by Eli Clifton & Jim Lobe
The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) is having a rough six months. Last year, ECI and its chairman, Republican operative Bill Kristol, did all it could to portray Barack Obama as insufficiently supportive of Israel. The group’s efforts and considerable spending on television ad-buys did little [...]]]>
by Eli Clifton & Jim Lobe
The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) is having a rough six months. Last year, ECI and its chairman, Republican operative Bill Kristol, did all it could to portray Barack Obama as insufficiently supportive of Israel. The group’s efforts and considerable spending on television ad-buys did little to sway Jewish voters, 69% of whom voted for Obama.
Hot off their election losses, the group then sunk several hundred thousand dollars into a campaign to derail Obama’s nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) to head up the Pentagon. The campaign failed, and Hagel, despite being labeled “not a responsible option” in full-page newspaper ads bought by ECI, was sworn in as Secretary of Defense at the end of February.
Having thus shown themselves to be at best in the mainstream of an increasingly extremist and partisan Republican Party and lacking a scintilla of evidence that they represent the views of a majority of Jewish Americans, the group today took issue with a letter from the Israel Policy Forum (IPF), signed by 100 prominent Jewish Americans, calling on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “work closely with Secretary of State John Kerry to devise pragmatic initiatives, consistent with Israel’s security needs, which would represent Israel’s readiness to make painful territorial sacrifices for the sake of peace.”
Signatories included well-known donors to Jewish and Israeli charities and foundations, such as Charles Bronfman, Danny Abraham, Lester Crown, and Stanley Gold; former U.S. Defense Undersecretary Dov Zakheim; former Rep. Mel Levine, former AIPAC executive director Tom Dine; Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt; the current and immediate past presidents of United Reform Judaism; Atlanta Hawks owner Bruce Levenson; the former chairman of of the United Jewish Appeal, Marvin Lender; former chairman of the Jewish Agency, Richard Pearlstone; and the director of the influential Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, Rabbi David Saperstein, among others.
The ECI blasted the IPF in its own letter to Netanyahu, which was signed by its three board members — Kristol, Gary Bauer, and ”Bad Rachel” Abrams – its executive director, Noah Pollak, and “adviser” Michael Goldfarb. The five signatories assured the Israeli leader that the IPF signatories — whom they call “oracles of bad advice” — “don’t speak for us or for a majority of Americans.”
We not only question the wisdom of their advice, we question their standing to issue such an admonition to a democratically-elected (sic) prime minister whose job is not to assuage the political longings of 100 American Jews, but to represent — and ensure the security of — the Israeli people.
The ECI letter goes on to assure Netanyahu that its five signers “affirm the words of Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, who recently asked an American Jewish audience to ‘respect the decisions made by the world’s most resilient democracy.’”
“We, too, have strong opinions on the peace process — but one thing we never presume to do is instruct our friends in Israel on the level of danger to which they should expose themselves.”
The letter concludes:
We trust, of course, that you are under no misapprehensions about any of this. But we felt it important that you heard from a mainstream voice in addition to the predictable calls from a certain cast of American activists for more Israeli concessions.
Indeed, there is little to reason to doubt that ECI’s board members, one of whom called on Palestinians to be thrown into the sea “to float there, food for sharks, stargazers and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose,” have “strong opinions about the peace process” or that they are strong supporters of Netanyahu (although, as individuals, they have offered no end of advice to other Israeli Prime Ministers, such as Ehud Olmert.)
But, as their short list of signatures suggests, US Jews, in any event, don’t agree with ECI’s extremist views.
The American Jewish Committee’s 2012 poll of Jewish public opinion found only 4.5% of Jewish voters listed US-Israel relations as their most important issue in November’s 2012 presidential election. A November 6, 2012 J Street poll found that 73% of Jewish voters agreed with Obama’s President’s policies in the Arab-Israeli conflict, while 76% supported the US playing an active role in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict “if it meant the United States putting forth a peace plan that proposes borders and security arrangements between Israelis and Palestinians.”
Such an agreement may well run afoul of Oren’s directive that Jewish Americans “respect” Israel’s decisions or ECI’s suggestion that it is inappropriate for American Jews “to demand ‘painful territorial sacrifices’ of Israelis.”
Thus, it seems safe to conclude that the views of IPF’s signatories are much closer to those of most US Jews than to ECI’s and its five signatories.
