Obama Decides To Move Confrontation With Israel Away From The Glare
The White House went out of its way to report that the President and Prime Minister Netanyahu had a friendly 20 minute phone conversation yesterday. The press office even sent out a photo of Obama on the phone with Bibi.
Ma'ariv's Ben Caspit writes today that "The US has become convinced that the overt annoyance on the Israeli side in wake of the crisis will not help to make substantive progress on the issues and the Americans are now giving a chance to dialogue."
Not to worry. It is all tactical.
Obama is not backing down. However, the smart White House team understands that rightwing Israeli Prime Ministers exploit public confrontations with the White House to rally the descamisados. Better to keep up the pressure but quietly. And that is what has happening.
The less the Obama strategy is played out in the media, the less opportunity for the usual suspects to scream "enough already."
But this President is not backing down, nor will he remain bogged down on settlements. He'll win that battle and go on to the larger issues: defining borders and starting final status negotiations.
Plus: former AIPAC chief, Tom Dine, on why we have to bring Syria in from the cold.
obama has checkmated netanyahu. obama has picked an issue, the settlement issue, in which netanyahu cannot win. that is why we see the reaction in netnayahu's government.
the more netanyahu resists the more just the demand to stop the settlement becomes. the more netanyahu resists, the more israel's position will be seen as obstructionist. the more netanyahu resists, the more obama gets to take netanyahus's pieces off the chess board. the more more netanyahu resists, the more the noose around netanyahu's neck tightens.
June 9, 2009 8:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
We'll see. Obama is still trying to put a square peg through a round hole, i.e., mouthing the idiot word "security" as sacrosanct when all that really means is defending Zionist expansion.
Notice Obama hasn't pointed out the fact that Israelis want "natural growth" of their settlements, but they deny Palestinians in East Jerusalem building permits to allow "natural growth" of Palestinian homes. (That's one example, among a million, of the double standards involved.)
Obama is our best hope. I wish him success. But, unlike MJ, I remain skeptical he can deliver.
June 9, 2009 9:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Until the next big terrorist attack by Arabs against Israelis or westerners, of course. Then, unless the Obama Admin. has some as yet undisclosed powerful hand gripping the chessboard to hold it steady, all the pieces are dumped off to the side to great media fanfare, and the game starts all over with more rows of US Congressional rooks and queens on Netanyahu's side than before opposed by fewer Congress pacifist pawns than before. "See", the argument will repeat and re-echo with nauseating predictability, "the Palestinians never were anything but thugs and murderers, of course they have no right to any land or a state of their own." For further details on the essential core of the pre-programmed AIPAC stance, see the analogous portions of any standard Nazi rant on why Jews were an inferior menace that had to be wiped out. For the media's playbook, see the equivocations and rationalizations that accompanied various 100-eyes-for-1-eye IDF rampages over the past 12-13 years.
June 9, 2009 10:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
geez.. you are boring
June 9, 2009 10:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
geez.. you sound like a petulant child.
June 9, 2009 10:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's what people are saying -- that Obama holds all the cards. But I haven't seen an analysis yet that explains why it's so.
Israel still has a powerful US lobby (though it seems to have, inexplicably, lost much of that power of late). It still has a very divided public and funky politics -- with right wing zealots who will stop at NOTHING to kill those who get in the way of their expansionist visions.
Assuming Israel cannot effectively apply pressure on Obama -- given that nearly 80% of the Jewish voters were in his corner -- I'm still not sure Obama can cut off Israel's aid. And if he did, Israel might still choose to go it alone. Hard to imagine I know, but is Natanyahu checkmated?
If you understand the dynamic, please explain. Thx.
June 9, 2009 9:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well, American Jews' support for President Obama may be fairly strong, but that doesn't seem to be stopping Israeli hardliners from contemplating trying to toss a wrench into the Adminstration's plans anyway.
Just check out this article from the Jerusalem Post: Israeli Minister calls for sanctions on U.S.
Bottom Line: Minster-without-Portfolio Yossi Peled thinks the Israelis ought to try to directly influence US I/P policy by financing Democratic Party challengers to Obama Adminstration policies. Seriously.
