Obama's Grand Plan for the Middle East, by Gidon D. Remba, The Jerusalem Report

As published in the Jerusalem Report, June 8, 2009 and online in Jewcy, May 18, 2009

With the maiden visit of newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington set for May 18, signs of an immanent clash between U.S. President Barack Obama and the hardline Israeli leader abound.

While both leaders will look to find common ground, papering over differences with diplomatic formulas, the rift may be unavoidable. The impending tension recalls previous encounters between Likud leaders and U.S. presidents from both parties. This time the tremors will center not only on the Palestinian fault line, but also on Iran.

Netanyahu views the development of an Iranian uranium enrichment capacity as an existential threat to Israel that must be squelched. He is certain that Obama’s “dialogue” with Iran is bound to fail, rendering inevitable an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear sites. An Israeli attack will be preceded by more punishing economic penalties on Iran of the kind mooted lately on Capitol Hill, and backed by AIPAC, the hawkish pro-Israel lobby. But sanctions-on-steroids are unlikely to blunt Iran’s quest to join the nuclear club, serving only to clear away the final hurdles blocking a final push for preemptive Israeli military action.

Obama’s way represents nothing less than a revolution in the Middle East: not the stillborn new Middle East the Bush Administration imagined could be midwifed by the force of American and Israeli arms, but a new order that will arise from the centripetal forces unleashed by a political earthquake. How does Obama hope to set in motion this tectonic realignment? Reading the tea leaves, one can divine an unfolding pattern whose contours will only be more fully revealed when Obama delivers a major speech to the Arab and Muslim worlds in Egypt on June 4, following meetings with Netanyahu, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

With the backing of the Pentagon’s top brass and his Republican Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Obama’s administration is convinced that a military strike against Iran will engulf the region in a raging firestorm. It believes that an Israeli air attack on Iranian nuclear sites will fall far short, accelerating the Iranian nuclear weapons program, part of which will remain intact underground. Netanyahu hopes to persuade Obama that, if all else fails, the U.S. must turn its gunsights on Iran. But Obama will be immovable: he will not launch the next catastrophic Mideast war.

On the contrary, Obama believes a negotiated solution to the nuclear issue may be in the cards if the U.S. treads an untried path with Iran. He may offer to create a multinational consortium to produce enriched uranium inside Iran under international management and supervision, with an enhanced verification system to ensure that weaponization does not take place. Israel too may be pressed to declare its nuclear capabilities, subjecting them, along with those of India and Pakistan, to international oversight and inspection. In return for a mutually acceptable resolution of the nuclear impasse, Iran may be willing to scale back its military aid to the Lebanese Hizballah and Palestinian Hamas militant organizations and accept a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace accord, which could include Lebanon. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has now offered, on American television, to support whatever peace plan is accepted by the Palestinian people and the international community.

Should U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations fail, Obama hopes to transform the regional landscape in which Iran would emerge with a nuclear arms capacity in such a way that deterrence would be most likely to succeed. Even without a “grand bargain,” the U.S. will seek to foster cooperation with Iran in as many areas as possible, replacing confrontation with détente, from a position of greater regional leverage. Those in the regime who seek to project Iran’s influence in the Arab and Muslim worlds by backing Hizballah and Hamas “resistance” against Israel will have the rug pulled out from under their feet.

Obama hopes to woo Syria out of Iran’s orbit with economic and political incentives and a determination to broker a peace treaty between Israel and Syria as part of a grand rapprochement between Israel and the Arab and Muslim worlds. The U.S. will loosen Iranian bonds with Syria and Hamas – which has now offered a long-term truce with Israel – while depriving Hizballah and its Iranian backers of the tinder for their incendiary tactics. Contrary to pundits who cry that Israel will be sacrificed on the altar of American reconciliation with the Islamic world, Obama’s aim is the creation of a new regional political architecture in which Israel’s vital needs, and American national security, will be more firmly anchored than ever before.

For Obama, the Israel-Arab conflict, including the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum, can and must be moved towards resolution under American stewardship. Press reports suggest that the U.S. and Arab allies Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are working on revising the Arab League Peace Initiative, making explicit key compromises on Jerusalem and the refugee problem. They would make Israel an offer it will be hard pressed to refuse: Palestinian refugees would return only to the new state of Palestine or be rehabilitated within the Arab states or other countries. This would insure that refugee repatriation could not undermine Israel’s Jewish majority or the principle of “two states for two peoples” affirmed in the original 1947 U.N. partition resolution calling for an Arab and a Jewish state in Palestine. Gaining Arab unanimity on this radioactive issue may prove impossible. But even engineering the sponsorship of a group of leading Arab states for so far-reaching a change to the historic Arab position would represent a coup for Obama.

Jerusalem’s Old City, with its holy sites sacred to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, objects of both Israeli and Palestinian national identification, would come under international supervision, as proposed in the partition resolution. Arab and Muslim states would begin normalizing relations with Israel, in exchange for concrete Israeli steps like a comprehensive settlement building freeze, and a time-table for removing most West Bank settlers, designed to send the message to Palestinians and the Arab world that Israel is committed not only in word but in deed to realizing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Arab League, together with the Palestinians, and the U.S.-led Quartet, together with Israel, will become the primary interlocutors in the new negotiations. By adopting a novel holistic, regional framework, and clarifying the parameters of the Arab peace initiative and the way forward to its realization, Obama raises the odds higher than ever before that the players will at last overcome four great obstacles which have thus far stood in the way of a Palestinian-Israeli accord:

1. With the Arab League as the primary Arab interlocutor, Obama’s way helps bypass one consequence of Palestinian weakness and division, creating an environment in which the Palestinians are brought to the table hand in hand with the entire Arab world. By providing broad Arab and international public legitimacy for just compromises on Jerusalem and the refugees, as well as on borders and security, the regional approach eases the way towards Palestinian popular acceptance of the deal. Contrary to those skeptics who see only guile in Hamas’ offers of a long-term truce with Israel, ignoring the larger political context in which the movement operates, Hamas will feel enormous Palestinian public pressure to end terrorism against Israel, and to play its part in a Palestinian government that will sign on.

2. By the same token, the U.S. role in the new constellation helps compensate for the endemic weakness in the Israeli political system which has prevented shaky Israeli coalition governments from credibly offering a viable Palestinian-Israeli bargain. Former prime minister Ehud Barak’s government was already a minority coalition by the time he went to Camp David in 2000, and when he dispatched negotiators to Taba in early 2001. Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and their Kadima party were on their way out the door when they renewed final status talks with the Palestinians this past year under the Annapolis umbrella, in the shadow of a Pyrrhic victory in Lebanon and corruption allegations against the prime minister.

3. Instead, the U.S., the Quartet, and the Arab League may ask Israeli and Palestinian leaders to present to their publics a complete outline for peace incorporating already ongoing Arab concessions and concrete steps to build Israeli confidence, paired with unfolding Israeli concessions and concrete steps to build Palestinian trust. Israeli and Palestinian plebiscites will take place with a full understanding on both sides that pushback from either Israeli or Palestinian governments will be met with the firm hand of their American and Arab patrons, who will be loath to see their monumental efforts fail. Israelis and Palestinians are bound to demand that their governments seize the opportunity for a breakthrough.

The Arab League, the U.S. and NATO will oversee the implementation of all aspects of the regional peace treaty: U.S.-led and Arab multinational peacekeeping forces will guarantee Palestinian and Israeli security in the West Bank and Gaza as Israel removes most settlers and phases out military control. An international trusteeship will guide the economic and institutional baby steps of the newly de-occupied demilitarized Palestinian state.

4. The U.S. will help broker Israel’s peace talks with Syria – and possibly Lebanon, if Iran and Hizballah can be co-opted. Should Iran and Hizballah prove unwilling, they will find themselves isolated in a new Middle East order, facing a far more united Israeli-American-Sunni Arab and international front.

Obama will no longer tolerate the slogans of American or Israeli obstructionists who claim that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not “ripe” for resolution – it never is by their lights – or that there is no Palestinian partner for peace. Nor will he countenance an Israeli strike on Iran, as he will make clear to Netanyahu. But Obama refuses to accept the status quo, which has proven far too dangerous for the U.S., Israel and our Arab allies. The risks of rejectionism now dramatically outweigh the risks of peace.


Gidon D. Remba is executive director of the Jewish Alliance for Change (http://www.jews4change.com/), a nonprofit organization which supported Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy and advocates for a progressive domestic and foreign policy agenda. A veteran Middle East analyst and pro-Israel peace advocate, he served as senior foreign press editor and translator in Israel's Prime Minister's Office from 1977-1978 during the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David peace process.

Bibi and Barack: A Chance for Peace?, by Doni Remba

Is the new hardline Netanyahu government in Israel on a collision course with the Obama administration – and the rest of the world? What can President Obama do to advance Israeli-Arab peace even if the Israeli government is led by a man who refuses to endorse the two-state Palestinian-Israeli solution backed by the U.S., previous Israeli governments, the Palestinian Authority, the Arab states and the international community?
Read more here.

Arrange for Gidon D. Remba to speak on Israeli-Arab Peace

Jewish Alliance for Change Executive Director Gidon D. Remba is available to speak on "President Obama, Israel & Middle East Peace" at synagogues, churches, universities and other communal institutions.

Mr. Remba is a veteran Middle East analyst and pro-Israel peace advocate, and served as Senior Foreign Press Editor and Translator in the Israel Prime Minister's Office from 1977-1978 during the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David peace process. His commentaries on Israel and the Middle East have appeared widely in the Jewish and general press, including the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Chicago Sun Times, the Nation, Ha’aretz, the Forward, the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), Jerusalem Report, Tikkun, and many other publications. He blogs at http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/

To arrange for Mr. Remba to speak at your event, contact him at info@jews4change.com or dremba@comcast.net

Recent reviews:

Temple Har Zion, a reform synagogue in a Toronto suburb:

"You deliver a fast, hard punch of facts and history." Members felt that "we needed to have you longer, during the day, instead of Friday night. People wanted to learn more and discuss more with you. I will look at things differently now, trying always to determine what is really in Israel's interest." - Natalie Cremer, Adult Education Chair, Temple Har Zion

"Members are still talking about your visit, and the debate it stirred. We were impressed by your insider knowledge of Israeli and American political workings."- Rabbi Cory Weiss, Temple Har Zion

Selected Recent and Upcoming Appearances:

May 20, 2009, 7:30 PM: Special guest at political comedian Scott Blakeman's political humor talk show "The End Of The Week As We Know It," at the 45th St. Theater, 354 W. 45 St., New York City.

April 26, 2009: Institute for Living Judaism, Brooklyn, NY, "The Settlements," in a dialogue with Stuart Ain, columnist for the Jewish Week

February 2009: Panelist, The Joey Reynolds Show, WOR News Talk Radio

January 2009: Erev Shabbat talk, "President Obama, Israel & the Mideast," Temple Har Zion, a reform synagogue in a Toronto suburb

October 2008: Speaker on Obama’s Chicago career as a progressive pragmatist, in "Broadway for Obama," State Theater, in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania electoral battleground before an audience of a thousand people.

Recent Publications:
Obama's Grand Plan for the Middle East (PDF version), Jerusalem Report, May 18, 2009, reprinted online in Jewcy

For Selected Publication List visit here.

Click here for Mr. Remba's full bio

Selected Publications: Gidon D. Remba

A few of my publications of particular interest

1. Obama's Grand Plan for the Middle East, Jerusalem Report, May 18, 2009, reprinted online in Jewcy

2. Bibi, Tzipi and Barack: A Chance for Peace?, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom Email & Website, Feb. 13, 2009

3. Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf: A Remembrance, Chicago Jewish News, Jan. 2, 2009

4. Barack Obama, A True Friend of Israel, The Jerusalem Report, June 4, 2008. Only two governments on earth are in shock over the newly revealed Israeli-Syrian dialogue: the Iranian regime and the Bush administration. Obama and McCain bring to this pregnant Mideast moment two sharply divergent conceptions of America's place in the world.

5. Like Bush, McCain Offers Bluster Instead of Good Advice on Iran, Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) and Washington Jewish Week, April 16, 2008.

6. Israel Should Negotiate with Syria, in Amanda Hiber, Editor, Should Governments Negotiate with Terrorists?, At Issue: National Security Series (Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press), June 2008; originally published as “Now May Be the Time to Pry Syria from Terrorist Camp,” The Jewish Chronicle, September 7, 2006.

7. McCain, Obama and the Middle East: What Conservative Mudslingers Don’t Want You To Know, The Jewish Chronicle, March 13, 2008. A defense of Scrowcroft-Brzezinski ‘realism’ on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

8. Israel, Settlements and the “P” Word, The Jewish Chronicle and www.Ameinu.net, January 15, 2008. Kissinger, Ford, Carter and George H.W. Bush all recognized that constructive, judicious U.S. pressure on both sides is often necessary for successful Arab-Israeli peace-making.

9. What Bush and Olmert Could Learn from Begin and Sadat: Lessons from the 30th Anniversary of Sadat’s Visit to Jerusalem, The Jewish Chronicle and www.Ameinu.net, December 20, 2007 Contrary to popular opinion, which largely credits Sadat with the breakthrough, it was a far-reaching Israeli peace initiative which preceded Sadat's visit, and made successful Arab-Israeli peace talks possible. The tale is retold here, with a contemporary moral.

10. Genocide, Morality and American Jews (Published as “Don’t Alienate Ankara”), October 29, 2007, The Jerusalem Post.

11. AIPAC Hijack: With Friends Like These…, www.Ameinu.net and The Jewish Chronicle, March 20, 2007 (Widely reprinted on the web.) After attending the annual AIPAC National Policy Conference and Executive Committee meeting in Washington as the representative of a major American Jewish organization, I issued a press release on behalf of the organization revealing that AIPAC’s 2007 Action Agenda adopted radical hawkish positions on the Palestinians which would have quashed current Palestinian-Israeli peace efforts, placing AIPAC in sharp opposition to the Bush Administration, the Israeli Government and the Israeli public. (Covered in the Forward, JTA and other publications.)

12. Are We the New Jews of Silence?, The Jewish Chronicle, February 22, 2007 and www.Ameinu.net Reprinted by the American Task Force for Palestine. An account of my recent visit to Hebron and an appeal to American Jews to support the forces in Israel and the American Jewish community working to encourage an end to settlements which endanger both Israel’s security and its moral standing.

13. Look Who’s Pressuring Israel, The Jewish Chronicle, January 23, 2007. Response to Wendy Singer, AIPAC Israel director’s 500-word letter in Ha'aretz criticizing my Ha’aretz op-ed, “Wanted: A Moderate Pro-Israel Lobby.” A defense of Track II Syrian-Israeli talks and critique of Bush Administration’s and AIPAC’s positions vis-à-vis US opposition to Track I Syria-Israel negotiations.

14. Carter's “Palestine”: Badly Flawed with a Large Kernel of Truth, Israel Horizons, Meretz USA Quarterly Magazine, Winter 2007. Earlier versions appeared in online magazines and blogs: Engage, Zionism and Israel News Archives, December 11, 2006, and OpinionSource. Generated favorable press coverage in the Forward. Carter's top 10 misrepresentations reveal a systematic anti-Israel bias and a Manichean view of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In Carter’s world, the onus to make peace falls solely on Israel. Palestinians, for Carter, bear no share of responsibility for forging the conditions necessary for successful peacemaking.

15. Wanted: A Moderate Pro-Israel Lobby, an op-ed in the English edition of Ha'aretz, Nov. 17, 2006. Critiques the sometimes unhelpful role of AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby in US Arab-Israel policy from a pragmatic pro-Israel perspective; advocates creation of a new moderate pro-Israel lobby to complement AIPAC. Widely reprinted online, by Israel Policy Forum, American Task Force for Palestine Middle East News World Press Roundup, Daily Kos, and elsewhere.

16. Convergence Towards Peace, The Forward, June 2, 2006, also published as “Moving Israeli Settlers Behind Wall Isn’t a Barrier to Peace,” Op-Ed, Chicago Sun Times, June 8, 2006. Response to right and far left critics of the Israeli government's West Bank “realignment” plan; advocates a negotiated disengagement.

17. The 'Israel Lobby' and the Persian Gulf Wars, Viewpoint, the Jerusalem Report, June 12, 2006. A rebuttal to Mearsheimer and Walt’s claim that Israel and the American Jewish “Israel Lobby” steered the US into a disastrous war in Iraq. Of the seven major Persian Gulf oil producing states, only two were not US allies, and instead were leaders of the radical anti-American front in the Arab and Muslim worlds: Iraq and Iran. Both have sought to dominate their Muslim Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf, and Israel, as Mearsheimer’s own theory of regional hegemony predicts.

18. Progressive Jewish Perspectives on Divestment from Israel, April 17, 2005. Published by Chicago Presbytery Ecumenical and Inter-Religious Work Group (4,000 words). Critique of Presbyterian divestment from Israel as a counter-productive strategy for advancing Israeli-Palestinian peace. Presented as part of a multi-year dialogue between 4 Chicago Jewish leaders and the Chicago Presbyterian leadership.

19. Republican Jewish Attack Ads Push Spinning into Sinning, Published by Jews for Kerry, www.JewsforKerry.org, October 25, 2004. 4,000 words. Response to attack ad campaign in the American Jewish press by the Republican Jewish Coalition smearing Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry and the Democratic Party. Discusses Democratic and Republican positions on Israel’s security barrier, targeted killing of terrorists, negotiating with Arafat and other Palestinian leaders, US aid to Israel, anti-Semitism and blaming the Jewish community for the war in Iraq.

20. Follow ‘West Wing’ Script on Mideast Peace, co-authored with Americans for Peace Now Policy Director Mark Rosenblum, Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, September 24, 2004: This op-ed was discussed in a front-page story in the Forward, titled "The Peace Process Marches On...Television, at Least," October 29, 2004. Proposes a formula for the next US president to re-invigorate a Palestinian-Israeli negotiation process under the Roadmap.

21. On Arafat and the Peace Process, Chicago Tribune, November 16, 2004. Corrects the Chicago Tribune’s misrepresentation of my position on Arafat’s legacy in an article on reactions to his death, which at the same time corrects several widely held misperceptions about the Palestinian leader’s positions at Camp David and relationship to terrorism during the Oslo years.

22. Israel and the New Anti-Semitism, The Nation (April 12, 2004), 1,200 words, published as “Anti-Semitism: New or Old? An Exchange with Brian Klug.” Reprinted on many websites, translated into German and reprinted in a European political journal. Prompted a three-page attack in Virginia Tilly, The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (University of Michigan Press, 2005). For my rebuttal to Tilly, see “A Response to Jennifer Tilly,” at Tough Dove Israel.

23. A Response to the Campaign Against Palestinian Peace Advocate Sari Nusseibeh: An Americans for Peace Now White Paper, September 30, 2002 (3,800 words), published on APN’s website and the subject of a press release, garnered widespread local and international media coverage, including articles in the Jerusalem Post, the Forward, and in other media, at the height of the Palestinian intifada.

24. What is Zionism? Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State, www.Ameinu.net (2007, 2002), 5,000 words. How Israel can be a Jewish state and a state of equal citizens where the civil, political and economic rights of the non-Jewish Arab minority are accorded fully equal respect. First delivered as a talk at the University of Chicago, “What is Zionism? A Symposium,” co-sponsored by the University’s Human Rights Program and Students for Israel, September 2002.

25. Mideast Forgiveness: A Reply to Prof. Cherif Bassiouni on International Law and the Definition of Terrorism, Chicago Tribune, August 2, 2001. Argues against politicizing the definition of terrorism and in favor of amnesty (versus criminal prosecution) for Arab-Israeli war crimes to promote conflict resolution and regional stability.

26. The Canard of Democratic Peace, Viewpoint, Jerusalem Report, September, 25, 2000. Rebuttal to Netanyahu and Sharansky—and subsequently the Bush Administration—view that only democracies can make peace and that therefore the US and Israel should not negotiate with Syria.

27. Oslo Accord Has Helped Limit Terror Attacks, Letter, New York Times; August 28, 1997. A response to the spurious claims of critics who insist that the rise in terrorism since the Oslo Accords vitiates the value of Arab-Israeli peace agreements.

28. Jewish Ethics and the Palestinian-Israeli Problem, July-August 1997, Tikkun: A Bi-Monthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society, a 6,000 word essay outlining both Jewish and generic moral and pragmatic arguments for the development of Israeli and Palestinian national identities consistent with the duty to promote peace and respect the other; a rebuttal to Jewish fundamentalist religious approaches to ethics and politics.

29. Are We Now Due for A Stinging Lesson in Scorpion Logic?, a 550-word op-ed length letter in the New York Times, published February 2, 1991, on the eve of Desert Storm. This essay responded to an op-ed by Edward Said comparing Israel's purported violation of U.N. resolutions on the Arab-Israel conflict to Iraq's. At the same time, it offers a just war critique of President George H.W. Bush's failure to sufficiently explore diplomatic alternatives before launching the war.

Books in Progress

The Great Rift: Arab-Israeli War and Peace in the New Middle East, co-author with Prof. Mark Rosenblum

Building on conversations with Israeli, Palestinian and American political leaders and policymakers from the eve of the Lebanon-Gaza wars through their still-unfolding aftermath, this study chronicles the rise and fall of unilateralism as a philosophy of Middle East conflict management. Despite the fatal flaws of unilateralism, the authors show that coordinated unilateral action can reinforce negotiations. The authors make the case that only a regional approach to bargaining with Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinians, the Saudis, the Gulf states, and Iran itself, can lay the groundwork for a more secure political realignment in the Middle East. To prevent the next earthquake, the United States must dramatically change course and lead a diplomatic initiative of a new kind.

The Paradox of Peace: A Jewish Odyssey

Equal parts memoir and political argument, I recount my and my family’s story spanning the founding of Israel through contemporary Arab- and Palestinian-Israeli warfare and peacemaking. Following the saga of Isaac Remba, chief aide to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of militant Revisionist Zionism, and long-time publicist to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, I chronicle my father’s life-long battle for peace and security for Israel as a young Haganah fighter, Labor Zionist, American economist and public advocate in Israel and America. I bear witness to a generation of Arab-Israeli peace efforts, in my own work under Prime Minister Begin and Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan during Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking visit to Jerusalem and the negotiation of the Camp David Egyptian-Israeli peace accords, through a quarter century as an American Jewish activist, community leader and progressive Zionist.

For Press Clips about my work from 2008 - 2009 click here

For Press Clips about my work from 2007 click here

Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, z"l--"Obama's Rabbi"--A Remembrance, by Doni Remba, Chicago Jewish News

Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, z”l—“Obama’s Rabbi”—A Remembrance
by Doni Remba, President and Executive Director, the Jewish Alliance for Change

Abridged version published in the Chicago Jewish News

Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, one of the great religious leaders of our time and a champion of peace and social justice, has left us. I had the privilege of working with Arnie during the 1980’s as a teacher of children and adults for the first six years of his tenure at KAM Isaiah Israel Congregation in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He remained a friend and ally ever since. This is a time to remember him, and the enormous contribution he has made to Jewish and American life.

By the time I had met him in 1980, Arnie had already served as a Navy chaplain during the Korean war, marched with King in Selma during the sixties, founded and led an innovative synagogue, and had been one the primary moving forces behind the creation in 1973 of the first national Jewish organization advocating for Palestinian-Israeli peace based on a two-state solution, at a time when calling for mutual Israeli and Palestinian recognition and rights was seen as high treason within the Jewish community.

In his essay, “A Theology of Activism,” Arnie writes: “I believe that Judaism mandates a quite specific political ethic which is binding upon all Jews. I include among our political obligations the amelioration of inequality, offering sanctuary to those fleeing oppression and tyranny, and a perpetual struggle for peace, even at some risk to our own security and safety…[T]he positive commandment of Judaism is to begin to act again and again, in the face of all doubt and with due consideration of all that negative experience can teach…God will complete our imperfections. She will not forgive our self-defensive cowardice or our fear of failure.”

He thought a rabbi ought to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”—as one rabbi and close friend put it at his funeral, as his friend Martha Nussbaum, the renowned political philosopher at the University of Chicago Law School, reports in what is perhaps the most evocative remembrance of him. Throughout his life and work, Arnie exemplified “a passion for challenge and argument, a love of the search for truth whatever its inconveniences, a profound respect for dissenting opinions,” in Martha’s apt words.

Contrary to what some hawkish Orthodox critics say, the commitment to the pursuit of peace and social justice of many Jews like Arnie did not flow from some attachment to universalism that was somehow opposed to their Jewishness and their Judaism. For Arnie, it was integral to his understanding of what Jewish tradition demanded of us. Though he was an iconoclast and progressive in his politics, he was among the leaders of the return to tradition in Reform Judaism.

Arnie saw Judaism as defined by the belief that “it is better to do something under command than by choice….Mitzvah [commandment] is in a privileged position….To all of us North Americans,” he noted, “autonomy and choice—freedom and the ability to decide for ourselves—are crucial. But to Judaism, as I understand it, the opposite is the case…All Judaism is mitzvah. There is nothing else.” He maintained, as one of his provocatively titled articles put it, that “There is No Judaism but Orthodoxy—But All Jews are Really Reform.”

He taught that

"Jews are required, so far as they are able, to help other Jews. We have an obligation to support Israel, which by no means is identical to support for any given government policy there or, for that matter, a policy of the United States. We are not allowed to be bland universalists, just as we are not allowed to consider our own family the moral equivalent of all other families. Our ethical tasks begin close to home and then move in ever-widening circles until, in principle, if never in reality, we embrace the whole world. To be a Jew means to love ‘the near one’ (neighbor) as ourselves, hoping to bring near as many as we can."

To a young man who in 1980, having recently lost his 47-year old father, wondered how a just God could have created a universe in which life could be so torn asunder, Arnie responded in the traditional Jewish idiom as God had to Job that we cannot understand the ways of the Creator—a response that left me distinctly unsatisfied. My grappling with God, good and evil inevitably spilled over into my classroom at KAM. After a free-wheeling exchange in which my young students and I alternately challenged and defended the conventional explanations of God and radical evil, I asked them to put their thoughts to paper. Arnie loved the product, even with its dissenting and sometimes slightly heretical notions. In 1981 and again in 1984, he published their ruminations for the whole congregation, presenting their “profound and poignant theological reflections with pride and deep respect.” “When do we lose these youthful insights,” he wondered aloud. “How do we get them back again?”

The Loving Critic: Israel and the American Jewish Community

Arnie was, in so many ways, an exemplar of the rabbinic teaching that “Love unaccompanied by criticism is not love . . . Peace unaccompanied by reproof is not peace.” (Genesis Rabbah 54:3) He lived a life guided by the prophetic ideal of criticism from love. As founding chair of Breira—which means “alternative”—he helped spearhead a Jewish organization which proposed “an alternative to the intransigence of both the PLO and the several governments of Israel,” speaking out for the then-heterodox idea of a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Though Breira had the participation of over a hundred Reform and Conservative rabbis and noted American Jewish writers and intellectuals, the group was subjected to a vicious McCarthyite campaign of calumny in the organized Jewish community. Rabbi Alexander Schindler, then president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, was perhaps the only major leader of a Jewish organization to defend Breira, calling the attacks on the group, and firing by major Jewish organizations of some of its rabbinic supporters, a “witch hunt,” all of which led to Breira’s dissolution by 1977.

While Arnie continued to be a passionate advocate for Israeli-Palestinian peace, I believe he was deeply heartened to see that from the 1980’s on there were so many other American Jews—and mainstream pro-Israel Jewish organizations—who had followed in his footsteps in calling, and working, for a serious and sustained American initiative to help bring about Palestinian-Israeli rapprochement and a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement. But Arnie was no uncritical peacenik. He wrote of the obligations of Palestinians to end violence against Israel, and of Israel to work with Palestinians to end the occupation and bring about a secure two-state solution:

"The Palestinians are right to demand their liberation; the Jewish people need look no further than their own history to understand the wrong of the occupation. But it must not be forgotten that Israel is also right to demand the end of violence coming from some segments of the Palestinian community. Liberation is not enough -- we have also the obligation to live ethical lives.

"Both sides, then, must recognize the humanity of the other, and work together toward their mutual freedom, their mutual obligations. We learn in Exodus 12 that the Israelites went up from Egypt with a mixed multitude -- they were not alone as they shook off their oppression, and, we can presume, they were not alone at Sinai.

"God does not speak only to the Jews. The Creator speaks to all Creation, calls on each of us, individually and in our communities, to live in freedom and responsibility. Israel and the Palestinians must talk with each other, in honesty and mutual respect, and achieve a durable peace agreement, if either people is to know real liberation."

When, as president of Chicago Peace Now, the progressive Zionist group I had co-founded in 2001 after the failure of the Oslo peace process, I returned to KAM in 2004 to host a public dialogue with the Senior Legal Advisor to the Palestinian Negotiating Team from the Camp David and Taba talks, and a prominent American Jewish peace advocate, it was at the invitation of KAM’s Cantor Debra Bard. Arnie was there, but I was remiss in not having publicly recognized that we were in the presence of one of the rabbinic giants who had courageously pioneered American Jewish support for Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation.

It had been a few years since I had been back at KAM, though I had continued to visit with Arnie in other places. His eyes twinkled as he asked: “So, does it look the same?” I went up to my old classroom, whose windows gaze out on Barack Obama’s home, and confessed: “It’s as if time has frozen. Nothing has changed!” But so much had, and we both knew it.

Though now the synagogue’s emeritus rabbi, Arnie continued to teach classes, educate Bar and Bat Mitzvah students, deliver the occasional sermon, and engage, as always, in political activism. Last year, Arnie delivered a blistering Yom Kippur sermon titled “Our Sin.” KAM had all at once lost its serving rabbi, its cantor, and its director of education, all extraordinarily talented people each in their own fields. Arnie went on to reprove the congregation, and himself, for their and his own very real failings, which he believed had caused the departure of so many of the synagogue’s senior staff.

“Obama’s Rabbi”

Arnie had been one of Obama’s earliest supporters when Obama first ran for the Illinois State Senate in a district that encompassed Hyde Park and other parts of Chicago. When, over a decade later, late in the presidential race, McCain and Palin sought to discredit Obama through guilt by association with one Professor Bill Ayers, a Hyde Park neighbor, Arnie let it be known that for a host of reasons it was a bum rap. Attempting to tar Obama as “paling around with terrorists,” McCain and Palin claimed that Ayers had “launched Obama’s political career in his living room.” But Arnie pointed out that many people in Hyde Park had hosted coffees for Obama—“there were several every week”—to introduce the candidate to the community and help him build political support. He noted that his wife Grace insisted that their own coffee for Obama had actually been the first—so if anything, Obama’s political career had actually been “launched” in Arnie and Grace’s living room.

In March of this year, Arnie sprang to Obama’s defense when he was under attack for the remarks of his minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He made clear that he supported Obama’s candidacy not out of “neighborly instinct,” but “because he stands for what I believe, what our tradition demands.” And as a rabbi who had long prized his freedom to take controversial political and religious stands before his congregation, he reminded the American Jewish community that “We sometimes forget, but an integral part of that tradition is dialogue and a willingness to disagree. Certainly many who call me their rabbi have taken political positions far from mine - just as Barack Obama's opinions have differed from those of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.”

Then he reminded us of what was really at stake in this election for Jews and for all Americans, adding his and his family’s testimony to vouch for his friend Barack:

"Obama's strong positions on poverty and the climate, his early and consistent opposition to the Iraq War, his commitment to ending the Darfur genocide - all these speak directly to Jewish concerns. If we're sidetracked by Wright's words, we'll be working against these interests. After all, a preacher speaks to a congregation, not for the congregation.

"I've worked with Obama for more than a decade, as has my son, a lawyer who represents children and people with disabilities. He has admired Obama's dedication and skill as he worked on issues affecting our most vulnerable citizens….Barack Obama is brilliant and open-hearted; he is wiser and more thoughtful than his former minister. He offers what America, Israel, and the Jewish community need: a US President willing to ask hard questions, and grapple with difficult answers. I am very proud to be his neighbor. I hope someday to visit him in the White House."

Soon thereafter, Arnie joined our Board of Advisors, with the encouragement of his (other) political activist and Orthodox son, Jonathan. Arnie was proud to join a Jewish organization which was then sponsoring Jews for Obama, and which, as the Jewish Alliance for Change, continued to advocate for Obama in the Jewish community through Election Day, while espousing a progressive domestic and foreign policy agenda.

President-elect Obama issued the following statement upon learning of Arnie’s passing, which was read at his funeral at KAM:

"I am deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, who was not just our neighbor, but a dear friend to Michelle and me. We are joined in this time of grief by the entire Hyde Park community, the American Jewish Community, and all those who shared Rabbi Wolf’s passion for learning and profound commitment to serving others.

"Throughout Chicago and in Jewish homes and classrooms across our country, Rabbi Wolf’s name is synonymous with service, social action, and the possibility of change. He will be remembered as a loving husband and father, an engaging teacher, a kindhearted shepherd for the KAM Isaiah community, and a tireless advocate of peace for the United States, Israel and the world."

But Arnie’s long-time vociferous support for Obama did not prevent him from criticizing his friend when he believed he had erred. A few weeks ago, at a public talk at KAM delivered by Abner Mikva, the former federal judge and White House Counsel to President Clinton who is one of Obama’s mentors and advisors, Arnie chastised Obama over some of his cabinet appointments and for his reversal this summer on a civil rights issue: Obama’s decision to support legislation granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that had cooperated with the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants. This “pragmatic move to the center” was a reversal of Obama’s prior opposition to President Bush’s effort to expand the government’s domestic spying powers.

Even as he defended Obama in March, Arnie wrote that “I've sometimes found Obama too cautious on Israel. He, like all our politicians, knows he mustn't stray too far from the conventional line, and that can be disappointing. But unlike anyone else on the stump, Obama has also made it clear that he'll broaden the dialogue. He knows what peace entails.”

Had Arnie lived to see the great suffering of Israelis and Palestinians in the current crisis, he would have been among those reminding us that it stems above all else from the woeful absence of real diplomatic leadership on the part of the United States and its allies. He would have been privately urging his friend, the President-elect, to upon taking office launch an unprecedented drive to negotiate a more durable cease-fire, coupled with a bold regional approach to comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace, one which “breaks fundamentally with past efforts.”