As for ECI’s claim that it speaks for “a majority of Americans,” that, too, seems in question. Nearly two-thirds of respondents (65%) in the latest of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’s quadrennial series of surveys, released last September, said they believed that Washington should not side with either party in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. That finding was broadly consistent with previous polling on the same or similar questions over many years.
]]>Ending a long and controversial battle, the U.S. Senate Tuesday voted 58-41 to confirm former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel as President Barack Obama’s new secretary of defence.
The confirmation, which followed a more-lopsided 71-27 vote to end a Republican-led filibuster against the decorated Vietnam War veteran, broke mainly along party lines, [...]]]>
Ending a long and controversial battle, the U.S. Senate Tuesday voted 58-41 to confirm former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel as President Barack Obama’s new secretary of defence.
The confirmation, which followed a more-lopsided 71-27 vote to end a Republican-led filibuster against the decorated Vietnam War veteran, broke mainly along party lines, with four Republican senators joining the 52 Democrats and two independents in the chambre in voting to approve the nomination.
The vote marked a major defeat for hard-line neo-conservatives, notably the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) and its chairman, Republican operative Bill Kristol, whose “Weekly Standard” magazine and website published a constant stream of charges against the former Nebraska senator, ranging from anti-Semitism to deep hostility toward Israel, since word that Hagel was Obama’s preferred candidate for the post in mid-December.
ECI and several other well-funded “astro-turf” groups tried first to pre-empt the nomination, which came in January, and then to derail it by promoting a filibuster by Republicans and persuading – albeit unsuccessfully — key Democratic senators considered susceptible to pressure by more-mainstream Israel lobby groups to defect.
In grueling eight-hour testimony late last month, as well as one-on-one meetings with senators, however, Hagel, who served in the Senate from 1997 to 2009, reassured doubters that he was both a strong supporter of Israel’s security and, despite a number of previous public statements suggesting that military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities would be grave mistake, he would indeed recommend such a course of action if all diplomatic efforts to curb Tehran’s nuclear programme fell short.
In a statement issued after the vote, Kristol insisted that ECI was “proud” of its role during the confirmation battle, adding that, “We are heartened that that the overwhelming majority of senators from one of the major parties voted against confirming Mr. Hagel.”
Hagel will now join his fellow-Vietnam War veteran, Secretary of State John Kerry, as one of the three top national-security officials in the cabinet, along with Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, White House Chief of Staff and former deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough, Vice President Joe Biden, as well as U.N. Amb. Susan Rice, as the president’s key foreign-policy advisers.
Yet to be confirmed is Obama’s choice for director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Brennan, the top counter-terrorism official in the White House during most of Obama’s first term.
While Hagel is the only Republican among the top national-security officials, he is widely seen as generally sharing their worldview on key foreign-policy and defence issues – notably, the desirability of maintaining a “light military footprint”, especially in the Middle East; “engaging” actual and potential geo-political foes through diplomacy; using military power only as a last resort; and relying more on multilateral institutions, such as the U.N. and NATO, and regional actors, to address key crisis situations, sometimes derisively referred to by neo-conservatives and other hawks as “leading from behind”.
One basic tenet of their beliefs was expressed by former Pentagon chief Robert Gates two years ago when he told Army cadets: “Any future defence secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as Gen. (Douglas) MacCarthur so delicately put it.”
As Vietnam veterans who came to believe that the war in Indochina was a major strategic error – as well as a waste of U.S. blood and treasure – Hagel and Kerry are regarded as particularly sceptical of the effectiveness of military action and of “nation-building” and counter-insurgency strategy – a scepticism also shared by Biden, whose influence on foreign policy is seen as having risen over the past two years.
Biden’s top foreign-policy aide for many years, Tony Blinken, has now taken McDonough’s place as deputy national security adviser.
Indeed, in a column published over the weekend, foreign-policy insider par excellence, David Ignatius, warned that Obama’s second-term team is so unified in their general foreign-policy outlook that Obama “is perilously close to groupthink”.
While both Kerry, who hails from the liberal-international wing of the Democratic Party, and Hagel, who is close to the rapidly disappearing “realist” wing of the Republican Party (of which Gates was also a part), both voted in 2002 to give George W. Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq, they did so with considerable reservations at the time and, within a year of the invasion, began criticising what Obama himself called a “dumb” war.
Hagel’s criticism of the Iraq war – as well as his neutrality in the 2008 race between Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain – has been cited as a major reason why most Republicans opposed his nomination, although not to the extent of supporting an indefinite filibuster against it.