June 9, 2009 1:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Parallax, this is a very good and important question, and one that still remains unanswered.
June 10, 2009 7:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
I knew this was an issue hurting Netanyahu, when I heard so many Zionist jumping on the relativism argument. Suggesting how wrong it was for Obama to equate Israel’s refusal to stop the settlements, with other unacceptable issues, such as the Palestinian’s acceptance of a two State solution and Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. Chicago reporter, Lynn Sweet qualified it as Obamaism this morning on the Bill Press radio show. Of course the President never said these things were all equal to each other, nor does it matter. His obvious point was they are all things that need to be changed. Throughout history, we have seen progress in the peace movement made by Lions who finally decided to sit down with Lambs. Lets just see what kind of cat Netanyahu is!
June 9, 2009 9:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
- W.B. Yeats
http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2008/08/18/movers-and-shakers/
June 9, 2009 10:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
Better to keep up the pressure but quietly. And that is what has happening.
Could you explain to us, MJ, in what that pressure consists?
So far, the only pressure of which we have been made aware is the pressure of public disapproval of Netanyahu's policies by the popular Obama. If Obama plans to drop that, what is left?
If you are aware of behind the scenes threats, could you fill us in? Because so far it just seems like a lot of talk. And now even that is falling away.
June 9, 2009 11:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Also, I wasn't aware that there was a "crisis". To what crisis is Caspit referring?
June 9, 2009 11:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
The "crisis" is related to the fact that this WH has been far less inclined to share in important moves such as providing Israel with rough drafts of speeches and consulting on the final product ahead of time:
(also fromMa'ariv)
"Officials in Jerusalem are beginning to realize: The US president is following new rules of the game. Israel enjoys no advantage and no special privileges.
US President Barack Obama is holding his first visit to the Middle East and did not even incorporate a visit to Jerusalem in his itinerary. Officials in Jerusalem are greatly troubled by the lack of cooperation and coordination between the White House and the Prime Minister's Bureau.
In the past, the senior Israeli echelon has known in advance what the main points in speeches being made by US presidents would be, and what the plans of the administration in Washington were. In similar cases in the past, drafts would be delivered and impressions would be exchanged. This time, as far as Israel was concerned, the coordination between Jerusalem and the White House was far from satisfactory. Despite the great efforts on the part of political officials to obtain the main points, the administration in Washington did not update Israel and did not convey messages.
"Obama is courting the Arabs at the expense of the alliance and friendship with Israel," said a political source in Jerusalem."
http://www.israelpolicyforum.org/blog/israeli-officials-troubled-obamas-middle-east-trip
From Haaretz:
"The American determination caught Netanyahu and his aides by surprise, and they were neither party to the drafts of the president's speech nor were they able to influence its content. The PM's Bureau is finding it difficult to function and is barely able to respond to telephone calls, much less put together a counter-spin. Netanyahu sent the "dovish" ministers, Dan Meridor and Ehud Barak, to the U.S. in an effort to explain it was not possible to freeze it all because that is not realistic. The Americans have not budged."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1090359.html
It's believed that the new hardball rules of the road are due to Rahm Emmanuel's influence.
June 9, 2009 3:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dan, the Israeli press is using the word "crisis" (at least in their English translations) to describe Obama's insistence that settlement growth end completely and, more broadly, Obama's general outlook toward Israel and the Middle East, which seems to combine a willingness to be more firm in our dealings with Israel with a desire to be less autocratic with the Arab and Persian nations.
I think it's interesting that this rather modest and healthy change in the US leadership's attitude toward Israel and the Arab/Persian nations is described as a "crisis." It reflects what appears to me to be a growing paranoia in Israel. Reading Haaretz yesterday, my impression was of a society that is very unhealthy--dominated by fear and ethnocentric thinking.
June 10, 2009 7:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe the "crisis" is that there is a black man in the White House, and that while his policies on Israel don't seem objectively all that different from Clinton, Bush I, Carter or Reagan, he is assumed to be a Jew-hater on the basis of pigment, and his mere existence is causing panic.
