Tweet
-
-
the first jewish president
The Tsuris
Barack Obama is the best thing Israel has going for it right now. Why is that so difficult for Netanyahu and his American Jewish allies to understand?
* By John Heilemann
The last time Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu shared each other’s company, you could say that the encounter did not go well—if by “not well” you mean abysmally. This was on May 20, the day after Obama gave his big speech on the Arab Spring, in which he unleashed a tsunami of tsuris by endorsing the use of Israel’s 1967 borders “with mutually agreed [land] swaps” as the basis for a two-state solution with the Palestinians. Obama and Netanyahu were seated in the Oval Office for what was supposed to be one of those photo ops devoted to roasting rhetorical chestnuts about the solidity of the U.S.-Israel alliance. Instead, while Obama watched silently, looking poleaxed, Netanyahu lectured him—for seven and a half minutes, on live television—about the folly, the sheer absurdity, of suggesting Israel ever return to what he called the “indefensible” 1967 lines.
Obama was furious with Netanyahu, who in choosing to ignore the crucial qualifier about land swaps had twisted Obama’s words beyond recognition—the kind of mendacious misinterpretation that makes the presidential mental. The seniormost members of Obama’s team felt much the same. Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates, Bill Daley, the former Mideast-peace envoy George Mitchell: All were apoplectic with the prime minister, whose behavior over the past two years had already tried their patience. “The collective view here is that he is a small-minded, fairly craven politician,” says an administration source deeply involved in its efforts to push the parties to the negotiating table. “And one who simply isn’t serious about making peace.”
But this week, when Barack and Bibi arrive in New York for the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly, they will not be going toe-to-toe but standing arm-in-arm. For months, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has been threatening to mount a bid for statehood recognition at the U.N. The Obama administration has been scrambling furiously to fashion a compromise with Abbas to forestall that application—at this writing, to no avail—and has pledged to veto the bid should it come before the Security Council.
For both Israel and the U.S., the timing could hardly be more miserable. With the Middle East apparently hurtling headlong into crisis, Israel finds itself increasingly isolated, beleaguered, and besieged: its embassy in Cairo invaded by Egyptian protesters, its relations with Turkey in tatters, its continued occupation of (and expansion of settlements within) the Palestinian territories the subject of wide international scorn. How wide? Wide enough that Abbas could credibly claim that 126 of the 193 U.N. member states support his statehood initiative. Yet despite the damage thwarting that bid might do to America’s standing in the region, the Obamans have never wavered in going balls-out for Israel.
And not for the first time, either. Again and again, when Israel has been embroiled in international dustups—over its attack last year on a flotilla filled with activists headed from Turkey to Gaza, to cite but one example—the White House has had Israel’s back. The security relationship between the countries, on everything from intelligence sharing to missile-defense development to access to top-shelf weapons, has never been more robust. And when the Cairo embassy was seized and Netanyahu called to ask for Obama’s help with rescuing the last six Israelis trapped inside the building, the president not only picked up the phone but leaned hard on the Egyptians to free those within. “It was a decisive moment,” Netanyahu recalled after the six had been freed. “Fateful, I would even say.”
All of which raises an interesting, perplexing, and suddenly quite pressing question: How, exactly, did Obama come to be portrayed, and perceived by many American Jews, as the most ardently anti-Israel president since Jimmy Carter?
This meme, of course, has been gathering steam for some time, peddled mainly by right-wing Likudophiles here and in the Holy Land. But last week, it took center stage in the special election in New York’s Ninth Congressional District, maybe the most Jewish district in the nation and one held by Democrats since 1923. When the smoke cleared, the Republican had won—and Matt Drudge was up with a headline blaring REVENGE OF THE JEWS.
Obama’s people deny up and down that the loss of a seat last occupied by Anthony Weiner portends, well, pretty much anything for 2012. But the truth is that they are worried, and worried they should be, for the signs of Obama’s slippage among Jewish voters are unmistakable. Last week, a new Gallup poll found that his approval rating in that cohort had fallen to 55 percent—a whopping 28-point drop since his inauguration. And among the high-dollar Jewish donors who were essential to fueling the great Obama money machine last time around, stories of dismay and disaffection are legion. “There’s no question,” says one of the president’s most prolific fund-raisers. “We have a big-time Jewish problem.”
oonnoo goo read da rest -
obama: the first jewish president
Obama: America's 'first Jewish president'?
After the president's speech to the UN, our senior analyst wonders why US leaders continue to pander to a foreign power.
Marwan Bishara
Obama is the "the first Jewish President". That's the title of New York magazine's lead article, written by John Heilemann and quoting a major Obama fundraiser.
Listening to Obama speak at the United Nations on Wednesday many would nod in agreement, not less in Palestine and the Arab world.
The US president has embraced the rejectionist Israeli position on the question of international recognition of an independent Palestinian state.
But that's not a Jewish position. It's a radical Zionist position. Many Jews, including US and Israeli Jews, do not embrace such extremist views.