But most political analysts here believe most Republican senators would have gone along with the nomination – as is customary for most presidential cabinet appointees – had the neo-conservatives and their funders, as well as elements of the more-mainstream Israel lobby, not mounted such a vigorous and expensive effort to defeat him.
Unlike most members of Congress, for whom the influence of the Israel lobby looms very large, Hagel spoke out publicly about what he believed were Israel’s poor treatment of Palestinians, the urgent necessity of a two-state solution, the importance of engaging Hamas in a peace process, and the potentially catastrophic dangers of an Israeli or U.S. military attack on Iran.
In at least one interview, he also spoke out against the “intimidate(ing)” influence of what he called the “Jewish lobby” – a phrase for which he was later accused of anti-semitism, and for which he subsequently apologised. (A major component of the Israel lobby consists of evangelical Christians, a core Republican constituency.)
Indeed, during his grueling and less-than-impressive eight-hour confirmation hearing, Republicans focused their questioning almost exclusively on his views regarding Israel and Iran.
Indeed, “Israel” was mentioned 179 times (Iran 171) – more often than Iraq (30), Afghanistan (27), Russia (23), Palestine or Palestinian (22), Syria (18), North Korea (11), Pakistan (10), Egypt (9), China (5), NATO (5), Libya (2), Bahrain (2), Somalia (2), Al-Qaeda (2), and Mali, Jordan, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea (once each) combined.
The questioning was so Israel-centred that the popular satirical weekly television programme, Saturday Night Live, even devoted a skit broadcast over the web depicting Hagel’s Republican inquisitors competing to avow their devotion to the Jewish state.
But whether Hagel will indeed play a key role in determining U.S. policy toward Israel remains to be seen. For now, the much bigger challenge he faces is the implications of the so-called budget sequestration that appears certain to take effect Mar. 1 and as a result of which the Pentagon could face as much as 600 billion dollars in cuts to its budget over the next 10 years in addition to the almost-500 billion dollars in cuts that have already been mandated.
Ironically, the impact of the sequestration on the Pentagon’s budget is also seen as potentially disastrous to the neo-conservatives who opposed Hagel.
Given their strong conviction that Israeli security and global stability rests primarily on U.S. military power, they have spoken out strongly against growing Republican complacency about the effects of sequestration on the Pentagon, fearing that it heralds a resurgence of isolationist sentiment in the party. But instead of focusing primarily on rallying Republicans to compromise with Obama on the budget, they spent significantly more time and resources on defeating Hagel.
Photo: Senator Charles T. Hagel smiles with Senator John Warner, retired, (left) and Senator Sam Nunn, retired, (right). Credit: DoD Photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo
]]>Yesterday, Mitt Romney held three fundraisers in the Hamptons, the exclusive beach towns known as a playground to super-rich New York City financiers.According to the Los Angeles Times, one event was co-hosted by Daniel Loeb, a hedge-funder who turned against President Obama and bankrolled a neoconservative pressure group [...]]]>
Yesterday, Mitt Romney held three fundraisers in the Hamptons, the exclusive beach towns known as a playground to super-rich New York City financiers.According to the Los Angeles Times, one event was co-hosted by Daniel Loeb, a hedge-funder who turned against President Obama and bankrolled a neoconservative pressure group that called last month for the U.S. to attack Iran. The Los Angeles Times reported:
At Romney’s luncheon with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor at the Creeks, supporters were asked to contribute or raise $25,000 per person for a VIP photo reception. Among the co-hosts were lobbyist Wayne Berman, a former bundler for George W. Bush, as well as financiers Lew Eisenberg and Daniel Loeb.
Loeb supported Obama’s first run for president, raising $200,000 for him in 2008. But, comparing Obama to an abusive spouse to the hedge-fund industry — “[Obama] really loves us and when he beats us, he doesn’t mean it,” he told friends in an e-mail — he turned away from Obama and began supporting partisan, right-wing causes.
Among the beneficiaries of Loeb’s shifting political allegiances was a right-wing pressure group called the Emergency Committee For Israel (ECI). According to FEC filings, Loeb remains the largest single overall donor to ECI’s PAC.
Led by neoconservative don Bill Kristol, ECI is best known for publishing patently dishonest attackson Obama, smear campaigns against its ideological opponents, and attempting to paint the Occupy Wall Street Protests as anti-Semitic (trying to discredit Occupy seems a natural move for a hedge-funder).
Last month, ECI launched a television ad calling on Obama to bomb Iran. Watch it here:
Kristol quickly followed-up on ECI’s pro-war ad with a long article in the Weekly Standard calling for Congress to authorize war with Iran — only the latest in a long line of such calls from Kristol.
