Mondoweiss

Russert, Obama and Hillary All Flub the Israel Question

I finally caught Tim Russert's question in the Cleveland debate Tuesday night about whether Obama would reject Louis Farrakhan's support, a man who once called Judaism "a gutter religion." Russert's follow up was, " What do you do to assure Jewish Americans that, whether it's Farrakhan's support or the activities of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, your pastor, you are consistent with issues regarding Israel..."

Three quick impressions:

Obama is the coolest candidate I've ever seen but he seemed close to flustered on these questions. He kept speaking of his support in the Jewish community and support for Israel and his desire to solidify the black-Jewish alliance that played such a role in the civil rights movement. He seemed a little nervous to me. His answer was awful. There was no nuance at all, no suggestion comparable to what he suggested in his meeting with 100 Jews from Cleveland last week, that there has to be a more open debate about Israel in this country and that Israel is not always right. I simply don't believe him when he says what he said in the debate, I believe he's pandering. More craven evidence of the power of the Israel lobby in our politics.

Hillary was worse. She said that Obama should reject Farrakhan, rather than simply "denounce" him, because the consequences of Farrakhan's rhetoric are "so far-reaching." This seemed to me a clear Holocaust reference. How helpful is Holocaust rhetoric to addressing our support for Israel in a presidential campaign? It is purely emotional--demagoguery in its own special category.

Russert also failed the question. Why is it that a candidate must assure Jewish Americans about his being "consistent" on a foreign country, Israel? Isn't this an acknowledgement that American Jews feel dual loyalty? Isn't a call to consistency code for political correctness on this issue, rather than exploration of a miserable situation in Israel/Palestine? Should Russert be honoring dual loyalty feelings, or challenging them? Wasn't Irish-American support for the IRA a controversial issue, rather than a Law of Politics, as Russert seemed to say? And is supporting Israel an American interest or a Jewish American interest? If only the latter, shouldn't that be the subject of journalism?
As I have said several times now, Obama's leftwing background and the groundswell popular movement against Israel in this country assure that there will be a robust debate over our support for Israel before too long. The Democratic debate did nothing to advance the issue.

The Most Important Obama Question (What Does His Movement Want?)

I'm headed into the woods. Annual Adirondacks trip for a few days. But here's my question. Obama is leading a popular movement. This is the first real progressive political movement of my lifetime, excepting the McCarthy spasm when I was a kid (and yes, followed by the cultural revolution...). I was angered by Hillary's "celestial... everything will be right in the world" mockery in her yellowjacketed speech the other day. She is just like Malcolm Hoenlein saying, Why change anything, that will lead to mischief. Obviously Obama's people want change.

Still haven't gotten to my question. What do these people want to change? Forget about Obama. He's just a guy we can believe in, for various reasons. Seems alright to me. As he says, it's not about him. And what does this progressive movement want? Journalists should be interviewing these people. I'll try to interview some of 'em in the woods.

(And yes, I think many share my hobbyhorse. I was at two dinner parties recently where the mood of the table was impatient re Palestinian freedom. And what does it mean that two things Obama has had to renounce publicly--the Walt/Mearsheimer ad on his website, and Zbig Brzezinski's endorsement of the book--involve the same hot-button issue?)

Obama Reminds Jews of a Time When Israel Was Wrong

Obama's meeting with 100 Cleveland Jews is taking on the same kind of resonance as Kennedy's talk about the Pope to the Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960. Except Obama came to kiss a ring, not unkiss it! Now the Washington Post has picked up the meeting. Soon it will be on national television.

Note that  The Post refers to a"recent book about the 'Israel lobby'", as Newsweek also did this week, without giving credit to the authors, Walt and Mearsheimer.

And note when Obama talks about his controversial church:

It is true that my pastor, Jeremiah Wright... is somebody who on occasion can say controversial things.... He was very active in the South Africa divestment movement, and you will recall that there was a tension that arose between the African American and the Jewish communities during that period when we were dealing with apartheid in South Africa, because Israel and South Africa had a relationship at that time. And that cause -- that was a source of tension. So there have been a couple of occasions where he made comments with relation, rooted in that. Not necessarily ones that I share. But that is the context within which he has made those comments.