Baruch Dayan Emet

Arnie was, as he himself had said of his great teacher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “a prophet who knew that prophecy was now impossible. But, as he taught us, the prophets and sages are dead. It is only the living who now constitute Israel and will together make its future.” What a hole in the universe has been left, cried Rabbi Arthur Waskow. Arnie will be sorely missed by so many; and we need him now more than ever.

2007 Press Clips about the work of Gidon D. Remba (Excluding My Publications)

For press clips about my work from 2008 - 2009 click here

2007 Press Clips (Excluding My Publications)

12/24/2007
Jerusalem Report: Fringe Theater at Annapolis
Busloads of activists gather in the cold winter sunlight of late November outside the gateway to the Naval Academy in the sleepy town of Annapolis, Maryland, to spew vitriol, decry Israeli ... › More Info

12/01/2007
Jerusalem Post: The 'Daily Gevalt' ("The Narrowing of the Jewish Mind")
Like many Jews with an e-mail account and a keen interest in Israel, I receive the "Daily Alert" on the Middle East. The alert, a compendium of Mideast news and opinion, is "prepared for ... › More Info

11/28/2007
JTA: Supporters, opponents stage rallies at Annapolis conference
ANNAPOLIS, Md. (JTA) -- The streets of Annapolis were ringing with the sound of Hebrew folk songs as Jewish organizations of many stripes held rallies either in support of or opposition to the ... › More Info

11/28/2007
Forward: On Summit Sidelines, Jewish Groups Square Off
...Jewish activists took to the streets here Tuesday to express their views on the Middle East peace conference that was taking place at the United States Naval Academy. An estimated 100 ... › More Info

11/27/2007
CBS TV Broadcast of Annapolis Peace Rally
New York's CBS TV sent a camera crew to interview New York rally-goers as they departed on the bus from in front of Beit Shalom at 7:30 am, and again in Annapolis itself. CBS erred in ... › More Info

11/26/2007
Ha'aretz: Dovish U.S. Jewish groups plan pro-Annapolis rally on Tuesday
A coalition of dovish American Jewish organizations are to hold a rally for Israeli-Palestinian Peace to coincide with the Annapolis Middle East peace conference on Tuesday. The rally, ... › More Info

11/21/2007
International Herald Tribune: Peace conference security could cramp Annapolis' style
Wednesday, November 21, 2007 ANNAPOLIS, Maryland: People planning a brisk autumn run or walk at the U.S. Naval Academy face a possible detour past shouting anti-Palestinian ... › More Info

10/29/2007
Jerusalem Post: Genocide, Morality and American Jews
Published as "Don't Alienate Ankara" The Jerusalem Post, Oct. 29, 2007 (Unedited version) Under pressure from the Bush Administration and Turkey, a key US NATO ally, ... › More Info

07/31/2007
JTA: Ban on Leasing Land to Arabs Slammed
NEW YORK (JTA) -- A proposed Israeli law that would uphold the government's refusal to lease land to Israeli Arabs has generated broad opposition among American Jews concerned about the ... › More Info

07/28/2007
Jerusalem Post: US Jewish groups lobby against JNF bill
The Reform Movement and other liberal Jewish groups are urging the Knesset not to move forward with legislation that would prohibit Arab Israelis from leasing land owned by the Jewish National Fund. ... › More Info

07/27/2007
Guardian: The 'right' to discriminate
A fixture in the lives of all children who have ever attended Hebrew school is the blue Jewish National Fund (JNF) pushke (or charity box), into which parents and teachers encouraged us to throw our ... › More Info

07/25/2007
JTA: Some Jews oppose land bill
Some U.S. Jewish groups are protesting a Knesset bill that would permit the Israel Lands Authority to uphold a policy that favors Jewish landowners in Israel. Ameinu, the American affiliate of the ... › More Info

07/25/2007
Forward: Reform Slams Knesset Plan for JNF Land
Some U.S. Jewish groups are protesting a Knesset bill that would permit the Israel Lands Authority to uphold a policy that favors Jewish landowners in Israel. Ameinu, the American affiliate of the ... › More Info

07/06/2007
Jewish Herald-Voice (Houston): Progressive Zionist. Simply a term for a Jewish traitor says the Right. An oxymoron says the Left.
Including Everybody In the Family Conversation Progressive Zionist. Simply a term for a Jewish traitor says the Right. An oxymoron says the Left, since Israel is an apartheid state engaged in ethnic ... › More Info

05/25/2007
The Forward: Amid Rockets and Civil War in Gaza, Israelis Sour on Peace Prospects
Amman, Jordan - Israeli leaders are now scrambling for a strategy to deal with the potential civil war erupting in the Palestinian territories and Hamas rocket attacks on the southern town of Sderot. ... › More Info

05/04/2007
The Forward: Liberal Mideast Newsletter to Launch
Washington - A prominent liberal think tank is launching a new e-mail newsletter following claims that the main daily digest put out by the Jewish community advances a right-wing agenda. The Center ... › More Info

03/14/2007
JTA: Liberal Zionists denounce AIPAC
A liberal Zionist group denounced the America Israel Public Affairs Committee for adopting "radical hawkish positions" at the powerful lobby’s annual policy conference. In a statement Wednesday, ... › More Info

03/13/2007
The Forward: Aipac Conference: Pastor Hailed, Bibi Dissed, Pollard Rejected, While Politicians Preen
Washington - Perhaps the most enthusiastically received speaker at this year’s annual Aipac conference was the fiery evangelical leader Pastor John Hagee. During his speech Sunday night to the 6,000 ... › More Info

2/23/2007
The Forward: Is Community Open to Critics of Zionism? Ira Youdovin
"Doni Remba, a leader of Americans for Peace Now, characterizes Carter’s book as being 'badly flawed but with a large kernel of truth.' In the future, will an author who condemns Carter’s main thesis nevertheless find himself condemned because he accepts some of Carter’s critique?"

For press clips about my work from 2008 - 2009 click here

Barack Obama, a True Friend of Israel, Gidon D. Remba -- The Jerusalem Report, Viewpoint, 6/4/08

What should we say of an American president who tells the Knesset that negotiating with “terrorists and radicals” is like appeasing Nazis, but who bargains with states like Libya and North Korea over nuclear disarmament and with Iran over stabilizing Iraq? And suppose a Republican presidential candidate endorses the implied appeasement charge against his opponent, suggesting that while the Democrat is surely Hamas’ best friend, he himself will never truck with terrorists. Next imagine that just before the election spotlight shines upon him, this same Republican announces that sooner or later we’re going to have to talk to Hamas.

George Orwell, author of the dystopian novel 1984, called all this Newspeak. In Newspeak, explained Orwell, one displays “a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this…The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.” In Oldspeak, diplomacy meant bargaining, directly or indirectly when needed, with one’s foes, as well as with friends. In Newspeak, we never talk of such things, even when our leaders do them because they must. In Oldspeak, we do as we say and say as we do. In Newspeak, we say what we want the people to think, and then do as we wish.

Barack Obama represents a revival of Oldspeak to a people grown weary of the gaping chasm between rhetoric and results, happy-talk and truth, from an administration that promised Americans security and global triumph, and its Jewish citizens undying friendship to Israel. While a stubborn minority clings to fantasies of “moral clarity” on absolute good and evil and vanquishing Israel’s enemies, many now see that the swashbuckling moralists have boosted the “evil-doers” while whispering sweet hosannas to Israel in Jewish ears.

These dragon-slayers have broken the Arab state which was Iran’s chief rival, installing Shiite-led Iran-friendly rule in Iraq. In the name of “freedom” and “democracy,” they foisted new elections on the Palestinians, against both Israel’s and Fatah’s better judgment, letting Hamas win power. Then they armed Fatah against Hamas in Gaza hoping to depose the Hamas-led authority, until Hamas preempted, wresting control of Gaza from Fatah.

They fiddled with toothless sanctions while Persian centrifuges spun. They neglected the most potent U.S. economic and political inducements, while Iran leapt forward towards nuclear weapons' breakthrough. They refused to lure Syria away from Iran in a pax Americana, as we once did Egypt from the Soviet orbit, allowing the Syrians to keep funneling more lethal arms to Hezbollah and Hamas, magnifying the threats to Israel.

Obama has blasted the Bush crew for pressuring Israel to duck peace parley with Syria, despite the conviction of both its prime minister and defense minister, and much of its security establishment, that engaging Damascus would be to Israel’s advantage. Only two governments on earth are in shock over the newly revealed Israeli-Syrian dialogue: the Iranian regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Bush administration, which reportedly called Israel’s overture towards Syria “a slap in the face.” Such language is not unlike that doubtlessly heard in government halls in Tehran and Hezbollah’s Beirut these days about their Syrian ally.

But don’t expect Syria’s President Bashar Asad to publicly surrender his chief asset and strongest bargaining chip—his marriage of convenience with Iran—in the opening act. Engineering this break will take a bountiful dowry from the wealthy American and Western families of the Israeli would-be bride. The prospects for success will depend, in part, on whether a new U.S. president seizes the opening, persuading Syria of the benefits we will offer in exchange for spurning Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.

Barack Obama and John McCain bring to this pregnant Mideast moment two sharply divergent conceptions of America’s place in the world. Reflecting his grasp of the supporting role the United States must play as a true friend of Israel, Obama responded that he has “consistently said that the United States must stand ready to help Israel achieve peace with its neighbors, and should not block Israel from the negotiating table, nor force it to negotiate.” McCain’s spokesperson offered the laissez-faire bromide “that the sovereign government of Israel should be free to make its own decisions on how best to defend Israel and whether to engage in negotiations.” (Read: Knock yourself out, Israel. But don’t come to us for help.)

Facing down Iran, Obama will marshal all elements of American power on behalf of security and peace in the region, wielding both carrots and sticks. McCain’s long-time cheerleading for the hawkish "talk and walk" of the Bush league leaves little doubt that a McCain administration will be hostage to the same martial doublethink: an over-reliance on arms and isolation as magic potions for all that ails America and Israel, Orwell’s perpetual war clothed in earnest devotion to Newspeak “diplomacy.”

“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” remarked Orwell’s character Syme, reveling in the way the cleansing of language constricts thought, stamping out the very idea of imagining alternative courses of action. But then he was fictional, of course.


Gidon D. Remba, a veteran American Jewish Israel activist, is President of KAHAL America (http://www.kahalamerica.com/), a new Jewish nonprofit issues advocacy organization and sponsor of "Jews for Obama" (http://www.jewsforobama.com/).

John McCain was for Hamas before he was against Hamas (he flip-flopped just to smear Obama)

Let's Have Straight Talk on Jewish Issues, Senator McCain, by Gidon D. Remba

If you thought that the world’s most ignoble occupation was prostitution, think again: it’s politics. That’s right. Only a politician could solemnly pledge integrity, honesty and decency as nothing more than a ploy to get our votes, then twist the truth beyond recognition all the way to the polling booth.

Sure, all politicians lie. But not all politicians lie all of the time. Watching the 2008 election season closely, I’ve discovered a trusty rule of thumb: the more a politician’s positions suffer from moral and intellectual bankruptcy, the more they lie. How else did you think we got stuck with George W. Bush? Because he waged and won a superior battle of ideas?

A former top Republican strategist has said of Bush’s former senior campaign advisor Karl Rove that his “goal is never just to win, it is to destroy your opponent, [use] character assassination, whatever it takes. There is almost nothing Karl would not do. For example, religion was not part of Karl’s life but he viewed it as a political tool to be manipulated.” Only now the term “Rovian politics” has, for many, become redundant.

Though I have not supported McCain for President, I, like many others, admired the man for his willingness to stick to principle and sometimes buck the neoconservative mania of his party. Arianna Huffington notes that “his nobility and his true reformer years have given way to pandering in the service of ambition.” She has compiled a frighteningly long roster of recent McCain lies and deceptions, most of which the media have ignored. But when McCain hired as a campaign advisor Karl Rove, what did we expect? An honest, thoughtful issue-oriented contest? A Talmudic debate?

But McCain’s fall from grace began well before the campaign. Huffington sums up just a few of the most egregious charges in the case against him: He now wants to make permanent Bush’s good-for-the rich tax cuts that “he twice voted against, saying he could not ‘in good conscience support’ them; the campaign finance reformer [has been] replaced with a candidate whose campaign is run by lobbyists and fueled by loophole rides on his wife's jet; the hard-line stance against torture replaced by a vote allowing water boarding…and the embracing of the disastrous policies of a man he so abhorred he would not vote for him.” But we’re just getting warmed up. McCain has repeatedly misled the public with false charges that the Democrats favor “nationalized government-run healthcare,” evoking the specter of socialized medicine. Respected media outlets like CNN not only fail to correct such gross distortions; they even parrot them.

On issues vital to Israel’s security which will determine the future stability—or instability—of the Middle East like the war in Iraq and threatening war with Iran, McCain promises to out-cowboy George W. Bush. The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg notes that “McCain wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal—that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we'll stay.”

McCain promised the American people to pursue a presidential campaign that is more like a respectful argument among friends than a bitter clash of enemies. He suggested that his conduct during this contest will demonstrate why he is the candidate best able to build a bipartisan consensus to address our nation’s challenges: “I intend to wage this campaign and to govern this country in a way that [Americans] would be proud of me.” And “I’m going to raise the level of political dialog in America, and I’m going to treat my opponents with respect and demand that they treat me with respect.” He promised straight talk.

Despite these vows, he has joined those attempting to tar and feather Senator Obama with the outrageous remarks of Rev. Wright, which Obama has roundly rejected as “divisive,” “destructive,” and “appalling.” Even after being falsely attacked himself for miscegenation by Karl Rove in 2000, McCain has done little to stop a race-baiting TV commercial being run against Obama by the Republican party in North Carolina replete with Wright video clips. Why call for a frank discussion on the merits of his own and Obama’s plans for the war in Iraq or our ailing economy, when it’s so much more fun and effective to encourage us to dwell on the revolting Reverend or AWOL lapel pins?

Now his campaign has tried to paint Obama as the favorite candidate of the Israel-hating terrorists of Hamas. Yet McCain knows full well that Obama’s clearly stated position is the same as his, that the US and Israel must refuse to talk with Hamas until it recognizes Israel, renounces violence and accepts past agreements. What’s more, the Hamas official who referred to Obama did so while praising President Carter for negotiating peace between Egypt and Israel, and expressing hope that the former president could broker peace between Israel and Hamas. But these little facts would get in the way of destroying his opponent and winning at any price. But enough about Hillary Clinton…

McCain’s willingness to pander for votes without regard for moral scruples led him to seek out, and to continue to welcome the endorsement of Rev. John Hagee, a bigot whose views are no less offensive than those of Rev. Wright. Hagee writes in his recent book “Jerusalem Countdown” that the Jews are responsible for their own persecution: “It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day….How utterly repulsive, insulting, and heartbreaking to God for His chosen people to credit idols with bringing blessings He had showered upon the chosen people. Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of anti-Semitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come…” Of course, the rebellion of the Jews, and the anti-Semitism it breeds, will end only when the Jews accept Jesus as their savior.

Adding insult to injury, the McCain campaign has now appointed as national finance co-chair none other than Fred Malek, whose dubious background includes counting and demoting Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics during the Nixon Administration. And did I mention that McCain has declared America to be a Christian nation? How many fundamentalist evangelical voters did you say there were Karl?

If like me, you mourn the corruption of American politics, and long to see a presidential contest that is respectful, civil, and truthful, free of lies and smears, a campaign revolving around a forthright debate on policies and ideas and how they affect us and our children, then I invite you to join me and many others in endorsing an open letter to Senator McCain at http://www.mccainmustdenouncehagee.com/. Demand that the Senator renounce the endorsement of extremists like Pastor Hagee, repudiate his hateful anti-Jewish remarks, and dismiss anti-Semites like Fred Malek from his campaign. Take a stand for straight talk on Jewish issues—and on all that is at stake in this fateful election.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Gidon D. Remba, a veteran Israel activist and commentator, is editor and publisher of the http://www.jewsforobama.com/ e-newsletter. He blogs at http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/

More Than a Gas Tax Holiday, Jews for Obama Editorial

There are several crises brewing simultaneously which demand real leadership from the US. Global warming is a growing threat to our environmental security. Riots have recently broken out around the world because the escalating price of food -- flour is up 32%, bread 12%, milk 18.5%, eggs 30% since March 2007 -- leads to rising malnutrition and starvation. We take our food supply for granted, the fact that we can walk into a supermarket, 7-11, or restaurant, but around the world “food security” is increasingly in jeopardy. Finally, the price of gasoline, which has risen to $4 per gallon, combined with skyrocketing food prices, is placing a mounting economic burden on lower and middle income Americans. Those of us who have fought hunger through food pantries and Jewish organizations like Mazon, which works throughout the United States, and around the globe, to bring critical relief to millions of hungry families, have witnessed the impact of these problems first hand.

The Congressional Joint Economic Committee (JEC) just held its first hearing on rising food prices, and found that they are linked to ballooning gas and transportation costs.

The alarming and explosive threats to food, environment, energy, and health security--not preacher sound bites--should be center stage for all people of faith this election season.

Instead we have economic policies like a check to every family, an incumbent’s attempt at buying love and re-election. We have the other two candidates promising a holiday in the Gasoline Tax. What’s next? Will McCain declare “Free Beer” in October to be donated by his wife’s company to “help the working class”?

Instead of panderers, we need a leader who will bring forward serious policy recommendations, not give away the treasury for re-election or to buy votes. Senator Obama recently explained in Indiana why he believes that the gas-tax holiday is not the solution, but a serious error leading only to more pollution, higher profits for Exxon, and less investment in efficiency, and all economists agree. Unable to name a single economist in support of the policy, Hillary Clinton declares that she is not going to put her "lot in with economists". In response, Robert Reich warns against continuing to elect politicians "who reject facts in favor of short-term poll-driven politics".

The global dimensions of the impending food disaster are illustrated in the following projection made by the Worldwatch Institute. "The United States still consumes three times as much grain per person as China and five times as much as India, notes the report. U.S. per-capita carbon dioxide emissions are six times the Chinese level and 20 times the Indian level. If China and India were to consume resources and produce pollution at the current U.S. per-capita level, it would require two planet Earths just to sustain their two economies." Globalization has increased wealth in China and India, increasing demand for both energy and food. In our own country, we need more than a new food pyramid from the FDA and the dairy industry to change our consumption habits.

We need leadership that, instead of catering to industrial profits in the short term, can see the long-term effects of policies and their impact on our lives and our children’s lives. We need leadership that does not buy love with cheap gimmicks and pronouncements, but works with other countries and international organizations to coordinate programs for global consumption.

Solving these large problems facing our society and world demands a leader with Obama's extraordinary capacity to build consensus. Obama’s ability to devise and stand strongly behind thoughtful policies has won him the support of knowledgeable and experienced policy makers like former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich and creative thinkers like University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee, who was praised by conservative pundit George Will as "the sort of person you would want at the elbow of a Democratic president.”

There are many talented and brilliant people in America who are concerned about these impending disasters, which Bush has either ignored or exacerbated for the last eight years. Obama will bring together and motivate the best people to begin to solve these looming problems before the 21st century is remembered as a second dark age known for famine, flooding and foreclosure.

Prophets and Demagogues—Rev. Wright Revisited: D’var Torah Parshat Metzorah, Glenn Gottlieb

D’VAR TORAH
SHABBAT METZORA
(Leviticus 14:1 - 14)

Glenn Gottlieb

Prepared by Glenn M. Gottlieb for the Leo Baeck Temple Community Retreat, April 11-13, 2008, Brandeis-Bardin Campus of the American Jewish University. Glenn is an Attorney-Mediator practicing in Los Angeles, California (http://www.glenngottlieb.com/).

In today’s Torah portion, you are about to hear some pretty wild stuff!

Imagine the scene: a person who previously was declared “unclean,” because affected with some scaly skin disease (mistranslated, we are told by Rabbi Plaut, as “leprosy” – probably only some sort of skin rash) has been banished outside the camp. After some time, a priest (probably dressed in some sort of ritual or ceremonial garb) goes outside the camp to examine him to determine whether he has been cured of this affliction. If he has, the priest engages in a rather bizarre ritual involving the slaughter of a bird over a bowl of water and dipping of another live bird into its blood.

This blood and water, mind you, has been mixed with some cedar wood, some red yarn and some pungent spice. He then shpritzes the poor shmo with the mixture seven times (“Of course!”, you say. “Seven is a magical number!”) and lets the live bird fly away. The person washes his clothes, shaves all his hair off and takes a bath. After all this, now the guy is actually declared “clean,” and is allowed back into the camp. But he still isn’t allowed to go back inside his own tent.

Another couple of rituals continue seven and then eight days after all this. I’m stopping here – but it goes on . . .

Okay – I haven’t seen this done lately, but it sounds pretty bizarre! Talk about the “heartbreak of psoriasis”!!

Now imagine this scene: you are going with a friend to attend their place of worship. It is a religion you have heard of, but are not very familiar with. As you enter the hall, you see rows of seats in front of a “stage.” At the head of the stage appears to be a large closet of some sort, with double doors, decorated in strange characters that look like an ancient, foreign alphabet. The leader and the congregation say most of the prayers in a foreign language that not too many people in the world even speak any more, and it appears not many, if any, in the congregation understand. The worshipers stand up and sit down at various times in the service that seem sort of random, and usually face the head of the stage, but turn back toward the door at least once, and sometimes everyone, including the leader turns and faces the closet.

At one point in the service, everyone stands up, the leader approaches and opens the double doors of the closet and takes out what looks like a dressed-up, double scroll of old parchment, which is paraded around the room, and everyone touches and kisses it with reverence. They then read from this scroll in the same foreign language and put it back in the closet. Not many folks in the congregation seem to understand the language or what they are saying, and no one except maybe the leader seems to understand what is being read from this scroll.
Okay, you get the idea.

Now the last scene: a video tape of an African-American minister, passionately preaching a “fire and brimstone” sermon - shouting and gesturing wildly: “God bless America? No! God damn America!!”

Need I say more?

The chapter of Leviticus we read today is part of the Torah laws that, needless to say, seem pretty far out and anachronistic in the extreme in today’s world. Given the importance we Jews attach to the Torah, however, someone trying to find out about us and “what we believe in” – picks up our holy book and reads these laws. Out of context, that person might assume we believe in some pretty weird stuff.

Indeed, if they attended for the first time a modern prayer service like I have described, in a Reform congregation, much less Conservative or Orthodox, they might very well conclude we still believe in and practice some pretty weird stuff.

What if they also found out the translation of one of our most revered prayers – the “Aleinu” – one of the ones in which the rabbi him or herself stands solemnly in front of the Ark, bows down in front of all these holy parchment scrolls – and everyone says, “We honor and revere you God, because you made us Jews, and did not make us like all those other people out there”?!

As I have watched the controversy unfold over the sermons of Barack Obama’s former pastor, Reverend Wright, I have been concerned in the same way that it is not just the “what” Reverend Wright was preaching about that was being brought into question. I have had the strong sense that there was an underlying seed of fear his opponents were trying sow in the “how.”

That the playing and replaying of the video was intended to play on folks’ discomfort with the unfamiliarity of the ritual itself – you know, is Obama one of “those” holy rollers who scream and shout in such an undignified fashion in religious services? It’s the age-old fear of “the other” that is being invoked, having nothing to do with who he is, much less what he actually believes in.

I have also been concerned that even the “what” – after all, it seems to legitimately be pretty inflammatory stuff to be shouting “God damn America!” in front of a large crowd of pious church-goers – may be a way of giving folks an excuse to express what is really thinly-veiled racism on their part.

Because whatever Barack Obama may be, and whatever he may believe, nothing in his history or what we’ve seen of him indicates that he “hates” America or is an “angry black man” of the sort we witnessed and feared in Malcolm X or Eldridge Cleaver or Huey Newton in the race wars and rebellions of the 60's – or in the current manifestation in Minister Farakhan, whose views and endorsement Obama has explicitly rejected.

But by focusing on his pastor and giving these fears a “respectable” cause – a “politically correct” something to point at – it has allowed “respectable folks” to give an excuse to express their deeply buried, and perhaps even unconscious, prejudices. So that in rejecting the man they do not have to take responsibility for or examine their own hearts too closely about what it is about him that truly gives them cause for concern in his becoming the leader of our country.

But “you know,” they will say, in hushed tones, furtively looking over their shoulder to see who is listening, “look at who his pastor is and what he said. Can we really trust someone to be our president who has this kind of guy as his closest spiritual advisor?”

Reading these lines from Leviticus, I urge us all to remind ourselves that in our own synagogue comfort zone, we, too, engage to this very day in some rituals which, while to ourselves they may seem warm and familiar, to an outsider might seem quite strange and even disturbing. That our own Senior Rabbi Emeritus was railed against and even as much as called a traitor when he was out in front of public opinion, criticizing our government for what the rest of the country finally came to believe was an unjust an immoral war.

I ask you: was Jeremiah Wright so wrong when he cautioned his congregation that for the sins we are committing as a country – right now, in our day – we may very well be damned by an avenging God of justice and righteousness? Was his message so divergent from that of our own prophets we hear railing at our ancestors every week in our Haftarah readings? Do we need to be reminded that, although it may be in his faith tradition’s own style, Reverend Wright is actually preaching from that very same source?!

When we go into someone else’s “home” – that is, their house of worship, and experience their forms of observance, these passages about literally being totally isolated from the community, about bathing in slaughtered bird’s blood, cedar wood and spice – and so forth – much less other passages about red heifers and scape goats and sacrificial offerings and such – in our own holy and sacred literature – should remind us to not judge so quickly the religious observances of others – and certainly not to take them out of context.

Lest you think that the parallels I have drawn this morning are a little stretched. Rabbi Plaut informs us that, in the midrash, the rabbis actually made a pun on the name of today’s very portion, metzora, meaning “leper,” likening it to “motzi ra” – a slanderer, someone who literally, according to the Hebrew, “brings forth evil.”

Just last week we marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

On this Shabbat – just one week later, may we be reminded of the dangers of “character assassination.”

Let us remind ourselves not to fall victim to the appeal to our baser instincts by demagogues who would play on our fears for their own cynical, political ends.

May we be reminded to judge others, as Reverend King exhorted us, “not by the color of their skin” – or, forgive me Rabbi, by the ravings of their spiritual leaders – but solely by what it is that they believe and do, and most importantly, by the content of their character.

Kein yehi ratzon.

Amen.

________________________________________________

Glenn Gottlieb, a Los Angeles attorney and professional mediator, is a native of Southern California and has been involved with many community-based organizations, including serving as a member of the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of The Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, member of the Board of Directors of Bet Tzedek Legal Services and member of the Board of the Los Angeles Urban League.

Mr. Gottlieb is a Vice President and a member of the Board of Trustees of Leo Baeck Temple, Los Angeles, California, and also served on the Advisory Board of the School of Communal Service of the Los Angeles Campus of the Hebrew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion. Mr. Gottlieb is proud to be an active “Big Brother” with the Jewish Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Los Angeles. Mr. Gottlieb was the 2007 recipient of the Ameinu organization’s Tzedek ("Justice") Award for his history of service to the Los Angeles Jewish community.

McCain Still Can't Tell The Difference Between Shiite (Iran) & Sunni (Al Qaeda)

An Israeli Pre-Emptive Strike on Iranian Nuclear Sites Would be an Act of Folly, Gidon D. Remba

P.O. Box 96503 #89647
Washington, D.C. 20090-6503

April 13, 2008

Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue

New York, NY 10018

To the Editor:

Zev Chafets’ “Israel Can Stand Up for Itself” (April 13) suffers from three faulty assumptions which vitiate its argument. First, Mr. Chafets claims that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s announcement of the installation of 6,000 new centrifuges makes obvious “the failure of diplomacy.” Since President Bush has in fact not tried direct diplomacy with Iran at all, or offered the kinds of inducements which would give the U.S. the best prospects for insuring that Iranian nuclear enrichment would not lead to the development of nuclear weapons, diplomacy cannot be said to have failed.

Second, Mr. Chafets assumes that Israel is free to make an autonomous decision independent of the U.S. on whether to launch its own preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. It would be “a noble thing,” he remarks, if the U.S. were to back Israel’s "efforts to stop an Iranian bomb" with military force—as if the U.S. would have a choice. In fact, Iran would regard an Israeli attack on its nuclear sites as having tacit, if not overt, American approval, and would hold the U.S. responsible along with Israel. The U.S. cannot therefore permit Israel to make a unilateral decision about whether to entangle it in a second protracted, unwinnable and vastly more difficult Mideast war, even were so large a share of U.S. ground forces not already embroiled in neighboring Iraq.

Third, Mr. Chafets believes that Israel has the capacity “to act on its own to degrade and retard the Iranian nuclear program as it did in Iraq (and, more recently, Syria).” In fact, it is unlikely that either Israel or the U.S. know where all Iranian nuclear sites are located. Many American Iran experts say that such a strike would prompt Iranians to rally around the most hard-line mullahs bent on accelerating the acquisition of nuclear weapons and exacting revenge on Israel. A preemptive Israeli or American assault on Iran will retard, not advance, a change in regime towards more pragmatic Iranian leaders, leaving a nuclear-armed Shiite power under the control of its most immoderate clerical rulers.

Sincerely,

Gidon D. Remba

The writer, who served as Editor and Foreign Press Translator in Israel’s Government Press Office under Menachem Begin and Zev Chafets during the Egyptian-Israeli peace negotiations, is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of the new Jews for Obama e-Newsletter.

LA Times Revives Obama Smear, Ari Berman, The Nation

Does being friends with Palestinians make one anti-Israel? Peter Wallsten of the LA Times apparently thinks so. His latest piece about Barack Obama's past ties to pro-Palestinian activists in Chicago is certainly meant to give the reader that impression. [See my recent Nation article, "Smearing Obama," for background on this topic. One of Wallsten's sources happens to be a key purveyor of the "Obama is a Muslim" lie. Update below.]

The evidence Wallsten presents is scant and hardly alarming: Obama said nice things about Rashid Khalidi at a going away party for the respected Palestinian scholar, who moved from the University of Chicago to the Columbia University; he attended a speech by the late Palestinian expert Edward Said in 1998; he occasionally made statements supportive of Palestinians to Palestinian activists he knew in Chicago. [Also on The Nation's website, my colleague Jon Wiener puts the views of Khalidi and Said in context.]

Yet the implicit tone of Wallsten's article suggests that Obama is not to be trusted on matters relating to Israel. Left aside is the fact that one can be pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel (at least in Chicago). Or the fact that the majority of Israelis support a two-state solution to the conflict, the same position held by Obama. MJ Rosenberg brilliantly parodied the gist of the Times' article in a blog post at Talking Points Memo today: "LA Times Today: Obama Not To Be Trusted, Doesn't Hate Arabs!!"

Says MJ:

I used to work for Sen. Carl Levin, a Jew and a strong supporter of Israel, who is a close friend of the Arab community (in part, because he represents more Arab Americans than any other senator). I've seen Carl at Palestinian dinners (last year I saw him at one with Condi Rice). In fact, Joe Lieberman, not exactly an enemy of the State of Israel, has always gone out of his way to keep an open door to Arab-Americans, Palestinians and others.

In other words, this article is utterly bogus. Yes, Obama has empathy for Palestinians, just as he has empathy for Israelis. The man is naturally empathetic which will help repair some of the damage inflicted to our country's image by the current xenophobic administration.
If Arab-Americans and Palestinians trust Obama and think he plays fair, he will have considerably more leverage with them than either of the other two candidates who are not perceived that way. As Congressmen Bob Wexler and Steve Rothman, both Obama supporters, like to say, an American President who can speak to and be heard by Arabs can do a much better job in helping Israel and the Palestinians achieve peace and security than a President who is considered utterly unsympathetic to their concerns.

The accusation that Obama is "anti-Israel" isn't really about Obama or Israel. It's about racism, Islamophobia, and an attempt by Obama's political opponents to score a few cheap political points.

UPDATE: Debbie Schlussel, an inflammatory right-wing blogger and originator of the "Obama is a Muslim" lie, has identified herself as one of Wallsten's sources.

Here's some background on Schlussel, from my recent article:

"Barack Hussein Obama: Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim," blogger Debbie Schlussel wrote on December 18, 2006. Schlussel had a history of inflammatory rhetoric and baseless accusations. She said journalist Jill Carroll, who was kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents in 2006, "hates America" and "hates Israel"; labeled George Soros a "fake Holocaust survivor"; and speculated that Pakistani terrorists were somehow to blame for last year's shootings at Virginia Tech.

Great to see the LA Times relying on such reputable sources.
Posted by Ari Berman at 04/10/2008 @ 3:37pm

Originally published at
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=308475

How to Talk to a (Jewish) Hawk (Abridged for Publication), Gidon D. Remba, JTA

Abridged for publication in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) and Jewish Chronicle (Pittsburgh)

By Gidon D. Remba
April 16, 2008

A friend who spent the last year living in Israel recently wrote to explain why he won’t vote for Senator Barack Obama for President. He believes that “most American Jews just don’t get what is happening. We are in a fight for our lives, period. Ahmadinejad means to do us in if he can. He is a Hitler, pure and simple. I am supporting McCain,” he confesses, “because I feel he is the one president most likely to militarily go after Iran's nuclear facilities. I do not believe anything short of that or regime change will stop Iran from getting and using a nuclear bomb against our people.”

I am convinced that my friend woefully misunderstands the Middle East—and much else. Because Israel is in a fight for its life and American security remains in a parlous state both at home and abroad, it’s absolutely vital that we get it right, that we grasp what will and won’t help Israelis and Americans best protect ourselves from the threats we face.

“Who is the first American president to condemn the indefensible omission of conscience of not bombing the train tracks to Auschwitz?,” challenges my friend. “None other than cowboy Bush when he recently visited Yad Vashem; the Bush at whom American Jews look down their semitic noses for being so stupid and folksy and corrupt. They dismiss what he said as politicking. Not so. He meant it, for he is morally non-nuanced enough to understand that there is good and evil in the world and that not everything is relative. And this is why I voted for Bush in 2004 and why I support McCain now.”

By my friend’s logic, the leader who knows what is truly evil will crush our enemies and thwart their demonic plans. He would have bombed the train tracks at Auschwitz. He will now fight on in Iraq until we win, staying as long as it takes, as McCain has promised (not for 100 years, but until we achieve our goals, as he has indeed vowed). If push comes to shove, he will blow Iran’s nuclear plants to kingdom come, as McCain has pledged.