Romney’s Iran policy is more difficult to nail down. The presumptive GOP nominee regularly employs militaristic rhetoric toward the Islamic Republic, and many of his top foreign policy advisers often call for war with Iran. But when asked how Romney’s Iran policy would be a change from Obama’s, his campaign has a hard time trying to differentiate.
One wonders, though, how quickly the divide will be bridged now that Romney and Kristol are feeding from the same trough.
]]>Emergency Committee for Israel: A news advertisement unleashed this week by the ultra-hawkish letterhead group the Emergency Committee for [...]]]>
Emergency Committee for Israel: A news advertisement unleashed this week by the ultra-hawkish letterhead group the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), which is headed by Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, speaks for itself. “Time to Act” seems like a parody from the Daily Show but the ECI actually wants Americans to see the world through the ultra-paranoid, fact-devoid lens that they’re manufacturing. Eli Clifton provides a backgrounder on what the ECI is really about:
ECI’s reflexive hawkishness stems from its hard-right neoconservative disposition. The organization was even born in the same Washington office as the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), a short-lived right-wing pressure group that pushed for an Iraq invasion. A major player in the Iraq war push, Kristol, for his part, already called for a war with Iran last October.
Robert Wright also discusses ECI’s fanaticism in the Atlantic.
Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post: Surprise, surprise. The ECI ad gets a plug from the militantly pro-Israel Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin who regularly agitates for a U.S. war on Iran. Congressional hawks pushing measures that will make those “meaningless talks” between the Iranians and Western countries even less likely to result in a negotiated settlement are also praised by Rubin:
Sitting mutely by on the sidelines while the centrifuges keep spinning in Iran is a dereliction of duty by Congress. Unlike President Obama, however, I think there are lawmakers willing to step up to the plate. History will judge them well.
For more on “Congressional obstructionism” on Iran see Trita Parsi’s recent Op-Ed in the New York Times.
Daniel Pipes, National Review Online: Arch hardliner Daniel Pipes–whose writings were cited 18 times in the “Manifesto” penned by Oslo killer Anders Brevik–criticizes Nicholas Kristof’s observations from his recent trip to Iran. Why? Because Kristof suggests that Iranians are unlikely to welcome a war with open arms:
After providing this information – which tallies with what other travelers to Iran have recounted – Kristof reaches an inexplicable and illogical conclusion: “My guess is that the demise of the system is a matter of time — unless there’s a war between Iran and the West, perhaps ignited by Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. That, I sense, would provoke a nationalist backlash and rescue the ayatollahs.”
Comment: Whence this “sense”? If the Iranian population blames the mullahs for its economic woes today, why not assume it will also blame war on them too?
Emanuele Ottolenghi, FDD/Commentary: According to former Dick Cheney national security adviser John Hannah, the ultra-hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies and particularly Hannah’s “colleague” and FDD executive director Mark Dubowitz was pivotal in framing the U.S.’s decision to sanction Iran’s central bank. Now that sounds all fine and dandy except for one contradiction that all this exposes. If the FDD’s goal with Iran is regime change as stated here by Dubowitz and Reuel Marc Gerecht and this week by FDD staffer Emanuele Ottolenghi (among other places), then why does the U.S. insist that sanctions are integral to reaching a nuclear deal with Iran? If the sanctions are designed by an organization that is striving for regime change, then what hope can there be in any success through diplomacy? Here’s Ottolenghi:
]]>Trouble is brewing then, and offering a facile compromise on nuclear matters to this regime at this juncture would be a terrible mistake. Sanctions are slowly working – but we should keep using them less to extract an impossible deal and more to undermine the regime in Tehran.
The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) released a new ad today suggesting that the U.S. should immediately bomb Iran. Among those behind the ECI and its ad are the same people who pushed the U.S. into the Iraq war.
The ad from ECI, a group which aims to push pro-Israel [...]]]>
The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) released a new ad today suggesting that the U.S. should immediately bomb Iran. Among those behind the ECI and its ad are the same people who pushed the U.S. into the Iraq war.
The ad from ECI, a group which aims to push pro-Israel voters away from President Obama and is headed up by Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, tells viewers in its new commercial that Obama is insufficiently committed to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and concludes, “Now it’s time to act,” followed by an explosion. Watch it:
ECI’s reflexive hawkishness stems from its hard-right neoconservative disposition. The organization was even born in the same Washington office as the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), a short-lived right-wing pressure group that pushed for an Iraq invasion. A major player in the Iraq war push, Kristol, for his part, already called for a war with Iran last October.