June 10, 2009 7:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not sure there's so much anti-Black sentiment in Israel. I know there is some, of course, and maybe more now that so many Israelis come from places other than Western Europe. But I sense the feeling of crisis stems from something much closer to home. I think Zionism is really what's in crisis, and I think Israelis are beginning to sense it. The so-called demographic threat, the increasing contradiction between Israeli treatment of Arabs and liberal democratic principles, the nascent rapprochement between the Arab world and the West, the growing sense among so many in the world that Israel is a hysterical, paranoid, dangerous nation that sees itself pitted against the whole world and that is so willing to use lethal force against anyone it perceives to be a threat (and that seems to perceive threats everywhere, even in President Obama!)--all of this suggests a great deal of unhealthiness which now is reaching a fever pitch.
Nationalism has a good side, I guess (when it focuses on the liberation of a people from oppression and on preserving the culture of a group), but almost inevitably it dissolves into racism and suspicion of the Other. Zionism has always had a bit of both the good and bad sides of nationalism, but in the past the good side predominated. Now I think the bad side dominates. And I think this is very much a consequence of the refusal of the Israelis to recognize the real rights of the indigenous people who equally inhabit the land Jewish Israelis have declared a homeland for themselves. For Israel to survive as a viable homeland for Jews, it must paradoxically become more inclusive, less Jewish. Otherwise all it can be is an armed camp separated from the rest of the world behind its hafrada barrier, a kind of ghetto, isolated from its neighbors, hated by them and hating back.
June 10, 2009 8:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
What does "descamisados" mean?
June 9, 2009 11:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
A Term originating with Juan Peron of Argentina that litterally means Those without a shirt on their backs. Namely the poor or the disenfranchised, or perhaps street people....hard to translate the nuanced meaning of it really
June 9, 2009 12:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not that hard. It means the smart White House team will not Netanyahu to rally the dumb schmucks.
June 9, 2009 1:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
RE: "Obama is not backing down."
FROM J STREET: Following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rejection of a full settlement freeze, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said...that President Obama "wants to see a stop to settlements - not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions."
This is exactly the sort of leadership we need from the President and Secretary of State if we are going to achieve a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - the only way to truly secure Israel's future as a Jewish, democratic homeland.
You can bet the Obama Administration is already hearing from hawkish voices on Israel - urging him to make exceptions, allow for more settlement growth, and to go slow.
No way - a freeze means a freeze. We've got to make sure the President knows pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans support his strong line on settlements, for both Israel's and America's sake and security.
Please send the President a message telling him you support his "Freeze means Freeze" approach to Israeli settlements.
* TO SEND MESSAGE - http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/2747/t/3251/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=593
June 9, 2009 11:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
I am not worried that this isn't going to be played out in public. I rather see the tactical move as positive. Let Mitchell do his thing behind closed doors
The big news, a potentially decisive development could come this weekend after Friday's vote in Iran
Ayalon's "Axis of Pragmatists"?
I hate to get my hopes up. Ahamdinejad is trying to stuff ballot boxes
Good round up at IC today
http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/tens-of-thousands-rally-for-mousavi-in.html
June 9, 2009 1:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for pointing to Juan Cole's roundup; the comments there are good, too.
June 10, 2009 8:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
Whenever the United States is engaged in any public diplomatic pressure against any country whatsoever, the leaders of that other country will attempt to rally their people to resist the pressure by railing against the interference by foreigners. That just goes with the territory.
If the United States is disposed to cave at the first sign of such an entirely predictable backlash, then it might as well give up coercive public diplomacy altogether. But that hardly seems like a rational course of action. There will always be such a backlash. But if you are genuinely serious about the ends you are trying to accomplish, you have to keep the pressure on and ride it out.
Obama needs to decide whether his chief aim is to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that creates a viable Palestinian state, or to be loved by Israelis and America's most strident supporters of Israel. These are almost certainly incompatible aims, and he needs to get used to it.
June 9, 2009 1:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Unfortunately, the constant theorizing and comment as to the tactics of the US government vis-a-vis Israel and vice-versa, are of little practical interest.
The LIKUD party head, Netanyahu, is obliged to further the mission of his party which is to obtain a greater Israel by any means. How he intends to achieve this unmodified objective is by further obfuscation of the issues, by the killing of more women and children to terrorize the Palestinians or simply by using the power of AIPAC in Congress to tie the hands of Obama and the White House.