There is just one small problem: to many of the best American military minds these martial “solutions” will conjure up a fool’s paradise.

President Bush plays on historic Jewish vulnerabilities by lashing out at the Allied failure to “take out” the tracks to the death camps during the Shoah. Jews who vote with their kishkes instead of their kopfs (their guts instead of their heads) will hail such stalwart men and women as the battle-hardened defenders that Israel and America need to be safe. But those who favored striking out against the greatest evils were dead wrong during the Holocaust; they are even more recklessly wrong now.

Jewish historian William D. Rubinstein devoted an entire chapter to “The Myth of Bombing Auschwitz” in his book The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews From the Nazis. He notes that “Recent military historians have looked at…claims about the possibility of bombing Auschwitz with critical eyes, and concluded that the options put forward were highly impractical and most unlikely to have succeeded.” He concludes: “Because of the inaccuracy of bombing raids in 1944, if a raid had somehow been launched against Auschwitz in 1944 it is probable—even likely—that such a mission would have been seen, then and now, as a complete fiasco, an ill-considered and dubious exercise, carried out for political rather than for military reasons, in which many hundreds of Jews and other captives were killed but which utterly failed to halt the Nazi death machine.”

Most Pentagon generals view an assault on Iranian nuclear facilities—promised by McCain if Iran does not halt its march towards nuclear weapons—as not only ineffective but likely to entangle us in another protracted war that we cannot win and may well lose. Senior American military officials believe that an attack on Iran “could set off Iranian retaliation without halting Tehran's nuclear program for long,” reported the Los Angeles Times. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and much of the Pentagon brass “have concluded that a strike against suspected Iranian nuclear sites could be counterproductive,” according to senior U.S. Defense Department officials. “War with Iran would result in Iranians rallying around the flag...The government would be strengthened instead of toppled. The Iranian nuclear program would most likely accelerate than be destroyed,” warns Iran expert Trita Parsi.

Reporting from the Persian Gulf, David Ignatius intimated in the Washington Post that “the United States doesn't have good military choices now -- and the Iranians know it. That's one reason they are being so provocative; they believe that a U.S. military strike would hurt America more than Iran.” Iran could “lure the United States onto a battlefield where its immense firepower wouldn't do much good. The Iranians could withdraw into the maze of their homeland and keep firing off their missiles -- exacting damage on the West's economy and, most important, its will to fight.” A war with Iran, many top US military officials have concluded, would be a trap. And that is the trap our bomb-happy friends, and their favored presidential candidates, tout as the miracle drug for what ails us.

Senator McCain pays lip service to the need to use “all elements of our national power” in the war on terror, including diplomacy and economic development. But when confronting the chief purveyor of Middle East terrorism he would have the United States face Iran with very few arrows in our quiver.

The Jewish dogma we most need to throw overboard is our blind faith in Bar Kochba-like politicians as our saviors. The less a candidate has sound mooring for his policies the more apt is he to manipulate us by invoking our cherished symbols and comforting slogans. Those who promise that they will keep “Jerusalem as the eternal united capital of Israel,” or pulverize “Ahmadinejad’s nuclear sites” may be telling us what we want to hear, but not what we can sustain in the world in which we must live.

Those Jews who would cast their vote for the most battle-tested politician or bellicose plan would have brought upon America, the Allies and world Jewry a military embarrassment in the struggle against Nazism. What we needed then as now is sober strategy and a cool hand. All signs point to the wisdom of Senator Obama’s carrot-and-stick approach to Iran, Iraq and Syria, and to the folly of the even more ambitious Mideast wars urged on us by Senator McCain. Former Reagan Administration defense official Larry Korb warns that McCain “would employ military force to the exclusion of other options.” America and Israel will be ill served by Bush on steroids for the next four years.

Gidon D. Remba, a veteran Israel activist and commentator, is Editor-in-Chief & Publisher of the new Jews for Obama e-Newsletter. He blogs at http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/ and can be reached at dremba@comcast.net

JTA published an edited version of this piece here--with an opposing viewpoint by smear-monger Ed Lasky.

How to Talk to a Hawk—Or, Abandon These Myths Before You Vote, Gidon D. Remba

To Read the New Abridged Version to Appear Soon in a National Publication Click Here

Unabridged Version

A friend who recently spent the last year living in Israel recently wrote to explain why he won’t vote for Senator Barack Obama for President. He believes with all his heart and soul that “most American Jews just don’t get what is happening. We are in a fight for our lives, period. Ahmadinejad means to do us in if he can. He is a Hitler, pure and simple. I am supporting McCain because I feel he is the one president most likely to militarily go after Iran's nuclear facilities. I do not believe anything short of that or regime change will stop Iran from getting and using a nuclear bomb against our people.”

In fact, I am convinced that it is my friend who grossly, and dangerously, misunderstands the Middle East—and a whole lot else. And because Israel is in a fight for its life and American security remains in a parlous state both at home and abroad, I believe it’s absolutely vital that we get it right, that we grasp what will and won’t help Israelis and Americans best protect ourselves from the threats we face.

What Not to Learn from the Holocaust

“Who is the first American president to condemn the indefensible omission of conscience of not bombing the train tracks?” asks my friend. He answers: “None other than cowboy Bush when he recently visited Yad Vashem, at whom American Jews look down their semitic noses for being so stupid and folksy and corrupt and all that. They dismiss what he said as politicking. Not so, he meant it, for he is morally non-nuanced enough to understand that there is good and evil in the world and that not everything is relative. And this is why I voted for Bush in 2004 and why I support McCain now.”

By my friend’s logic, the leader who knows who and what is truly evil is he (or she) who will use the most force to defeat our enemies and to thwart their demonic plans: the right leader would have bombed the train tracks at Auschwitz. By the same token, the best president will now fight on in Iraq until we win, staying as long as it takes, as McCain has promised (not for 100 years, but until we achieve our goals, as he has indeed vowed). And that strong leader will “take out” Iran’s nuclear facilities with air strikes and commando raids, or whatever kinds of military attacks are needed, as McCain has promised, before it can commit a new holocaust against the Jewish people.

There is just one small problem with my friend’s logic: most of the best American military minds find these bellicose “solutions” to be foolhardy, utterly ineffective and strategically disastrous.

Take the case of bombing the train tracks—or the crematoria—at Auschwitz. President Bush shamelessly panders and manipulates Jewish emotions by condemning the US failure to “take the tracks out” to the death camps during the Shoah. Jews who think and vote with their kishkes instead of with their kopfs (their guts instead of their brains) hail W, and McCain, or even Hillary Clinton, as the kind of tough seasoned pro-Israel patriots that Israel and America need to be safe. In fact, those who favored the most use of force against what from a Jewish viewpoint seems the greatest embodiment of evil were dead wrong during the Holocaust, and demonstrably so; they are even more recklessly wrong now.

Jewish historian William D. Rubinstein devoted an entire chapter to “The Myth of Bombing Auschwitz” in his book The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews From the Nazis. He notes that “Recent military historians have looked at … claims about the possibility of bombing Auschwitz with critical eyes, and concluded that the options put forward were highly impractical and most unlikely to have succeeded.” He concludes: “Because of the inaccuracy of bombing raids in 1944, if a raid had somehow been launched against Auschwitz in 1944 it is probable—even likely—that such a mission would have been seen, then and now, as a complete fiasco, an ill-considered and dubious exercise, carried out for political rather than for military reasons, in which many hundreds of Jews and other captives were killed but which utterly failed to halt the Nazi death machine.”

Shoot or Talk with Iran? Obama vs. McCain

John McCain pays lip service to the need to use “all elements of our national power” in the war on terror, including diplomacy and economic development. But when it comes to the chief purveyor of Middle East terrorism he would have the United States confront Iran with very few arrows in our quiver. Moreover, economic sanctions and threats of force have completely failed to halt Iran’s nuclear enrichment activities, which continue to advance.

The vast majority of generals in the Pentagon view a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities—promised by McCain if Iran does not halt its march towards nuclear weapons—as both highly ineffective and extremely likely to involve us in another protracted war like Iraq that we cannot win and may well lose. Most senior American military officials believe that an attack on Iran “could set off Iranian retaliation without halting Tehran's nuclear program for long,” reported the Los Angeles Times. Many in the Pentagon’s leadership, “including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, have concluded that a strike against suspected Iranian nuclear sites could be counterproductive,” according to senior U.S. Defense Department officials. That of course is diplo-speak for yet another clusterf***. “War with Iran would result in Iranians rallying around the flag...The government would be strengthened instead of toppled. The Iranian nuclear program would most likely accelerate than be destroyed,” warns Iran expert Trita Parsi.

Writing from Abu Dhabi, David Ignatius intimated in the Washington Post recently that “the United States doesn't have good military choices now -- and the Iranians know it. That's one reason they are being so provocative; they believe that a U.S. military strike would hurt America more than Iran.” Iran could “lure the United States onto a battlefield where its immense firepower wouldn't do much good. The Iranians could withdraw into the maze of their homeland and keep firing off their missiles -- exacting damage on the West's economy and, most important, its will to fight.” A war with Iran, many top US military officials have come to recognize, would be a trap. And that is the trap our bellicose Jewish friends, and their favored presidential candidates, tout as the panacea to the security ills that ail us and our closest Mideastern ally Israel.

Even the conservative Chicago Sun-Times has, in a moment of extraordinary clarity, implored Americans thus: “We should take a lesson from our failures in Iraq and try to handle our conflict in Iran with more level-headed diplomacy. The Iraq war already has cost the United States its global credibility. Even Ahmadinejad has played up our tarnished image, denouncing the sanctions as ‘bullying powers.’ If the United States takes on Iran by itself, it will only inspire more terrorists and create more enemies, both of whom will be working toward our demise.”

With these lessons in mind, I urge you take Remba’s Rule Number 1 with you into the voting booth: The candidate who talks toughest, or who has the most military experience, may be the worst for both America's and Israel’s security.

The faith in Bar Kochba-like politicians as our saviors is the mother of all fallacies in politics, and the one we Jews are most in need of throwing overboard. Politicians shamelessly pander to our emotional biases and play on our heartstrings. The wisest words I have heard yet from a Jewish source on the issue of Iran come to us from an editorial in New York’s Jewish Week, cautioning that “the Iran threat is too important and too complex for the chest thumping, sloganeering and jockeying for partisan gain that define the Iran debate on the 2008 presidential campaign trail … Negotiating with terror-supporting regimes clearly raises difficult questions, but it is irresponsible to suggest that negotiations are, by definition, the equivalent of appeasement, just as it is irresponsible to take the military option off the table entirely… But stopping [Iran's] nuclear program will take creative thinking, sober policymaking and a willingness to make tough choices in a universe of imperfect options.”

The less a politician has a cogent rationale for his or her policies the more he or she is apt to manipulate us by cozying up to our cherished symbols and mouthing comforting slogans about “the eternal unity of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,” or bombing "Ahmadinejad's nuclear sites" to save the Jewish state from a future holocaust. If your bubbe didn’t teach you this lesson, she should have, and it behooves us all to learn it now: these are the most dangerous politicians for the Jewish people and for the United States.

Those Jews who would cast their vote for the most battle-tested politician or bellicose policy would have brought upon America, the Allies and world Jewry the embarrassment of grotesque failure against the Nazis when sober strategy was what we needed most. Then as now, we need helmsmanship with a sure compass steering our ship of state. All signs point to the wisdom of Barack Obama’s smart carrot-and-stick diplomacy on Iran and Iraq and to the folly of the new wars urged on us by John McCain. McCain's refusal to deploy the power of tough talk or hard bargaining with Iran or to use the leverage of real incentives bear all the hallmarks of Bush on steroids. So muscle-bound is his plan of attack that it cannot dodge and weave through the Mideast's serpentine alleyways, which demand agility and political ju-jitsu, not throw-weight.

Obama has said “he would ‘engage in aggressive personal diplomacy’ with Iran if elected president, and would offer economic inducements and a possible promise not to seek ‘regime change’ if Iran stopped meddling in Iraq and cooperated on terrorism and nuclear issues.” He has made clear that “forging a new relationship with Iran would be a major element of what he pledged would be a broad effort to stabilize Iraq…‘Changes in behavior' by Iran could possibly be rewarded with membership in the World Trade Organization, other economic benefits and security guarantees.” As Obama has stressed, “we will be in a stronger position to achieve … [tougher] international sanctions if the United States has shown itself to be willing to come to the table” with aggressive diplomacy incorporating both the offer of more potent incentives directly from the United States and the likelihood of more painful sanctions if talks fail or are dragged out in bad faith by Iran.

A New Diplomatic Solution to the Iranian Nuclear Impasse?

A new report by a group of former American diplomats and regional experts who have been meeting behind the scenes with a group of Iranian academics and policy advisers suggests that the Iranian leadership is open to direct US-Iran talks over a novel solution to the nuclear impasse: Western governments would jointly manage, operate and closely supervise all of Iran’s nuclear activities on Iranian soil. Under this proposal, “Iran would be prohibited from producing either highly enriched uranium or reprocessed plutonium,” thereby preventing it from producing the essential ingredients for constructing a nuclear weapon. Under such tight international supervision, even a secret attempt on Iran’s part to manufacture weapons-grade nuclear materials “would carry the risk of discovery by the international management team and the staff at the facility; the high probability of getting caught will likely deter Iran from trying to do so in the first place.” Iran would be permitted to produce “only uranium enriched to low levels that could be used in nuclear power plants.” And it would have to agree to fully implement the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, “which requires member nations to make their nuclear facilities subject to snap inspections, environmental sampling, and more comprehensive reporting requirements,” as Iran has already offered to do.

While this option is not ideal—only a complete cessation of nuclear enrichment by Iran would be—it is the best of the realistic options which may be available to us and the one most likely to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Moreover, it is far better than the worst option, which is the one we are most likely to end up with if we continue down the paths advocated by Bush and McCain, and Hillary Clinton as well: “a purely national [nuclear enrichment] program on Iranian soil, one aimed at producing nuclear weapons” either without international safeguards or with insufficient monitoring. As the U.S. diplomats warn, “Outsourcing US diplomacy to others has not worked and is even less likely to work in the future … The US is the only nation that can take on [the task of direct engagement with Iran on the nuclear issue] and achieve the breakthroughs that will be necessary… The reward may be a more stable and peaceful Middle East.”

The Folly of War with Iran Revisited

Returning to the utter folly of the “bomb Iran” option, consider Exhibit B: Jerusalem Post Deputy Managing Editor Caroline Glick has written—with a straight face, I kid you not—that “even if an attack against Iran's nuclear installations inside of Iran were completely successful, there is a possibility that Iran's nuclear capabilities will not be significantly downgraded. Iran's program may be dispersed in Syria, North Korea, and in Pakistan which transferred nuclear technologies to Iran and North Korea, (as well as Libya and Egypt). In other words, there is now a distinct possibility that Iran is not the only country that will have to be attacked to prevent Iran and its allied rogue states from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

This, of course, is just what the neocons have always had in mind. War without end against all the “evil forces” threatening us and Israel; the ubiquitous devils which only moral absolutists like George W. Bush and John McCain can clearly see. Former Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark reported recently that “on the eve of the war [in Iraq] he was shown a Pentagon document that portrayed Iraq as the first in a series of operations to change regimes in Iran, Syria, Sudan, Lybia, Somalia and Lebanon.” We know how well that plan went in Iraq, and how far it got. Recent revelations indicate that while we were distracted by the monstrous mess in Iraq, the Bush Administration was gearing up to foment a military coup in Gaza last year. The administration co-opted Israel and Egypt into playing along with its scheme to arm Fatah in Gaza in preparation for an armed showdown which would have deposed Hamas from power after having won democratic Palestinian elections (balloting held at Bush’s behest, contrary to the urgings of Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni). But last summer Hamas preempted the impending coup, routing Fatah and completely taking over the Gaza Strip. Israeli analysts fear that the West Bank may well be next. The deterioration in Israel’s security, the strengthening of Hamas and the rise in missile attacks on Sderot, Ashkelon and the kibbutzim in southern Israel were brought to you by none other than the “spare no use of force” trigger-happy gunslingers in the Bush administration.

And how did Hezbollah manage to rearm with even more long-range missiles, now targeting all of Israel, and with greater accuracy, than it had before the Lebanon war of 2006? Despite ongoing Israeli efforts to test the waters with Syria in behind-the-scenes diplomatic contacts over the last two years, the Bush Administration has refused to offer Syria the kind of powerful economic, political and security incentives which could lure it away from its rewarding alliance with Iran and Hezbollah. Only the U.S., leading its allies, has the power to counter the attractions of Iran for Syria, much as it did when moderate Republican and Democratic administrations pried Sadat’s Egypt away from the Soviet Union, helping to lay the foundations for peace with Israel. The failure of Bush to pursue robust diplomacy with Syria and Iran has permitted the military threats to Israel from both Syria, Hezbollah and Iran, to escalate year after year.

As for McCain, who with many of his senior advisors, including Senator Joe Lieberman, have long been among the most vocal champions for regime change in Iraq, Bloomberg News reports that many analysts believe, based on his own stated positions, that he is even more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, North Korea, Russia and China. Just what the doctor ordered. Dr. Kevorkian, that is.

Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan has said that McCain “will make Cheney look like Gandhi.” “He’s the true neocon,” notes Brookings Institution scholar Ivo Daalder: “He does believe, in a way that George W. Bush never really did, in the use of power, military power above all, to change the world in America’s image. If you thought Bush was bad when it comes to the use of military force, wait till you see John McCain. He believes this. His advisors believe this.” “He would employ military force to the exclusion of other options,” adds Larry Korb, a former Reagan Administration defense official. He is among those who are convinced that the Vietnam War could have been won if the US military had been given free rein.

This sounds eerily like the Israeli super-hawks who demand of the government to just "let the IDF win" in Gaza or Lebanon, much to the chagrin of the IDF general staff which knows that a full-scale Gaza invasion would bring Israel yet another pyrrhic victory, mushrooming into an even more destructive and futile—for Israel—conflagration with Hezbollah and possibly Syria. And now John McCain feels that if we follow Obama—or Clinton—we will make the same “mistake” all over again in Iraq and in the broader “transcendent” struggle against Islamic extremism. "There's going to be other wars," promises McCain. "I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender, but there will be other wars." May God save us from the havoc this aging warhorse will wreak.

The Price of the Surge: How US Strategy is Hastening Iraq's Demise (Excerpt), by Steven Simon

Excerpt from Foreign Affairs, May-June 2008

Editor's Introduction:

This new analysis by Mideast expert Steven Simon outlines how the Bush-McCain surge in Iraq is in fact destabilizing the country, endangering the security of the entire region where Israel lives.

At the same time, far from representing US “surrender” or “letting Al Qaida win,” as McCain and the Republicans suggest, establishing an international diplomatic mechanism for overseeing an effective Iraqi reconciliation process requires that the US announce a clear commitment to conduct a carefully coordinated drawdown of the bulk of US forces from Iraq over the next two to three years. Obama’s approach is more likely to bring about political reconciliation among the major Iraqi factions, making Iraq and Israel’s neighborhood more stable.

Gidon D. Remba

The Price of the Surge: How U.S. Strategy Is Hastening Iraq’s Demise, by Steven Simon (Excerpt)

In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new approach to the war in Iraq. At the time, sectarian and insurgent violence appeared to be spiraling out of control, and Democrats in Washington -- newly in control of both houses of Congress -- were demanding that the administration start winding down the war. Bush knew he needed to change course, but he refused to, as he put it, "give up the goal of winning." So rather than acquiesce to calls for withdrawal, he decided to ramp up U.S. efforts. With a "surge" in troops, a new emphasis on counterinsurgency strategy, and new commanders overseeing that strategy, Bush declared, the deteriorating situation could be turned around.

More than a year on, a growing conventional wisdom holds that the surge has paid off handsomely. U.S. casualties are down significantly from their peak in mid-2007, the level of violence in Iraq is lower than at any point since 2005, and Baghdad seems the safest it has been since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime five years ago. Some backers of the surge even argue that the Iraqi civil war is over and that victory on Washington's terms is in sight -- so long as the United States has the will to see its current efforts through to their conclusion.

Unfortunately, such claims misconstrue the causes of the recent fall in violence and, more important, ignore a fatal flaw in the strategy. The surge has changed the situation not by itself but only in conjunction with several other developments: the grim successes of ethnic cleansing, the tactical quiescence of the Shiite militias, and a series of deals between U.S. forces and Sunni tribes that constitute a new bottom-up approach to pacifying Iraq. The problem is that this strategy to reduce violence is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state.

If anything, it has made such an outcome less likely, by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni Arab tribes and pitting them against the central government and against one another. In other words, the recent short-term gains have come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.

Despite the current lull in violence, Washington needs to shift from a unilateral bottom-up surge strategy to a policy that promotes, rather than undermines, Iraq's cohesion. That means establishing an effective multilateral process to spur top-down political reconciliation among the major Iraqi factions. And that, in turn, means stating firmly and clearly that most U.S. forces will be withdrawn from Iraq within two or three years. Otherwise, a strategy adopted for near-term advantage by a frustrated administration will only increase the likelihood of long-term debacle...

RESPONSIBLE RETREAT

At this stage, the United States has no good option in Iraq. But the drawbacks and dangers of the current bottom-up approach demand a change of course. The only alternative is a return to a top-down strategy. To be more effective this time around, Washington must return to the kind of diplomacy that the Bush administration has largely neglected. Even with 160,000 troops in Iraq, Washington lacks the leverage on its own to push the Maliki government to take meaningful steps to accommodate Sunni concerns and thereby empower Sunni moderates. (The legislative package and the de-Baathification reform law passed earlier this year were seriously flawed and did more to spur the Sunnis' anxieties than redress their grievances.) What the United States could not do unilaterally, it must try to do with others, including neighboring countries, European allies, and the United Nations (UN).

In order to attain that kind of cooperation, Washington must make a public commitment to a phased withdrawal. Cooperation from surrounding countries and European partners is unlikely to be forthcoming without a corresponding U.S. readiness to cede a degree of the dubious control it now has over events in Iraq. Currently, the dominant U.S. presence in Iraq allows the rest of the world to avoid responsibility for stability in and around Iraq even as everyone realizes the stakes involved. A plan to draw down U.S. forces would therefore contribute to the success of a larger diplomatic strategy, prompting Middle Eastern states, European governments, and the UN to be more constructive and proactive in working to salvage stability in the Persian Gulf.

The point, therefore, is not to focus on the precise speed and choreography of a troop withdrawal. Rather, what is necessary is to make clear that the United States intends to withdraw. Should the Bush administration suspend the currently programmed withdrawals of the surge force, it would send precisely the opposite message. President Bush, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and General Petraeus have all signaled their interest in halting any further drawdowns after the last surge brigade has come home this summer. Petraeus, who has already begun to lay out his case in interviews, argues that "the key is to hang on to what you've got." The president has suggested that he is unwilling to withdraw additional troops until after the Iraqi provincial elections -- which, although originally scheduled for October, could very well be delayed. It is therefore possible that the next U.S. president will have to decide what to do with approximately 140,000 troops, a considerably larger number than most observers assumed would still be on the ground in Iraq at the end of 2008. (Some consideration will also have to be given to the problem of removing 56,000 contractors and facilitating the departure of a segment of the 30,000-50,000 Iraqi and foreign workers supporting the U.S. presence.)

Given that the laws of physics are as relevant to troop redeployments as are the laws of strategy and politics, the higher baseline bequeathed by Bush would mean a longer timeline for withdrawal. As of last summer, there were 1,900 tanks and other armored vehicles, 43,000 trucks, and 700 aircraft in Iraq. Equipment is scattered over 70 bases throughout the country, along with 38 major supply depots, 18 fuel-storage centers, and 10 ammunition dumps. According to the conservative rule of thumb used by military logisticians, the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps could move a brigade per month from the Iraqi theater. Moving the 15 brigades likely to be in Iraq in January 2009 would require up to 10,000 truck trips through potentially hostile zones within Iraq.

Although fixating on an exact timetable for withdrawal might be unhelpful at this juncture, a new administration should begin to draw down deliberately and in phases as soon as its internal deliberations are complete and the process has been coordinated with Baghdad. These steps could take months, as the new team conducts its policy-review process; military planners plot safe and efficient withdrawal routes; congressional consultations are carried out; conclusions are reached about where the forces being drawn down should be redeployed; planners determine the size, roles, and missions of the residual force; and the numerous dependencies created by the occupation and the surge are gradually shed. Once under way, however, a drawdown of most of the troops now in Iraq could be completed within two years. The redeployment might proceed more quickly if U.S. public support for the war collapsed, the Iraqi government demanded a swifter withdrawal, or the political situation in Iraq settled down; alternatively, the process might take more time if U.S. forces were under attack, an atrocity claiming the lives of many Americans occurred, or a responsible, reconciliation-minded Iraqi government and a concerned international community sought a slower drawdown.

RECONCILIATION FROM ABOVE

Announcing a withdrawal will entail certain risks. Aware that U.S. forces will finally be departing, Iraqi factions might begin to prepare for a new round of fighting. The Sunnis, aware of their vulnerabilities to attack by militant Shiite forces without the United States to protect them, might resuscitate their alliance with al Qaeda. The government in Baghdad might be concerned about its own exposure to attack in the absence of a U.S. shield and proceed to forge tighter links with Tehran or encourage greater activism by the Mahdi Army. It is all the more vital, therefore, that the drawdown take place as part of a comprehensive diplomatic strategy designed to limit these risks. The interval between a decision to withdraw and the removal of the bulk of U.S. forces should provide the space in which the UN can convene a multilateral organization to foster a reconciliation process in Iraq.

There is much that can be done to revitalize a top-down approach to reconciliation if it is under UN auspices and led by a credible special envoy. First, the international community should be energized to help Iraq move forward on provincial elections, which would test the popularity of the new Sunni leaders who have emerged during the surge and lash them up to Baghdad. This would have the added benefit of isolating the radical federalists from the majority of Shiites, who would prefer to live in a united Iraq. A UN envoy would have a better chance of brokering a deal on the distribution of provincial and federal powers, the issue that led to the veto of the provincial election law, than would Washington. In a multilateral setting that is not conspicuously stage-managed by the United States, regional states, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, could play a pivotal role in this process. Although Tehran's cooperation is inevitably hostage to its broader relations with Washington, UN sponsorship of this effort might provide the leaders of Iran with the cover they need to act in their own interest. The Saudis, for their part, would like to see the UN involved and are prepared to use their influence and money to impel the parties in Iraq toward reconciliation.

Second, an institutionalized multilateral group of concerned states should mobilize the broader international community to assist with the care, feeding, and permanent housing of the millions of refugees and internally displaced Iraqis who have not been able to get to the United States or Europe. This is essential, since refugee camps and squatter settlements are incubators of radicalism and radiate violence. The longer these populations remain unmoored and cut off from education, employment, and access to adequate social services and health care, the harder it will be to resettle them permanently, whether in Iraq or elsewhere.

Third, before a new and more intense phase of the civil war begins, there should be a multilateral process put in place to prod Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states to finance investment projects that provide real employment in Iraq. Furthermore, Iraq's neighbors, including Iran, should be pressing the Iraqi government to bring far more Sunni Awakening volunteers into the regular Iraqi army and, crucially, into the provincial police forces funded by the central government. The latter step would reinforce the positive effects of the provincial elections and the emergence of politically legitimate local leaders. The current commitment to enlist 20 percent of the Awakening's members is far too small to have an impact.

Finally, the tribes feeding off the surge must be weaned from U.S. assistance and linked firmly to Baghdad as their source of support. Intertwining the tribes with Baghdad in this way, as the Iraq specialist Charles Tripp has noted, would yield something very much like the imperial protectorates in the Middle East of the first half of the twentieth century. The "club of patrons" in the capital would dole out goods to tribes through favored conduits. At this juncture, the U.S. military is performing the role of the patrons -- creating an unhealthy dependency and driving a dangerous wedge between the tribes and the state. Through coordinated action by the UN sponsors of the multilateral process, the government in Baghdad, and U.S. commanders on the ground, payment responsibilities will have to be transferred from the U.S. military to Iraqi government representatives.

There is no guarantee that the old way of giving tribes a taste of the lash followed by a dollop of state largess -- the model that successfully integrated tribes in Jordan and Saudi Arabia in the twentieth century -- can be successfully applied to a divided Iraq today. Iraq is heterogeneous, unlike Jordan or Saudi Arabia, where the state and the tribes shared a religious heritage.

Furthermore, overestimating Iranian or Saudi influence on Iraqi politics and the willingness of the UN Security Council to plunge into the existing morass is all too easy. In any event, it will be a slow and hazardous undertaking. Many things have to happen more or less simultaneously in a carefully coordinated chain of actions. Washington has to announce that it will begin withdrawing the bulk of its forces. The UN secretary-general, with the backing of the Security Council, must select a special envoy. A contact group of key states must be formed under UN sponsorship. Priorities and milestones will need to be set for the distribution of resources within Iraq, the recruitment of Sunnis to the army, provincial elections, foreign investment, dealing with refugees, and development assistance. Crucially, the phasing of the troop drawdown will have to mesh with this diplomatic process but not hinge on its ultimate success. This course is risky and possibly futile. Yet it is still a better bet than a fashionable, short-term fix divorced from any larger political vision for Iraq and the Middle East.

To read the full article click here.

Steven Simon is Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern
Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1994 to 1999, he served
on the National Security Council in positions including Senior Director
for Transnational Threats.

The Strange Case of Robert Malley, by Gershom Gorenberg

Editor's Introduction:

Not long after President Clinton's Special Assistant for Arab-Israeli Affairs Robert Malley and others began to unearth the fuller picture of the July 2000 Camp David Clinton-Arafat-Barak summit, showing that the one-sided story we had been fed by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton on the reasons for its failure was simplistic and self-serving, I began to add to the mix evidence of my own in favor of Malley. The more research on the subject I did, the more stunned I was to discover how strong a case there was in favor of something like Malley's more nuanced view, and how widely well-respected journalists, writers and political commentators on Israel were following the Barak-Clinton line without question.

I was the first to translate from the Hebrew into English an excerpt from Barak's own chief negotiator Gilad Sher's account of the summit which gave the lie to Barak and Clinton's story, which still remains the commonly accepted orthodoxy in the American Jewish community, and posted it to the Chicago Peace Now website, under the title Barak’s Chief Negotiator Gilad Sher Explodes The Myth Of Camp David: The Palestinians Made A Counter-Offer, with this introduction:

"We continue to hear the familiar canard that the Palestinians made no counter-offer at Camp David in response to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's unprecedented concessions. This myth arose from the self-serving story put out by Barak and President Clinton in an attempt to place the entire blame for the summit's failure on Arafat. It was accepted uncritically by much of the American and Israeli media at the time. Since then, fuller, more accurate accounts of the negotiations have recently emerged. These more nuanced accounts of the ill-fated Camp David summit and the failure of the Oslo peace process suggest that the story of the nay-saying Arafat is part fact and part fiction.

"According to Israel's own chief negotiator Gilad Sher, at Camp David the Palestinians presented a map of the West Bank as they envisioned it in a peace accord, as reported in his Just Beyond Reach: The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations 1999-2001, published in Hebrew in Israel in 2002. Contrary to popular belief and American-Israeli spin, the Palestinians did in fact make a counter-offer at Camp David. It was Barak who rejected the Palestinian proposal, only to come much closer to Palestinian positions six months later in the final belated round of peace talks at Taba.

"Sher reports that on July 21, 2000 the Palestinians presented a map at Camp David consenting to Israel’s annexation of settlements in 2.5% of the West Bank and a more equitable division of Jerusalem, in exchange for an equal land swap from within Israel." To read the rest, click here.

Now, five years hence, right-wing opponents of Barack Obama have turned the bogus Barak-Clinton story into a litmus test for being pro-Israel, charging that Malley, who rejected the one-sided narrative, was anti-Israel. Gershom Gorenberg has the goods.

--Gidon D. Remba

The recent hounding of Barack Obama for the supposed anti-Israel stance of his informal adviser Robert Malley is just the most recent of the outsized attacks that have marked the Democratic primary.

Gershom Gorenberg March 27, 2008 The American Prospect

Of all the recent efforts to smear Barack Obama, none strikes me as stranger than the claims that one of his informal advisers on foreign affairs, Robert Malley, is anti-Israel. This, in turn, is supposed to prove that as president, Obama is liable to institute dangerous changes in U.S. policy toward Israel.

As a campaign trope, the calumny may have begun with Ed Lasky, news editor of the right-wing Web site The American Thinker, who posted a fervid attack on Malley in January. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America has taken time off from its hawkish media-bashing to post a blast at Malley on its Web site. Journalists regularly speculate on whether the Malley connection will hurt Obama among Jewish voters, though there's no evidence of that. Meanwhile, Malley's diplomatic colleagues -- including Sandy Berger, Dennis Ross, and Martin Indyk -- have issued an open letter defending him.

There's more at work here than the usual, nearly boring, attempts to slime a liberal candidate as anti-Israel for the "sin" of supporting what Israel needs most -- determined diplomatic efforts to achieve peace. Lurking in the background is another of the battles over how Israel-Palestinian history is told. In that fight, the original furious critic of Barack Obama's adviser is former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. There's also a lesson about Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy: Besides settling the practical questions, it requires resolving the conflicting narratives about the past. To approach this task, the next president will need not just hard work but a gift with rhetoric, with words.

The Malley story actually goes back to 2001, when the former Clinton foreign-policy staffer began writing about what went wrong at the Camp David summit the summer before. First in The New York Times, then in a joint article with Hussein Agha in The New York Review of Books, Malley described mistakes made by Israel and the United States, not just by the Palestinians, that led to the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

As special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs, Malley was part of the American negotiating team at Camp David. Today he is the Middle East director for the International Crisis Group and one of many informal advisers to the Obama campaign. Though it should not be necessary to mention this, he is Jewish. Agha, his frequent co-author, is an expert on Palestinian affairs, today at Oxford.

As Malley wrote in the Times, by 2001 the accepted story of the long summit was that "Camp David is said to have been a test that Mr. Barak passed and Mr. Arafat failed." While rejecting that simplistic account, he and Agha did not spare criticism of the Palestinian side. "The Palestinians' principal failing is that they were unable either to say yes to the American ideas or to present a cogent and specific counterproposal of their own," they wrote in their detailed New York Review article. Even more telling is their assertion that for the Palestinians "Oslo ... was not about negotiating peace terms but terms of surrender." This was hardly an attitude likely to lead to creative diplomacy.