ECI, whose board members and director have a history of exhorting acts of violence, ignores U.S., U.N., and Israeli intelligence findings in their efforts for yet another U.S. war in the Middle East — this time with Iran.
In Israel, meanwhile, a growing consensus has emerged among former top security officials that a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be counterproductive to Israeli interests. And areport last month suggests that the consensus opposing an Israeli attack on Iran extends all the way to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s defense chiefs.
A recent report from an influential Washington security think tank said attacking Iran “could backfire.” The U.S. government doesn’t think Iran has made a decision to build a nuclear weapon and seeks to dissuade it from doing so with a negotiated diplomatic resolution, which the Obama administration considers the “best and most permanent way” to end the crisis. A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, as well as the nuclear non-proliferation regime. U.S., U.N. and Israeli intelligence estimates give the West time to pursue a dual-track approach of pressure and diplomacy.
ECI’s ad and statements, first published on BuzzFeed, make a terrifying case that an Iranian nuclear weapon is imminent — an assertion unsupported by facts. In a 60 Minutes interview in January, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said Iran will need “about a year” to build a nuclear bomb and “possibly another one or two years to put it on a deliverable vehicle of some sort.”
UPDATE: J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami responded to the ad:
The people who pushed for war with Iraq are now bent on starting a war with Iran. The security of the United States – and of Israel – is too important to stand idly by while some of Mitt Romney’s biggest supporters press for another war.
Preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is a key US and Israeli national security interest. That’s why Americans and Israelis, including prominent national security experts in both countries, support the crippling sanctions and diplomacy that have been the heart of President Obama’s policy.
In a debate last night with Jeremy Ben Ami of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street, neoconservative don Bill Kristol told the audience in the New York synagogue that he had no problems with President Obama’s Israel policies. But just two months ago, a right-wing pro-Israel group Kristol heads rolled [...]]]>
In a debate last night with Jeremy Ben Ami of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street, neoconservative don Bill Kristol told the audience in the New York synagogue that he had no problems with President Obama’s Israel policies. But just two months ago, a right-wing pro-Israel group Kristol heads rolled out the latest of its serial attacks on Obama’s policies toward Israel.
The Weekly Standard editor praised Obama and said the difference between Obama’s Israel policies and presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s “is not that great.” Kristol stated that he was “happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree.” He went on:
I’ve been mostly supportive of the Obama administration in the last couple of years…
I think President Obama has moved sufficiently on these issues from the Cairo speech in 2009 to the AIPAC speech of two months ago, that the difference between the parties is less than it was.
But as Haaretz and WNYC pointed out, the Kristol-led Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) consistently lambasts Obama on Israel. The group ran ads in Washington around its campaignasserting Obama was “not pro-israel.” In December, Kristol, in an ECI statement, said Obama “keeps acting to weaken the security of the state of Israel.” (Earlier that year, right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Kristol frequently praises, said that under the Obama administration “our security cooperation is unprecedented.”)
Just two months ago — far from the “last couple years” Kristol has been “supportive” of Obama’s policies — the hedge fund-bankrolled ECI released a 30-minute anti-Obama online film, complete with ominous music. In the film, Kristol associate Liz Cheney says Obama attempted to “put distance” between the U.S. and Israel. Neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer says Obama “delegitimized” Israel, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Lee Smith said Obama’s “narrative fit [a] rejectionist and resentful narrative.”
This isn’t the first time ECI’s attacks on the Obama administration’s Israel policies have been revealed as disingenuous political maneuvers. Last May, ECI executive director Noah Pollak, commenting via Twitter, publicly praised Obama’s speech on the Middle East, but ECI later condemned the speech in an attack ad. When ThinkProgress revealed the hypocrisy, Kristoldisowned the tweets in comments to the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin. Rubin added: “Kristol graciously avoided pointing out that while Pollak has the executive director title, the group is firmly under the control of Kristol and his two co-founders.”
With ECI “firmly under the control of Kristol,” and with Kristol now “happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree” on Israel, will the organization lay off its right-wing attacks on the president? “We’re trying to decide,” Kristol told WNYC.