This is a significant comment. It is reminding Jews of a time when Israel was flat wrong, when it sought to prop up apartheid South Africa. Obama's being tactful as all get-out, but he knows his leftwing history. And you know what side he was on.

P.S. Oh and which way did history go on apartheid South Africa?

McCain Gains Sanctificaton for Jews Fleeing Obama

Rosner, in Haaretz, agrees with me that the general election will at last bring a robust debate of our Israel policy:

Israeli experts on American politics said in recent weeks that a campaign between Obama and McCain will place Israel at center stage and will require extreme caution on the part of Israel. McCain is hoping to attract Jewish American votes, both because of his many years of support for Israel, and also as a result of the endorsement he received from Senator Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman is often mentioned as a possible member of the McCain administration, possibly as secretary of defense. 

One reason why McCain can draw Jewish votes is that he is free of the burden of George Bush, who in spite his support for Israel, cannot easily attract Jewish voters because he is a conservative evangelical. McCain, on the other hand, has adopted moderate policies domestically, and will allow Jewish voters to choose him with greater ease.   
 

Lieberman came into politics as an antiwar dove. Now he's defense secretary? Look what militarized Israel has done to my people!

Reagan Revolution, Meet Obama Revolution

The Asia Times is attacking Obama in a vicious way by using his anthropologist mother and pro-"blackness" wife against him.

Anthropologists...proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother's revenge against the America she despised.

As for his wife: "Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public."

While this is vicious reaction, I know the Asia Times is on to something. Obama has true leftwing pedigree. His wife was taken up with the black man's plight, Obama has called American Jews, by hints anyway, away from the Israel lobby. Yes he is careful as all get out, but this is his "intellectual milieu," to use a term Paul Berman once used (haranguing about Islamofascism).

The truth is America is ready for a leftist. Because all the brilliant right wing ideas are smoldering in Mesopotamia.  We are witnessing a people's movement in Obama's rise, and if he wins by anything like what Reagan did in '80, he will claim a mandate to change America's image in the world (as Reagan reversed Carter), and he will talk to Syria and Iran. The Obama revolution. It's time, dude.

Chelsea Clinton's Lack of Accomplishment (and Mom's Lack of Success) Signals the End of the Elite That Gave Us Iraq

I read the New York magazine profile of Chelsea Clinton hungering for any evidence of something idealistic she believes in. No, she seems insipid, a pale copy of her parents, with a New York lifestyle. She's on the board of a ballet company, but tThere isn't a shred of what her mother expressed when she graduated from Wellesley 40 years ago, during Vietnam:

our prevailing acquisitive and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living.

People are for Obama because they want a larger sense of meaning to their American lives. And in that sense the Clinton era is over. Hillary talked about it some times, but the Clintons never offered us a "politics of meaning." Bill's one great accomplishment was economic growth in the 90s. Chelsea's life seems to have drained into those materialist values. She works for a hedgefund.

Of course I look at it from a Jewish perspective. My people came inside with the Clintons. The most philosemitic administration in history (per Frum, from the next philosemitic administration). The two Supreme Court appointees were Jewish. The big donors to Hillary's campaign are Jewish and Chelsea's boyfriend is Jewish (and works at Goldman Sachs), as was her father's most famous lover. The establishment has been by my estimate half-Jewish. The Camp David negotiating team was almost all Jewish. When John O'Keeffe writes to me that now is the time for Israel to cut a deal he's right. It seems like this era is already passing, that the Jewish arrival-into-power generation didn't stand for enough--besides wealth and the Iraq war--and so now it's going into the dustbin of history. The Vietnam debacle ended a blueblood establishment that went out in the domestic convulsions of the 70s, and the great minds that gave us Iraq will give way, even if he loses, to an Obama-fostered rising class of assimilating intermarrying leftleaning ethnics who don't play identity politics and want to reinspire our democracy. I can't wait.