But Malley and Agha also described the mistakes of Clinton and, particularly, of Barak. As prime minister, Barak first tried to negotiate with Syria, treating the Palestinians as second priority. More concerned with not upsetting Israeli settlers than with addressing Palestinian concerns, he allowed rapid settlement construction to continue. He prevented any progress in preliminary negotiations, insisting that a peace deal would have to be put together at the conclusive summit. To the Palestinians, these moves radiated arrogance and were an attempt to force them into a corner. Once at Camp David, Barak did go beyond what Israel had offered earlier yet kept his position ambiguous. The Palestinians did make concessions, but neither side went far enough to bridge the chasm between their positions. As for Clinton, his errors began with pushing Arafat into an ill-prepared summit.

No one answered Malley with more outrage than Barak. Barak, once intent on making peace, was trying to salvage his own reputation after the collapse of the process and of his premiership. To do that, he was willing to reinforce a narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has deep resonance for many Israelis and Diaspora Jews -- but that warps history, harms peace efforts, and ultimately hurts Israel itself.

Barak delivered his response to Malley and Agha in The New York Review of Books nearly a year later, in an interview with Benny Morris. This in itself was deeply ironic: Among Israeli historians, Morris has been the most insistent that interviews are to be mistrusted, that history can only be constructed through documents. In Morris' description, "Barak continuously shifts between charging Arafat with 'lacking the character or will' to make a historic compromise ... and accusing him of secretly planning Israel's demise." Arafat's plan, he said, was to establish a state only as a step toward gaining all of Palestine. As Morris hints, this is indeed a contradiction, because if Arafat had really regarded any deal as temporary, he could have settled for less.

Barak also asserted an essentialist cultural divide that made agreement impossible: The Palestinians "are products of a culture in which to tell a lie ... creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture," he told Morris. To explain why he had not succeeded, he argued that success was impossible -- a description that offered much comfort to hawks who had once opposed him.

It will be many years before documents are available to reconstruct what happened at Camp David. In the meantime, Malley and Agha's version rings true for several reasons. Diplomacy is complex, rife with misunderstandings. New York Times correspondent Deborah Sontag, in an extensively researched article, reached a similar picture (also enraging Barak).

My own journalistic experience with Barak suggests that he approached diplomacy belligerently. I interviewed him for The New Republic in 1997, just after he was chosen as leader of the Labor party. When I put my tape recorder down on his desk at the start of the conversation, a Barak aide demonstratively put down another recorder, as if to tell me: "We're keeping track of you." I've never met that gesture of suspicion from any other politician. In the interview, he compared peace negotiations to Greco-Roman wrestling -- "a form of struggle with agreed rules." It makes more sense to accept Barak's a priori description of his negotiating philosophy than his ex post facto explanations. Going to Camp David, Barak was brave in seeking an agreement but was also tragically unsuited by temperament to achieve what he wanted.

What's interesting is how tenaciously Barak's version has been accepted by many supporters of Israel. The reason, I'd suggest, can be found in a superb recent book by Bryn Mawr political scientist Marc Howard Ross, Cultural Contestation in Ethnic Conflicts. (Disclosure: Ross and I have cooperated professionally in the past, and I'm in his acknowledgments.) Ross doesn't deal specifically with Camp David. But he describes the historical narratives that ethnic groups build to explain their past, their present, and their relation to their opponents. The narratives are "compelling, coherent" and link "specific events to that group's general understandings." They are also selective and inaccurate. Disagreement with a group's memory is often perceived as an attack on its identity, if not its existence.

The most common versions of the Israeli and Palestinian narrative share this: Each side perceives the other as wanting to push it out of the land through both aggression and artifice. Those stories helped foil the talks at Camp David. They also shape the post mortems. The story told by Barak, erstwhile peacemaker, reinforces the old story of conflict. Malley's account -- a careful, scholarly telling by a diplomat committed to Israel's future -- is met with ferocious emotion by those who misperceive it as an assault on Israel's very existence. The reaction becomes another obstacle to understanding of the past and to future compromise.

There's two implications here: Precisely because he is committed to Israel's well-being, Barack Obama will do well to listen to Robert Malley's analysis of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. But if he has the opportunity, beginning next January, to renew diplomatic efforts, he will need to do more than reconcile conflicting interests. He will have to look for ways to reconcile the conflicting stories. The right choice of words will be critical. It's said that Obama has some skill in that realm.

Gershom Gorenberg is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. He blogs at South Jerusalem.

Open Letter to the Pennsylvania Jewish Community, March 31, 2008

This powerful open letter to the Pennsylvania Jewish community, signed by dozens of Pennsylvania Jews, including rabbis, legislators and other prominent individuals, deserves to be read by all American Jews.

Doni Remba

Dear Friend:

We are writing as American Jews from all across Pennsylvania to ask that you join us in supporting Senator Barack Obama for President of the United States.

Much has been said and many questions have been raised within the Jewish community in recent weeks about Senator Obama's sensitivity to our community and his record on Israel. Unfortunately, much of the discourse has been based more on politics and positioning and less on facts and fair-minded analysis. We are writing to set the record straight and tell you why we intend to vote for Barack Obama.

Each of us - us members of the Jewish community - takes great pride in our commitment to Judaism. For us, the strategy of assigning guilt by association - as has been to done to Senator Obama - runs counter to our teachings and dishonors Jewish law and ethical traditions. Jewish law neither condemns thoughts nor does it denounce the musing of other's hearts. By contrast, under Jewish law, we - all of us - are judged by our actions and our actions alone.

Senator Obama has earned our respect and gratitude because of his support for traditional Jewish values and his commitment to a peaceful and prosperous Israel. His support for Tikkun Olam - "repairing the world" - and social justice is evident through his accomplishments in the Illinois Senate and the U.S. Senate. Without exception, Senator Obama has voted 100% consistently with the position of AIPAC on foreign aid and all other legislation and resolutions affecting Israel. These are the kind of actions for which we are grateful as a community. And, these are facts. For a more in depth look at the Senator's strong record on issues that matter to our community, please click here.

Earlier this month, responding to withering criticism of the pastor of his church, Senator Obama delivered a courageous and powerful speech that demonstrated his unique ability to talk frankly about the continuing racial tension in our country. His speech itself will not lead to racial reconciliation or a complete understanding of our different religious and cultural traditions, but it has opened a new door for Americans of all backgrounds to begin speaking openly with one another. It is a speech that will serve as a teaching tool for all our citizens and will surely serve the interests of the Jewish community. In trying to place the speech in historical context, The New York Times editorialized that the "Inaugural addresses by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt come to mind, as does John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech on religion..."

While we are profoundly disturbed by the unpatriotic, bigoted and anti-Semitic comments of the retired pastor of Senator Obama's church, we are moved that Barack stood up at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia earlier this month, and "condemned in unequivocal terms the statements of Reverend Wright" and expressed his own views on issues near and dear to the heart and soul of the Jewish community.

Specifically, in repudiating the remarks of his former pastor, Senator Obama said Reverend Wright "expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country...a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a great rabbinic scholar of the 20th century, was known equally for his theological scholarship and as well as for having marched alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement.

Heschel once recalled that when marching in Selma, he was confronted by a host of people who were filled with hate and ignorance. They jeered at the Rabbi who afterwards declared to his fellow Jews: "When I marched in Selma, my feet were praying." Later, Heschel would recount that while he had always found comfort in his Siddur, his prayer book, it was in Selma where he learned to pray with his feet as well.

We have each chosen to pray with our feet and stand with Barack Obama because he is sensitive to the issues of the Jewish community and a stalwart supporter of Israel.

We respectfully ask that you stand with Senator Barack Obama and vote for him on April 22.


The Honorable Josh Shapiro, Deputy Speaker, Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Abington, PA

The Honorable Daylin Leach, Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Ardmore, PA

Rabbi Robyn Frisch, Rydal, PA

Rabbi Seth Frisch, Rydal, PA

Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, Philadelphia, PA

Rabbi Jonathan H. Gerard, Easton, PA

Rabbi David A. Teutsch, Philadelphia, PA

Rabbi Joshua Waxman, Fort Washington, PA

Robert S. Adelson
Merion, PA

David Ainsman
Pittsburgh, PA

Meryl Ainsman
Pittsburgh, PA

Mark Alderman
Bryn Mawr, PA

Marian Allen
Pittsburgh, PA

Tom Allen
Pittsburgh, PA

Irl Barg
Chester County, PA

Henri J. Barkey
International Relations Dept., Lehigh University
Allentown, PA

Dr. Steve Barrer
Abington, PA

Daniel Berger, Esq.
Philadelphia, PA

Todd W. Bernstein
Philadelphia, PA

James D. Bloom
Muhlenberg College
Allentown, PA

Peter Buttenwieser
Philadelphia, PA

Daniel Clearfield
Harrisburg, PA

Carl Cohen
Pittsburgh, PA

Dan Cohen,
Pittsburgh, PA

Hillary Cohen
Pittsburgh, PA

Marcia Cooper
Pittsburgh, PA

Mickie Diamond
Pittsburgh, PA

David Ehrenwerth
Pittsburgh, PA

Judy Ehrenwerth
Pittsburgh, PA

Justin Ehrenwerth
Pittsburgh, PA

Bradley T. Forman
Harrisburg, PA

Sue Friedberg
Pittsburgh, PA

Aaron J. Friewald, Esq.
Wynnewood, PA

Jeffrey Frutkin
Spring House, PA

Serena Fujita
Bucknell University
Lewisburg PA

Bernard Gerber
Berks County, PA

Susan Golomb
Pittsburgh, PA

Stephen M. Goodman
Philadelphia, PA

Mahnaz Harrison
Pittsburgh, PA

Ross Harrison
Pittsburgh, PA

Rick Horowitz
Wynnewood, PA

Ruth Horowitz
Wynnewood, PA

Eve Klothen, Esq.
Swarthmore, PA

Joseph Kohn, Esq.
Devon, PA

Dean Kross, M.D.
Pittsburgh, PA

David Landau
Wallingford, PA

Clifford Levine, Esq.
Pittsburgh, PA

Rosanne M. Levine
Pittsburgh, PA

Daniel E. Loeb
Publisher, Philadelphia Jewish Voice
Philadelphia, PA

Cathy Lewis Long
Pittsburgh, PA

Andrea M. Lowenstein
Pittsburgh, PA

Michael E. Lowenstein
Pittsburgh, PA

Jules Mermelstein
Township Commissioner
Upper Dublin, PA

Morey Myers, Esq.
Scranton PA

Sondra Myers
Scranton, PA

Jacob Naveh
Pittsburgh, PA

Todd Reidbord
Pittsburgh, PA

Stephan Rosenfeld
Jenkintown, PA

Jeff Shell
Philadelphia, PA

Laura Shell
Penn Valley, PA

Stephanie Shell
Ardmore, PA

Carl Shuman
Harrisburg, PA

Alan Siger
Pittsburgh, PA

Patricia Siger
Pittsburgh, PA

Prof. Lawrence Silberstein
Director, Berman Center for Jewish Studies, Lehigh University
Bethlehem, PA

Larry Silverman
Pittsburgh, PA

Roger Simon
Lehigh University
Bethlehem, PA

Jill Stein
Villanova, PA

Lem Tarshis
Blue Bell, PA

Jill Zipin
Philadelphia, PA

McPeak, Obama and the "Israel Lobby": Why the Right is Wrong, Gidon D. Remba

A new tempest in a teapot has broken out over remarks from 2003 unearthed by a conservative magazine about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by Gen. Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak, Senator Barack Obama’s campaign co-chair. The Republican Jewish Coalition claims that McPeak “blames American Jews rather than Palestinians” for the failure of the peace process.

The Obama campaign issued the following statement on McPeak: "Senator Obama's longstanding commitment to Israel is clear to anyone who has reviewed his voting record, read his speeches or looked at his policy papers. As he has said, his support for our democratic ally Israel is based on America's national interests and our shared values. Neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama agrees with every position their advisors take, and in this case Senator Obama disagrees with General McPeak's comments."

The RJC says this is not enough and that Sen. Obama should remove Gen. McPeak. The RJC calls McPeak’s comments from the 2003 interview “offensive” and in its second press release on the subject in 24 hours says that “more telling are the comments General McPeak made to The Oregonian on Wednesday, March 26 [2008] when he said he 'stood by his position that U.S. policy in the Mideast is influenced by pro-Israeli voters'"…The issue is not whether American Jews have any influence, the issue is who is to blame for the problems in the Middle East. General McPeak blamed American Jews in 2003 and he blames them still today. It is painfully clear he does not understand the offensive nature of these comments.”

McPeak’s sin is that he does not subscribe to the dogma that Israel is always the righteous victim and the Palestinians are nothing if not evil terrorists; that all right and good inures to Israel and all wrong falls on the Palestinians. The Republican Jewish Coalition, like the Israeli and American Jewish right, will countenance only the most simplistic Manichean view of the conflict: Israel is the innocent angel and the Palestinians genocidal demons. Israel can do no wrong, nor can any Israeli policy be objectionable or possibly dim the prospects for peace.

McPeak pointed to the role that Israel’s West Bank settlements play in obstructing a two-state solution, and the support Israel’s settlement project receives in some American Jewish quarters. These forces help to reinforce a laissez faire American approach to Israeli construction beyond the Green Line, even as US officials regularly bloviate about the “unhelpfulness” of Israel's long-running West Bank extravaganza. Gen. McPeak rightly challenged the central taboo of the Jewish right’s worldview. (Even some on the Israeli Labor party’s right-wing, including Defense Minister Ehud Barak, have bought into to this, in Barak's case, self-serving, black-and-white portrait.)

But once we acknowledge that US policy in the Mideast is influenced by pro-Israeli voters in the American Jewish community, as even the RJC admits, it’s hard to see why it should be offensive to grant that the way in which that influence is exercised does not always serve Israel’s or America’s interests. It would come as a great surprise to AIPAC, widely considered to be among the most successful and influential lobbies in Washington, that it, and the American Jews it represents, have no influence on US policy vis-à-vis Israel. But as far as the RJC is concerned anything an American Jewish organization lobbies for must ipso facto be as good for Israel and America as hummus and apple pie.

The RJC irresponsibly conflates McPeak’s acknowledgement of that political reality, and his criticism of the misguided policies it sometimes abets, with the recklessly flawed Carter-Walt-Mearsheimer view. (I’ve debunked both Carter and Mearsheimer/Walt in previous publications, while recognizing the grain of truth in their views). But this trio ill-served their own cause by giving a bad name to a well-founded thesis held by many staunchly pro-Israel Jews: that AIPAC and fundamentalist Christian Zionists often exercise their influence and that of the citizens they represent in ways that are harmful to Israel’s security, and may even clash with the Israeli government’s policies. To affirm this one needn’t swallow the wholesale warped worldview of Carter, Mearsheimer and Walt: that Jews have excessive influence on US policy, or that the "Israel lobby" or Jewish neocons betrayed the United States by goading American leaders to invade Iraq for Israel’s sake. But such is the RJC’s standard MO: tar all moderate and liberal pro-Israel Jews by collapsing their views into the most egregious and wrong-headed theories of the far left, and then attack the moderates for buying into the whole noxious mix.

In reality, American Jews do not have enough influence on US policy: the moderate majority is, in fact, not well represented by the mainstream pro-Israel lobbying organizations. It is therefore welcome news that, according to news reports, a moderate pro-Israel lobby is, at long last, now aborning.

Gen. McPeak told the Oregonian on March 26 2008 that “he worked closely with the Israeli military as an Air Force officer and considers himself a strong ally of Israel. But, he added, "the way to get to peace is to find some way out of the box canyon that Israel has built for itself with the West Bank settlements. . . . And it is just a fact that the [pro] Israeli vote -- or the Jewish vote -- is something that all politicians have to consider."

The American Jewish Committee’s Annual Survey of Jewish Opinion for 2007 (November 6-25, 2007) found that while 46% of American Jews favored the establishment of a Palestinian state “in the current situation,” 43% oppose. Let’s set aside, for the purposes of this discussion, how the wording of this question influenced the respondents’ replies, and take the result at face value. Other polls have shown broader American Jewish support for a two-state solution and a robust American role in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

This poll suggests that there is a significant minority of American Jews which opposes the creation of a Palestinian state. Given that American Jews are concentrated in major states like New York and Florida, and have among the highest percentages of voter turnout of any religious or ethnic group in the U.S., it is unsurprising that an administration which seeks to invest political capital into brokering a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement will need to be concerned about the significant minority of Jewish voters—particularly in those two states—who oppose the creation of a Palestinian state, one of the primary outcomes of such negotiations.

Significant American Jewish opposition to US engagement in brokering peace negotiations is indeed a factor in the failure of the Bush Administration, and previous administrations, to become more actively involved in peace efforts, even now as it pursues the “Annapolis peace process.” But still, McPeak is wrong: the neoconservative ideology of the Bush Administration has been the overriding reason why for the last seven years it has not assumed an active role in backing or brokering Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. Under that doctrine—held by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush—the US must first vanquish radical states like Iraq, Syria and Iran, sapping the Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists they underwrite; peace negotiations must be deferred until the radicals have been neutered by force of arms.

As it faces its final year in search of a legacy, left with the dismal results of its polices from Iraq to Iran, Lebanon and Gaza, the Bush administration--mugged by reality--has been forced to do an about face and, after seven years of malign neglect, had little choice but to get behind a new attempt at Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. This it has done despite the finding of the recent AJC poll that a significant minority of American Jews opposes the intended outcome of those negotiations: a two-state peace deal eventuating in a Palestinian state. The grand failure of its Middle East strategy after eight years is an awful legacy to bequeath the Republican party, this country, and America’s allies from Israel to pro-Western Arab states. Seizing even the appearance of triumph from the jaws of chaos and defeat trumps the wishes of a divided American Jewish public. The opinion of the wider American public as it enters a new presidential election, and the judgement of history, is a far greater burden to bear.

Obama National Campaign Co-Chairman Gen. Merrill McPeak Disputes Anti-Israel Charges from Republican Jewish Coalition, Shalom TV

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 28, 2008

SHALOM TV EXCLUSIVE: OBAMA NATIONAL CAMPAIGN CO-CHAIRMAN GENERAL MERRILL McPEAK DISPUTES ANTI-ISRAEL CHARGES FROM REPUBLICAN JEWISH COALITION

March 28, 2008 (Fort Lee, NJ) -- General Merrill "Tony" McPeak, Senator Barack Obama's military advisor and national campaign co-chairman, responds to charges from the Republican Jewish Coalition of "alarming anti-Israel views" that warrant his removal by telling Shalom TV that he has "no criticism of Israel." Wednesday's RJC attack cites a 1976 Foreign Affairs article written by General McPeak that criticized Israel for not returning to the 1967 borders, and a 2003 interview in the Oregonian in which he blamed the lack of Middle East peace progress on the undue political influence of American Jews.

"This all stems from an article I wrote in the mid-70s, [and] I urge you to get the article," states General McPeak to Shalom TV's Mark S. Golub. "The Council on Foreign Relations has published it again on their Web site. I will happily buy you dinner anywhere if you can find those words in that article. This is baloney." "I decided a long time ago that I was on Israel's side," declares General McPeak. "I'm a long-term admirer of Israel and consider myself a friend of Israel." In an exclusive phone interview, the retired former chief of staff of the US Air Force notes that, even today, he has "fighter pilot friends and buddies in Israel who, I hope, are not alarmed by these scurrilous charges that I regard Israel as the bad guy in the Middle East."

General McPeak does suggest "it would serve everyone's purposes for Israel to remove itself from occupied territories in conditions that represent a negotiated solution agreeable to both sides. "What Israel security requires is peace with its neighbors, and a failure to get to a negotiated solution on the occupied territories has prevented peace. There's enough blame on both sides, and even blame for the United States. I would like the United States to play a constructive role to bring about progress in the [peace] process."

The general makes clear he does not hold Israel responsible for failing to return to the 1967 borders, and sees no moral equivalence between terrorists bombing Israeli restaurants and people who want to make peace.

General McPeak also feels that the American Jewish community has not acted inappropriately with respect to US foreign policy in Israel and the Middle East, saying that "American Jewry has some influence, just like [American] Irish have influence about Ireland policy, just like the National Rifle Association has something to say about our arms policy. "I don't object to interest groups or lobbying groups exercising influence. I think our government takes account of the various kinds of competing interests that are represented in our country, and then acts in a way that is consistent with our own best interest."

Regarding the RJC, General McPeak concludes, "you'll have to check with them [on] what they're trying to do here. Or with the Clinton campaign. This has the smell of politics, doesn't it?"

Shalom TV [www.shalomtv.com] is a mainstream Jewish cable television network seen nationally on Comcast; in New York and New Jersey on Time Warner; and in Pennsylvania on Blue Ridge Communications. The free English-language "Video On Demand" network features news and event coverage, a Jewish film festival, Israel updates and travelogues, kids programs, and Jewish studies. Shalom TV's offices and production facilities are located in the New York City metropolitan area.

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Why I Quit My Shul in Protest--and Obama Did Not, by Gidon D. Remba

The firestorm which has erupted over outrageous remarks by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's former pastor, evokes a time in my life when I too faced a moment of decision not unlike the one Obama's critics insist he failed.

Some five years ago, I and my family quit our synagogue in protest over the rabbi's deeply offensive sermons. Setting aside that I am not a candidate for public office, the differences between my situation and Obama's are instructive.

After settling down in the northern suburbs of Chicago, my wife and I left a synagogue soon after joining. At the baby naming ceremony for our then three-month old daughter, before hundreds of our guests, friends and family, the rabbi, in the days after the terrorist massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya, fulminated that Israel must now slaughter the Palestinians without mercy. Not the terrorists, but “the Palestinians.” This was followed by a paean to the superiority of Judaism over both Christianity and Islam, just the thing my non-Jewish friends who had never set foot before in a synagogue needed to hear about what it means to be a Jew: in short, militant vengeful wrath, racism which demonized an entire people, brooking no distinction between the innocent and the guilty, capped by a triumphalist conceit proving not the superiority of Judaism but the moral bankruptcy of one of its annointed representatives.

Several friends stormed out of our baby naming in disgust. I could hardly blame them. It was a profoundly disturbing moment, and we followed suit when for us the time was right.

We quit within months of joining; we had no history, no prior powerful or intimate personal or familial bond with our religious leader before the moment of moral outrage. And we had no countervailing experience of uplifting spirituality and moral inspiration challenging us to measure our revulsion against our love and our awe.

In an ideal world, I wish Barack Obama had never joined Rev. Wright’s church, or quit once he realized that his opinions were sometimes objectionable. But Obama’s account of the complex weave of the relationship between congregant and pastor reveals his situation to have been far more fraught than ours.

In the link that follows, I highlight the most poignant part of Obama’s speech on race which, I feel, brings to the fore the categorical difference between our personal situation and his. It is also the most inspiring portion of his speech. I urge you to read it here.

Obama's Poignant Speech on Race: An Excerpt

…We’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow....

"We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle—as we did in the OJ trial—or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina—or as fodder for the nightly news.

"We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.

"We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

"We can do that.

"But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

"That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

"This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

"This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

"This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

"I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation—the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

"There is one story in particularly that I'd like to leave you with today—a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King's birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

"There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

"And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

"She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

"She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

"Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother's problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn't. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

"Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, 'I am here because of Ashley.'

"'I'm here because of Ashley.' By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

"But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins."

Read the rest of Obama’s historic speech on race here.

McCain, Obama and the Middle East: What Conservative Mudslingers Don’t Want You To Know, Gidon D. Remba

Published in the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, March 13, 2008

(Expanded Version)

Anti-Obamanauts have flayed the Democratic presidential hopeful with claims that former Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Clinton Mideast aide Robert Malley were anti-Israel advisors to Obama. In fact, neither is among Obama’s primary Middle East counselors, and neither is anti-Israel. But what conservative mudslingers don’t want you to know is that there are more than ample grounds to raise the same false suspicions over what a President John McCain’s Israel policies might be as there are over a President Barack Obama’s.

The very ideas invoked by the fear-mongers to frighten Jewish voters away from Obama are endorsed by at least one of McCain’s key foreign policy advisors: former G.W.H Bush National Security Advisor Brent Scrowcroft. The new tack, common to many Republicans and Democrats who view the Middle East through a “realist” lens, not only bucks the calamitous Middle East nostrums of George W. Bush and the “experienced” Dick Cheney. It learns the lessons of past failures, deploying a different compass to navigate around the errors of previous thrusts at Arab-Israeli peacemaking.

In the run-up to the Annapolis Palestinian-Israeli peace summit this past November, a group of prominent Republican and Democratic foreign policy experts sent a letter to President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice titled “Failure Risks Devastating Consequences.” The letter, signed and initiated by Scowcroft, Brzezinski and others, urged the administration to insure that “the conference…. focus on the endgame and endorse the contours of a permanent peace.” And it spelled out precisely what those contours should look like.

One distinguishing feature of this innovative approach is that its authors urge the U.S. and the U.N. Security Council to provide Israelis and Palestinians, for the first time, with the clear guidance of a well-defined international consensus on the outline of a permanent peace treaty. No longer will Palestinian radicals be able to claim that there is a basis in international law, or support in the international community, for the return of refugees to former homes and villages in Israel. The Security Council would once and for all put that claim to rest, insuring that all understand the solution must not violate the essential premise of a two-state solution.

Protest though they may, Jewish extremists will be forced to recognize that the U.S. and the entire international community now affirm that Jerusalem must be the home of two capitals, and that the final borders will based on the 1967 lines with minor agreed modifications reflecting an equal land swap. This sends a resounding message to the messianic fanatics of the Jewish settlement movement, and to other Jewish hardliners, that the international consensus and the U.S. position is now no longer in doubt: settlements outside these lines will have to be removed under a peace agreement, and the amount of territory to be annexed to Israel in the final deal will be limited by the need to provide an equal land swap to the state of Palestine.

The new approach gives a shot in the arm to moderates on both sides, strengthening leaders who seek a fair compromise. It also telegraphs to Olmert and Abbas that the U.S. and the rest of the international community expect them to negotiate within these now-universally accepted parameters.

A second new element in this approach pertains to Hamas. The foreign policy mavins—again including one of McCain’s senior advisors—believe “that a genuine dialogue with the organization is far preferable to its isolation; it could be conducted, for example, by the UN and Quartet Middle East envoys.” They suggest that “promoting a cease-fire between Israel and Gaza would be a good starting point.”

The Scrowcroft-Brzezinski letter warns the Bush administration that repeating the old errors will once again doom the peace process, a prediction which looks increasingly like the present reality: “If Syria or Hamas is ostracized,” they warn, “prospects that they will play a spoiler role increase dramatically. This could take the shape of escalating violence from the West Bank or from Gaza, either of which would overwhelm any political achievement, increase the political cost of compromises for both sides, and negate Israel's willingness or capacity to relax security restrictions. By the same token, a comprehensive cease-fire or prisoner exchange is not possible without Hamas's cooperation.”

Third, the U.S. and its allies can no longer remain complacent about the yawning gap between rhetoric and reality, whether regarding settlements or security. The letter reminds the administration that “unless both sides see concrete improvements in their lives, political agreements are likely to be dismissed as mere rhetoric, further undercutting support for a two-state solution.” Israel’s failure to remove settlement outposts and unnecessary roadblocks, much like tepid Palestinian security and anti-terror moves, are not frozen into the Middle East landscape like Lot’s wife. They are changeable if the U.S. and its allies muster the will to do what it takes. In short, Israelis and Palestinians can’t get there on their own. It takes a village; a global village.

Finally, we have a report on McCain’s own remarks on what his Israel policy would look like were he elected president. The Forward reports that “Nearly two years ago, a Ha'aretz reporter wrote that he had asked McCain if resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue would require movement toward the 1967 armistice lines with minor territorial modifications, and McCain had nodded in the affirmative. The senator had added that if elected president, he would ask both sides to make sacrifices and would send ‘the smartest guy I know’ to the Middle East. That person could be the elder George Bush's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, or his secretary of state, James Baker, ‘though I know that you in Israel don't like Baker.’” When a hawkish Orthodox American Jewish newspaper bashed McCain over this story, he denied its accuracy; the Ha’aretz reporter stands by his report.

If, as Obama’s critics claim, he is privately “critical of U.S. bias toward Israel and lack of sensitivity to Arabs” and “very supportive of U.S. pressure on Israel,” and if a President Obama did indeed act to prod the Israeli government to begin to roll back West Bank settlements and the Palestinians to deliver real security, moving to enact the bipartisan Scowcroft-Brzezinski recommendations, he would at long last do the very thing that Israel needs most, which recent presidents have lacked the courage to do. It is precisely this failure of vision and will on the part of American leaders, especially President Bush, which has allowed Israel to fall deeper into an abyss from which it is becoming increasingly difficult to reach for a two-state accommodation. Presidents Ford, Carter and G. H. W. Bush all had the chutzpah to press Israel and the Arabs to do what they needed, even if it was politically unpopular at the time. And each contributed mightily to Israel’s security.

Now we learn that “a senior US official” is predicting that “Washington is likely to pressure Israel and the Palestinian Authority to make significant” progress “before US President George W. Bush visits the region in May,” according to Ha’aretz. The administration official says that the U.S. wants Israel to “start evacuating illegal settlement outposts” and is “disappointed by Israel’s inaction and its refrain of ‘we are still negotiating with the settlers.’” It wants Israel to move “parts of the separation fence from the West Bank to the Green Line,” an affirmation that not only security but political considerations have been factored into fixing its present course. It believes that “enacting a law to compensate settlers who leave the West Bank voluntarily…would demonstrate Israel’s seriousness about a two-state solution.” The unnamed senior U.S. official concluded with harsh criticism of the Israeli government’s Palestinian strategy: “The current Israeli approach to daily Palestinian life strengthens Hamas in Gaza.” News flash: George W. Bush wants a better Mideast legacy. And it took him only seven and a half years to discover the first hints of what must be done.

We can only hope that Barack Obama is the leader who will put an end to the indulgent friendship in which George W. Bush has long bathed Israel. John McCain might do much the same. Like true American heroes, perhaps neither will wait until the sun is setting on his term in office and new rivers of blood have been carved into the region’s scorched topography.

Good friends don’t let friends drink and drive. They take the keys and drive them home until they regain sobriety. Now that’s what true friendship is all about.

Gidon D. Remba is a veteran Israel activist and commentator. He blogs at http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/ and can be reached at dremba@comcast.net

Smearing Obama, by Ari Berman, The Nation

This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/berman

Smearing Obama
by ARI BERMAN
[from the March 31, 2008 issue]

He's a Muslim. He was sworn into office on the Koran. He doesn't say the Pledge of Allegiance. His pastor is an anti-Semite. He's a tool of Louis Farrakhan. He's anti-Israel. His advisers are anti-Israel. He's friends with terrorists. The terrorists want him to win. He's the Antichrist.

By now you've probably seen at least some of these e-mails and articles about Barack Obama bouncing around the Internet. They distort Obama's religious faith, question his support for Israel, warp the identity and positions of his campaign advisers and defame his friends and allies from Chicago. The purpose of the smear is to paint him as an Arab-loving, Israel-hating, terrorist-coddling, radical black nationalist. That picture couldn't be further from the truth, but you'd be surprised how many people have fallen for it. The American Jewish community, one of the most important pillars of the Democratic Party and US politics, has been specifically targeted [see Eric Alterman's column in the March 24 issue, "(Some) Jews Against Obama"]. What started as a largely overlooked fringe attack has been thrust into the mainstream--used as GOP talking points, pushed by the Clinton campaign, echoed by the likes of Meet the Press host Tim Russert. Falsehoods are repeated as fact, and bits of evidence become "elaborate constructions of malicious fantasy," as the Jewish Week, America's largest Jewish newspaper, editorialized.

What floods into one's inbox these days bears little or no relation to Obama's record. "Some of my earliest and most ardent supporters came from the Jewish community in Chicago," he has said. Obama ran for the Senate promising to help reconstitute the black-Jewish civil rights coalition. His first foreign policy speech of the campaign was before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), where he pledged "clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel." He has occasionally angered pro-Israel hawks by urging direct negotiations with Iran and Syria, but Obama's foreign policy record is well within the Democratic Party mainstream. He's committed to a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, supported Israel's incursion into Lebanon in 2006 and has criticized Hamas. During his campaign for the presidency, Obama has been defended by AIPAC, the neoconservative New York Sun and The New Republic's Marty Peretz, a noted Israel hawk. And yet no defense of Israel by Obama--or of Obama by the pro-Israel establishment--seems to be enough. "When one charge is disproved, another is leveled," says Rabbi Jack Moline, who leads a synagogue in Alexandria, Virginia.

It's nearly impossible to decipher where the smears originated [for a comprehensive account of how such campaigns are generated and spread in the age of the Internet and e-mail, see Christopher Hayes, "The New Right-Wing Smear Machine," November 12, 2007]. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency traced one e-mail back 200 people before it stopped with a filmmaker in Tel Aviv who didn't receive a return address. "No one knows if it's the Clintons, a rogue agent or a Rove agent," says Congressman Steve Cohen, a Jewish Obama backer who represents a largely black district in Memphis. Likely it's a combination of the three.

We may not know who started the smears, but we do know who's amplifying them. The "Obama is a Muslim" rumor began in the fringe conservative blogosphere. "Barack Hussein Obama: Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim," blogger Debbie Schlussel wrote on December 18, 2006. Schlussel had a history of inflammatory rhetoric and baseless accusations. She said journalist Jill Carroll, who was kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents in 2006, "hates America" and "hates Israel"; labeled George Soros a "fake Holocaust survivor"; and speculated that Pakistani terrorists were somehow to blame for last year's shootings at Virginia Tech. Yet her post on Obama gained traction; one month later, the Washington Times's Insight magazine alleged that Obama had attended "a so-called Madrassa" and was a secret Muslim.

