Soccer Dad

The njdc's ledge

A common device in an adventure movie is to have a character standing on a ledge. But the ledge is retracting into the wall. Before long the character, unless he finds a way off the ledge, will plunge downward to his doom.

Politically the NJDC is on such a ledge. Proclaiming to be both pro-Israel and proud of their Democratic Party, they can't seem to bridge the dissonance between their professed support of Israel and the increasingly confrontational positions has been taking regarding Israel.

If we go back a few months, we find Ira Forman of the NJDC criticizing statements made by Chas Freeman after Freeman withdrew from consideration to be the nation's top intelligence official.

Cries of a pro-Israel conspiracy are cartoonish.

That's fine as far it goes. But nowhere did I find anything from the NJDC criticizing the appointment itself. Freeman wasn't exactly an unknown quantity when he was considered for the position. A former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who was on the Saudi payroll is not someone who is going to be sympathetic to Jewish national aspirations. When someone such as Chas Freeman is considered for a high post in an administration, I would think that the administration's pro-Israel bona-fides are questionable.

Fast forward to President Obama's speech in Cairo. Here's how Steve Sheffey of the NJDC dismisses criticisms of theh President's speech.

The pro-Israel community should be cheering Obama's speech, not splicing the text looking for hidden meanings and secret messages the way that pot-heads in college dorms used to try to decode "Revolution #9." The ability of some of our Republican friends to ignore the good and find fault with everything Obama does reminds me of the story of the little boy who is playing at the beach and is washed away to sea. His grandmother pleads with God for his return. Miraculously, the tide brings him back, unharmed. The grandmother looks skyward and says, "But he had a hat."

Of course, this is a straw man argument. It would be straw man even if the criticism of the President wasn't exclusively the province of the pro-Israel right. The speech was also problematic with elements of the pro-Israel left. Longtime Obama supporter, Martin Peretz, penned a lengthy essay in the New Republic challenging the way, President Obama made his case before the Muslim world.

About the President's juxtaposition of the Holocaust to the founding of the modern state of Israel - that Sheffey blithely dismisses as insignificant - Peretz writes:

When Obama attributes the establishment of Israel, and also Israel's fear that the Iranian government and many Arabs would quite happily visit another devastation on it, to the Holocaust, he is in fact accepting Dr. Ahmadinejad's analysis of the Zionist triumph and also one of the tenets of Palestinian rejectionism, which is that the Palestinians are correct in their phobia that they have paid the price for what the Nazis did to the Jews.

Sheffey himself acknowledges that what's important is "... what people hear," and yet he can't understand why someone would assume that the Muslim world would have drawn a distinctly different conclusion for that section of the speech than he would have.

Glenn Kessler reported in the Washington Post that President Obama got plenty of input from Muslim groups for his speech. Given that he was addressing the "Muslim world" that makes sense, but that hardly reassures me that he was giving much consideration to the Israeli side of the conflict.

But Judith Apter Klinghoffer pointed out that David Gregory asked Vice President Biden if the administration was distancing itself from Israel. Biden, who vouched for Barack Obama, couldn't defend why the President had singled out Israel for a specific rebuke in his Cairo speech. The Vice President responded with double talk about the need for a two state solution, but he never answered the question about the President's specificity that was directed solely towards Israel.

The juxtaposition of the Holocaust to the founding of Israel and the President's specific rebuke to Israel don't require any fancy analysis to discern. It doesn't require smoking pot and black light. It simply requires an understanding of English and composition.

Now it's not just Republicans, who have doubts about the President's commitment to Israel. According to a recent poll only 6% of Jewish Israelis consider President Obama to be pro-Israel. This means that it's not just "settlers" who mistrust the President. It's the Israeli mainstream that does.

Barry Rubin identifies three things the President has done that has alienated him from the Israeli public:

The first of these is that he held back on condemning the Iranian regime's stealing an election and repressing its people for fear that this might provoke a patriotic reaction against him. In fact, he has united Israel's citizens to view him as hostile.

Secondly, he suggested that the United States should not meddle in Iran's affairs, implying that Iranians knew best what their country needed. This has not stopped the president and members of his administration, however, from telling Israel--on the basis of both ignorance regarding the facts on the ground and a poor understanding of the country's situation--what's best for its interests.

And finally, Obama's cultural relativism--everything's really the same in its differentness--which led him to equate the Iranian regime and opposition has made him equate democratic Israel and a Palestinian movement which has still not reconciled itself to a two-state solution.

Simply put, everything President Obama has done has confirmed that his singling out of Israel in the Cairo was not a mistake or oversight. It was done deliberately. Israelis have noted it too.

The "President is pro-Israel" plank continues to retract.

I've always thought that unlike J-Street, NJDC was truly pro-Israel. (J-Street takes the approach that they know better what's good for Israel, so it's pro-Israel to pressure Israel to do things its leaders find risky.) It's getting harder and harder for NJDC to maintain its unquestioning support of President Obama in addition to its pro-Israel stance. It wouldn't hurt the NJDC's Democratic credentials to take issue with the President's approach to the Middle East. Two Democratic senators have done just that. And while Martin Peretz makes it clear that he disagrees with President Obama on Israel, I see no sign that he regrets supporting him as President.

However it is becoming more and more difficult for the NJDC to keep the posture that they support the President unconditionally and that they support Israel too. The time has come for them to acknowledge that the President is not pro-Israel by any reasonable definition of the term.