I always use the word meritocracy to describe my generation but it's not precise. What is the meritocracy? It was a ruling class that melded the burgeoning communications industries with Wall Street and global entrepreneurialism, i.e., hedge funds and the internet. When they were young the meritocrats made the first cut via standardized tests, and these tests gave them the sense that they were the best, chosen democratically; and the meritocracy was pervaded by elitist prestige thinking. Few of them had kids in the Iraq war, and they felt no personal connection with Bush's war, which their representative almost universally suported. And yes, my people did especially well in the meritocracy. As I reported yesterday, Pew shows that 55 percent of Reform Jewish households make over $100,000 a year, three times the national percent. We brought our entrepreneurialism to the American economy and brought our worldview to the ruling class. When 9/11 happened, the powerful press never said that Osama bin Laden was motivated by anger about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

My father has said to me that when America turns against Jews, it will happen "without fireworks." He's right. This Jewish-flavored establishment will pass without fireworks. Though I believe Walt and Mearsheimer have played a large subterranean role in this presidential campaign--Newsweek cites them but can't even mention their work by name in a piece on whether Obama is good for the Jews. Their ideas won't stay subterranean. All the murmuring from Clinton's pro-Israel braintrust and the neocons about Obama's true agenda is going to break out in open accusation, that Obama wants an evenhanded policy in the Middle East. Again, I can't wait. And as Obama himself has said, all the bleeding of Jews into the Republican party is over Israel. Jews now make up the conservative bulwark of the Democratic Party. We're like Rockefeller Republicans, in their day, just as status quo oriented. Why change anything, Malcolm Hoenlein said to Haaretz, when he attacked Obama, it's just inviting mischief...

Why change anything? My own disappointment with the meritocracy stemmed from my awareness that it was as smug and entitled as the ruling class it replaced. When PBS's Paul Solman interviewed the Indian Vandana Shiva about her anti-globalist crusade--to stop agriculture companies from patenting ancient indigenous cures-- he expressed irritation that she was anti-progress, anti-urban, anti-growth. Is there any soul in his values? When the New York Times offered a piece yesterday on the latest trend in Holocaust education for children, there was scarcely a word about the importance of the Holocaust in identity politics, to the preservation of the state of Israel and Jto the Jewish campaign against intermarriage (at a time when everyone wants to marry us, as they wanted to marry rich gentiles back when). And no mention of the ways that human suffering is unfolding before us now, including in the Occupied Territories. Some day soon these attitudes will seem quaint and ancient.

'Nothing Has Changed.' A Dialogue With Saif Ammous Over the 'Peace Process'

I've learned a lot about Israel/Palestine from Saifedean Ammous, a Palestinian grad student at Columbia U. and a leader of the Arab Students Association there. He's introduced me to lots of Arab students, I've heard him lecture at the 92d Street Y about the economies of the Middle East. A couple months back after the IPF conference in New York, I came out for the 2-state solution, and Ammous bridled and sent me an email. We had an exchange, which he's allowed me to post.

I haven't changed my point of view here significantly, though I must say that the last 2 months have been kinder to Ammous's view than mine. The collective punishment of Gaza, the continuing construction of colonies, it is not these Israeli actions that dismay me as much as the utter failure of my own country to do anything about those conditions. Ammous's cynicism about the peace process is, after all, very similar to Henry Siegman's, in this brilliant piece.

But here's the dialogue:

Ammous: Why did you—of all people—start repeating this Peace-Process-Delusion?!  Do you honestly believe the words of that war-criminal Ramon?!  Can't you see that this discrepancy between actions and rhetoric is exactly what is needed to sustain the reality on the ground!?

Weiss: Here's why, because I am new to these issues, and everyone is allowed their first day at the fair, their moment to try and believe in the good faith of all parties, before disillusionment. The people like you who have had more experience say this is another delusion, and since i don't have the experience I choose to believe. And maybe I will be right this time. As for Ramon, and Sneh, I am appalled by the racist underpinnings of their belief in their state, but I am praying for a real shift and change here. ...

Ammous: This isn't about experience and being new... though that helps. Simply put: if an alcoholic says they want to quit a hundred times, it makes the 101st time they say it less credible.  However, if the alcoholic says they want to quit for the 101st time between full gulps of Jack Daniel's and while ordering another shipment of Jack Daniel's to last him a year, then you know for sure that he ain't going to quit.  Actions speak louder than words.  If they really wanted to quit, they wouldn't have made the purchase.  It's that simple.

Hot-Damn! Obama's Secretly a Leftist

Yesterday Obama spoke to 100 Jews in Cleveland. The Obama campaign released this transcript, now published in the NY Sun. A few key passages:

1. Strongly hinting that he is likely to shift U.S. policy and calling on the diversity of opinion in American Jewish ranks...