The Christian right is also preoccupied with Obama's religious beliefs. "Is Obama a Muslim?" the Rev. Rob Schenck, a reform Jew who converted to Christianity and now calls himself a "missionary to Capitol Hill," asked in a recent videoblog. "He may be an apostate, he may be an infidel, he may be a bad Muslim, a very, very bad Muslim, he may be an unfaithful Muslim." Schenck's videoblog was circulated by the Christian Newswire and Cross Action News, a self-described "Drudge Report for Christians." Schenck later concluded that, although not a Muslim, Obama was also "not a 'Bible Christian'" and did not practice a "confident faith." A separate report posted on the Christian Newswire recently asked if Obama was "Wearing a What-Would-Satan-Do Bracelet." And a top figure in the group Christians United for Israel, Pastor Rod Parsley, a "spiritual guide" to John McCain, repeatedly referred to Obama as "Barack Hussein Obama" before campaigning with McCain in Ohio. (Thirteen percent of registered American voters now incorrectly believe that Obama is a Muslim, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, up from 8 percent in December. Forty-four percent of respondents are unsure of his religion or decline to answer; only 37 percent know that he is a Christian.)

The Muslim rumor was followed by fictions about Obama's actual faith, Christianity. In February 2007, Erik Rush, a columnist for WorldNetDaily, a hub of right-wing yellow journalism, called Obama's Chicago church a "black supremacist" and "separatist" institution. Rush found a sympathetic audience at Fox News, where he was interviewed by Sean Hannity. Soon after, another blast of e-mails went out, calling Obama a racist: "Notice too, what color you will need to be if you should want to join Obama's church...B-L-A-C-K!!!" Like the Muslim claim, it was a lie. But screeds about Obama's faith soon gave way to wide-ranging attacks against his campaign advisers, his positions on the Middle East and his associations in Chicago.

At the fulcrum of this effort is a little-known blogger from Northbrook, Illinois, named Ed Lasky, whose articles on AmericanThinker.com have done more than anything to give the smear campaign an air of respectability. Lasky co-founded AmericanThinker.com in 2003, modeling it after Powerline, a popular conservative blog. Before that, he had frequently written letters to newspapers defending Israel and criticizing the Palestinians. Though his background remains a mystery, Lasky didn't hide his neoconservative leanings. He wrote a blog post in 2004 titled "Why American Jews Must Vote for Bush," made three separate donations to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, contributed $1,000 to Tom DeLay and has given more than $50,000 to GOP candidates and causes since 2000. Lasky sits on the board of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, headed by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, whose close affiliations with Christian-right operatives like Ralph Reed has made Eckstein a controversial figure in the Jewish community.

A lengthy article from January 16, "Barack Obama and Israel," put Lasky on the map. "One seemingly consistent theme running throughout Barack Obama's career is his comfort with aligning himself with people who are anti-Israel advocates," Lasky wrote. To reach that conclusion, Lasky laughably warped what it meant to be "pro-Israel," criticizing Obama for, among other things, opposing John Bolton as UN ambassador and hiring veteran foreign policy hands from the Clinton and Carter administrations. By Lasky's criteria, every Democrat in the Senate, and more than a few Republicans, would be considered "anti-Israel." "Lasky's piece is filled with half-truths, omission of 'inconvenient facts,' innuendo, deeply flawed logic, undocumented charges, hearsay, and guilt by distant association," wrote Ira Forman of the National Jewish Democratic Council in the Philadelphia Jewish Voice.

Despite--or perhaps because of--its propagandistic nature, Lasky's column and subsequent follow-ups circulated far and wide. Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post quoted Lasky at length in a January column, printing his false claims as fact, as did a separate column in the same paper by Marc Zell, a former law partner of Douglas Feith (a onetime top official in the Bush Defense Department) and a top ally of neocon darling and Iraq War proponent Ahmad Chalabi and co-chairman of Republicans Abroad in Israel. More surprising, Lasky became a household name in the mainstream Jewish press, the talk of the town at synagogues--even liberal ones--and a useful ally for members of the Clinton campaign, who circulated his articles. Recently he's been interviewed by mainstream outlets like NPR and the New York Times, which have labeled Lasky a "critic" of Obama without explaining his neoconservative sympathies. "I wonder how a tendentiously argued anti-Obama piece is mass-emailed by so many Jews who should know better," blogged Andrew Silow-Carroll, editor of the New Jersey Jewish News.

Another key purveyor of the smear campaign is Aaron Klein, an Orthodox Jew who is Jerusalem correspondent for WorldNetDaily. WND is notoriously disreputable, a sort of National Enquirer for the right (typical headline: "Sleaze Charge: 'I Took Drugs, Had Homo Sex With Obama'"). Klein made a name for himself by getting terrorists to say nice things about Democrats and allying himself with extremist elements of the Israeli right, whom he frequently quotes as sources in his articles--when he bothers to quote anyone at all. Klein originally called Hillary Clinton the "jihadist choice for president," but when Clinton stumbled, he turned his fire to Obama, attempting to expose his so-called "terrorist connections."

Klein penned two stories in late February wildly distorting Obama's links, from his days in Chicago, to pro-Palestinian activists like Rashid Khalidi, a respected professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University who previously taught at the University of Chicago (hardly a bastion of left-wing activism). Klein's story goes something like this: Obama sat on the board of a foundation in Chicago that gave a grant to the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), run by Khalidi's wife, which supposedly rejects Israel's existence; and Khalidi directed the PLO's Beirut press office and is a supporter "for Palestinian terror." (In fact, the AAAN focuses solely on social service work in Chicago and takes no position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Khalidi says he was never employed by the PLO; he has been a harsh critic of Palestinian suicide bombings and a longtime supporter of a two-state solution, and he has never been an adviser to Obama. As for Obama's past statements, at least in Chicago, being pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian is not a contradiction in terms.)

Once again, the facts mattered little, and Klein's stories gained an audience beyond the narrow confines of WND. Christian publicist Maria Sliwa sent Klein's articles to prominent reporters, the Tennessee GOP included his claims in a press release titled "Anti-Semites for Obama" and the Jewish Press, an Orthodox Brooklyn paper, reprinted his story about Khalidi. His latest article alleges that "terrorists worldwide would indeed be emboldened by an Obama election." As evidence, Klein quotes Ramadan Adassi, a leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank's Askar refugee camp, who says an Obama victory would be an "important success. He won popularity in spite of the Zionists and the conservatives." In previous stories, Klein has quoted Adassi praising Cindy Sheehan, Rosie O'Donnell and Sean Penn. For a suspected terrorist, Adassi follows pop culture and US politics remarkably closely.

Despite Klein's questionable sourcing and scandalous accusations, mainstream reporters now call the Obama campaign to ask about Klein's articles. He also reports for John Batchelor, a right-wing talk-radio host for KFI-AM in Los Angeles who has written a series of outlandish columns about Obama for the conservative magazine Human Events and repeatedly pushed the Obama smears on his radio show. According to an e-mail of Batchelor's obtained by The Nation, Batchelor says that information about Obama and Khalidi came via "oppo research."

Even if the false claims about Obama originally emanated from the neoconservative right, the Clinton campaign has eagerly pushed them. Clinton operative Sidney Blumenthal has e-mailed damaging stories about Obama to reporters, including a recent article by Batchelor. Clinton fundraiser Annie Totah circulated a column by Ed Lasky before Super Tuesday, with the inscription "Please vote wisely in the Primaries." Clinton adviser Ann Lewis falsely referred to Zbigniew Brzezinski, a critic of AIPAC, as a chief adviser to Obama on a conference call with Jewish reporters. "I can tell you for a fact people from the Clinton campaign are calling reporters and asking them to pay attention to things involving Obama and Israel," says Shmuel Rosner, Washington correspondent for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz. The volume of e-mails about Obama in a given state tends to track the election calendar--hardly a coincidence.

Large American Jewish organizations, like AIPAC and the Orthodox Union, have repeatedly defended Obama. Yet they've had little sway over reactionary elements in both the United States and Israel--including Jewish hate groups--who are eager to keep the smear campaign alive. The website Jews Against Obama, for instance, is run by the Jewish Task Force, which funnels money to the radical settler movement in Israel. (Curiously, John McCain's alliance with Pastor John Hagee of Christians United for Israel, a leading proponent of "end times" theology, and his recent endorsement by former Secretary of State James Baker have received far less scrutiny from pro-Israel pundits. It was Baker, after all, who reportedly told George H.W. Bush, "Fuck the Jews. They didn't vote for us anyway.")

Respected news outlets have stoked these smears, even as they attempt to debunk them. "Is Barack Obama a Muslim?" asked an editorial in the Forward. "Almost certainly not. Was he ever a Muslim? Almost certainly yes." After Obama criticized "a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel," Rosner of Ha'aretz accused Obama of "meddling in Israel's internal politics." The Washington Post noted Obama's "denials" of his Muslim faith, without ever stating that the rumor was untrue. Post columnist Richard Cohen crassly connected Obama, his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and Louis Farrakhan, a line of guilt-by-association questioning that Tim Russert aggressively repeated in the last Obama-Clinton debate.

Among conservatives, Fox News has endlessly amplified such rumors. Karl Rove, a new hire by the network, recently speculated that Obama would withdraw funding for Israel. Sean Hannity has asked if Obama has a "race problem." Fox News radio host Tom Sullivan compared Obama to Hitler. "Fox News are on to him and all the arguments our 'smear' camping [sic] is making and for the most part it is running with them," right-wing blogger Ted Belman, of Israpundit, wrote in a recent e-mail.

The attacks on Obama reek of racism and Islamophobia but, as John Kerry learned in 2004, any Democrat should expect such treatment. "If Moses was the Democratic nominee, he'd still be the victim of this hate mail," says Doug Bloomfield, a former legislative director for AIPAC. The right-wing smear machine grinds on, with the mainstream media and rival campaigns lending a helping hand.

As Death Toll Mounts in Gaza and Southern Israel, Most Israelis Want Direct Talks with Hamas, Gidon D. Remba

As Hamas and other terrorists escalated their lethal rocket attacks this week on Sderot, Ashkelon and other parts of southern Israel, leading Israel to ratchet up its air and ground counter-attacks on parts of Gaza, the question on most minds was whether Israel will carry out its threats to launch a massive invasion and re-occupation of Gaza. The goal would be to stop the rockets once and for all, or at least exact a far greater price on Hamas.

In his remarks to a group of American Jewish leaders in Cleveland last week, Barack Obama highlighted how much more open debate is in Israel itself than in the American Jewish community about Israeli-Palestinian issues. A case in point, I would add, is how Israelis and American Jews approach the question of negotiating with Hamas. The Israeli government’s official position, along with that of the Bush Administration, AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, is that Israel will not negotiate with Hamas until it recognizes Israel’s right to exist, commits to previous agreements signed by the PLO, and abandons terrorism.

No presidential candidate in this country will dare deviate from this line, including Barack Obama, who has just issued a statement reemphasizing that his willingness to meet with foes "does not include Hamas. You can't negotiate with somebody who does not recognize the right of a country to exist so I understand why Israel doesn't meet with Hamas." But reports from Israel have consistently shown that the "establishment view" goes against what a considerable majority of Israeli Jews actually believe.

This is once more illustrated by the latest Ha’aretz-Dialogue poll (as reported in “Most Israelis back direct talks with Hamas”) which found that “Sixty-four percent of Israelis say the government must hold direct talks with the Hamas government in Gaza toward a cease-fire and the release of captive soldier Gilad Shalit. Less than one-third (28 percent) still opposes such talks.” The poll indicates that even among voters for the right-wing Likud, no less than 48% supported direct negotiations with Hamas over a cease-fire and the release of Gilad Shalit (within the context of a prisoner exchange).

A new Ha’aretz news report indicates that “various Israeli figures, including retired generals, have been holding indirect talks with Hamas, largely through European mediation.” And now we learn that Cabinet Minister Ami Ayalon, a leading figure in Israel’s Labor party, an admiral and former chief of the Shin Bet General Security Service, “is planning to propose that Israel initiate indirect negotiations with Hamas, with Egyptian mediation, to bring about a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.”

The Ha’aretz article which reported on the poll notes that “An increasing number of public figures, including senior officers in the Israel Defense Forces' reserves, have expressed similar positions on talks with Hamas. It now appears that this opinion is gaining traction in the wider public, which until recently vehemently rejected such negotiations.” Key Israeli security figures who have endorsed something like this view include former national security advisor (to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon) Giora Eiland, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, former Shin Bet Cheif Ya'akov Perry, and former defense minister and IDF Chief of Staff Lt-Gen (res.) Shaul Mofaz, now Israel's Minister of Transportation.

Why this discrepancy between the official position of the Israeli government and the organized American Jewish community, on the one hand, and Israeli public opinion on the other? Israelis are nothing if not pragmatic. They understand that there is no military solution to ending Qassam rocket attacks on Sderot, Ashkelon and southern Israel. According to IDF estimates, a full-scale invasion of Gaza would lead to hundreds of Israeli military casualties, and over one thousand Palestinian civilian casualties, provoking widespread international condemnation of Israel, not unlike during the Lebanon War. Israel would be forced to re-occupy the Gaza Strip with its 1.5 million Palestinians, and re-institute a military government, a thankless task Israeli leaders dearly wish to avoid.

Moreover, the Qassams would not stop, as they did not when Israel occupied the territory before. The invasion might also provoke Hezbollah to restart the missile war against Israel, against which Israel still has little or no defense, as we saw in the Lebanon war of summer 2006. (Michael Oren, writing in the Washington Post recently, suggested the possibility of an even more devastating scenario, in which a Qassam strike which happens to cause mass Israeli civilian casualties provokes a full-scale Israeli invasion of Gaza, which sparks a regional war involving Hezbollah, Syrian and Iranian missile strikes against all of Israel.)

No matter which scenario one envisions, a full scale invasion of Gaza appears singularly unappealing to most Israelis and to the Israeli government itself. Many have concluded that the least bad option for Israel’s security is to negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas and end the Qassam rockets via a limited agreement, rather than by escalating the war. This isn’t a peace agreement by any stretch; it’s not even a long-term truce. But it’s better, say most Israelis, than the escalating war raging in Gaza and southern Israel. At the same time, the government will continue to gradually escalate the IDF's counter-attacks, so as to exact a greater price on Hamas, and put pressure on it to agree to a cease-fire on better terms for Israel.

American Jewish organizations (with a few exceptions like Americans for Peace Now, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom and Israel Policy Forum) continue to take their cue from the Israeli government line, ignoring the shift in Israeli public opinion. Nor is there much sign that most Jewish organizations are particularly interested in what American or Israeli Jews actually think about this issue. They make no effort to educate the American Jewish community about it, and continue to expect American Jews to slavishly follow the Israeli government’s official line.

This definition of what it means to be a good Zionist, however, is doing more harm to Zionism and support for Israel than the anti-Zionists could ever inflict. Expecting unthinking, uncritical support for whatever the government says—as un-American an idea as any—fuels the growing alienation of young American Jews from Israel. Yet this is the reality in which presidential candidates must operate if they expect to gain the lion’s share of the American Jewish vote. They must win over American Jews, biases and all.

In time, governments may respond to shifts in public opinion, particularly when they are rooted in sound analysis of Israel’s strategic situation. And then other American Jewish organizations will—maybe—follow the Israeli government’s lead, and the political environment will shift as well. But don’t hold your breath.

Watch Senator Obama Speak About Israel’s Security, from Jews for Obama

On Sunday, February 24, 2008, Barack Obama met with the Cleveland Jewish community for nearly an hour. He spoke about his views on issues of concern to the Jewish voters, including his strong support for Israel’s security and the U.S.-Israel relationship, and his determination to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He also took questions from the audience, including on issues raised in email attacks against the Senator.

We thought you would like to see and hear his remarks for yourself, and hope that you would pass them on to others, so everyone will have an opportunity to hear the truth about Senator Obama’s views from the Senator himself. Below are links to several video excerpts:

Senator Barack Obama on Israel’s Security:
“Israel’s security is sacrosanct, it’s non-negotiable…. Israel has to remain a Jewish State and what I believe that means is that any negotiated peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians is going to have to involve the Palestinians relinquishing the right of return as it has been understood in the past.”"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnXUE2cfxGk

Senator Barack Obama on the Palestinians’ Commitments:
“I have consistently said, and I have said this to Palestinians, I said this when I was in Ramallah, that you cannot fault Israel for being concerned about any peace agreement if the Palestinian state or Palestinian authority or Palestinian leadership does not seem to be able to follow through on its commitments. And I think the approach we have to take with respect to negotiations is that you sit down and talk, but you have to suspend trust until you can see that the Palestinian side can follow through and that’s a position that I have consistently taken and the one I will take with me to the White House.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D79hRYLn9CQ

Senator Barack Obama on opposing negotiations with Hamas:
“….you can’t have a conversation with somebody who doesn’t think you should be on the other side of the table. At the point where they recognize Israel and its right to exist, at the point where they recognize that they are not going to be able to shove their world view down the throats of others but are going to have to sit down and negotiate without resort to violence, then I think that will be a different circumstance. That’s not the circumstance that we’re in right now.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-UeFWEmU4s

Senator Barack Obama on Israel’s right to Self-Defense:
“When Israel launched its counterattack against Hezbollah in Lebanon during the summer of 2006…I said, if somebody invades my country or is firing rockets into my country or kidnapping my soldiers, I will not tolerate that. And there’s no nation in the world that would.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuMNF6m9ALE

Senator Barack Obama on bridging African-American and Jewish Community Relations:
“….one of my goals constantly in my public career has been to try to bridge what was a historically powerful bond between the African American and Jewish communities that has been frayed in recent years. For a whole variety of reasons. I think that I have served as an effective bridge and that’s the reason I have overwhelming support among the Jewish community that knows me best, which is the Jewish community in Chicago. And I think that anybody who has friends among the Jewish community in Chicago should check out those credentials.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFlOt_TZREQ

Senator Barack Obama on Bush Foreign Policy:
“I do not understand how anybody who is concerned about Israel’s security and the threat of Iran could be supportive of George Bush’s foreign policy. It has completely backfired. It is indisputable that Iran is the biggest strategic beneficiary of the war in Iraq. We have spent what will soon be close to a trillion dollars strengthening Iran, expanding their influence. How is that helpful to Israel? How is that helpful to Israel?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89W6rGj39fY

Best of Jews for Obama: Top Links

Latest Updates:

How to Talk to a Hawk--Or, Abandon These Myths Before You Vote (Abridged), Jewish Chronicle, Gidon D. Remba
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-to-talk-to-hawk-abridged-for.html

Open Letter to the Pennsylvania Jewish Community [and to all American Jews]
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-letter-to-pennsylvania-jewish.html

Obama National Campaign Co-Chairman General Merrill Mcpeak Disputes Anti-Israel Charges From Republican Jewish Coalition, Shalom TV Press Release
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/03/obama-national-campaign-co-chairman-gen.html

My Neighbor, Barack" by Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf
http://t.ymlp2.com/bealauuwadauhbyatajwb/click.php

Obama's Historic Speech on Race: An Excerpt
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/03/given-my-background-my-politics-and-my.html

Web Video: Watch Obama's Historic Speech on Race
http://youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU

Obama Denounces Rev. Wright's Controversial Remarks: Web Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7piGy0u43c

Classics

Obama is Good for the Jews, Miriam Sapiro, former Special Assistant to the President, National Security Council, Clinton Administration
http://jews4obama2008.wordpress.com/obama-is-“good-for-the-jews”/

Watch Senator Obama Speak about Israel’s Security
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/03/watch-senator-obama-speak-about-israels.html

The Lying Despicable Campaign to Turn Jews Against Obama, M.J. Rosenberg
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/02/lying-despicable-campaign-to-turn-jews.html


An Online Petition: We Are Jewish. We Support Barack Obama.
http://jews4obama2008.wordpress.com/

Obama is a Strong Friend of Israel, by Congressman Robert Wexler, Jerusalem Post
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/02/obama-is-strong-friend-of-israel-by.html

Obama Reaches Out to Jewish Leaders (Cleveland, Ohio)
http://elections.jta.org/2008/02/25/obama-reaches-out-to-jewish-leaders/

Obama National Campaign Co-Chairman General Merrill Mcpeak Disputes Anti-Israel Charges From Republican Jewish Coalition, Shalom TV Press Release
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/03/obama-national-campaign-co-chairman-gen.html

Philadelphia Jewish Voice Dossier on Obama: Best Links
http://www.pjvoice.com/v33/33100dossier.aspx#c

McCain, Obama and the Middle East: What Conservative Mudslingers Don’t Want You To Know, Gidon D. Remba, Jewish Chronicle (Pittsburgh) http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/03/mccain-obama-and-middle-east-what.html

Smearing Obama, Ari Berman (The Nation) http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/03/smearing-obama-by-ari-berman-nation.html

The Israel Litmus Test, Aaron David Miller, LA Times http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/itsonlyfair/latimes0137.html

The New Republican Jewish Obama Smear: Return of the Big Lie, Gidon D. Remba
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/02/new-republican-jewish-obama-smear.html

Web Video: Chicago Jewish Leaders Defend Obama Against Smear Campaign-Rabbi Sam Gordon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRZLgqGcIz8

Web Video: Chicago Jewish Leaders Defend Obama on Israel--Lee Rosenberg
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/02/chicago-jewish-community-leaders-defend.html

The Truth About Obama's Foreign Policy Advisors, by Jack S. Levin (Obama friend and campaign insider)
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2006/11/truth-about-obamas-foreign-policy.html

Barack Obama Speaks Out Against Anti-Semitism
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/02/barack-obama-speaks-out-against-anti.html

Jewish Senators Condemn Religious-Based Attacks on Sen. Barack Obama
http://jews4obama2008.wordpress.com/jewish-senators-condemn-religious-based-attacks-on-sen-barack-obama/

An Insider's Report on Barack Obama's Meeting with Cleveland Jewish Leaders http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/02/insiders-report-on-barack-obamas.html

Obama’s Change Could Be Good for Israel, by Daniel Levy, Ha'aretz
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/02/obamas-change-could-be-good-for-israel.html

Why Obama is Better for Israel, Daniel Levy
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/02/why-obama-is-better-for-israel-by.html

Obama’s Middle East: Good for the Jews, Gidon D. Remba, Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle & Ohio Jewish Chronicle
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2006/11/obamas-middle-east-good-for-jews-by.html

What Does It Mean To Be Pro-Israel? Response to a Critic on Obama's Middle East, Gidon D. Remba
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/03/response-to-critic-on-obamas-middle.html

More Than a Friend, Bernard Avishai http://bernardavishai.blogspot.com/2008/02/more-than-friend.html

Facts About Barack Obama and Israel, by Obama Middle East Advisor Eric Lynn (Response to right wing blogger Ed Lasky’s misinformation about Obama)
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2006/11/facts-about-barack-obama-and-israel-by.html

Web Video: Obama: I Will Re-Build Black-Jewish Alliance
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/02/web-clip-obama-i-will-rebuild-black.html

American Smear-Artist Ed Lasky attacks Senator Barack Obama, by Ira Forman
http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2008/02/american-smear-artist-ed-lasky-attacks.html
Rob Malley, the Willy Horton of Right-Wing Jewish Nut Jobs, Daniel Fleshler http://www.realisticdove.org/archives/189

The Smears Against Rob Malley Continue, But Former U.S. Officials Rise to His Defense, Daniel Fleshler http://www.realisticdove.org/archives/193

Tony Karon's Eloquence on Obama Candidacy (Obama Reflects the Highest Ethical Ideals of Judaism), Richard Silverstein http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2008/02/29/tony-karons-eloquence-on-obama-candidacy/

Official Obama Website http://www.barackobama.com/

Obama Support Site http://my.barackobama.com/

What Does It Mean To Be Pro-Israel? Response to a Critic on Obama's Middle East, Gidon D. Remba

In a letter response to my column “Would Obama’s Middle East be Good for the Jews?” from the Feb. 14 Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle (also reprinted in the Ohio Jewish Chronicle on Feb. 28), Howard Richman criticizes my testimony on the enthusiastic support which Illinois Senator Barack Obama has long enjoyed from the Chicago Jewish community by asking whether I realize “that the Chicago Palestinian-American community also supported him enthusiastically when he was a state senator.” Richman quotes an article which cites an anonymous source saying that Obama “often expressed general sympathy for the Palestinians — though I don’t recall him ever saying anything publicly.”

Setting aside the unreliability of “anonymous sources” whose statements can never be verified—I have an anonymous source who tells me that Mr. Richman is secretly married to Mike Huckabee—Mr. Richman seems to believe that the Palestinians, and the Palestinian American community, are the arch-enemy of the Jews. Why else would he imagine that for Senator Obama to have privately expressed sympathy for the Palestinians, if that’s what he did, while voting and acting in all respects in support of pro-Israel and Jewish interests, should be considered a threat to the Jewish community?

In fact, Palestinian Americans, like Arab and Muslim Americans, overwhelmingly support a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, negotiations and peace with Israel. The same is true of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, as the latest polls once again confirm. Even when Hamas won a plurality of votes in the last Palestinian election, defeating Fatah, opinion surveys showed that 73% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza believed that Hamas should “change its position on the elimination of the state of Israel,” while 84% favored a peace agreement with Israel.

When Mr. Richman and other fear-mongers bandy about reports of Obama’s private expressions of sympathy for the Palestinians as supposed proof of Obama’s “secret” anti-Israel bent, it is reminiscent of the shameful booing of then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz by some in a pro-Israel crowd in 2002. Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times about that incident: “Mr. Wolfowitz…is on the hawkish right of the Bush administration. He is a Jew whose father's family was wiped out in the Holocaust. Nonetheless, he was booed when he spoke on behalf of the president at the large pro-Israel rally held by American Jews in Washington last month. His transgression? During an encomium to Israel, he acknowledged aloud that ‘innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying in great numbers as well’ in the Middle East.” Mr. Richman panders to this same bigotry which infects parts of the Jewish community.

Moreover, if the Chicago Palestinian-American community enthusiastically supported Senator Obama during all these years while he was hewing scrupulously to strong pro-Israel positions in both the Illinois State Senate and the U.S. Senate, it clearly caused no concern in the Chicago Jewish community, in which I have been involved as an Israel activist and Jewish leader for three decades. If Obama has consistently acted as a rock-solid ally and friend of Israel and the Jewish community in his public life for many years, while expressing private sympathy for the Palestinians, we clearly have the answer to Mr. Richman’s question, “which Obama would show up during an Obama presidency”: the Obama who is staunchly pro-Israel in all his public acts and who expresses private sympathy for the Palestinians! And if a President Obama chooses to come out of the closet and risk publicly expressing sympathy for the Palestinians, as Paul Wolfowitz did, only the most intolerant and chauvinistic of Jews will find such statements evidence of anti-Israel betrayal.

Mr. Richman does cite one source who is not anonymous: Palestinian-American activist and Electronic Intifada co-founder Ali Abunimah, a rabid Israel hater and anti-Zionist advocate for a “one-state solution.” Even the neoconservative Ed Lasky admitted in his anti-Obama screed in the American Thinker that Abunimah is “not the most reliable source.” But Mr. Richman is happy to invoke him if he can help sling some anti-Israel mud at Obama.

Finally, Mr. Richman’s letter highlights the real issue which lurks behind his objections to Obama: while there is virtual wall-to-wall agreement on many aspects of support for Israel among American Jews, such as continuing current levels of US military aid or increasing them if necessary, we differ in other ways on what it means to be “pro-Israel.” In a recent pair of columns, I cited former Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh's statement that "he believed U.S. pressure on Israel was justified when Israel was not living up to its obligations to the U.S. ...Israelis would support or at least not object too strongly if the U.S. prodded Israel to keep the promises made in the road map." During President Bush’s recent visit to Israel he stated that “Israeli settlement expansion is…an impediment to” successful peace efforts, and insisted that "the unauthorized outposts…need to be dismantled, like the Israelis said they would do." Nonetheless, the over 100 illegal settlement outposts still remain, and the official settlements continue to build out onto more land intended for a future Palestinian state.

Perhaps Mr. Richman thinks it is pro-Israel for the President of the United States to be complicit, through inaction, in the hijacking of the Israeli government by a powerful minority on the messianic Jewish right. When this faction places obstacles in the way of a peaceful two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by continually expanding West Bank settlements and blocking the Israeli government and the Israel Defense Forces from removing illegal settlement outposts, I and many other American Jews do not consider it pro-Israel when the U.S. President fails to help an Israeli leader stand up to such obstruction.

After all, the pro-settlement Jewish right is acting to bring about the one-state solution which will foreclose for all time the possibility of a negotiated peace based on two states for Israelis and Palestinians. In such a "greater Israel" Jews will become the minority, Palestinians the majority, and Israel will lose either its democracy or its Jewish character. It would lose its democracy by depriving the Palestinian majority of full citizenship rights, becoming a pariah state reminiscent of apartheid South Africa, jeopardizing its remaining support in the rest of the world, as Prime Minister Olmert himself has warned. Or if Israel grants the Palestinian majority full citizenship rights, including the right to vote for representation in the Knesset, as democracy requires, it will lose its Jewish character, bringing the Zionist project to an end. Right-wing Jewish schemes which attempt to avoid impaling Israel on the horns of this dilemma are based on fantasy and have no chance whatsoever of happening in the real world.

Prime Minister Olmert said recently that if Israel cannot reach a two-state solution, dividing Israel from the great majority of the West Bank, then Israel, and the Zionist dream of a democratic Jewish state, is “finished.” A majority of Israelis who voted for political parties seeking to negotiate such a partition clearly agree with Prime Minister Olmert. It follows that those who are thwarting Israeli government efforts to bring about a secure two-state solution are acting against Israel’s most vital interests.

If, as Abunimah claims, Obama is privately “critical of U.S. bias toward Israel and lack of sensitivity to Arabs” and “very supportive of U.S. pressure on Israel,” and if a President Obama did indeed act to prod the Israeli government to freeze and then begin to roll back the West Bank settlements, he would at long last do the very thing that Israel needs most, which recent presidents have lacked the courage to do. It is precisely this failure of vision and will on the part of American leaders, especially President Bush, which has allowed Israel to fall deeper into a hopeless abyss in which it is increasingly difficult to work out a two-state deal with any credibility. Presidents Eisenhower, Ford, Carter and G. H. W. Bush all had the chutzpah to press Israel to do what it needed, even if it was politically unpopular at the time. And each, with the exception of Eisenhower, contributed greatly to enhancing Israel’s security. (It goes without saying, as I have emphasized in many previous articles, that the U.S. must push its Arab and European allies to apply pressure on the Palestinian government as well to fulfill their obligations to stop incitement against Israel and to fight terror. These countries must also do much more to help the Abbas-Fayad government build up its security forces to enable it to fulfill those commitments.)

Israeli journalist Raanan Shaked has written in Yediot Ahronot what too few have been willing to admit but all too many know. Leading Israeli commentators, he notes, “repeatedly say that George W. Bush is Israel’s best friend and it would be best if he just stayed in the White House with all the other furniture. Well, you saw what happens when such a great friend of Israel is ruling Washington: Nothing. Any president who resides in the White House without aiming a double-barreled rifle to the heads of Israel and the Palestinians so that they get down on their knees and put their hands up is not quite a friend of Israel. Yes, there’s plenty of love there, but something gets screwed…. It is indeed possible that the rumors are right, and that [Obama] is not overly sentimental towards Israel. We can only hope. An over-abundance of sentimentality in Washington has been hindering us for decades.”

We can only hope that Barack Obama is the leader who will put an end to the indulgent friendship in which George W. Bush has bathed Israel. Good friends don’t let friends drink and drive. They take the keys and drive them home until they regain sobriety. Now that’s what true friendship is all about.


Gidon D. Remba is a veteran Israel activist and political analyst. He blogs at http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/ and can be reached at dremba@comcast.net

Mr. Remba's commentaries on Israel, the Middle East and Jewish affairs have appeared widely in the Jewish and general press, including the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Chicago Sun Times, the Nation, Ha’aretz, the Forward, the Jerusalem Post, the Jerusalem Report, Tikkun, and the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, where he writes a monthly column on Israel.

Mr. Remba served as Senior Foreign Press Editor and Translator in the Israel Prime Minister's Office from 1977-1978 during the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David peace process. He translated the Knesset speeches of Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, and Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, as well as Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and other Israeli leaders for the foreign press during the period from Egyptian President Sadat's visit to Jerusalem until the Camp David Peace Accords. He co-translated Sadat's Knesset speech into English for the world press.

An Insider's Report on Barack Obama's Meeting with Cleveland Jewish Leaders

Dear friends and family,

I've received so many questions over the last month about Barack Obama, his positions on Israel, and his relationship with the Jewish community. I've been deeply troubled by smears directed at Obama - claiming that he is a Muslim, suggesting that he is anti-Semitic, or implying that he is anti-Israel. On Sunday, I had the opportunity to attend a meeting with Obama and a small group of Jews in Cleveland, during which Obama answered questions about these smears and discussed a wide range of issues that are critically important to the Jewish community.

Because I think it's important to know where Obama stands on all of this, I wrote up this report.

Please feel free to forward it widely.
Best,
Josh

Obama walked in the room at Landerhaven banquet hall shortly after 9 a.m. and was greeted with a warm ovation. There were about 100 Jewish leaders in the room, some supporting Obama, some not. Ron Ratner, who organized the event, was the first to speak. He said he had been supporting Obama for eight months, and had literally "given him his first-born son," Matt, who worked on the campaign.

Next to speak was Congressman Robert Wexler, who represents a district including Boca Raton, Florida, with 300,000 Jews. He spoke enthusiastically about Obama, saying he was a "unique person" who would deliver on a "moderate progressive agenda," mentioning health care, the environment, and the economy as key issues. He said Obama was a "stalwart supporter of the state of Israel," with a conviction that Israel needs to maintain its "military advantage." Obama, he said, unequivocally understands "America's heartfelt and long-term friendship with Israel." He cited a letter sent by Obama in January to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, urging the U.N. to fully condemn Hamas (In that letter, Obama wrote: "The Security Council should clearly and unequivocally condemn the rocket attacks against Israel, and should make clear that Israel has the right to defend itself against such actions. If it cannot bring itself to make these common sense points, I urge you to ensure that it does not speak at all." (Here's a New Jersey Jewish Standard article about the letter: http://www.jstandard.com/articles/3790/1/Obama-supporters-speak-out%3B-he-writes-to-U.N.-on-Israel)

Wexler also noted that Obama was one of the first U.S. Senators to express U.S. support for Israel during the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. After Obama spoke at a recent AIPAC conference, Wexler said, he sought out Bibi Netanyahu, and the two discussed ways to isolate Iran, economically. (AIPAC has stressed that it is satisfied with Obama's positions on the Middle East; a spokeswoman recently told the New Republic: "Like all the leading presidential candidates, the senator has a strong record on issues of importance to the pro-Israel community.") Wexler noted that Obama is the lead sponsor of legislation, currently pending in the Senate, promoting divestment from Iran. (The legislation would "provide needed information about which companies are supporting Iran's energy industry, clarify that state and local governments have the authority to divest of such companies, and provide legal protection for those governments that wish to do so.") He mentioned an article by New Republic editor Martin Peretz, a staunch and long-time supporter of Israel, arguing that Obama has it absolutely right on Israel. ("Can Friends of Israel -- and Jews -- trust Obama? In a Word, Yes." Read the article here: http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=6bd11ed5-bf80-44a0-b683-a0563e11ab89&k=6923)

Wexler said Obama would promote a two-state solution in the Middle East, and understands that we can not "unilaterally ask Israel to make concessions."
He concluded with a flourish: "Obama had the wisdom of judgment to oppose the Iraq war, and to oppose the nomination of Alberto Gonzales. He fully appreciates that what is needed to be done is to change the ideology of Washington that permitted the war in the first place."