There will be no real progress until the power of the unelected Israeli lobby is curtailed by law. Whatever is said, the fact remains that it is a gross misuse of the democratic process for an unelected minority to hold such undue influence over both Houses and thereby to restrict the power of the elected president and his foreign policy.
June 9, 2009 2:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Whatever is said, the fact remains that it is a gross misuse of the democratic process for an unelected minority to hold such undue influence over both Houses and thereby to restrict the power of the elected president and his foreign policy.
For the most part, what the pro-Israel lobby does is no different than what any other lobby does. So, if some minority holds an unwholesome and undue influence over the majority in the United States, that is our fault. Citizens and members of the government who disagree with the policies promoted by the lobby, but are intimidated into supporting them, need to grow a pair and stop being intimidated. That's it; that's all.
The lobby doesn't employ thumbscrews, sledgehammers, Manchurian candidate brainwashing or secret mind-altering potions. It employs ordinary electoral pressure, money and emotional blackmail. That's politics in America.
We need to stop whining about the lobby and just fight back against them. If there are enough people who disagree with them, they can be licked.
June 9, 2009 6:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
To ColinDale
"...until the power of the unelected Israeli lobby is curtailed by law."
This is America, not 1930's Europe. Do you propose to take away their right to speak? To vote? To support or oppose candidates? Their citizenship? Should we curtail by law the ability of every group we disagree with to advance their views?
I smell a whiff of anti-semitism and authoritarianism.
June 9, 2009 3:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Those damn Learned Elders of AIPAC. They're just as bad as the Cubans (embargo), Armenians (genocide resolution, pressure on Turkey), Greeks, Eastern Europeans (tension w/Russia), Serbs (support of Serb genocide)--notice I point out all those other U.S. ethnic minorities that have supported policies antithetical to U.S. interests, not to mention the NRA, big pharmaceuticals and HMOs, pro-choice, pro-life, gay rights and all the other one issue to the exclusion of all others groups.
Thus is the folly of living in a democracy, or as it was said a horrible form of government, but still better than all others.
Even more disturbing is the simpleton narrative that it's not the Israelis or Palestinians that are to blame, but the Americans, and most especially that nettlesome cabal.
June 9, 2009 4:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
@want2no
What you can smell is democratic pragmatism, of the people, for the people and by the people!
No amount of convoluted argument will change the facts. The US legislative process has and is being corrupted by the improper use of minority pressure albeit that the majority could without doubt neutralize that improper pressure if they got off their butts. But they do not and will not and therefore steps need to be taken urgently to correct an imperfect system.
Democratic government must be just that - not a tool for the political wishes of a minority for the advantage of a foreign state. If the American government is not first and foremost for the whole American electorate - then it is not a government of the people and for the people.
June 9, 2009 4:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
And I suppose we should let you, one man, be the judge of who is corrupting the system. And then you can decide how to stifle their dissent. Sounds real democratic.
June 9, 2009 4:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Heil, comrade. Power to the people!
June 9, 2009 9:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Doesn't need a whole lot of judging, Garry ...
I HAVE LITTLE DOUBT THAT THE AUTO-WORKER IN MICHIGAN, the plum farmer in Florida, the tobacco grower in Virginia or the fisherman in California or New Hampshire - all have not the slightest interest in Netanyahu’s settlement expansion schemes on the West Bank of Israel in the eastern Mediterranean.
What they are actually interested in is jobs, employment security and MediCare expansion schemes in Tampa, Detroit, San Francisco, Charleston and Maine. In other words, 300 million ordinary Americans are interested first and foremost in the welfare and careers of their families in America and not in the political ambitions of those who left America to live somewhere in the Middle East.
June 9, 2009 5:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
I can't disagree with that part, but that's part of our system. People from Tampa, Detroit, Iowa (not London) elect a President and Congress to govern and work out the details. Last time I checked they're more pissed about our entanglement in Iraq and Afghanistan, not our support of Israel.