I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt a unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel. If we cannot have a honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we're not going to make progress. And frankly some of the commentary that I've seen which suggests guilt by association or the notion that unless we are never ever going to ask any difficult questions about how we move peace forward or secure Israel that is non military or non belligerent or doesn't talk about just crushing the opposition that that somehow is being soft or anti-Israel, I think we're going to have problems moving forward. And that I think is something we have to have an honest dialogue about.

2. Having the standard enlightened person's response, on his one trip to Israel, and then alluding indirectly to the Israel lobby:

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

3. On the leakage of Jewish Democrats to the other side.

to the extent that there's been bleeding over into the Republican Party, it all has to do with this issue of Israel. [But George Bush, Obama went on, has been bad for Israel...]

A few responses. Obama clearly has studied the progressive critique of Israel. You can tell because he's fluid. He knows the issues here and he touches on all of them, but not with any of the emphases I would like. Still: he knows the stations of the leftwing cross. Point 3 is his response to the Liebermans of the world. Well he is not going to make the Liebermans happy and there is going to be more bleeding in the months to come.

I don't think you can read Ali Abunimah's piece on Obama, in which he says that Obama abandoned his pro-Palestinian talk after he lost a race for Congress in 2000--

Over the years since I first saw Obama speak I met him about half a dozen times, often at Palestinian and Arab-American community events in Chicago including a May 1998 community fundraiser at which Edward Said was the keynote speaker. In 2000, when Obama unsuccessfully ran for Congress I heard him speak at a campaign fundraiser hosted by a University of Chicago professor. On that occasion and others Obama was forthright in his criticism of US policy and his call for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

I don't think you can read Michelle Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton assailing the goal of assimilation for black professionals... can't read Michelle O's statement about not being proud of her country till now... can't read Obama's statement on not wearing a flag pin in the time after 9/11...
without concluding that Obama is schooled completely in progressive values. He's a leftist at heart, I better keep that secret.

 

Jews Are Richer, Older and Better Educated Than Other Americans

I always say that Jews are privileged. Well, the Pew Forum's study of the American religious landscape shows that my people are richer, older, and more educated than other Americans by a significant factor.

Consider income. According to Pew, 46 percent of Jews say their family income is over $100,000 a year. Nationally the number is 19 percent. If you turn to mainline Protestant families--the gentiles I usually compare Jews to as privileged--the percentage is just 21 percent, less than half the Jewish percentage. No one else is even close. Except for Hindus, with 43 percent of their families making over $100,000; and I have to think that number is skewed by Asian professional immigration--and by the fact that Hindus are a splinter group, less than half of a percent of the population. Jews are 1.7 percent of the population.

And if you break down Pew's Jewish numbers, you find that 55 percent of Reform Jews make over $100,000 a year--three times the national figure of 19 percent.

Other revelations are that 51 percent of Jews are 50 and older. The national average is 41 percent. Though mainline Protestants are also older in the same proportion: 51 percent. I wonder whether this is a sign of better health care and longevity. Though it could be a sign of the erosion in Jewish numbers from intermarriage.

Now education. The national average for college or postgraduate education is 27 percent. Among Jews it is 59 percent. Among Hindus, that number is a whopping 74 percent. And as for mainline Protestants, 34 percent.

What's the bottom line? My people are an American elite. We are principals in American society. Celebrate it, and accept the social responsibility that status entails.

How Matt Drudge Runs the Political Conversation 'Tween Hillary and Obama

Matt Drudge is an amazing journalist, with faultless tabloid news judgment. This morning he circulated the "Dressed" photo of Obama, in which he looks like a Muslim, the picture taken in Kenya when he dressed in local costume, as a Somali elder. Drudge said that the Clinton people were circulating the photo, to undermine Obama.

Well now on Drudge, attached to the same report, are three photos of other leaders in local costume: Clinton, Bush, and Hillary (wearing a headscarf in a Muslim country). This motion of fairness on Drudge's part was transparently fed by Obama's people. They know how important Drudge is, and wanted to make sure the political conversation included the important fact that Obama was hardly alone in going native. Watch for it on the national news and Chris Matthews tonight. What an amazing world we live in.