Obama took the podium, and, again, was greeted with a warm ovation. He started by thanking Ratner, and then ackowledged Mark Dann, "your terrific attorney general," and his wife, Alyssa, who were in the audience. He said he was thankful for the "support of so many friends in the Jewish community, dating back to my first days in public life in Chicago." He mentioned the late Chicago businessman and philanthropist Irving Harris as an early supporter, and noted that the "strong support of the Jewish community" in Chicago has been vital to his political success.

Obama next spoke generally about issues of importance to him, including health care, the need for an energy policy that "not only creates jobs and secures our planet but also stops sending billions of dollars to dictators and effectively leads us to fund both sides of the war on terror," and a change in foreign policy, beginning with ending the war in Iraq.
"These changes are founded in a view of the world that I believe is deeply imbedded in the Jewish tradition," Obama said, "That all of us have a responsibility to do our part to repair the world. That we can take care of one another and build strong communities grounded in faith and family. That repairing the world is a task that each of us is called upon to take up every single day."

He then said that he will carry with him to the White House "an unshakable commitment to the security of Israel and the friendship between the United States and Israel. The US-Israel relationship is rooted in shared interests, shared values, shared history and in deep friendship among our people ...I will work tirelessly as president to uphold and enhance the friendship between the two countries."

Obama next described a trip he took to Israel 2 years ago, and his travels around the country, saying it "left a lasting impression on me."
"Seeing the terrain," Obama said, "experiencing the powerful contrast between the beautiful holy land that faces the constant threat of deadly violence. The people of Israel showed their courage and commitment to democracy everyday that they board a bus or kiss their children goodbye or argue about politics in a local café.
"And I know how much Israelis crave peace. I know that Prime Minister Olmert was elected with a mandate to pursue it. I pledge to make every effort to help Israel achieve that peace. I will strengthen Israel's security and strengthen Palestinian partners who support that vision and personally work for two states that can live side-by-side in peace and security, with Israel's status as a Jewish state ensured, so that Israelis and Palestinians can pursue their dreams."

He continued: "I also expect to work on behalf of peace with the full knowledge that Israel still has bitter enemies who are intent on its destruction. We see their intentions every time a suicide bomber strikes, we saw their intentions with the Katusha rockets that Hezbollah rained down on Israel from Lebanon in 2006, and we see it today in the Kasams that Hamas fires into Israel every single day from as close as Gaza or as far as Tehran. The defense cooperation between the United States and Israel has been a model of success and I believe it can be deepened and strengthened."

He went on to say that "the gravest threat ... to Israel today I believe is from Iran," noting that the "radical regime" is continuing to pursue nuclear weapons.
"President Ahmadinejad continues his offensive denials of the Holocaust and disturbing denunciations of Israel," Obama said. "He recently referred to Israel as a deadly microbe and a savage animal. Threats of Israel's destruction cannot be dismissed as rhetoric. The threat from Iran is real and my goal as president would be to eliminate that threat.
"Ending the war in Iraq, I believe, will be an important first step in achieving that goal because it will increase our flexibility and credibility when we deal with Iran. Make no mistake: I believe that Iran has been the biggest strategic beneficiary of this war and I intend to change that.

"My approach to Iran," he continued, "will be aggressive diplomacy. I will not take any military options off the table. But I also believe that under this administration we have seen the threat grow worse and I intend to change that course. The time I believe has come to talk directly to the Iranians and to lay out our clear terms: their end of pursuit of nuclear weapons, an end of their support of terrorism, and an end of their threat to Israel and other countries in the region.

"To prepare this goal I believe that we need to present incentives, carrots, like the prospect of better relations and integration into the national community, as well as disincentives like the prospect of increased sanctions. I would seek these sanctions through the United Nations and encourage our friends in Europe and the Gulf to use their economic leverage against Iran outside of the UN, and I believe we will be in a stronger position to achieve these tough international sanctions if the United States has shown itself to be willing to come to the table."

He added: "We have not pursued the kind of aggressive and direct diplomacy that could yield results to both Israel and the United States. The current policy of not talking is not working."

All told, he spoke for about eight minutes. Then, he opened the floor to questions.
The first questioner asked about Obama's affiliation with his church in Chicago, and his Reverend, Jeremiah Wright. The questioner asked if Obama was still a member, noting that Rev. Wright has preached anti-Israel sermons, and that the pastor has a close relationship with Louis Farrakhan, of the Nation of Islam.

Obama started by describing his church, the Trinity United Church of Christ, to which he has belonged for 20 years. It's a "very conventional" African-American church, he said. If you go on a given Sunday, you hear gospel music and "people preaching about Jesus."
He then said: "It is true that my Pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who will be retiring this month, is somebody who on occasion can say controversial things. Most of them by the way are controversial directed at the African American Community and calling on them start reading books and turn off the TV set and engage in self help. And he is very active in prison ministries and so forth.

"It's also true that he comes out of the 60s, he is an older man. That is where he cut his teeth. That he has historically been interested in the African roots of the African-American experience. He was very active in the South Africa divestment movement and you will recall that there was a tension that arose between the African American and the Jewish communities during that period when we were dealing with apartheid in South Africa, because Israel and South Africa had a relationship at that time."
Obama said that relationship was "a source of tension" for his pastor.
"So there have been a couple of occasions where he made comments with relation, rooted in that," Obama said. "Not necessarily ones that I share. But that is the context within which he has made those comments."

Obama went on to say that Wright does not have close relationship with Farrakhan.
"I have been a consistent, before I go any further, denunciator of Louis Farrakhan, nobody challenges that." (Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, confirms this. Here is a link to an Anti-Defamation League statement, praising Obama's condemnations of Farrakhan: http://www.adl.org/PresRele/NatIsl_81/5208_81.htm.)

Noting that Farrakhan was given an award, in 2007, by the Church's magazine (for his work on behalf of ex-offenders), Obama said: "I believe that was a mistake and showed a lack of sensitivity to the Jewish community and I said so. But I have never heard an anti-Semitic [comment] made inside of our church. I have never heard anything that would suggest anti-Semitism on part of the Pastor. He is like an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don't agree with."

Obama went on to talk more broadly about the relationship between blacks and Jews, saying: "the point I make is this: that I understand the concerns and the sensitivities and one of my goals constantly in my public career has been to try to bridge what was a historically powerful bond between the African American and Jewish communities that has been frayed in recent years. For a whole variety of reasons. I think that I have served as an effective bridge and that's the reason I have overwhelming support among the Jewish community that knows me best, which is the Jewish community in Chicago."

Then, returning to the question of his pastor, and repeating that his pastor is retiring this month, Obama said: "this is always a sensitive point, what you don't want to do is distance yourself or kick somebody away because you are now running for president and you are worried about perceptions, particularly when someone is basically winding down their life and their career."
(The Anti-Defamation League confirms that there is no evidence of anti-Semitism from Wright. For a recent JTA article examining Obama's positions on all of this, see "ADL leader says Obama has Settled Farrakhan Issue": http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/2008022720080227obamafarrakhandebate.html)

The second questioner asked Obama about emails that have circulated, suggesting he's a Muslim. Obama called the emails "virulent"; they started early in the campaign, he said, and have come out in waves, "magically appear[ing]" in states before primaries and caucuses. They contend that Obama is a Muslim, that he went to a madrass, that he used a Koran to swear himself into the Senate, and/or that he doesn't pledge allegiance to the flag.
"If anyone is still puzzled about the facts, in fact I have never been a Muslim," he said. "We had to send CNN to look at the school that I attended in Indonesia where kids were wearing short pants and listening to ipods to indicate that this was not a madrassa but was a secular school in Indonesia."

The next questioner asked about the reports that Obama's advisors included Zbigniew Brzezinski (Jimmy Carter's national security advisor) and several others perceived as anti-Israel.
"There is a spectrum of views in terms of how the U.S. and Israel should be interacting," Obama said. "It has evolved over time." Obama said that when Brzezinksi was national security advisor, he would not have been considered outside the mainstream of that spectrum. Noting that Brzezinski "is now considered by many in the Jewish community anathema," Obama said: "I know Brzezinski. He's not one of my key advisors. I've had lunch with him once, I've exchanged emails with him maybe 3 times. He came to Iowa to introduce me for a speech on Iraq. He and I agree that Iraq was an enormous strategic blunder and that input from him has been useful in assessing Iraq, as well as Pakistan ... I do not share his views with respect to Israel. I have said so clearly and unequivocally."
He went on to say that the other advisors who he's been criticized for having on his staff are former members of the Clinton administration. He mentioned Tony Lake, the former national security adviser, and Susan Rice, the former assistant secretary of state for African Affairs.

"These are people who strongly believe in Israel's right to exist. Strongly believe in a two-state solution. Strongly believe that the Palestinians have been irresponsible and have been strongly critical of them. [They] share my view that Israel has to remain a Jewish state, that the US has a special relationship with the Jewish state."

He then departed, a bit, from the topic of his advisors, and spoke more generally. "This is where I get to be honest and I hope I'm not out of school here," he said. "I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel, and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel. If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we're not going to make progress."
He took issue with commentators who suggest that talk of anything less than "crushing the opposition" is "being soft or anti-Israel."
"[If] we are never ever going to ask any difficult questions about how we move peace forward or secure Israel" in ways that are "non-military," he said, then "I think we're going to have problems moving forward. And that I think is something we have to have an honest dialogue about."

He pointed out that none of the emails about his advisors mention people on the other side such as Lester Crown, a member of Obama's national finance committee, "considered about as hawkish and tough when it comes to Israel as anybody in the country."
"So, there's got to be some balance here," he said. "I've got a range of perspectives and a range of advisors who approach this issue. They would all be considered well within the mainstream of that bipartisan consensus ... in terms of being pro-Israel. There's never been any of my advisors who questioned the need for us to provide Israel with security, with military aid, with economic aid. That there has to be a two state solution, that Israel has to remain a Jewish state. None of my advisors would suggest that, so I think it's important to keep some of these things in perspective. I understand people's concern with Brzezinski given how much offense the Israel lobby has raised, but he's not one of my central advisers."

He then noted that there has been a "fairly systemic effort" by Hillary Clinton's campaign to "feed these suspicions" about his advisors, citing a new Newsweek article documenting the effort. (Read the article here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/114723?from=rss )

The next question was sort of a follow-up. Given your range of advisors, the questioner asked, how would you approach foreign policy decision-making on Israel and the Middle East?
"Well here's my starting orientation," Obama said: "A - Israel's security is sacrosanct, is non-negotiable. That's point number one. Point number two is that the status quo I believe is unsustainable over time. So we're going to have to make a shift from the current deadlock that we're in. Number three, that Israel has to remain a Jewish state and what I believe that means is that any negotiated peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians is going to have to involve the Palestinians relinquishing the right of return as it has been understood in the past. And that doesn't mean that there may not be conversations about compensation issues. It also means the Israelis will have to figure out how do we work with a legitimate Palestinian government to create a Palestinian state that is sustainable. It's going to have to be contiguous, it's going to have to work - it's going to have to function in some way.

"That's in Israel's interest by the way. If you have a balkanized unsustainable state, it will break down and we will be back in the same boat. So those are the starting points of my orientation. My goal then would be to solicit as many practical opinions as possible in terms of how we're going to move forward on an improvement of relations and a sustainable peace. The question that I will be asking any advisor is how does it achieve the goal of Israel's security and how does it achieve the goal of sustainability over the long term and I want practical, hardheaded, unromantic advice about how we're going to achieve that."

He added that when he was in Ramallah, he told the Palestinians "you can't fault Israel for being concerned about any peace agreement if the Palestinian state or Palestinian Authority or Palestinian leadership does not seem to be able to follow through on its commitments." With respect to negotiations, he said, "you sit down and talk, but you have to suspend trust until you can see that the Palestinian side can follow through and that's a position that I have consistently taken and the one I will take with me to the White House."

"One of the things that struck me when I went to Israel," Obama continued, "was how much more open the debate was around these issues in Israel than they are sometimes here in the United States. It's very ironic. I sat down with the head of Israeli security forces and his view of the Palestinians was incredibly nuanced because he's dealing with these people every day. There's good and there's bad, and he was willing to say sometimes we make mistakes and we made this miscalculation and if we are just pressing down on these folks constantly without giving them some prospects for hope, that's not good for our security situation. There was a very honest, thoughtful debate taking place inside Israel. All of you, I'm sure, have experienced this when you travel there. Understandably, because of the pressure that Israel is under, I think the U.S. pro-Israel community is sometimes a little more protective or concerned about opening up that conversation. But all I'm saying though is that, ultimately, [that] should be our goal -- to have that same clear-eyed view about how we approach these issues."

The next questioner asked what Obama would say to the Jewish community about George Bush and his support for Israel. Obama noted straight off that the Jewish community is "diverse" and "has interests beyond Israel." He said the Jewish community in America has a tradition as a "progressive force" concerned with children, civil rights, and civil liberties.
"Those are values ... much more evident in our Democratic Party and that can't be forgotten."

He said that to the extent some Jews have gone over to the G.O.P, it's been because of Israel. "And what I would simply suggest is look at the consequences of George Bush's policies. The proof is in the point. I do not understand how anybody who is concerned about Israel's security and the threat of Iran could be supportive of George Bush's foreign policy. It has completely backfired. It is indisputable that Iran is the biggest strategic beneficiary of the war in Iraq. We have spent what will soon be close to a trillion dollars strengthening Iran, expanding their influence. How is that helpful to Israel? ... You can't make that argument.
"And so the problem that we've seen in U.S. foreign policy generally has been this notion that being full of bluster and rattling sabers and being quick on the draw somehow makes you more secure.

"And keep in mind that I don't know anybody in the Democratic Party, and I will say this for Hillary Clinton and I will say this for myself, who has indicated in any way that we would tolerate and allow to fester terrorist threats, that we wouldn't hunt down, capture, or kill terrorists, that haven't been supportive of Israel capturing or killing terrorists. So it's not like we're a bunch of folks asking to hold hands and sing Kumbiya.

"When Israel launched its counterattack against Hezbollah in Lebanon during the summer of 2006, I was in South Africa at the time, a place that was not particularly friendly to Israel at the time and I was asked by the press, what did you think? And I said, if somebody invades my country or is firing rockets into my country or kidnapping my soldiers, I will not tolerate that. And there's no nation in the world that would."
At this point, one of Obama's aides told him he had time for one more question. A questioner asked him about press reports that he would consider Sen. Dick Lugar for his administration, given, again, his lack of friendliness toward Israel.

Obama said he was good friends with Lugar, and that Lugar "represents old school bipartisan foreign policy." He said that, among Republicans, Lugar was less ideologically driven, more driven by facts on the ground. After praising Lugar, he said he would "not be so presumptuous" to start talking about his cabinet, given that he is not yet the Democratic nominee.

Obama then decided, since his answer was relatively short, that he would take more questions. I raised my hand, and Obama called on me. I told him that I thought his approach to foreign policy -- negotiating with your enemies - could be powerful, strategically. I said that a few days earlier, I had met with my rabbi in Akron, and mentioned to him that I was going to be here this morning.
"The rabbi asked me to ask you whether you would meet with Hamas," I said.
"The answer is no," Obama said.
"What's the distinction, then," I asked, "between Hamas and Iran?"
"The distinction would be that ... they're not the head of state," he said. "They are not a recognized government ... There is a distinction to be drawn there and a legitimate distinction to be drawn."

"Now, again," he continued, "going back to my experiences in Israel and the discussions I've had with security officials there, I think that there are communications between the Israeli government and Hamas that may be two or three degrees removed, but people know what Hamas is thinking and what's going on and the point is that with respect to Hamas, you can't have a conversation with somebody who doesn't think you should be on the other side of the table. At the point where they recognize Israel and its right to exist, at the point where they recognize that they are not going to be able to shove their world view down the throats of others but are going to have to sit down and negotiate without resort to violence, then I think that will be a different circumstance. That's not the circumstance that we're in right now."

He then turned to the audience to take one more question, about Indonesia (where Obama lived as a child) and the United States' approach to the Muslim world.
Obama said Indonesia represented a good case study. He said Indonesia actually had a very mild, tolerant brand of Islam when he was living there. This existed up through 1997. That year, the Asian financial crisis hit very hard, and Indonesia's GDP contracted by 30 percent. Essentially, a poor country had been hit with a Great Depression. "There was a direct correlation between the collapse of that economy and the rise of fundamentalist Islam inside of Indonesia," he said.

Obama said there is a hard-core group of jihadist fundamentalists in the Islamic world who "we can't negotiate with." He said Richard Clarke, the former chief counter-terrorism advisor in the Bush administration, estimates that there are between 30,000 and 50,000 jihadists worldwide -- "the hard core jihadists [who] would gladly blow up this room." He added, though, that it's a "finite number."
"We have to hunt them down and knock them out. Incapacitate them. That's the military aspects of dealing with this phenomenon ... and that is where military action and intelligence has to be directed."

"The question then is what do we do with the 1.3 billion Muslims who are along a spectrum of belief? Some extraordinarily moderate, some very pious but not violent. How do we reach out to them? And it is my strong belief that that is the battlefield that we have to worry about, and that is where we have been losing badly over the last 7 years. That is where Iraq has been a disaster. That is where the lack of effective public diplomacy has been a disaster. That is where our failure to challenge seriously human rights violations by countries like Saudi Arabia that are our allies has been a disaster. And so what we have to do is to speak to that broader Muslim world in a way that says we will consistently support human rights, women's rights. We will consistently invest in the kinds of educational opportunities for children in these communities, so that madrasas are not their only source of learning. We will consistently operate in ways that lead by example, so that we have no tolerance for a Guantanamo or renditions or torture. Those all contribute to people at least being open to our values and our ideas and a recognition that we are not the enemy and that the Clash of Civilizations is not inevitable."

Obama closed with this: "Now, as I said, we enter into those conversations with the Muslim world being mindful that we also have to defend ourselves against those who will not accept the West, no matter how appropriately we engage. And that is the realism that has to leaven our hopefulness. But, we abandon the possibility of conversation with that broader Muslim world at our own peril."

(After the event, the Obama campaign released a partial transcript to the press. You can find it here: http://elections.jta.org/2008/02/25/obama-reaches-out-to-jewish-leaders/ )

Again, Obama received an extended standing ovation. He had spoken for about 45 minutes. And he was mobbed by well-wishers at the podium. One woman asked him why he was not nearly as specific in the debates. "We have 30 seconds!" Obama said. Another woman said: "It is so refreshing to hear someone think."

When it was my turn, I shook his hand, introduced myself, and told him I had been working hard to defuse the smear campaigns directed at him. "It means a lot," he said. "Thank you."
I asked him if he could give me an autograph for my sons, Meyer and Heshel, and handed him a piece of paper and pen. As he began to write, I started spelling the names. "M-E-Y-E-R," I said, "and Heshel, H-"
But Obama cut me off: "Like Abraham?" he asked.
I was surprised that Obama knew Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Maybe I shouldn't have been. After all, Heschel had marched with Martin Luther King and had been an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War; Heschel was a pious, pluralistic Jew committed to social action. But so few Jews today are even aware of Heschel and his legacy.
I nodded -- Heschel had inspired the naming of our son -- though we spelled it without the "c," something that I forgot, in that moment, to add.
"To Meyer and Heschel," he wrote. "Dream Big Dreams. Barack Obama."

I felt a keen sense, leaving the meeting room Sunday, that the media "storyline" I'd been hearing and reading of late -- that Obama is all eloquence, no substance; that he is a rock star generating a mindless cult of personality -- is itself over-simplistic and false. Obama showed a gut-level understanding of Israel's security needs and the U.S.-Israel friendship. He exhibited a deep sensitivity to the Jewish community's concerns and addressed them, one-by-one. He spoke eloquently and precisely, without notes, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the complexities of Middle East politics, and a clear-eyed vision of how he would proceed as commander-in-chief.

And he was all the more credible because he did not pander. He knew his audience. He knew not everyone in the room would be satisfied when he said he met with Brzezinski because of his views on Iraq. Not all would agree when he said that we have to allow for a debate in this country beyond the hawkish Likud party position, or when he said a future Palestinian state would have to be contiguous. He said those things anyway - just as he told Palestinians in Ramallah that they would have to give up the right of return. He said them because he believes them. And he believes, ultimately, they would help Israel remain a vibrant and secure homeland for the Jewish people.

Obama clearly understood that he needed to reach out to the Jewish community. That's why he convened such a remarkable meeting, nine days before the Ohio primary. He also understood Jewish leaders needed to feel free to ask the toughest questions in an intimate setting. That's why the event was not on his official schedule; that's why the media was not invited.
But he also knew, or course, that only speaking to those 90 or so people would not be enough. As things
were coming to a close, after he finished taking questions, he turned back to the room one more time. "And go out and write emails, guys," he said.
That's what I'm doing.
I hope you'll join me in doing the same.
-Josh

The Lying Despicable Campaign to Turn Jews Against Obama, M.J. Rosenberg

It may be a case of chickens coming home to roost. I'm referring to Tim Russert's offensive questions to Barack Obama about Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan at this week's debate.

Yeah, yeah. I know that this is Tim Russert I'm talking about, a guy who has specialized in boorishness (especially toward Senator Clinton) during the entire campaign this year.

His idea of journalism is always the same: "gotcha." He surprises the candidate with some ancient quote or photo and then hectors him into an explanation. Every question he asks is designed not to produce a useful response but to knock her off her game and show the viewer that Tim (actually his team of researchers) has the ability to confuse the candidate. A stammering response is, for Tim, a hole-in-one. Essentially, Russert is in the oppo research business, not on behalf of any candidate but on behalf of his ratings.


This is not the place to discuss his disrespectful treatment of Clinton because it did not touch on Israel or Middle East issues. But Russert's attack on Obama did and this is an appropriate place to confront it.

The reason I refer to chickens coming home to roost is because I believe that Russert would not have mentioned Farrakhan if segments of the Jewish community had not raised this rather insignificant Muslim preacher into prominence. They did that by publicizing every nasty comment about Jews or Israel the man ever made, as if he had a huge following, was a candidate for high office, or was successfully instigating pogroms.

But that is what some segments of the community enjoy doing. It is as if our identity is only secure when we can point to enemies. Unfortunately, and predictably, our well-publicized responses to Farrakhan's attacks gave him national prominence he does not deserve.

In that sense, it is our own fault that Tim Russert asked Barack Obama about his non-existent relationship with Farrakhan. But it is Russert who asked the question and he is the one who needs to be called out for it. It is also worth noting that Farrakhan is seriously ill with cancer and has been out of the limelight for years -- at least until Russert decided to make him a story when he no longer is one.

Russert noted that Farrakhan had endorsed Obama at a recent prayer meeting and demanded to know, in a series of questions, "do you accept his support?" The question itself is ridiculous because it implies that Farrakhan's "support" for Obama is tantamount to Obama supporting Farrakhan.

It is obvious why Farrakhan "supports" Obama. Farrakhan is a black nationalist and would support any African-American running for President. Similarly, white supremacy groups will support John McCain if Obama is the Democratic nominee. Will Russert ask McCain if he "accepts" the support of the Ku Klux Klan? Of course not, because it is a stupid question although no less stupid than asking Obama if he accepts Farrakhan's support.

But the Farrakhan question was not just stupid. It was ugly, insensitive and disrespectful to Jews. It demonstrated Russert's obliviousness to the dynamite he was playing with: Jewish fears about anti-Semitism in the wake of the Holocaust. There are still thousands of Holocaust survivors among us and hundreds of thousands of their children and grandchildren. Today, in Iran, you have Ahmadinejad who denies the Holocaust took place while suggesting he might instigate another one.

It also was disrespectful to African-Americans, suggesting that every African-American can be held responsible for the actions or statements of every other (this is, of course, the essence of bigotry). It played on the racism of segments of the American public. And it poured fuel on the difficult, but improving, relations between African-Americans and Jews.

This is serious stuff, deadly stuff. But for Russert it was just an opportunity to pump up his ratings. Russert knows Obama does not share Farrakhan's views. (Would a young African-American have made it to the Senate from Illinois if he had?) Furthermore, Obama is a Christian and has no connection to Farrakhan.

Asking Obama to repudiate him is like asking me if I reject the praise the late Meir Kahane once bestowed upon me on the Larry King show. Why would I? Anyone who knows me understands that Kahane and I had nothing in common except our religion. Farrakhan and Obama don't even have that. End of story.

Following his Farrakhan line of attack, Russert went on to Obama's Protestant minister. Obama again said that he did not share his minister's views on anything but issues of faith (I don't share all of my rabbi's views either).

But Obama did not stop there. Although it was not necessary, he elaborated on his views on Jews and Israel. He said that he would not be in politics at all were it not for the support he always received from the Jewish community in Illinois. He called the Israel one "of our most important allies. " He said, " I think that its security is sacrosanct, and that the United States has a special relationship with Israel, as I myself do with the Jewish community."

He then added: " I would not be sitting here were it not for a whole host of Jewish Americans, who supported the civil rights movement and helped to ensure that justice was served in the South. And that coalition has frayed over time around a whole host of issues, and part of my task in this process is making sure that those lines of communication and understanding are reopened."

The bottom line is that Obama, like Senators Clinton and McCain, is a friend of Jews and Israel. But that won't stop his opponents in the community, from swearing on a stack of Bibles that one or the other of them hates Jews, Israel or both.

Remember the lies the people now maligning Obama told about Clinton when she ran for the Senate? If she wins the nomination, they will be repeating them and Tim Russert will be demanding an explanation for the Suha Arafat kiss despite Clinton's record in the Senate. For the haters, it's all fun and games -- although it is anything but for those of us who care about the Jewish people, about Israel and, above all, about America.

I really do not look forward to another eight months of this and I am not referring only to Russert. I refer to those circulating the hate emails in the Jewish community about Obama and Clinton. I refer to the Democratic operatives who are going to scour McCain's record to find evidences of some deviation from the Likud position on borders or Jerusalem or, God forbid, an expression of sympathy for Palestinian children caught in the crossfire. I refer to the attacks on Obama for having a Muslim-sounding name or on Hillary for that innocent and infamous kiss.

It's all garbage. There is no anti-Israel candidate running for President. The partisans of one party or the other who say that there is, and who distort and lie to "prove" their point, need to be told that their tactics are indecent and beyond the pale.

Although the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how to resolve it is a legitimate subject for debate, using Israel or anti-Semitism to score against opposing candidates is not. Worse than that, it disrespects and insults our community.

But don't expect to stop receiving those hate e-mails anytime soon. No matter that they are nothing but lies, just like those e-mails everyone gets promising that a particular pill will enlarge a particular body part. The e-mails about the candidates are no different: lies for the gullible. They deserve the same response. Just hit "delete."

Published at TPM Cafe and as Those Hate Emails: Just Hit Delete, at Israel Policy Forum

Web Clip: Obama: I Will Rebuild Black-Jewish Alliance

In this web video, Barack Obama speaks of rebuilding the bonds between the African-American and Jewish communities.

Obama is a Strong Friend of Israel, by Congressman Robert Wexler, Jerusalem Post

If you're Jewish and spend any time on the Internet, you've read some outlandish things about the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. But the facts are clear: Senator Obama is a strong friend of the American Jewish Community and Israel, and will make ensuring Israel's security a high priority of his presidency.

Barack Obama's record speaks for itself. He has longstanding support among the Jewish community in Illinois, who know first hand his unshakable commitment to Israel's security. In the US Senate, he has established himself as a strong friend of Israel. As a candidate, he has made clear his commitment to deepen the US-Israel relationship and to defend Israel's security as a Jewish state.

Yet Senator Obama is still the target of poorly sourced smears and innuendo, often anonymously circulated in mass e-mails. Sadly, these baseless attacks have been transformed into official Republican talking points. In his February 21, 2008 JPost.com op-ed ("Obama and the Jews" http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1203589810710&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull ) Marc Zell, the Co-Chairman of Republicans Abroad in Israel, compiled a greatest hits of fiction and distortion about Barack Obama culled from one false email after another. To begin with, Zell abandons the tradition of bipartisan support for Israel, and completely ignores Senator Obama's strong record of support for Israel:

Iran divestment: Senator Obama introduced priority legislation strongly supported by the pro-Israel community to make it easier for states to divest their pension funds from Iran, as a means of increasing economic pressure to dissuade Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons. The divestment idea grew out of a meeting between Senator Obama and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year.

Hamas: Senator Obama has been steadfast in taking a hard line against Hamas until it recognizes Israel, renounces violence, and abides by past agreements. He has been clear that the Palestinians' suffering is a result of their own failed leadership. He was a cosponsor of the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act.

Travel to Israel: Barack Obama traveled to Israel in 2006 and visited the home of an Israeli family that had been destroyed by a Katyusha rocket. Months later, when Hizbullah attacked Israel, he spoke out strongly for Israel's right to defend itself.

Israel's defense: Senator Obama has called for deepening US-Israel defense cooperation, especially in the area of missile defense, to ensure that Israel has the qualitative military edge it needs to defend itself.

Ignoring Senator Obama's record, Zell travels a low road filled with lies and distortions. In a sense, he has done us a service by demonstrating the total disregard for facts that Republicans will use to try to win this election. But these falsehoods cannot stand, so I will rebut each of them in turn.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Zell says Brzezinski heads the Obama foreign policy team. This is false. Brzezinski endorsed Barack Obama because he agrees with Senator Obama's views on Iraq. He is not an adviser to the campaign, and has done no work for the campaign.

Robert Malley. Zell says Malley is on Senator Obama's team. Malley is one of hundreds of people who have sent advice to the campaign. He is not one of Barack Obama's Middle East advisers.

Susan Rice: Zell repeats a lie that Susan Rice, while advising John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, advised him to propose former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker as Middle East envoys. There is only one problem: Senator Kerry made that statement in December 2003, and Susan Rice did not join his campaign until July 2004.

Pastor Jeremiah Wright: Zell cites controversial statements about Israel made by the Pastor at Barack Obama's Chicago church. It is unfair to attribute Pastor Wright's views to Barack Obama, particularly because Senator Obama has stated explicitly and repeatedly that he disagrees with Pastor Wright's views on Israel, has told him so directly, and does not turn to his pastor for political advice. Furthermore, the Anti-Defamation league concluded "it has no evidence of any anti-Semitism by Mr. Wright."

Louis Farrakhan: There is no easier way to upset the American Jewish Community than by mentioning Farrakhan. But Zell omits the most crucial information: Barack Obama has repeatedly, and explicitly, condemned the anti-Semitic views of Louis Farrakhan for over 20 years, calling his statements "abhorrent." Obama has spoken out forcefully against anti-Semitism in the African-American community, most recently in a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

Zell could have easily established the truth about any of these matters, with very limited research. Responsible journalists have had no trouble uncovering and reporting the truth. The conservative New York Sun editorialized on January 9, 2008 that "Mr. Obama's commitment to Israel, as he has articulated it so far in his campaign, is quite moving and a tribute to the broad, bipartisan support that the Jewish state has in America…. He has chosen to put himself on the record in terms that Israel's friends in America, at least those not motivated by pure political partisanship, can warmly welcome."

And on February 21, 2008, Eli Lake of the New York Sun reported that "the national security team that emerges around Mr. Obama is one that is in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. The Senator's advisers favor a withdrawal from Iraq and see it as a distraction from the wider war on Al-Qaeda; they have developed a detailed policy on how to exit the country. The campaign favors high-level diplomatic engagement with Syria and Iran, but in the context of changing the behavior of these regimes. And the foreign policy team, like the candidate, does not support pressuring Israel into negotiations with Hamas."

Unfortunately, Zell is more interested in using falsehoods to win an election than standing up for Israel and American-Israeli relations. But across America, Jewish voters have had no trouble sorting out fact from fiction, and have found no cause to shy away from supporting Barack Obama. Indeed, they are rallying to his campaign in ever-growing numbers, inspired by his leadership, judgment, and the possibility he represents for truly transformational leadership. Nothing that Marc Zell says can change that.

The writer is a Congressman representing Florida

Feb. 27, 2008

Obama and Israel: Triangulating Between Pragmatism and Idealism, Gidon D. Remba

In a comment on my "The New Republican Jewish Obama Smear: Return of the Big Lie," Richard Silverstein of Tikkun Olam wrote that "some of Obama's statements about Israel have been shamefully one-sided leaving no room for a balanced view of the conflict. He needs to be called on that even by those like me who support him." This raises what for many of us in the progressive community is the most challenging question of the presidential campaign: how do you win an election while at the same time remaining true to your (progressive) principles? Richard, here's my response to your comment.

I’m not sure that we can have it both ways. You acknowledge that adopting a “more one-sided” pro-Israel position is “part of the price you pay for moving from local to national & presidential politics.” Just how much Obama has had to do so is of course precisely the bone of contention between the Obama camp and his right-wing critics. But let's grant, for the sake of argument, that he, like any presidential candidate, has had to do that to some measure.

Yet what positions on the conflict could Obama take, that he hasn’t taken, which would enable him to gain the support of a large majority of the American Jewish community while remaining faithful to a progressive political outlook? We know that a considerable portion of the American Jewish community supports many of the positions of the Israeli peace camp. But can you run a successful presidential race hewing to those positions more so than Obama has so far? Solving this problem requires a complex triangulation between pragmatism and idealism.