]]>After a speech on Friday by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that implored Israel to make moves to thaw its cool relations with strategic partners and overcome its growing isolation, neoconservative commentators went bananas. Former Bush Mideast hand Elliott Abrams, speaking with neocon Washington Post [...]]]>
After a speech on Friday by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that implored Israel to make moves to thaw its cool relations with strategic partners and overcome its growing isolation, neoconservative commentators went bananas. Former Bush Mideast hand Elliott Abrams, speaking with neocon Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, wondered, “Does anyone wonder why Israelis don’t trust this administration to guard their security?” (In September, Abram’s himself said it was “true” that Israel and the U.S. enjoy “the best military-to-military relationship ever.”)
The most overblown response, though, came from right-wing don Bill Kristol. Speaking through a press release from the far-right-wing pressure group he heads, the Emergency Committee for Israel, Kristol attacked President Obama’s comments last weekend to Jewish donors that his administration’s security cooperation with Israel had reached new heights in the partnership. Kristol said:
Nobody believes President Obama when he claims, as he did last week, that he “has done more for the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration.” That’s because he hasn’t — and because President Obama and his administration keeps acting to weaken the security of the state of Israel.
The problem with Kristol’s statement, and one he seems to willfully ignore, is that there are at least a few people who don’t hold his stated opinion about the Obama administration’s work on Israel’s security, among them Israel’s leaders.
In a speech delivered to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) national convention in May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called American security cooperation with Israel during the Obama administration “unprecedented”:
Yesterday President Obama spoke about his ironclad commitment to Israel’s security. He rightly said that our security cooperation is unprecedented. He spoke of that commitment not just in front of AIPAC. He spoke about it in two speeches heard throughout the Arab world. And he has backed those words with deeds.
In September, Netanyahu personally thanked Obama in a speech for his attentiveness and support in resolving a crisis when demonstrators overtook Israel’s embassy in Cairo.
The various U.S. security commitments to Israel are legion. In the same speech Kristol criticized, Panetta announced that “the U.S. armed forces and the [Israel Defense Forces] will conduct the largest joint exercises in the history of that partnership.” This spring, Israel used an expanded aid package from the Obama administration to develop the Iron Dome missile defense system that protects citizens of southern Israel from rocket attacks with a 93 percent success rate. And the U.S. has worked closely with Israel in slowing Iran’s nuclear progress, even reportedly partnering up to create the Stuxnet virus that hampered Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and selling Israel bunk-busing bombs. All the work has included unflinching diplomatic support for Israel in international fora.
In August, former Israeli prime minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that he could “hardly remember a better period of support, American support and cooperation and similar strategic understanding of events around us than what we have right now.” Last month, Barak said Obama is an “extremely strong supporter of Israel in regard to its security” and that his administration was “excelling in this.” He added: “I don’t think that anyone can raise any question mark about the devotion of this president to the security of Israel.” Maybe someone should tell Bill Kristol.
]]>
The right-wing pro-Israel lobby group the Emergency Committee for Israel launched an ad campaign attacking President Barack Obama for his record on Israel. The ads, featured on billboards, public transport and with a web ad on the New York Times website, go after Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides, accusing him of, as the campaign’s tagline goes, being “Not Pro-Israel.” In a television spot, ECI — led by Bill Kristol, Gary Bauer and Rachel Abrams (with Noah Pollak as a mere figurehead) — shows a few clips of hardline pro-Israel hawks from both parties decrying Obama’s Israel policies, whereupon the narrator says:
- Democrats. Republicans. It seems everyone agrees President Obama is not pro-Israel.
The campaign, which features a smiling handshake between Obama and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (not unlike the one pictured upper right), got picked up at all the usual places, including by Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post. Rubin previewed the 60-second cut of the ad on Friday. But between her post and the ad’s scheduled runs today and tomorrow on local New York stations and cable news channels, something remarkable happened. A very important person to the neocons — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — came out and contradicted the ad. Speaking after Israel’s embassy in Cairo was nearly overrun by Egyptian demonstrators, Netanyahu gave a brief speech during which he said:
- Immediately at the beginning of the incident, I ordered that all the Embassy staff and their families in Cairo be put on a plane and returned to Israel. At the same time we worked together with Egypt and the American government [sic] to assure that our remaining staff at the Embassy would be rescued without harm.
I would like to express my gratitude to the President of the United States, Barack Obama. I asked for his help. This was a decisive and fateful moment. He said, “I will do everything I can.” And so he did. He used every considerable means and influence of the United States to help us. We owe him a special measure of gratitude. This attests to the strong alliance between Israel and the United States. This alliance between Israel and the United States is especially important in these times of political storms and upheavals in the Middle East.