So do you get worked up about Darfur, North Korea, heart disease, or gun violence on U.S. streets. Last time I checked those kill a whole hell of a lot more people. Probably more died in one week of gang raping in Darfur or house burning in Bosnia than in 60 years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Why is everyone so fixated on Israel?
June 9, 2009 5:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Probably more died in one week of gang raping in Darfur or house burning in Bosnia than in 60 years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict"
Not even remotely true. Probably 15,000 died in the Lebanon War in 1982, for instance. And from what I've read (though admittedly I don't know who to trust on Darfur), the majority of those who have died in Darfur have died from the indirect effects of the conflict, not from violence.
Anyway, that argument cuts both ways. Why do Americans hear so much about Palestinian suicide bombing?
June 9, 2009 10:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're way off. In total hundreds of thousands have died in Darfur so far and hundreds of thousands died in Bosnia, Croatia & Kosova.
You don't know who to trust on Darfur? How about the UN and int'l relief community to start, or will you take Bashir at his word that this is a western plot to split Sudan. And as from the indirect effects of the conflict in Darfur (like Bosnia) this was intentional. Deprive the people of food, shelter and public order and they will die, kill each other or flee. Ethnic cleansing at its best.
And you need to take out a book on the Lebanon Civil War. Laying the blame on Israel for all the deaths in the Lebanese Civil War is ignorant. Israel was a player in that nasty war along with the Lebanese factions, Syria, the Palestinians and others.
June 10, 2009 9:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
I am fixated on Israeli policies because I am Jewish and my family are horrified and physically sickened at the recent killings of hundreds of defenceless women, children in Gaza, by the IDF.
My grandfather escaped from the pogroms in Russia just a hundred years ago - but he died before he could see his vision fulfilled for a Jewish homeland.
That was his dream that turned into today's Kafkaesque dehumanized nightmare in which indigenous Palestinians are butchered for no reason other than that they want food, shelter and medical care for their families.
Such actions by Israel have no connection whatsoever with the ancient religion of Judaism which prohibits such barbarity against one's fellow man..
This is why so many are 'fixated' on Israel.
June 9, 2009 5:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
ColinDale,
I don't know if you live in the US or not, but I will tell you that the Palestinians and some other Arab nations over the years have made it pretty easy for many Americans to be more supportive or Israel, or, at least, not to see the other side as the more wronged party.
Also, if you think that Israel's supporters are just all or a part of the Jewish Community, you could not be more wrong...
You will not see any group's RIGHT to organize and have its voice heard curtailed by law, unless you change the US Constitution and re-write the first amendment. It won't be happening anytime soon.
ColinDale, your criticisms of "the Isreali lobby" match, almost word for word, what anti-semites said about the Jewish Community in the 1930's and the run-up to WWII. Just substitute Jewish for Israeli and you are there. Jewish groups were attacked for having "too much" influence over US foreign policy. In his famous 1941 Des Moines speech, Charles Lindberg warned that Jews were "controlling" the media and national dialog and pushing policies that prevented "peace." The Jewish Community was not nearly as organized at that time...and we know well just what happened.
I think, at some level, you know that your allegations that Palestinians are killed only because they wanted food and shelter for their families are foolish. You can agree or disagree with Israel's response, but you cannot argue that they were provoked. Look at the statements by Hamas's leadership, as well as their actions. It takes two to tangle, my friend, and Hamas has not been reluctant.
June 9, 2009 10:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
ColinDale, your criticisms of "the Isreali lobby" match, almost word for word, what anti-semites said about the Jewish Community in the 1930's and the run-up to WWII. Just substitute Jewish for Israeli and you are there. Jewish groups were attacked for having "too much" influence over US foreign policy.
Oh, goody. Let's run with this logic a bit.
"ColinDale, your criticisms of "the pharma lobby" match, almost word for word, what anti-semites said about the Jewish Community in the 1930's and the run-up to WWII. Just substitute Jewish for Pharma and you are there. Jewish groups were attacked for having "too much" influence over US foreign policy."
See? Everyone who calls out the influence of Big Pharma in Washington is a closet anti-Semite!
Feel free to make your own substitutions.
It's a neat little canard that really could be used by any group to silence criticism of their policies or their activities in Washington. In practice, nobody except the AIPACers have the chutzpah to use it.