I agree that Obama has made a number of AIPAC-like policy pronouncements throughout the campaign, including those he made to AIPAC in Chicago last year. Yet in several key areas he has clearly deviated from AIPAC orthodoxy. I would say that he has probably succeeded in doing that more so than any Democratic presidential candidate thus far.

First, there’s his statement in favor of negotiations with Syria, which is wisely couched in pro-Israeli government terms. In this, Obama has followed the tack that I (and other American Jewish progressive Zionists) took in late 2006 and early 2007, in my case, in a column in the Jewish press which you discussed at Tikkun Olam, "Look Who's Pressuring Israel”, where I wrote: “In reality, the Bush Administration is pressuring the Israeli government to refuse peace talks with Syria, according to the testimony of Prime Minister Olmert, his advisors and cabinet ministers. AIPAC, and its allies in the organized Jewish community, who rush to loudly protest any time there is a whiff of US pressure on Israel in favor of a peace initiative, has absolutely nothing to say when the White House blocks Israel from talking with Syria.” Following this line, which had become a staple of progressive Zionist/Americans for Peace Now criticism of the Bush Administration—see "APN Slams Bush for Pressuring Israel to Avoid Peace Talks", Obama told AIPAC on March 2, 2007, in a twist on its own never-pressure-Israel dogma: “No Israeli Prime Minister should ever feel dragged to or blocked from the negotiating table by the United States.”

Second, Obama has violated AIPAC orthodoxy, which shuns unconditional direct talks with Iran, relying instead on sanctions and implied threats of preemptive war, by repeatedly calling for negotiations with Iran over the nuclear impasse and other issues.

Third, Obama just told a group of leading American Jews in Cleveland, Ohio, that “there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel. If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we're not going to make progress." (A transcript of Obama's remarks, well worth reading, is here.) AIPAC has not always followed Likud policy of course, but it has often tended to hawkish positions, sometimes more so than the Israeli government itself (as I've discussed in several publications, including "Wanted: A Moderate Pro-Israel Lobby," and "AIPAC Hijack").

Fourth, Obama’s campaign strategist David Axelrod told the New York Times a few weeks ago that, in Roger Cohen’s paraphrase, “There would be no six-year time-outs on Israel-Palestine under an Obama presidency. ‘He’d be actively involved from day one,’ said Axelrod.” AIPAC was quite content to go along with the Bush Administration's policy of malign neglect towards peace efforts during its first six years.

Triangulating between the pragmatic imperatives of winning the Democratic primaries while remaining faithful to his principles, should Obama be criticizing Israeli settlements and occupation policies while running for the Democratic nomination? Should he now, or during the general election campaign, be condemning Israel’s harsh economic pressure on the population of Gaza in response to Qassam rocket attacks? Will that help him win the American Jewish vote and defeat John McCain in the general election? Do we want to turn him into a Ron Paul, a Ralph Nader or a Dennis Kucinich? How much more can he really be like any of them and not marginalize, and forfeit, his candidacy?

During the general election campaign against McCain there will be more opportunity for policy differences on the Middle East (beyond Iraq) to emerge. But I don’t think that the royal road to the White House would have Obama become much more of an advocate for Peace Now positions, or, lehavdil, for those of Jewish Voice for Peace (with whom I disagree on many issues). OK, maybe just a little. But the onus is on us progressive Zionists and other pro-Israel Jewish peaceniks to say precisely how.

The New Republican Jewish Obama Smear: Return of the Big Lie, by Gidon D. Remba

A press release from the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) titled “Nader Calls Out Obama's ‘Pro-Palestinian’ Past” continues the pattern of attacks on Barack Obama using lies, baseless innuendo and guilt by association. Republican Jewish Coalition Executive Director Matt Brooks claimed that "Ralph Nader added to the debate on Senator Obama's views on Israel and the Middle East and raised serious doubts and questions about the true leanings of Senator Obama on these important issues." The RJC is continuing its long tradition of debasing political debate during presidential elections by avoiding real issues and engaging in slanderous attacks, much as it did against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and other Democrats in the 2004 election.

In my response to the RJC’s calumnies from that contest, “Republican Jewish Attack Ads Push Spinning into Sinning,” I pointed out that “A former top Republican strategist has said of President George W. Bush’s senior campaign advisor Karl Rove that his ‘goal is never just to win, it is to destroy your opponent, [use] character assassination, whatever it takes. There is almost nothing Karl would not do. For example, religion was not part of Karl’s life but he viewed it as a political tool to be manipulated.’ (Wall Street Journal, Oct. 21, 2004) The Republican Jewish Coalition has followed the lead of its non-Jewish Republican mentors.”

The RJC now imagines that if it repeats fabrications and innuendos about Obama and Israel often enough, American Jews will start to believe its propaganda. The Republican Jewish Coalition continues to debase American electoral politics not only by repeating bald-faced lies about Obama, but by stirring up the bad odor of Jewish chauvinism, pushing American Jews to believe that to be pro-Israel one must be anti-Palestinian.

The RJC press release concludes with big-lie tactics which would have made Joseph Goebbels proud, shamelessly suggesting that “Obama supports Ralph Nader's policies, which consistently condemn Israel's right to defend itself against terrorism” and that Obama “shares this anti-Israel bias,” which “puts into doubt his commitment to the safety and security of Israel.”
In fact, neither the RJC nor Nader offer any evidence whatsoever that Barack Obama “supports Ralph Nader’s policies, which consistently condemn Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism,” as the RJC charges. Quite the contrary, given Obama’s long track record of whole-hearted support for Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism, and his defense of Israel’s and the Jewish community’s rights and needs both in the Illinois State Senate and the U.S. Senate, the RJC’s libels don’t even pass the laugh test. Goebbels wrote that “when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.” Precisely what kind of fools does the RJC take American Jews for?

Once again, the Republican Jewish Coalition, which calls itself “the “sole voice of Jewish Republicans to Republican decision makers and the Jewish community,” has set itself up as the Jewish Swift Boat Brigade. When the original Swift Boaters disseminated their smear campaign against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, Senator John McCain was among the first to condemn its ads and statements as “dishonest and dishonorable…very, very wrong.” Now that McCain is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, he should once again denounce Republican smear campaigns against his opponent, and insist that all groups participating in public discourse on the presidential campaign refrain from fear-mongering, slander and smear. We, the American Jewish community, are owed a far higher standard of debate than the political sewage being shoveled out by the Republican Jewish Coalition.

More examples from the RJC Press Release:

1. Fictions About Obama’s Positions on Israel: RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks now cites a comment from newly announced presidential aspirant Ralph Nader that “Sen. Obama had reversed his positions on Israel. Nader said Sen. Obama's ‘better instincts and his knowledge have been censored by himself’ and that Sen. Obama was ‘pro-Palestinian when he was in Illinois before he ran for the state Senate’ and ‘during the state Senate.’ Yet Nader offers not a scintilla of evidence for his claims, which have been refuted before.

These claims originate with the Palestinian American one-state advocate and Electronic Intifada editor Ali Abunimah, who was described by right-winger Ed Lasky as “not the most reliable source” in his own mendacious assault on Obama in the American Thinker.

The New York Daily News reported that “Pro-Palestinian Prof. Rashid Khalidi denied a report that Obama used to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and had recently shifted his stance to pro-Israel.” [3/6/07] (Abunimah was a protégé of Khalidi, who is now the Edward Said Professor or Arab Studies at Columbia University, and then at the University of Chicago).

2. Twisting Obama Quotations to Convey the Opposite Meaning: The RJC continues its distortions by recycling a quote taken so far out of context as to convey the opposite of what Obama actually said: it claims that “Sen. Obama has caught criticism for pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel statements and sentiments before. In March 2007, Sen. Obama was criticized for saying that ‘Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinians.’ In fact, The Baltimore Jewish Times reported that Obama “went on to say that the cause of that suffering was the Palestinians' own terror-sponsoring leadership.”

Obama’s impeccable pro-Israel record as a legislator and public figure has been summarized here and here.

3. The Anti-Israel Advisor Smear: The RJC press release continues its mud-slinging by recycling discredited charges about “advisors” to Obama who have “controversial” positions on Israel: “Obama has also been criticized for stocking his campaign with several controversial advisors including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Malley, Samantha Power and Susan Rice.”

In fact, Obama has not “stocked his campaign” with Brzezinski and Malley, who are not advisors to Obama, and Power and Rice do not advise him on Israel and the Middle East; instead, well-known, respected pro-Israel policy mavens including Dennis Ross and Dan Shapiro advise him on Israel.

For the real story on Obama’s foreign policy advisors, see “The Truth About Obama’s Foreign Policy Advisors,” by Obama friend and campaign insider Jack S. Levin.

JTA: Obama: Don't Equate 'Pro-Israel' and 'Pro-Likud'

Barack Obama faulted elements in the pro-Israel community that he says equate being pro-Israel with being pro-Likud.

"I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt a unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel," the Illinois senator and contender for the Democratic presidential nominee told a group of Jewish leaders in Cleveland on Sunday. "If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we're not going to make progress."

The Likud Party, in the Israeli opposition, advocates minimal territorial concessions to the Palestinians and promotes settlement in the West Bank.

Obama was addressing a series of attacks, most from Republicans, that suggest that he has surrounded himself with anti-Israel advisers. He noted that he did not take the advice of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter administration national security adviser named in some of the attack e-mails.

Obama explained that he accepted Brzezinski's endorsement, based on shared views on ending the Iraq war, but did not share Brzezinski's critical views of Israel. Nonetheless, he cautioned against marginalizing those with different views.

"Frankly some of the commentary that I've seen which suggests guilt by association or the notion that unless we are never ever going to ask any difficult questions about how we move peace forward or secure Israel that is non military or non belligerent or doesn't talk about just crushing the opposition that that somehow is being soft or anti-Israel, I think we're going to have problems moving forward," he said.

Obama also said he encountered more nuanced views among Israelis than Americans.

"There was a very honest, thoughtful debate taking place inside Israel," he said. "All of you, I'm sure, have experienced this when you travel there. Understandably, because of the pressure that Israel is under, I think the U.S. pro-Israel community is sometimes a little more protective or concerned about opening up that conversation. But all I'm saying though is that actually ultimately should be our goal, to have that same clear eyed view about how we approach these issues."

The meeting, taking place as the campaigns of Obama and U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) blitz the state ahead of a March 4 primary, was off the record, but a rough transcript was later made available.

http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/107170.html

2/24/08

Obama's Change Could be Good for Israel, Daniel Levy, Ha'aretz

Here's something else to add to an Israeli's menu of worries: The United States presidential elections may produce change in 2009. Or so fear people like Malcolm Hoenlein, the professional head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who said on a recent visit to Israel that all the talk of "change" is an "opening for mischief," and not good for Israel.

Apparently the status quo is so idyllic for Israel that one should wish for nothing more than that it be perpetuated eternally.

Of course not all change is good, but the Israeli-American relationship could benefit greatly from a dose of new thinking - in terms of both the nature and the exclusivity of that alliance.

There are already two storm clouds looming over the blissful American-Israeli landscape, but they are the product of current, not possible future, policies. The first is that reality is forcing more Americans to take a closer look at the Middle East. They see the scorched earth left behind by their government's recent policies, and the investment of U.S. lives and lucre. As they begin to ask questions, the role of the bilateral partnership is inevitably placed under increasing scrutiny. Sometimes the scrutiny is unfair: Israel, for example, did not get the U.S. into Iraq. And sometimes it's more justified: Complicity in Israeli settlements and occupation carry a heavy toll for America's standing in the region and beyond.

The candidacy of Ron Paul, on the Republican side, has been a lightning rod for that sentiment. His campaign broke party records, raising $4.2 million in contributions in one day, mainly in online donations. Paul will not be the Republican candidate for president, but the tendency for people to ask, "What is going on with the U.S. in the Middle East, and why does our ally Israel make things more difficult?" should give cause to reflect. The business-as-usual approach of many of Israel's supporters is not sustainable over time.

Four or eight more years of aggressive, divisive, costly and failed American policies in the region - especially if supported by the so-called pro-Israel camp - will exacerbate this tension, perhaps exponentially.

The second cloud is that Israel is today hitched to an America that is weakened economically, stretched militarily, deeply divided at home and decidedly unpopular abroad. To the extent that the next president continues the policies that have contributed to those trends, Israel too will pay a price. When Israel is so dependent on the U.S., and the U.S. is wounded, we feel it.

The warm rhetoric continues to emanate from Washington, and that feels comforting. The problem is that its utility is diminished, and nice words are no substitute for the smart plans that would actually make the U.S. and Israel more, not less, secure. Israel should hope for and encourage a change that lifts America out of its current morass, while at the same time diversifying its ally portfolio.

Haaretz's "Israel Factor" notwithstanding (and most members of that panel look like the Israeli equivalent of the aging WASPs one tends to find on a platform alongside John McCain), it is Barack Obama who has best positioned himself to reverse these trends and thereby guarantee the U.S.-Israel relationship. An Obama presidency is more likely to be the antidote to further tensions than their source.

The response so far in Israel to the Obama candidacy has split between gevald and hatikva. The former has more to do with email slur campaigns and our own prejudices than with hard policy positions espoused by the Illinois senator. The latter is easily understood when set against the prospect in 2009 of a 1999 election redux, of Bibi (Netanyahu) vs. Barak (Ehud), yawn. Perhaps Obama's ability to mobilize young people and to transcend political indifference, and his audacity to hope, will be infectious here in the 51st state of the U.S.A.

But Israel should be looking beyond the election. Yes, an Obama presidency is more likely to reverse America's decline - internally and externally - and to correct the hubris, incompetence and adventurism of the Bush years. The same might also be true of Clinton and McCain, though it seems less likely. It is what Obama could do to reenergize America that is first and foremost the good news for Israel. And when he talks of "changing the mindset" that got America into the Iraq war, Obama implies a policy of realism and engagement that stands to stabilize the region and even advance genuine peace. Israel could well be a main beneficiary of such a change.

But what if the next president is all about more of the same or something very similar? Israel must plan for the possibility of an America that continues in its decline, that can deliver less, and remains militarily bogged down in Iraq and perhaps elsewhere in the region. Under this scenario, the special relationship with Israel will become an ever-more contentious issue. America itself might increasingly turn its gaze toward Asia.

So while following American developments closely, and hoping for change, Israel should also be more active out there on the dating circuit. Though efforts have been made to strengthen other alliances, results have been mixed so far, and our options will remain limited so long as the Palestinian issue remains unresolved.

The preference for a prolonged strategic relationship with the U.S. should not extend to an exclusive reliance on that relationship or preclude placing some eggs in other baskets - in Europe, in Asia, and yes, also in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Daniel Levy, a senior fellow at the New America and Century Foundations, is a former adviser in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and was lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative.

Published 2/22/08 in Ha'aretz

Originally Published in Ha'aretz as "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst"

Some Israeli Hawks Say: Talk with Hamas

Former Shin Bet/General Security Services Chief Ya'akov Perry and Israel's Minister of Transportation, former IDF Chief of Staff Likudnik Shaul Mofaz have joined the growing ranks of Israeli hawks and other pragmatic realists who believe that it is in Israel's security interests to engage in talks with Hamas over a bilateral cease-fire and the release of Israeli captive Gilad Shalit.

In a new interview, former Mossad Chief Efraim Halevy (a Sharon appointee) makes the case once again for the view that Israel's current policy towards Hamas and the PA is failing and should be replaced by a more realistic strategy (he has made his case in many places during the last year, including in the Wall Street Journal). A new more successful approach, in Halevy's view, would no longer insist on Hamas' recognition of Israel as a pre-condition for any negotiations, much as Israel has never insisted on this pre-condition with any other Arab party with whom it has negotiated. Rather, recognition of Israel should be the outcome of a negotiation process.

Halevy proposes an alternative way which would enable Israel to continue to avoid direct contact with Hamas, but bargain with Hamas all the same: indirect negotiations through a third party acceptable to both sides. The potential dividend to Israel's security? Not only a cease-fire which would end the rocket attacks on Sderot and southern Israel, and avoiding a costly invasion of Gaza which might also fail to achieve its objectives, while also risking a renewed flare-up of hositilities with Hezbollah in the north, as happened in the summer of 2006, leading to the Lebanon War. A serious dialogue through a third party could even drive a wedge between Iran and Hamas, Halevy suggests.

While Halevy seems pessimistic that the Olmert government will try this approach, latest reports indicate that there are third party mediation efforts going on right now between the Israeli government and Hamas over a cease-fire and prisoner release. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak's threats of a coming full-scale Gaza invasion may be intended to strengthen Israel's hand in the negotiations, so that Hamas believes it may have much to lose if it fails to cut a deal with Israel.

Back here in the States, suggesting that Israel talk to Hamas in any way, shape or form is viewed as heresy worthy of excommunication (despite the fact that such respected figures as Bush's former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff led the U.S. to victory in the first Persian Gulf War, has endorsed this view). No presidential candidate, including Barack Obama, will so much as flirt with such notions. American electoral politics is no place for subtle distinctions, deviations from the slogans of political orthodoxy, or tectonic shifts in thinking about the Middle East. Or is it?

Doni Remba

Israel's Mossad, Out of the Shadows
Washington Dispatch: Former Israeli intelligence chief Efraim Halevy explains why he advocates talks with Hamas.
By Laura Rozen
Mother Jones
February 19, 2008

It's fair to call Efraim Halevy—who served three Israeli prime ministers as chief of the Mossad, Israel's national intelligence service—a hawk. He negotiated a covert peace deal with Jordan that preceded the countries' public treaty in 1994. Nine years later, he resigned as head of Israel's National Security Council over policy differences with then-prime minister Ariel Sharon. And when he left the Mossad, Halevy received the prestigious CIA Director's Award from then-director George Tenet for his assistance to the U.S. intelligence service—the exact details of which Halevy cannot disclose.

This month, St. Martin's Press published a paperback edition of Halevy's riveting 2006 memoir of his 35 years in the Mossad, Man in the Shadows: Inside the Middle East Crisis with a Man Who Led the Mossad. I interviewed Halevy by phone and email about his career, details of covert channels in his book, and his recent public call for both the Bush administration and Israel to talk with the Palestinian militant group, Hamas.

Mother Jones: Mr. Halevy, in your memoir you make clear your belief that Europe, and to a lesser extent the United States, have not fully come to terms with the national security threats posed by Islamic militancy and terrorism. Yet you've also said it would be a grave mistake for the West to treat all Islamist terrorist groups the same way, and argued that Israel should have some sort of process for talking with Hamas. If the West, led by Washington, continues to shun Hamas as an illegitimate terrorist group, do you see a risk that the group could take on a more nihilistic type of violence, a la al Qaeda?

Efraim Halevy: Hamas is not al Qaeda and, indeed, al Qaeda has condemned them time and time again. Hamas may from time to time have tactical, temporary contact with al Qaeda, but in essence they are deadly adversaries. The same goes for Iran. Hamas receives funds, support, equipment, and training from Iran, but is not subservient to Tehran. A serious effort to dialogue indirectly with them could ultimately drive a wedge between them.

MJ: Why do you think Israel and Washington should talk with Hamas?

EH: Hamas has, unfortunately, demonstrated that they are more credible and effective as a political force inside Palestinian society than Fatah, the movement founded by [former Palestinian Authority president] Yassir Arafat, which is now more than ever discredited as weak, enormously corrupt and politically inept.

[Hamas has] pulled off three "feats" in recent years in conditions of great adversity. They won the general elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006; they preempted a Fatah design to wrest control of Gaza from them in 2007; and they broke out of a virtual siege that Israel imposed upon them in January 2008. In each case, they affected a strategic surprise upon all other players in the region and upon the United States, and in each case, no effective counter strategy mounted by the US and Israel proved effective.

Security in the West Bank is assured not by the fledgling and ineffective security forces of Abu Mazen now undergoing training once again by American-led instructors. It is the nightly incursions of the Israeli Defense Forces into the West Bank, their superior intelligence, together with that of the Israel Security Agency that does the job.

Current strategy in the West Bank to forge a credible Palestinian security capacity is floundering; indeed, several of the deaths of Israelis at the hands of West Bank terrorists were perpetrated by none other than members of the units under the command of Abu Mazen.
It makes sense to approach a possible initial understanding including Hamas—but not exclusively Hamas—at a time when they are still asking for one. No side will gain from a flare up leading to Israel re-entering the Gaza strip in strength to undo the ill-fated unilateral disengagement of 2005.

MJ: Should Hamas be required to recognize Israel's right to exist before Israel would talk with it?

EH: Israel has been successful in inflicting very serious losses upon Hamas in both Gaza and the West Bank and this has certainly had an effect on Hamas, who are now trying to get a "cease fire." But this has not cowed them into submission and into accepting the three-point diktat that the international community has presented to them: to recognize Israel's right to exist; to honor all previous commitments of the Palestinian Authority; and to prevent all acts of violence against Israel and Israelis. The last two conditions are, without doubt, sine qua non. The first demands an a priori renunciation of ideology before contact is made. Such a demand has never been made before either to an Arab state or to the Palestinian Liberation Organization/Fatah. There is logic in the Hamas' position that ideological "conversion" is the endgame and not the first move in a negotiation.

MJ: How should such talks be conducted?

EH: Hamas shuns direct contact and negotiations with Israel and this actually meets Israel's reciprocal attitude to them. The same is true of the United States. But Hamas is eager to "engage" the two indirectly and reach a verifiable cease fire, and understands that could lead to more "down the road."

Such a strategy of indirect proximity engagement, whilst covering our flanks, offers the prospects of lowering the temperature in the region, easing constraints, and opening up real possibilities of social and economic progress. This is a policy that could be tested, and is warranted by the abject failure of the present Palestinian Authority rump leadership in the West Bank led by the aging, tired and sad Abu Mazen [Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas], and his able prime minister Salaam Fayyad, a great economist and banker but a man who does not pretend to overstay his time.

MJ: Regarding your mention of "indirect proximity talks." Structurally, how does that work? Is it conducted by a third party, like Egypt or Turkey? Who would be a trusted broker?

EH: Proximity talks can sometime be done through third parties who are states or individuals—third party emissaries who are not states. It can be done by personalities acceptable to both sides.

MJ: How do we know this is not already taking place?
EH: I don't know whether it's occurring or not. If it's occurring, I applaud it.

MJ: Do you envisage that new leadership in Washington next year could reject the path taken by Bush of refusing to deal with Hamas and make a big change towards the approach you recommend?

EH: I have no idea. I don't want to second guess, and I don't know who the leadership will be. It would be politically incorrect to start surmising what the new leadership would do a year from now. A year in life of the Middle East is a millennium.

MJ: Again and again, Israel and Washington too have tried to engineer which Palestinians would come to power, to whom they would speak or recognize, etc. Is this itself problematic? Should the West step back from trying to manipulate internal Palestinian politics?

EH: Yes, for two reasons. First, is the sovereign right of Palestinians to decide who their leadership should be. I think that is the basis of democracy. More than that, it is the best possible way in my opinion for a country or society to determine how it wants to be governed and how it wants to be lead. And second, so far it must be admitted that attempts to do this [manipulate internal Palestinian politics] have not succeeded. After all, in the final analysis, it would not be possible to create and fashion a leadership from without.

MJ: It's not just Washington and Israel, but Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas who is asking those countries not to deal with Hamas, but rather strengthen him. So do you think it's more of the same phenomenon if the West then picks Hamas as the more legitimate representation of the Palestinians?

EH: I don't think one or the other are the sole representation. But I think that the way things are at the moment, the two of them have a major role in the leadership of the Palestinian people, and to exclude one and to magnify the other artificially will not lead to a productive outcome.
I don't know whether it is Abu Mazen who is pushing Washington and Israel not to deal with Hamas, or Abu Mazen who is acquiescing to them, or some combination of both. I don't know who the stronger element in this policy is.

There is a triangle of forces: Israel, the Abu Mazen–led group in Ramallah, and the [Bush] administration. They have become mutually interdependent on this policy and one cannot rule without the other two. That's the way it is at the moment.

MJ: You are not optimistic that the current administration will change course?

EH: It appears by all indications that neither Israel nor the United States are prepared to contemplate such a test of alternative strategy. Therefore, what we seem to be in for is a period where Israel will continue to negotiate the details of a permanent settlement to the dispute with a rump Palestinian leadership that has already indicated it will not run for re-election in the upcoming elections in 2009.

Laura Rozen is Mother Jones' national security correspondent.www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/02/israel-mossad-out-of-the-shadows.html

Why Obama is Better for Israel, by Daniel Levy

The debate around the Barack Obama candidacy has not surprisingly heated up of late in the Jewish and pro-Israel communities. Most of the arguments are well rehearsed and predictable, (some are spurious and deplorable) but they often miss the point and fail to connect between the broader Obama appeal and its relevance to the US-Israel equation. That connection is as follows: the Israel-America relationship is best served by a president who can bring external strength to the US through greater internal unity, can restore America’s standing and credibility in the Middle East, be an effective global coalition-builder and deal-broker and end, how can I put it, fairy-tale based foreign policy. And Barack Obama looks like the person to do those things.

Of course, the Jewish community is not immune to the kind of smear campaigns, innuendos and direct appeals to racism and Islamophobia that have been a feature of the more general anti-Obama sewer politics. In response, the alpha list of Jewish leadership, Orthodox, Reform, ADL, AJC and more, did the right thing and published this open letter speaking out against the “hateful emails,” and “abhorrent rhetoric,” that “mischaracterized Senator Barack Obama’s religious beliefs and who he is as a person.”

Unfortunately, there are attempts to kosher those kinds of smear campaigns for the specific consumption of American Jews—by making it about Israel. Look at his color, did you hear about his religion? He must be anti-Israel. When I was back home in Israel recently I was shocked to discover that an ugly hate campaign being distributed virally by email in the US has made its way into Hebrew and is doing the rounds in Israel. The Obama campaign has done an impressive job at pushing back in clarifying the senator’s record and positions in the Jewish-American and Israeli press. I know this election campaign is all about change but the pro-Israel community is often more interested in continuity and, in terms of the historic relationship between America and Israel, Obama offers that. Dare I say it, Obama seems more in step with Bill Clinton’s Israel policy as president than Hillary does (her policy, for instance, contradicts her husband’s peace plan of December 2000). Obama represents the classic appeal to a relationship based on security for Israel, stability in the region, active American diplomatic engagement and pursuit of peace - talk to the bad guys if that is what can deliver results and certainly don’t prevent Israel from talking to it’s neighbors (the Bush administration has, for instance, discouraged Israel’s leaders from resuming negotiations with Syria).

It is actually the Republican neocons under Bush 43 who have been the transformational policy change and new idea people when it comes to the Middle East. And to paraphrase Obama himself from a different conversation, to recognize that they had transformational ideas is not to support those ideas, agree with them, or think they were good ideas. Bush’s policies in the region have not been good for America or Israel. The Middle East is more radically and dangerously destabilized and Israel faces a more uncertain security environment.

So what is the point on Obama that gives him the edge on Israel? It sounds a little unusual, but a strong case can be made that the most important issue for an American politician to have gotten right in the last years from a pro-Israel perspective was the Iraq war. And I mean opposition to that war. And Obama got it right. His instincts and judgment trumped the supposed ‘experience’ of others. I know it’s fashionable in some quarters to view the Iraq war as carrying a Made in Israel label, but at the highest levels of the political and military leadership (and according to reports this includes then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon) the Israelis were skeptics, understanding the possible implications for regional equilibrium, the spread of al-Qaeda, and the oxygen this would suck up from attention to other issues.

Not all of the consequences of that war were so unpredictable. With the removal of its major regional competitor, Iran now has more influence and is emboldened. Al-Qaeda was able to establish a new base of operations in Iraq to which it has recruited fighters from across the Arab world and from which it has been able to spread out and conduct attacks in Jordan, in the Egyptian Sinai, in Lebanese refugee camps, and there are reports of al-Qaeda copycat cells in Palestinian areas. That is getting very close to home for Israelis and it is a dramatically unwelcome development. America is overstretched and bogged down militarily and its reputation is battered on so many levels. None of this of course is good for America but it is also very bad news indeed for Israel. So, the Iraq decision matters. And after the CNN debate there is no need for a refresher course on which candidate was ready, on day one, to oppose the war.

The combination of an American president deeply committed to Israel but vilified internationally and regionally, who pursues dangerously misguided Middle East policies and does so with woeful incompetence to boot, turns out not to be so ideal. A far greater asset to the pro-Israel community would be an American president equally committed to Israel and her security, and who is also able to build regional and global alliances, is capable of restoring America’s image, of deploying concerted, effective, and when necessary, tough diplomacy, and who, by uniting America from within, can strengthen the America that is then projected outwards. Barack Obama seems to have best positioned himself to be that president. As Senator Kennedy noted in endorsing Obama, “when he raises his hand on Inauguration Day, at that very moment, we will lift the spirits of our nation and begin to restore America's standing in the world.”

Here’s what Barack Obama had to say in the most recent CNN presidential debate when discussing Iraq: “I don't want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” Changing that mindset is very much a shared American and Israeli interest. Israel remains strong, but the hawkish Bush years have not been good for stability in Israel’s neighborhood, for Israeli security or for Israel’s long-term interests. Obama’s possibly unique ability to reverse America’s decline, to overcome the politics of fear and demonstrate a leadership that is compelling also outside of America matters to a certain country that is strategically aligned with and even reliant on the US, namely Israel. This point has been missed amidst all the mudslinging. It should matter deeply across the spectrum of the pro-Israel community in America.

Look, I’m an Israeli and this is probably none of my business. But having been a negotiator for the Israeli government and seen first hand the vital role that America can play, it matters to me. To be frank my personal belief is that it is in Israel’s interest for there to be a more robust, assertive and tireless American effort to help secure peace between Israel and her neighbors, that American leadership is perhaps a prerequisite in achieving this, and that American should pursue such an outcome as part of its own national security priorities. The Winograd report just published in Jerusalem that investigates the Lebanon war of summer 2006 is not particularly subtle in pointing out that Israel ’s military capabilities were seriously undermined by a lack of investment in training over the last years. That is a consequence of the Israeli Defense Forces being saddled with what are basically policing duties at checkpoints and in deployments throughout the West Bank. Israel needs to put the occupation behind it. As prime minister Olmert has pointed out, a two state peace deal is an urgent priority for Israel.

But I digress, that’s not what this is about. This is about what might unite most of the pro-Israel community and that centers around strengthening the America-Israel relationship in ways that are mutually beneficial, that bring out the best in both countries, and that can deliver a more stable, secure and peaceful Middle East. Israel’s supporters in America should not feel excluded or alienated from the excitement that surrounds the hope that is Obama, they have every reason, in fact, to embrace and be a part of it.

Daniel Levy is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Prospects for Peace Initiative at The Century Foundation and a Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation.

During the Barak Government, he worked in the Prime Minister's Office as special adviser and head of the Jerusalem Affairs unit under Minister Haim Ramon. He also worked as senior policy adviser to former Israeli Minister of Justice, Yossi Beilin. He was a member of the official Israeli delegation to the Taba negotiations with the Palestinians in January 2001, and previously served on the negotiating team to the “Oslo B” Agreement from May to September 1995, under Prime Minister Rabin. In 2003, he worked as an analyst for the International Crisis Group Middle East Program. Daniel was the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative and prior to joining The Century Foundation and New America Foundation was directing policy planning and international relations at the Geneva Campaign Headquarters in Tel Aviv.

Originally published as "Obama and Israel: Missing the Point" at Daniel Levy's Prospects for Peace blog

Assassinating Terrorist Kingpins: Successful Counterterrorism or Opening the Gates of Hell?, Gidon D. Remba

The assassination last week in Damascus of Imad Mugniyah, the notorious Hezbollah arch-terrorist, raises anew the long-swirling controversy over the practical efficacy, wisdom and moral justification for the Israeli and American counter-terrorism strategy of targeted killing. Israeli news correspondent Ronen Bergman offered the following trenchant observation in “Bracing for Revenge” in the New York Times (Feb. 18, 2008):

"However much backslapping and Champagne-cork popping may be going on in Tel Aviv and Langley, Va., the questions remains: Was it worth the effort and resources and the mortal risk to the agents involved? Few would deny that Mr. Mugniyah, who had the blood of many hundreds of Americans and Israelis, not to mention Frenchmen, Germans and Britons, on his hands, deserved the violent death that befell him, or that eliminating this top-flight mass murderer might prevent more death. But this act of combined vengeance, punishment and pre-emption might extract a far greater cost in the future…

At Mr. Mugniyah’s funeral on Thursday, Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, threatened to retaliate against Israel, saying, “Let it be an open war anywhere.”… Hezbollah has no doubt that it was Israel who eliminated its top terrorist, and once more it is bent on vengeance. As Hezbollah draws no fine distinctions between the United States and Israel, both nations, along with Jews around the world, might well have to pay the price for the loss of the man whose mystical aura was as important as his operational prowess.

In the immediate aftermath, Hezbollah has chosen not to respond with volleys of rockets aimed at Galilee, as many Israelis feared. But an inkling of how the group might respond can be found in the July 2007 statements of Michael McConnell, America’s director of national intelligence, expressing grave apprehension about Hezbollah sleeper cells in the United States that could go into action should the Americans cross the organization’s “red line.”

This line has now been crossed. Only the severest of countermeasures by the intelligence services of Israel and the United States will prevent last week’s assassination, justified as it was, from costing a vastly disproportionate price in blood."

I took the train today from New Jersey to Penn Station and saw the new signs at Amtrak and around the station informing passengers of the new security procedures: random checks of carry-on baggage, officers with automatic weapons and bomb-sniffing dogs patrolling platforms and trains. Having lived through mass terrorist attacks in Israel, it is clear to me that, reassuring though such steps might be, they are woefully inadequate. They remain a giant leap short of Israeli security practices in public places like commuter train stations. Moreover, the security holes remaining in the public transportation system are so large that one could almost drive an explosive-laden Mack truck through them. A determined terrorist—even a not-so-determined terrorist—can still carry a bomb into Penn Station’s main public areas through any of the non-secure trains linking from the tri-state area to Penn Station, or from the public entrances from 7th and 8th avenues, and wreak massive damage, killing dozens if not hundreds of people.