But the fact that Obama surpassed his predecessor George W Bush, the most radical supporter of Israel among all US Presidents, has left everyone in Israel dumbstruck. The latest Zionist US president sounded like Israel's own founding fathers.
Never have they heard a US president read straight from the papers of the Israeli government.
Propaganda passes for history
You would think after six decades of dispossession, four decades of occupation and two decades of peace processes that President Obama would recognise a political and moral discrepancy that needs fixing.
That he would underline, not undermine, his own words uttered in Cairo a year and a half ago about the need for Israel to stop its illegal settlements in Palestine.
That he would underline, not undermine his own projection - read promise - from the same podium last September of a Palestinian state within a year, meaning this week.
That he would underline, not undermine, his own rhetoric about freedom in the Arab region.
Or that he would underline, not undermine, his own opening emphasis about a peace based on withdrawal, not more of the same logic of war.
Alas, President Obama undermined his entire "change we can believe in" slogan.
His narrative is inspired by the worst of Israel's official propaganda. Indeed, much of it is cut and pasted from their playbook.
He spoke of historical "facts" that have long been repudiated by Israeli historians, and of truths that are nothing more than one sided interpretations of a political situation.
Obama claimed that the Arabs launched wars against Israel. But, in actual fact, Israel is the aggressor, launching or instigating wars in: 1956, 1967, 1982, 2006 and 2008. Only the 1973 war was launched by Arabs, but only to recuperate occupied territories after the US and Israel rejected Anwar Sadat's peace overtures.
He underlined the work of Israelis in forging a successful state in their "historic homeland". But most of the world, and certainly the Arab world, saw Israel's inception as a colonial project with theological pretexts.
Serbia also believes that Kosovo is the birth place of its nation; should they be allowed to forge a successful state of their own, an exclusively Serbian state in that territory?
Should each and every occupied people search from accommodation with their occupiers without interference from the international community? Is that how African and Middle Eastern nations gained their independence from European colonial powers?
Should a whole people go on living under occupation until their occupier is satisfied with the conditions for surrender?
It's politics, stupid
Every other commentator in town would like to remind you not to expect much action from a US president on Israel during an election year.
As Heilemann illustrates in his article, Obama's career was built on his relationships with generous Jewish contributors in Chicago.
Indeed, the guy who brought the most money to the Democratic party over the last several decades became Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel. Today, he's the mayor of Chicago.
But it's not only about money. It's also about crucial support in Congress over urgent domestic issues that could make or break the Obama presidency. And the Israeli lobby, AIPAC, can make the president's life miserable over the course of the next year.
Now, I understand all of that. But what I don't understand is why it is accepted as a fait accompli! As the nature of politics! Take it or leave it!
If this is the case, then let's at least call a spade a spade; and out the US administration(s) for being what so many seem to say it is: Not Jewish or Zionist, rather hypocritical.
It speaks of justice but pursues unfair policies; speaks of repression, but promotes its own interests at any cost. It preaches freedom but supports occupation; speaks of human rights but insists on entrusting the wolf, and only the wolf, with the hen house.
The joke is on everyone
Why should the Palestinians be held victims to US politics while being held hostage to Israeli politics for the last six decades. Why should most Israelis continue to live in a garrison state incapable of normalising relations with their neighbors?
Why should Americans watch as their politicians are held hostage to a foreign power and its influential supporters?
The pro-Israeli Jewish lobby, J Street, commented on the alarming pandering to Israel not only among Democrats but also Republicans, saying: "There's no limit, it seems, to how far American politicians will go these days in pandering on Israel for political gain."
While there has been strategic logic for the US support for Israel in the past, Washington's current pandering makes little sense.
Washington has long used its influence with Israel as strategic leverage to reign in Arab leaders. Only Washington can restrain Israel in war and wring concessions in diplomacy, Arab leaders once reckoned.
But the dictators who either exploited Palestine to garner popular support at home, or bartered it in return for Western favours, belong to the past.
Today's Arabs are bitter and angry at US-Israeli complicity in Palestine and they won't be as easily bounded or bribed as their fallen dictatorships.
Marwan Bishara is Al Jazeera's senior political analyst. He was previously a professor of International Relations at the American University of Paris.
..Comment
-
Re: the first jewish president
Can the UN create a state de novo ?
Didn't Yasser Arafat declare Palestine a state and himself president sometime in the 80's ? What happened ?
Didn't the Zionist Theodore Herzl simply declare that Israel was now a state too with the league of Nations and subsequently the UN General Assembly ratifying this only <span style="font-style: italic">after</span> the fact ?
Comment
-
Re: the first jewish president
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: R_C</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Can the UN create a state de novo ?
Didn't Yasser Arafat declare Palestine a state and himself president sometime in the 80's ? What happened ?
Didn't the Zionist Theodore Herzl simply declare that Israel was now a state too with the league of Nations and subsequently the UN General Assembly ratifying this only <span style="font-style: italic">after</span> the fact ?
</div></div>
arafat neva ave arab support cah dem arab leaders needed isreal fii hide behind
nah support plo until dem arab stapp enslavinn ann xxploitinn blakks
mii agree widd mixxed race man pon dissComment
Comment