June 10, 2009 7:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
>ColinDale, your criticisms of "the Isreali lobby" match, almost word for word, what anti-semites said about the Jewish Community in the 1930's and the run-up to WWII. Just substitute Jewish for Israeli and you are there
That is hasbara-speak - or for the uninitiated, carefully worded propaganda to counter the facts. You innocently suggest 'substitute Jewish for Israeli'. That apparently benign suggestion has been the core of Israel's Foreign Affairs Ministry policy for many years.
I, together with the majority of world Jewry are not Israeli. We are Jewish and French and English and American.
You know full well that the butchering of women and children is a terrible crime against humanity . An atrocity that is being investigated at this moment by the UN but in which the Israeli government refuses to co-operate.
These are Israeli actions - not Jewish ones. No one in Gaza or anywhere else 'provoked' the heavily armed IDF into this massacre of innocents.
But you know this. As does the international community.
June 10, 2009 2:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
You don't think all those rockets falling on Sderot and elsewhere within greenline Israel were provocation?
Now there's a strong argument to be made that the Israeli response was excessive and somewhat careless and that it hasn't necessarily accomplished much. Fair arguments. But it's hardly black and white, as in Israelis = super oppressors and Palestinians = perfect children of peace.
June 10, 2009 9:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Just several days ago Democratic leaders in Congress were not able to change regulations of home mortgages due to resolute opposition of banking lobby. So they started to negotiate with bankers to explain that it is also for THEIR own good. Indeed, lobbies have power in USA.
But Likudniks have more obstacles than ever. First, they have Likud. There is a number of values that the current ruling coalition in Israel and American mainstream DO NOT SHARE, especially American Jews.
I think that if Netanyahu will resolutely expand settlements, there may be some sanctions. After all, even AIPAC does not defend illegal settlements, or more generally, settlements on the other side of separation fence/wall. The normal tactic was to change the topic.
But the latest topic-changing theme is rather disastrous. Americans have no appetite for new avoidable military confrontations, including Iran.
Calling Ahmedinejad a new Hitler somewhat wears off, especially if Obama is also called a new Hitler.
In any case, Israeli PM may try to rally "descamisados" (although they seems to have shirts, some of brown hue), but on what slogan? Settlements? Censoring "Arab culture in Jerusalem"? Censoring Nakba rememberance? Some novel ideas for Arab bashing? Bring it on!
They may drive AIPAC to J Street if they will keep it like that. After all, AIPAC is an American creature, not Israeli or "Likudnik". The driving force are American rich Jews, who share a certain paranoid view of Israeli security, but not messianic delusions, proud racism (in America, you are supposed to be discrete with your racism, especially if you belong to sophisticated elite), and, well, disregard for property rights.
Indeed, we may well see something totally unexpected: AIPAC working in reverse. "Undemocratic, unelected and foreign" pressure on the government of Israel.
June 10, 2009 3:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with your analysis for the most part. If Netanyahu rallies to the flag of the extremist cowboy settlers he will turn off American supporters and make it politically unfeasible for AIPAC and others to continue to strongly support Israel.
I do take exception with the description of AIPAC or the Israeli lobby as simply rich American Jews. A lot of Israel's most fervent and uncompromising support comes from the old far-right (Helms types) and evangelicals (Imhofe, Christian Coalition), not to mention defense contractors that prosper from the U.S.-Israel military trade. American Jews are strong supporters too, but they come in different hues, be they Elliot Abrams or Adelsons, mainstream Jews and J Streeters, and even the likes of Chomsky and Finkelstein.
June 10, 2009 10:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
The official public words:
from
U.S. Envoy Reassures and Presses a Wary Israel, By Isabel Kershner for the June 10 New York Times.
June 10, 2009 10:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
MJ writes "The less the Obama strategy is played out in the media, the less opportunity for the usual suspects to scream "enough already." "
Perhaps MJ's relentless agitation against "Likudniks" is exactly the kind of media attention the Obama administration sees as counterproductive and is seeking to quiet down? POTUS message to MJ: relax already and stop undermining your President.
June 10, 2009 4:52 PM | Reply | Permalink