stand up to the Israel lobby and push Israel toward peace?" Lerner asks. "I sincerely doubt it. I see no reason to believe that he will take on that struggle."
Justin Elliott is an editorial fellow at Mother Jones.
***
Making Sense of Barack Obama
Mitchell Plitnick
The Third Way: Finding Balance In Mideast Analysis
http://mitchellplitnick.com/2008/02/08/making-sense-of-barack-obama/
While the right wing has been engaging in a shameful smear campaign against Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, the hard left has been slamming him for "kowtowing" to AIPAC.
I get a lot of e-mail, from all different points of view. I'm on a lot of lists. The words I've seen used to describe Obama include "maggot," "toady," "hypocrite," "worm," "traitor," "opportunist," and "supporter of war crimes."
These were all from people on the so-called left.
One has to pause and wonder what planet these folks are living on. They have not forgiven Obama since he made his speech to the AIPAC convention a year ago. The intensity of their anger toward Obama has only increased as the pressure Obama has faced from AIPAC has increased. A recent Mother Jones article details the kind of heat the so-called "pro-Israel" community has been putting on Obama.
The left, apparently, would have preferred that Obama disqualify himself from the running by launching a broadside against Israeli policy. This is not about the alleged "omnipotence" of the "Israel Lobby" in the Walt-Mearsheimer vein. This is simply about realities in American politics.
AIPAC does not call the shots all by itself. The fact is that American public opinion is decisively with Israel, and to the extent that it isn't, it is still not with the Palestinians. Consider this… In August 2006, with the Lebanon War in full swing, with Israel having recently pounded Gaza, destroying the airport there and severely damaging its power plant, with Israel's image taking some serious hits, Americans were asked whether they sympathized more with Israel or with the Palestinians. 52% said Israel, and only 11% said the Palestinians. These findings, from the Pew Research Center, also reflect a consistent pattern. Since 2003, support for Israel has fluctuated between 37% and 52% while that for the Palestinians between 9% and 13%.
That does mean that an awful lot of Americans don't much care one way or the other. But where they do, they favor Israel decisively. Thus, there is nothing for a candidate to gain from anything less than agreement with the AIPAC line, and much to lose. AIPAC is a very effective lobby. The Jewish community is home to a good many major political donors, particularly to the Democrats. These are factors, to be sure, but in the end, they would amount to very little if the overwhelming majority of Americans were not either neutral or taking Israel's side.
But the response of the mainstream Jewish community to the right-wing smear campaign against Obama is telling. A wide swath of groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, United Jewish Communities, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, National Council of Jewish Women, and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs issued an open letter decrying the campaign against Obama.
The issuing of the letter, in and of itself, is merely a reaction to the campaign. But the fact that the letter includes no qualification of the defense of Obama reflects the fact that the Illinois senator has a good deal of support in the Jewish community.
This was reflected in the Super Tuesday voting, where Obama and Hillary Clinton were very close among Jewish voters. Clinton won the Jewish vote going away in New York, but Obama won by a similarly significant margin in Connecticut, with the other four states with large Jewish populations that were examined showed very close results.
Lest too much of this be credited to "almighty AIPAC" it should be noted that, as reported in the Mother Jones article, "pro-Israel" PACs have contributed something like five times as much to Clinton as they have to Obama. Another blow to the populist and completely erroneous theory that AIPAC controls American elections, is the fact that, despite the disparity I just mentioned, Obama has been more successful raising funds overall than has Clinton, who was recently reported to have loaned her own campaign $5 million of her own money.
In fact, Obama's handling of the issue of Israel has been skilled and bodes well for his behavior when and if he takes over the White House. His speech before the AIPAC convention, so widely criticized by the left, was in fact a master stroke. He completely blunted the tools any in that group hoped to use against him by establishing himself as a friend of Israel, yet he also made it clear that he recognized the need for relief for the Palestinians and the abject failure of the politics of force. While radicals would have preferred that Obama either shun AIPAC or declare war on it, it should be obvious that it is preferable to have someone in office who is going to repudiate the failed neo-conservative approach (something neither Clinton nor John McCain seem inclined to do) and who recognizes the suffering of the Palestinians than it is to have a marginal presidential candidate make such a statement.
Such is not obvious to the left, unfortunately. This explains something of why the radical right can so often find a candidate it can support while the radical left wrings it hands and whines about how the system ensures that no one they can support can emerge (we'll leave aside the point that many on the left have, preposterously, embraced Ron Paul because of his intention to cut all foreign aid, including aid to Israel, despite the fact that his politics are strongly on the right wing side of libertarianism).
That Obama has surrounded himself with a wide range of advisors is also a good sign. His point person on Mideast issues is Dan Shapiro, a veteran political insider who had worked in the past for Rep. Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and has strong ties to the Jewish community. Shapiro himself is a bit enigmatic, but he played a key role in Nelson's activities around the Syrian Accountability Act and similar legislation that worked against peaceful resolutions to Mideast problems. Dennis Ross is also an advisor to Obama, and these two men go a long way toward reassuring Jews that Obama will not seek to harm Israel's interests.
And well it should. As Daniel Levy points out, it is precisely the strong bond between Israel and the US that creates the possibility, which has not been exploited of late, of the US being able to convince Israel to compromise. The flip side is visible in the words of Martin Indyk, Bill Clinton's ambassador to Israel: "…the US is not an even-handed mediator. We have our interests and allies, and Israel is an ally of the US. " (From The Camp David Summit – What Went Wrong? edited by Shimon Shamir and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, 2005, Sussex Academic Press, p. 103)
Having people like Shapiro and Ross around helps solidify Obama's relationship with both the American Jewish community and with Israel. That he is also getting advice from people like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Clarke, Rob Malley and Samantha Power means there is a real possibility that Obama will work to find workable solutions, not futile ones that seek to maintain the status quo.
Whether he can or not will depend, as always, on the ability of reasonable and moderate forces in the US, and particularly in the Jewish community, to create the political space for him to do so. The Jewish support for Obama reflects a desire for change among Jews. Yes, a lot of that has to with domestic policies, but a lot of it is also based in a recognition for a new approach to foreign policy and that the recent American policies of following Israel's lead rather than developing and executing its own policy in the Middle East have been disastrous for the US, for the Palestinians, for the Arab world and not least of all for the United States.
But Obama's ability to change that will depend on more than simply answering polls, it will require the work in the grassroots and on Capitol Hill to create the space to allow him to take strong leadership in rectifying the mistakes of both the Bush and Clinton administrations. That means sensible peace forces must work to create that political pressure despite the obstacles that will be erected by the rejectionists on both the right and the left. The latter may prove even more dangerous, as it has in recent years.
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Racheli Gai
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