As it turns out, not everyone agrees that Obama is anti-Israel. Perhaps Netanyahu had in mind the international diplomatic cover the U.S. gives — and has pledged to continue giving — to Israel. Or perhaps it is Obama’s work within U.S. policy and international diplomacy to slow Iran’s nuclear program — a top priority for Netanyahu’s government. Maybe it was Obama’s close cooperation with Israel to reportedly develop and deploy the Stuxnet computer virus against Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, a broader part of the program that prompted Netanyahu himself to comment this May at the AIPAC summit that “our security cooperation is unprecedented.”
While Netanyahu thanks Obama and praises his pro-Israel record, ECI and Jennifer Rubin choose to ignore that reality for one that better suits their hardline partisan worldview. Funnily, you won’t find the last two sentences of the above block quote in Jennifer Rubin’s write-up of the speech, in which she lavishes praise on the right-wing Israeli prime minister. No – Rubin cut those two sentences to interject a short introduction to the immediate next lines of the speech. She can’t seem to bear to tell her readers that someone — and someone quite important at that — actually thinks Obama is pro-Israel.
]]>Invited by Republican House Foreign Affairs Chairperson Ileana Ros-Lehtinin, the talking heads from Israel’s security establishment honed in on a permanent presence in the valley, which reportedly makes up about a quarter of the West Bank.
But the panelists — former Israeli UN Ambassador and JCPA chief Dore Gold and former Generals Uzi Dayan and Udi Dekel — also argued for continued Israeli control over more territory.
Many justifications were given for Israel’s eternal presence in the Jordan Valley: “strategic depth”, “Israel’s doctrine of self-reliance”, a region “engulfed in flames”, the examples of the unilateral withdrawals from Gaza and southern Lebanon, and guarantees from U.S. political figures.
Notably omitted were three other justifications: the valley’s resources, the ideological, religious and nationalist motivations of the settler movement (Israeli domestic politics), and the obstacle that holding the valley presents to a negotiated two-state solution (Palestinians are unlikely to make any deal that cedes so much of the West Bank’s already shrunken territory).
The weight of these unmentioned factors against security concerns was put on stark display last fall when President Barack Obama reportedly offered Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu U.S. support for a permanent Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley as part of a wide-ranging package of incentives in exchange for a two-month freeze of settlement construction in the West Bank. Israel rejected the offer.
The panelists also raised other issues facing Israel, including the “diplomatic assault” (an effort to have a Palestinian state recognized by the UN General Assembly), Iran’s nuclear program and Dayan’s recasting of David Frum‘s “evil axis” to include Turkey and, before the dust has settled, potentially Egypt.
Dayan sounded the alarm about Egypt, intimating that the Muslim Brotherhood was bound to take over and criticizing his host nation for not propping up deposed president Hosni Mubarak. “You were too fast to turn your back on Mubarak,” he said. “You should be careful to support your friends.”
Only a few members attended the briefing. They included Ros-Lehtinen, ranking member Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) and freshman Reps Ann Marie Buerkle (R-NY), Mike Kelly (R-PA) and Jeff Duncan (R-SC). A few staffers populated the 25 or so seats, as did right-wing pro-Israel activists Noah Pollak of the Emergency Committee for Israel and Noah Silverman of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
For the freshman, the briefing provided an opportunity to rub elbows with powerful Israeli players and pro-Israel activists. “I’m looking forward to educating myself on those issues,” said Duncan from the dais, proving the seriousness of his intent by citing Hamas’s — not Hezbollah’s — worrisome presence in Southern Lebanon.
Before leaving the briefing room, Berman, the only Democrat, admitted that his question about the Lebanese Armed Forces was a “softball.”
Berman’s much-acknowledged presence gave a bi-partisan seal of good-housekeeping to a briefing otherwise dominated by Republicans. The “‘members’ briefing” — which is not an official hearing – has been used by Ros-Lehtinen since her days in the minority to air views that she could not get previous chairpersons to open up debate on.
The mechanism of a “members’ briefing”‘ also means that only the organizers of the meeting choose the witnesses. In a normal hearing, Democrats would be allowed to bring their own witness to the hearing although Berman’s presence and ‘softballs’ indicate that perhaps a Democratic witness was unlikely to be any less to the right.) The other reason for making it a ‘briefing’ was that no real U.S. government business was discussed. the whole proceeding was just the delivery of a wish list from the Israeli right.