Trust me, I’m not giving the terrorists any ideas: they’ve done this countless times already in public places in Europe and in Israel. Innumerable security experts have been warning for years that we are long overdue for such attacks in the U.S. Now, the assassination of Hezbollah’s number two may well be the trigger which activates its sleeper cells in the U.S., pushing us off the cliff into the bloody hell of terrorist revenge on American soil.

U.S. government officials—federal, state and local—along with transportation authority leaders, still refuse to take the kinds of precautions which could save hundreds of innocent lives. These would entail, among other things, checking every passenger and parcel before he or she enters Penn Station and other mass transit points. It would vastly slow down our public transportation system, and snarl public commuting. I fear that we will take this highly inconvenient step only after we have sacrificed many more American lives.

Our current dilemma makes relevant once more an essay I wrote on the controversies surrounding targeted killing and assassination of terrorists in response to Steven Spielberg’s film Munich, titled Munich’s Moral Muddle: Steven Spielberg, Counterterrorism and Middle East Peace. There I show why, contrary to Spielberg (in his incarnation as the film’s director), and screenwriter Tony Kushner, state assassination of terrorists without trial is both moral and legal, and a necessary part of safeguarding our own human rights.

But I maintain that “Strong counter-terrorist efforts which are never followed by serious and sustained attempts to encourage Palestinian support for reconciliation with Israel, failing to exploit opportunities for peace, are misbegotten. Much the same is true of preemption which never knows when it is best to forbear the use of lethal force. Both condemn Israel to live by the sword forever, nurturing the cynical right’s self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.” Now what applies with regard to the targeted killing of Palestinian terrorists does not hold when it comes to the Lebanese Hezbollah. Nonetheless, might the assassination of Mugniyeh have been one more case in which it would have been wiser to forbear in the exercise of our legitimate right to employ preemptive force?

Munich’s Moral Muddle: Steven Spielberg, Counterterrorism and Middle East Peace
Gidon D. Remba

Excerpts Delivered as a Talk at Beth Emet The Free Synagogue, Evanston, IL

I. Spielberg’s Critique of Israeli Counterterrorism
II: The Historical Context: European Capitulation to Palestinian Terrorism after Munich
III. Targeted Killing and Jewish Ethics
IV. Just War, Terrorism and Preemptive Killing
V. Selective Criticism of Targeted Killings
VI. Spielberg’s Volte Face on Israeli Counterterrorism After Munich

I. Spielberg’s Critique of Israeli Counterterrorism

Steven Spielberg’s describes his film Munich as his “prayer for peace.” How so? Spielberg explained to the Los Angeles Times that answering aggression with aggression “creates a vicious cycle of violence with no real end in sight.” He has said much the same thing to Time magazine: “a response to a response doesn't really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine.” And indeed the message of the film is that striking back with force against terrorism only breeds more terrorism—a war on terror only engenders terror—and compromises the very moral values which differentiate the counterterrorists from the terrorists themselves. Spielberg’s juxtaposition of the World Trade Towers at the end of the film is meant to generalize this message from the Israeli context to the US war on terror. But Spielberg’s message is either banal or misbegotten. His film offers little insight into the Palestinian-Israeli tragedy for navigating the moral maze of war and peace.

It is worth noting that since it is the Israelis in the Mossad hit team who undergo these epiphanies about the moral dubiousness of preventive or retributive killing—not the Palestinians—criticisms of the film which suggest that the Israelis are portrayed as morally equivalent to Palestinian terrorists are groundless. It is, after all, the Israelis who are portrayed as fastidious about avoiding civilian casualties, the Israelis, not the Palestinians, who exhibit moral compunctions about every use of lethal force, a fact which stands in stark contrast with the indiscriminate slaughter perpetrated by Palestinian Black September members at Munich. But the overriding message of the film is clear—and it is delivered in the voice of the protagonist, Avner, the leader of the Israeli team, and secondarily in the voices of those other members of his team who increasingly question whether killing terrorists, or suspected terrorists, can be squared with their Jewish moral values, and with whether it is even effective as a counter-terror tactic. The conclusion they clearly reach is that counter-violence, counter-force is futile, solves nothing, that counter-terror tactics like targeted killings or assassinations of suspected terrorists simply breed more terror and can’t lead to peace. Indeed, several of the hit team members conclude that what they have been doing is both inimical to peace, immoral and un-Jewish.

Indeed, Avner protests, “maybe we will just keep killing them forever,” suggesting that the killing may simply contribute to an endless killing cycle with no exit. His Mossad handler, Ephraim, assures him: “in the end this will help bring peace,” but Avner remains skeptical: “Everyone we killed has been replaced by someone worse, someone more violent and more militant than their predecessor. There is no peace at the end of this,” he cries.

Consider this crucial scene at the end of the film: Avner wonders aloud to Ephraim: maybe we should have arrested the suspected Black September terrorists, as Israel did with Eichmann, rather than assassinating them. And there may be some who will think that this was a realistic or practical option for Israel. But nothing could be further from the truth. The kidnapping of Eichmann and his abduction to Israel from a foreign country was a unique event, and would be extraordinarily difficult to repeat, let alone dozens of times in numerous European countries. Israeli agents would be at much greater risk of failure and would likely to be caught and arrested themselves in the countries in question, since they would be committing crimes in those countries and violating their sovereignty.

II: The Historical Context: European Capitulation to Palestinian Terrorism after Munich

The sad truth is that we live in a world in which there is no serious international willingness to arrest, try and punish under law the terrorists who murder Israeli civilians. It was embarrassing how true this was in the period after Munich, when the Germans pusillanimously freed the three surviving captured Palestinian terrorists, in what many justifiably believe was a staged airplane hijacking by Black September designed to give the German government a pretext to free them from their Bavarian jail—and it remains largely true to this day. Upon learning of the “hijacking” of the Lufthansa jet only weeks after Munich, on October 29, 1972, the German government immediately acquiesced to the terrorists’ demands, without even informing the Israeli government. German Chancellor Willy Brandt explained that he “saw no alternative but to yield to this ultimatum and avoid further senseless bloodshed.” (Aaron J. Klein, Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response, pp. 127-8; Simon Reeve, One Day in September, p. 155, 156-159)

Simon Reeve reports: “The Palestinians had warned the government in Bonn that they would launch a wave of bombings and hijackings against Lufthansa unless the three Munich survivors were released. The ‘hijacking,’ according to German, Palestinian and Israeli sources, was a compromise agreed to by senior figures in the German government.” When Ulrich Wagner, a senior aide to German interior minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, “was asked point blank and on camera what he thought of the alleged German-Palestinian scheme, he replied, ‘Yes, I think it’s probably true.’” (Klein, p. 128) Wagner continued: “The German government thought that they could negotiate with the terrorist[s] and could convince them that they would give them money and something else to get rid of them…But of course it was the wrong way, no question, because when one case is solved in this way other cases will come.” (Reeve, pp. 157-8)

And come they did. On August 5, 1973, two Palestinians “produced submachine guns and grenades in the departure lounge at Athens airport and began blazing away at what they thought were Jewish passengers leaving Greece for Israel…There was carnage as they sprayed bullets indiscriminately…The departure lounge was a bloody mess, with the dying and seriously wounded screaming for help.” Three people were killed outright, a fourth died later in the hospital, and fifty-five passengers were wounded. The Palestinian terrorists were “caught, convicted and then promptly released by the Greek government when terrorists hijacked a Greek ship in Karachi and used them as bargaining chips.” (Reeve, pp. 199-200)

When Abu Daoud, the avowed mastermind of the Munich massacre, was arrested in France, he was quickly released “on a string of technicalities…after a perfunctory hearing lasting just twenty minutes.” (Reeve, p. 209) “The French authorities,” continues Reeve, “had been bribing and blackmailing terrorist groups to persuade them to avoid France during their attacks, and Daoud’s arrest by their officers threatened their delicate game…France chose to release Abu Daoud not only to protect itself from possible terrorist attacks but also because several Arab states threatened states threatened to withdraw deposits of cash totaling more than $15 billion—money from oil sales—that were stored in French banks. The morning after Daoud’s release, France also signed a deal with Egypt for the sale of two hundred Mirage jets…When the news of Daoud’s release was broadcast on radio and television there were near-riots in Tel Aviv…Even US President Jimmy Carter said he was ‘deeply disappointed.’” (Reeve, pp. 209-210) Much the same thing happened in Italy, as recently recounted by former Mossad chief Zvi Zamir: after arresting Palestinian terrorists who were about to fire Strella missiles at an El Al plane from an apartment overlooking the runway at Rome’s Fiumicino airport, “the Italians gave in and released” the terrorists when “a few months later the Palestinians hijacked a plane.” (Yossi Melman, “Preventive Measures,” Ha’aretz, Feb. 17, 2006).

The faked Lufthansa hijacking enabling the Germans to free the three surviving Palestinian Munich murderers little more than a month after the massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes “produced astonishment and rage in Israel,” notes Aaron Klein. Prime Minister Golda Meir later said with evident disgust: “I think that there is not one single terrorist held in prison anywhere in the world. Everyone else gives in. We’re the only ones who do not.” (Reeve, p. 158) Golda had resisted the urgings of Israeli military and intelligence officials to hunt down and assassinate those responsible for the Munich massacre. The German release of the Munich murderers was for her “the last straw.” Facing German and European cravenness, she consented to the counter-terror plan.

In the absence of real international cooperation to track down, arrest, try terrorists for their crimes against humanity in courts of law—rather than only using such venues selectively to advance the agenda of national liberation movements against Israeli or Western leaders considered war criminals while giving a free pass to their own barbarians—and to mete out proper judicial punishment to the guilty, countries like Israel and the US often have no choice but to take preemptive or preventive action themselves. And that means killing terrorists and their accomplices before they can strike again, often on the basis of intelligence information that would be insufficient to convict a terrorist of murder in a court of law beyond reasonable doubt. Even were there a concerted international effort to punish terrorists post factum, it would remain necessary to use lethal force to preempt and interdict terrorists in an effort to prevent acts of mass killing, particularly the many undeterrable terrorists who are prepared for martyrdom if only they can inflict mass casualties on their victim population.

When Israel in 1960 abducted Eichmann from Argentina to stand trial in Israel for genocide against the Jewish people, Argentina convened the UN Security Council and charged Israel with violating its sovereignty by committing an act of illegal force on its soil. It was the Soviet representative to the UN who, representing the apparent consensus of member states, responded: “By omitting to take measures for the timely arrest and extradition of Eichmann as a war criminal” Argentina had violated its international legal obligations. (Thomas M. Franck, Recourse to Force: State Action Against Threats and Armed Attacks (Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 112-114). Following Munich, it is equally apparent that Germany and other European states who capitulated repeatedly to terrorist threats and hijackings, released convicted mass murderers, and bribed Palestinian terror groups to avoid their territory, failed to fulfill their fundamental legal and moral obligations, leaving Israel with no recourse but to use force to punish, deter, disrupt and prevent, to whatever extent possible, the ongoing terrorist activities of Black September and those Palestinians who aided and abetted it.

III. Targeted Killing and Jewish Ethics

Spielberg in his commentary, and in the film itself, attempts to send a resoundingly negative message about the value, both moral and practical, of using force against terrorism. Instead he offers (in a Time magazine interview) that “The only thing that's going to solve this is rational minds, a lot of sitting down and talking until you're blue in the gills.” As a veteran peace advocate who has long championed Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, I find Spielberg’s nostrum singularly unhelpful and inapt. Yes, negotiations are sorely needed to “solve” the Palestinian-Israeli conflict—indeed they are well-advised right now not only with the Palestinians but with other Arab states, as Amos Oz suggests. [1] But that is not the question at hand.

The question rather is what to do now, and what was to be done then, about those who slaughter Israelis indiscriminately in the name of a political cause. “Munich” never ponders whether negotiations must sometimes be preceded by the just use of lethal force. The solution to Palestinian terrorism, much like the solution to the broader problem of Islamic terrorism, their differences notwithstanding, requires the use of both wise military counter-terror means and a foreign policy which dries up support for terror and provides viable alternatives to violence. The findings of the 9/11 Commission leave no room for doubt: success in the war on terror “demands the use of all elements of national power” including “a preventive strategy that is as much, or more, political than it is military.”

Spielberg’s screenwriter, Tony Kushner, has his Golda Meir justify Israel’s new targeted killing policy in the film thus: “Every civilization must negotiate compromises with its own values.” This suggests that Jewish values would prohibit the preemptive or retaliatory killing of suspected terrorists, but that practical necessities require Israel to flout those moral and religious norms. Kushner’s comments in Newsweek suggests that in his view targeted killings are indeed antithetical to morality: he refers to “the conflict between national security and ethics” as if ethics requires nonviolence and national security impels one towards immoral violence. But there are deep problems with this conception of Jewish ethics, and of morality in general. The dichotomy Kushner erects is meant to recapitulate the conflict between egoism and altruism writ large on a national scale. Those who act out of “national security” motives are the egoists, acting solely, or primarily, in the self-interest of their own co-nationals, their fellow citizens in the state whose security is at risk; while those who act out of “ethics,” for Kushner, value the rights of others so much so that they refrain from harming the other. It is the ethical ones, for Kushner, who engage only in respectful dialogue and negotiations over justice with their enemies and refrain from force of any kind. The ethical one, in sum, is drawn to an altruistic pacifism and nonviolence, while the national security actor acts violently and immorally from egoism and the demand for collective self-protection.

But consider this account of morality from a Jewish point of view put forth by Ahad Ha’am, the founder of cultural Zionism, and the difference he identifies between Christian and Jewish concepts of the ethical:

In an essay on “The Character of Judaism,” Ahad Ha'am maintained that the most fundamental principle of Jewish ethics—“You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18)—does not teach us to love our neighbor more than ourselves, but as much: “The true meaning of the verse is: ‘Self-love must not be allowed to incline the scale on the side of your own advantage; love your neighbor as yourself, and then justice will necessarily decide, and you will do nothing to your neighbor that you would consider a wrong if it were done to yourself’… Judaism cannot accept the altruistic principle; it cannot put ‘other’ in the center of the circle, because that place belongs to justice, which knows no distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’…” (Ahad Ha'am, "The Character of Judaism," (1910), in Simon Noveck, ed., Contemporary Jewish Thought: A Reader (New York: B'nai Brith Department of Adult Jewish Education, 1963); originally published as "Between Two Opinions").

While we may question whether Ahad Ha’am has fairly depicted Christian morality as purely altruistic—it was, moreover, Catholic theologians like Augustine and Aquinas who made seminal contributions to the development of just war moral thinking—from Ahad Ha’am we learn that we have duties not only to others but to ourselves, and that we must seek to balance these duties by way of principles of justice. Some acts of self-respect and self-preservation are expressions of our moral responsibility to ourselves and our own communities, even if they may harm others. We must turn to principles of justice to understand which acts of self-protection are morally mandated, and which are violations of what justice requires.

Second, there is indeed a Jewish moral basis for the preemptive killing of a prospective murderer in the Talmud—“If a man comes to kill you, you kill him first” (Sanhedrin 72a), a notion which is hardly in conflict with Jewish values, as Spielberg and Kushner suggest. The Munich massacre occurred within the context of an ongoing worldwide Palestinian terror war against Israel. “They hijacked planes, assassinated Israeli diplomats, and sent letter bombs all across the European continent,” notes Aaron Klein. In May 1972 alone, Palestinian terrorists hijacked a Sabena airlines flight from Brussels to Tel Aviv, demanding the release of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, while the PFLP recruited members of the Japanese Red Army to commit an indiscriminate massacre at the arrivals terminal of Lod International Airport in Israel, killing twenty-six people and wounding seventy-six others. Palestinian terrorists had again and again risen to kill Israeli Jews, and there was no doubt that after Munich they would continue to do so.

IV. Just War, Terrorism and Preemptive Killing

In contrast to the standard context for preemptive killing or preemptive war, in which “peacetime” or an absence of armed conflict prevails between the two states until one party commits a preemptive act of war, Israeli preemptive killing of suspected terrorists has always occurred within the framework of an ongoing Palestinian war against Israel. Such acts are more akin to lawful reprisals committed after an armed conflict has already begun. Indeed, “‘defensive retaliation’ is justified when its prime motive is protective,” in the view of many legal scholars of the laws of war. “To be defensive, and therefore lawful, armed reprisals must be future oriented, and not limited to a desire to punish past transgressions.” (Yoram Dinstein, War, Aggression and Self-Defence (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 199).

Former Mossad chief Zvi Zamir insists that “We were not engaged in vengeance. We are accused of having been guided by a desire for vengeance. That is nonsense. What we did was to concretely prevent terrorism in the future. We acted against those whom [we] thought would continue to perpetrate acts of terror…There is no defense without an offensive foundation….we viewed this as part the defensive alignment and deterrence that would put an end to open Palestinian terrorism in Europe. And I think that in the war which developed in the wake of Munich, we succeeded in putting an end to the type of terror that was perpetrated.” (Ha’aretz, Feb. 17, 2006) To be sure, one element in Israel’s motivation was surely a desire for retribution. But as Dinstein notes, “the motives driving states to action are usually multifaceted, and a tinge of retribution can probably be traced in every instance of response to force. The question is whether armed reprisals in a concrete situation go beyond retribution.”

Third, and most important, there is a crucial difference between pacifism and the just war traditions, between the endorsement of just but limited uses of force versus the view that all uses of force, and all wars, are immoral and unjust. In the pacifist schema, violence and peace are absolute polar opposites. But advocating peace, a just peace, does not require a pacifist stance against all violence or use of military force. In my view, those who take a just war approach to the use of force are the most responsible and the true advocates of peace and justice. But Spielberg’s film falls on the wrong side of this crucial distinction, confusing pacifism with peace, implicitly endorsing blanket opposition to the use of lethal force in self-defense—including anticipatory or preemptive self-defense—against those involved in murderous acts against innocents. The responsible peace advocate will instead embrace a more judicious way of criticizing inappropriate acts of force which at the same time recognizes the right of democratic states to engage in certain uses of lethal force.

I believe that the criteria for determining when an act of force is just must be redefined in the new era in which we live wherein Israel, European nations, the U.S., Australia and others are faced with asymmetrical warfare on the part of guerrillas, insurgents and terrorists. The characteristics defining such warfare include that
1. the agents of such forms of warfare against states are typically non-state groups;
2. they use stealth and do not identify themselves as combatants, refraining from wearing military uniforms;
3. they often engage in attacks against innocent civilians, often committing acts of mass murder.

In catastrophic acts of terror—like 9/11, or like the attempted bombing by Palestinian terrorists a few years ago of Israel’s largest fuel processing plant, near Tel Aviv, and another near Ashkelon, thousands, even tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent lives are at risk. When terrorists begin to use non-conventional weapons—as there is good reason to believe they will in time—the loss of innocent life could be unimaginable, especially in the case of a small nuclear bomb in a major urban area. Graham Allison, the founding dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and director of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, concludes his remarkable book, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (Henry Holt, 204) with the warning that if policymakers in Washington keep doing what they are currently doing about the threat, a nuclear terrorist attack on a major American city is inevitable in the next decade. At the same time, if we and other nations take necessary and appropriate steps, the ultimate catastrophe is also preventable.

If liberal democratic states do not have the right to engage in acts of lethal force for the purpose of deterrence and prevention, taking preemptive steps against those we have good reason to hold responsible for committing murderous acts against their citizens, then democracies have no effective right to self-defense to protect their citizens against such atrocities given the inherent advantages which guerrilla, terrorist or insurgent combatants have against states and against vulnerable civilians in open societies like ours. The steps democracies should take to prevent such catastrophic terrorism are wide-ranging, but they must include the judicious use of preemptive killing of suspected terrorists.

Moreover, we may accept the legitimacy of preemptive killing of suspected terrorists without necessarily embracing a broader philosophy of preventive war. But it is clear that many contemporary observers have come to recognize that there is a

"fundamental problem with the existing UN-based rules governing the use of force. These rules are based on two key principles that were the product of a particular era, the end of World War II and the start of decolonization: first, that states are sovereign equals, and second, that they should not interfere in each other’s internal affairs. The changes in the international environment of the past six decades have eroded the applicability of these foundational principles and thus rendered the rules based on them untenable." (Ivo Daalder and James Steinberg, in “The Future of Preemption,” The American Interest, Winter 2005).

But in a world in which state sovereignty is being eroded by a wide range of forces, and in which unprecedented threats to human life and well-being have emerged, the traditional UN “concept of the international system no longer accords with the world as it now exists. That means that the rules regulating the use of force must be adapted to the world we do live in—a world in which sovereignty is increasingly conditional on how states behave internally, and in which the need to intervene in the internal affairs of states is growing accordingly…[T]he problem with the Bush strategy has been less the concept of preventive force itself,” conclude Daalder and Steinberg, “than its near-unilateral application to achieve very ambitious—perhaps too ambitious—ends. Unilateral preventive wars of regime change should be relegated to the past. But circumstances will undoubtedly arise in the future in which policymakers will want to have the option of using force preventively—be it to kill terrorists, prevent weapons proliferation, halt genocide, stop the spread of deadly diseases, or deal with other kinds of danger. The proper task, then, is not to bury the concept, but to make it a more limited and more legitimate tool for addressing evolving security threats.”

Daalder and Steinberg maintain that

"a state’s failure to prevent internal developments that threaten people in other states implies that the responsibility to do so also falls on the international community. And the most effective way to commute that responsibility will often involve preventive action of some kind, up to and including military action. Indeed, the most effective way to defeat many of the new threats is to act before they are imminent—before enough fissile material has been produced to make nuclear weapons; before weapons in unsecured sites or deadly diseases in laboratories have been stolen; before terrorists have been fully trained to hatch their plots; before large-scale killing or ethnic cleansing has occurred; and before a deadly pathogen has mutated and spread sickness and death around the globe. Of course, in many of these cases military intervention is not the only or the preferred means for dealing with an emerging threat. There are often good alternatives…At the same time, the threat of force and the actual use of force will sometimes be necessary. And when it is, it is often best used early.” (pp. 36-37)

V. Selective Criticism of Targeted Killings

Beyond its blanket objection to Israel’s counterterrorism policy, “Munich” can also be understood as implicitly criticizing certain assassinations, like the killing in Rome of Wael Zu’aytir, a poet and translator who had rendered the Arabic classic One Thousand and One Nights into Italian, the first Palestinian assassinated in the film. The film depicts him as not having had a hand in killing Israeli civilians, whether the Munich athletes or others, though we hear Ephraim justify every target to Avner as having been complicit in terrorism against Israelis. Klein states that in fact, Zu’aytir, “unlike many of those around him…denounced terrorism and violence.” (p. 119)

He believes that “Zu’aytir was not directly involved in the Munich massacre. It also seems unlikely that he had an indirect hand in the operation as a saya’an [a helper]. Uncorroborated and improperly cross-referenced intelligence information tied him to the support network of Black September in Rome. From there, a slippery slope led the politically active, low-level saya’an to the Mossad’s hit list. Looking back, his assassination was a mistake. Undoubtedly, it resulted from the genuine desire to neutralize those involved in the Munich Massacre and ‘hot’ operatives in the midst of preparing an attack. Zu’aytir was, at best, a small fish in a pond of sharks. But in the vengeance-laced atmosphere of September and October 1972, when the head of the Mossad proclaimed that the mysterious, bohemian translator had blood on his hands, no one was in the mood to dispute it.” (p. 123)

Klein notes that a wide range of Palestinians in Europe who had been involved in the “planning, execution and logistical operations tied to the massacre” were placed on the Mossad’s assassination list. “In the weeks after the massacre, dozens of Palestinian names, implicated by thin shards of intelligence at best, were passed back to Tel Aviv. There, they were almost automatically put on a secret database of targets. The Mossad and the intelligence community, with the backing of the public consensus and the parliament, were stretching the meaning of the term ‘terrorist involvement’ to the limit. Anyone vaguely connected to a terrorist organization or act was immediately placed on the top of a slippery slope; assassination waited below.” (p. 111) While the Mossad did target terrorists who were substantially involved in the Munich massacre, or in planning or executing new attacks against Israelis, it is clear now that some of those it killed were not truly complicit in terrorism against Israel.

Had the film stopped there, its criticism of targeted killings would have been selective, judicious and appropriate. A judicious approach to criticizing targeted killings, drawn from just war tradition and modern laws of war, would apply the same sorts of criteria in deciding when an armed reprisal is immoral or unlawful: “[E]ach measure of counter-force should be put to the test whether it amounts to legitimate self-defense (in response to an armed attack), satisfying the requirements of necessity [and] proportionality…” (Dinstein, p. 203) Dinstein, like Michael Walzer and William O’Brien, among many other scholars who have applied just war doctrine to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, believes that some Israeli reprisals satisfy the criteria for just uses of force, while others do not. The same can be said for Israel’s assassinations. Each must be judged on its own merits.

Israeli governments can and should be criticized for having used this method at times irresponsibly, against the wrong people, including people who were innocent of complicity with the murder of Israelis and Jews; of having engaged in it at times and in ways that have sometimes have harmed the prospects for peace.[2] But from this it does not follow that targeted killings as a rule are inimical to a prospective peace. Aaron Klein concludes that overall, while some targeted killings have provoked acts of terror in the short term, “the numbers show a steep slide in the frequency of terror attacks against Israelis and Israeli institutions abroad from 1974 to the present.”

But the message that Spielberg and Munich seek to convey is that counter-terrorism solves nothing, begets more terror, and can’t lead to peace. Some targeted killings may indeed spur further retaliations, but the cumulative effect of a good counter-terror strategy is, and has been during several periods, the 80’s, 90’s and again in recent post-intifada years, to contribute to an overall disincentive to terror and to popular support for terror. At the same time, an effective counter-terrorism strategy must be accompanied by a very robust and generous set of political incentives to the Palestinian public to embrace moderation and the pursuit of peace talks with Israel, by far-reaching efforts to negotiate a peace agreement and on-the-ground changes which improve life for ordinary Palestinians. Strong counter-terrorist efforts which are never followed by serious and sustained attempts to encourage Palestinian support for reconciliation with Israel and to exploit opportunities for peace, are misbegotten. Much the same is true of preemption which never knows when it is best to forbear the use of lethal force. Both condemn Israel to live by the sword forever, nurturing the cynical right’s self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.

VI. Spielberg’s Volte Face on Israeli Counterterrorism After Munich

Having been subjected to widespread criticism for the moral message of Munich and for the politics he and Kushner attributed to the film in earlier interviews, Spielberg now insists that Israel was justified in waging its assassination campaign against Palestinian terrorists: He told Der Spiegel (January 26, 2006): “I believe that Israel’s prime minister had to respond to the monstrous provocation of Munich. Jews were being killed in Germany, and that at the Olympic Games. She could not let an act with such historic implications, such a gross transgression by the Black September movement, go unpunished. Munich was a national trauma for Israel. So in principle I think she did the right thing.” Now his revised view is that “A campaign of vengeance, even though it may contribute towards deterrence and preventing terror, can also have unintended consequences.” He draws our attention now to the damage such a campaign may wreak on the human beings who engage in assassinations: “It can change people, burden them, brutalize them, lead to their ethical decline. And even Mossad agents do not have water flowing through their veins.”

According to the new Spielberg, we are now to understand Avner’s disaffection with Israel, his abandonment of his country and his Mossad vocation, as nothing more than the dehumanizing consequences of combat on an individual, not as emblematic of the moral status of the State of Israel’s counter-terrorism policies. But can Spielberg have it both ways? The new Spielberg would have us believe, as he told Newsweek, that “’Munich’ never once attacks Israel”, and that “it barely criticizes Israel’s policy of counter-violence against violence.” Leon Wieseltier’s response to Spielberg’s new view is apt: “The latter claim is preposterous, as anybody who has seen Munich knows. The film’s very subject is the dubious moral legitimacy, and the dubious practical efficacy, of counterterrorism. If Munich is not about that, it is not about anything.” A repentant Spielberg, suddenly concerned with his image in the Jewish community, seems unwilling to stand by the principled criticisms of Israel’s counterterrorism policy that issue from his “prayer for peace.” As Wieseltier notes, “People should not engage the perplexities of morality and history if they are prepared only to be loved.”



RECOMMENDED READING

Two books offer far more historically reliable accounts than Spielberg’s film of Israel’s counter-terror campaign following the Munich massacre, and both read like thrillers: Aaron J. Klein, Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response (Random House, 2005)

Klein, who is an officer in Israel’s Military Intelligence Branch, and Time magazine’s military and intelligence affairs Jerusalem correspondent, [from amazon.com] interviews over 50 former and current Mossad members, and appears to have uncovered considerable new information. The book is described by the publisher as “the first full account based on access to key players who have never before spoken, of the Munich massacre and the Israeli response…”

Simon Reeve, One Day in September: The Full Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and the Israeli Revenge Operation “Wrath of God” (New York: Arcade, 2006)

For a more general history of Israeli intelligence and counter-terrorism:
Ian Black and Benny Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars: A History of Israel’s Intelligence Services

Recommended Articles:
1. Edward Rothstein, “Seeing Terrorism as Drama With Sequels and Prequels,” New York Times, December 26, 2005
2. Walter Reich, “Something’s Missing in Spielberg’s ‘Munich,’” Washington Post, January 1, 2006
3. Michael Kotzin, “‘Munich’ As a Post-Zionist Tale,” http://www.juf.org/news_public_affairs/article.asp?key=6667
4. Leon Wieseltier, “Steven Spielberg Bravely Confronts His Fundamentalist Critics,” The New Republic, February 2, 2006
5. Pauline Yearwood, “‘Munich’: Is Spielberg’s New Movie Good for the Jews?”, Chicago Jewish News cover story, January 1, 2006, presents a wide range of views about the film and its ideas in interviews with various Jewish commentators.

On the Jewish and Christian just war traditions, and law and morality in war, see:

1. Alan M. Dershowitz, Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways (Norton, 2006), which attempts to develop a jurisprudence or philosophy of preemption for our contemporary political world; unsurprisingly, the challenges facing Israel play a central role in Dershowitz’s thinking.
2. Yoram Dinstein, War, Aggression and Self-Defence (Cambridge University Press, 2001), by Israel’s leading scholar of the laws of war.
3. Yoram Dinstein, The Conduct of Hostilities under the Law of International Armed Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
4. William V. O’Brien, Law and Morality in Israel’s War With the PLO (Routledge, 1991), a classic and still highly relevant application of just war thinking to Israel’s counter-terrorist operations prior to Oslo.
5. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (Basic, 1977), a highly readable volume on the just war tradition, with several examples pertaining to Israel;
6. Michael Walzer, “War and Peace in the Jewish Tradition,” and Aviezer Ravitzky, “Prohibited Wars in the Jewish Tradition,” in Terry Nardin, ed., The Ethics of War and Peace: Religious and Secular Perspectives (Princeton, 1996);
7. Albert Vorspan and David Saperstein, “The Jewish Tradition and the Gulf War,” in their Tough Choices: Jewish Perspectives on Social Justice (UAHC Press, 1992).

[1]“I think Israel would be advised to terminate the occupation through an agreement or a settlement that, if it can't be made with the Palestinians at this moment, should be made with the member states of the Arab League. I believe termination of the Israeli occupation is urgent, and is in Israel's best interests and can be implemented as a part of an Israel-Arab comprehensive agreement.” Amos Oz interview, The Nation (online) “Curing Fanaticism” by Jon Wiener, February 1, 2006.

[2]Aaron Klein observes that after Munich, Israel often went after Palestinian diplomats in Europe who were not directly responsible for the Munich massacre or for acts of terrorism against Israelis, simply because they were largely unprotected and accessible, whereas the real perpetrators of Munich—those few who survived and those involved behind the scenes in planning and orchestrating it—were living in third world countries with much protection so that Israel found it virtually impossible to go after them. (There was one notable exception to this rule, the 1972 commando operation against several prominent Palestinian terrorist masterminds in Beirut by the IDF’s special anti-terrorist force, Sayeret Matkal, in which the young Ehud Barak played a prominent role.) But this was the exception that proved the rule.

The Truth About Obama's Foreign Policy Advisors, by Jack S. Levin (Obama friend and campaign insider)

Jack S. Levin
985 Sheridan Road
Winnetka, IL 60093

February 14, 2008

I have received many emails and seen many articles espousing the patently erroneous view that Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisors are anti-Israel, frequently listing a string of 4 or 5 so-called Obama foreign policy advisors and then asserting loudly that they are anti-Israel.

These assertions could not be further from the truth!

Here are the true facts so you can judge for yourself.

(1) The first allegation on almost every list is that Zbigniew Brzezinski is anti-Israel and is Barack’s chief foreign policy advisor.

The fact is that Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to a former president, called Barack and volunteered his endorsement of Barack’s campaign because Brzezinski agrees with Barack’s Iraq policy. While Barack briefly discussed Iraq with Brzezinski, Barack has never discussed, and will not discuss, Israel or Palestinian issues with Brzezinski. Indeed, Barack has no plans to talk further with Brzezinski about anything.

So to call Brzezinski a Barack foreign policy advisor of any kind is incorrect. And to call him Barack’s chief foreign policy advisor is a ludicrous misstatement.

(2) The second allegation on most every list is that Robert Malley is anti-Israel and is a Barack foreign policy advisor.

The fact is that Malley, who served on former President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy staff, emailed some of his writings and views to Barack’s staff as well as (we believe) to all (or most) of the other presidential candidates’ staffs. Barack has had, and plans to have, no conversations with Malley.

So Malley is not an advisor to Barack. Indeed, Martin Peretz (in a Jerusalem Post article entitled “Trust Obama on Israel”) unequivocally stated “Malley is not and has never been Middle East advisor to Barack Obama.”

(3) The third allegation on many lists is that Tony Lake is anti-Israel and is a Barack advisor. At last we have an allegation that is half correct: Tony Lake is a Barack advisor, but Tony Lake is not anti-Israel.

Tony was National Security Advisor to former President Bill Clinton (whose administration is clearly viewed as pro-Israel). Tony’s wife is Jewish and Tony himself converted to Judaism. Tony is pro-Israel and openly so, e.g., he is very well received when he speaks on U.S. foreign policy at synagogues and Jewish gatherings.

(Are you beginning to get the drift that you cannot believe everything you read on the Internet? Read on, please.)

(4) The fourth allegation on many lists is that Susan Rice is anti-Israel and is advising Barack.

Susan was Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under President Bill Clinton and Secretary Madeline Albright (again an administration clearly viewed as pro-Israel). She is not in any way anti-Israel. But in any ev