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