Nothing new to see here. Just bipartisan defense in Congress for policies — pushed by the Israeli right, the pro-Israel lobby, and neoconservative activists — that are almost certain to drive the last nails into the coffin of the two-state solution.
]]>WASHINGTON, Mar1, 2011 (IPS) – J Street, the Washington-based “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” advocacy group, drew a large crowd to its annual conference this year despite criticism over its controversial calls for the Barack Obama administration not to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction in [...]]]>
WASHINGTON, Mar1, 2011 (IPS) – J Street, the Washington-based “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” advocacy group, drew a large crowd to its annual conference this year despite criticism over its controversial calls for the Barack Obama administration not to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank.
In the end, the administration vetoed the resolution, but the controversy appeared to have had no negative effect on the organisation’s turnout for the just-ended conference, which had 2,400 participants – 900 more than last year – and over 500 students participating.
Over 50 members of Congress were in attendance and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a surprise appearance to honour Kathleen Peratis, vice chair of the J Street Education Fund and the recipient of the group’s Tzedek V’Shalom award.
With pro-democracy revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya dominating the headlines over the past week, uncertainty about the shifting geopolitics in the region was a recurring theme in the remarks delivered by J Street leadership, panelists and an Obama administration senior Middle East adviser.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s president, told attendees, “We know in our hearts that it’s not just the status quo in the Arab world that is bound to change, it is the status quo between Israel and the Palestinian people that has to change as well,” at the conference’s kickoff on Saturday night.
“And the events of recent weeks only convince us more deeply that the time is now for a serious and sustained effort to secure an agreement that provides for a democratic homeland for the Jewish people living side by side in peace and security with a democratic homeland for the Palestinian people,” he continued.
Indeed the emphasis on taking immediate steps, with the leadership of the United States, to bring about a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian is central to J Street’s mission as Washington’s “political home for pro-Israel, pro- peace Americans”.
J Street has gained attention for its willingness to press harder than other pro-Israel organisations in Washington – particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – to pressure Israel to halt settlement construction and for its efforts to create a political space for American Jews who are increasingly critical of the Israeli government’s occupation of the West Bank and its siege on Gaza.
The organisation’s founding and the appearance, for the second year in a row, of a senior Obama administration official at the conference has found a mixed reception from other “pro-Israel” groups in Washington.
This year, senior White House Middle East adviser Dennis Ross was dispatched to address the conference, leading the right-wing Emergency Committee for Israel to call on Ross to take a critical tone in his remarks to the J Street audience.
“There are few moments when someone with your experience and credibility is invited into the anti-Israel echo chamber and provided an opportunity to dispel myths, combat falsehoods, deliver much-needed moral clarity – and state clearly that the United States stands with Israel,” said a Feb. 24 letter from the ECI’s Executive Director Noah Pollak.
“I trust that you will seize this moment to explain why the Jewish State is not just one of our closest allies, but a country that fully deserves the admiration and moral support of all Americans,” Pollak wrote.
Ross spoke on Sunday and delivered remarks which, while avoiding the harsh criticisms which Pollak called on him to make, fell short of the recurring call from J Street panelists for the Obama administration to take a more aggressive approach to bridging issues on which both the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government have been unable to find common ground.
“We will continue to press both sides to engage seriously in negotiations – the only forum and the only mechanism that can resolve this historic conflict,” said Ross.
Ross deflected a question about the possibility for a new U.S. initiative to kickstart the peace process and repeated the administration’s position on Iran, stating, “While the door will always remain open for diplomacy, we remain determined to prevent Iran from acquiring the nuclear weapons and we won’t be deflected from this goal.”
The panel following Ross’s address was critical of the White House official’s position, leading New York Times columnist Roger Cohen to quip after Ross had left the room, “[Ross] sat in five administrations but couldn’t sit after the speech for the debate,” and, “When I hear the word process, I am dying inside, there is no process and there is no peace.”
The conference concluded with a keynote address from Naomi Chazan, president of the New Israel Fund and former deputy speaker of the Knesset, who told the audience, “The democratic wave spreading through the Middle East includes a free Palestine as an integral part of what is going on. And therefore, Israel as an occupying state cannot remain democratic while it rules over another people. It is antithetical to the winds of the time.”
Her speech repeated the calls heard throughout the three days of panels and discussions for the Obama administration to urgently assume greater leadership in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Neither Israel nor Palestine can [make peace] alone. Therefore, action requires that the U.S. and Europe and the international community take steps as well. The present administration in Washington must step forward now,” said Chazan.
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