J Street’s jackpot for Donna Edwards
Last week, some Jewish community leaders in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. were quoted in Politico expressing concern about the views of new Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) on Israel -- and her refusal to hold meetings with them. They went on to suggest that they were looking at backing a more "pro-Israel" challenger in a primary. (See my analysis here of why these threats were empty.)
Tuesday, J Street's PAC responded to that article by sending out a fundraising appeal for Edwards -- and raised $15,000 from 270 contributors in four hours.
"This is exactly how -- for decades -- established pro-Israel groups have enforced right-wing message discipline on Israel in Congress," stated the fundraising e-mail from J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami, who was quoted in the Politico article defending Edwards. "They intimidate Members of Congress, particularly junior ones, and threaten to fund a challenge. But not this time -- and not to our friend Donna Edwards. Let's show that there's real support for pro-Israel, pro-peace members of Congress by helping Congresswoman Donna Edwards scare off any possible challengers. Will you give $50 right now to her reelection campaign?"
Edwards was one of J Streets first endorsements in the 2008 campaign.
Meanwhile, over the Memorial Day recess, Edwards went to Israel with the New America Foundation and told the Washington Jewish Week that she discovered how settlements were impeding the achievement of a lasting peace:
As she drove through Israel's West Bank last week, Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) said that it became abundantly "clear" to her that Jewish "settlements really get in the way of a lasting peace."
America, the lawmaker said in an interview last Thursday after returning from her first trip to Israel, "would be making a big mistake" if it allows Israel to substitute "outpost closures" for full "settlement closures" throughout the country.
"It was so clear to me," Edwards recalled. "When you drive through the countryside" in the West Bank "and look at the hills where you have" large Jewish settlements amid smaller Palestinian ones, "you could actually see how that would impede any lasting peace agreement with borders that actually leave room for a Palestinian stat
And she found a Knesset debate she sat in on troubling: Edwards' trip also brought her to the halls of the Knesset where she met with Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni, as well as members of the other political parties, such as Labor and Meretz. Playing political observer as the Knesset members debated a controversial bill that would make it a criminal offense to, in any form, define Israel as anything but a Jewish and democratic state, Edwards says she was appalled when that measure passed a preliminary vote. "It was really shocking," she said. "We watched the vote happen and we watched the debate, which was really fascinating because I didn't think it would win." The bill -- which eventually died, but would have effectively silenced those who defame the state -- epitomized for Edwards "what it means to be in the Arab minority." "As an African American woman, I really didn't have a perception of a significant minority population in Israel, and there is," Edwards explained. "It struck me that there are issues that are raised in any country when you have to balance the interests of the majority with the minority" so that "people feel like they enjoy the full breadth of their citizenship. In Israel, this is a work in progress." And she addressed her relationship with Jewish leaders: Also a work in progress is Edwards' relationship with her local Jewish constituents, which has been strained at times. "The criticism to be quite frank has been that our office has not been open in meeting the Jewish community," Edwards said, dismissing the accusation as unfair. Ron Halber, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington's executive director, disputed that. "The JCRC and other Jewish organizations have not yet had any individual meetings with Edwards one-on-one," he said. "That remains a point of concern." Halber also said that while her trip appeared "quite comprehensive ... I still do remain concerned that some folks [leading the trip] may have had a certain [ideological] focus outside the mainstream American Jewish community." Edwards, he believes, would benefit from joining "the JCRC or other mainstream organizations on a trip to Israel so that we can ensure she's receiving, from our viewpoint, a healthy diversity of political perspective." Edwards, meanwhile, says she has repeatedly welcomed the Jewish community into her office. "I've been actually looking back at our logs [of meetings] and we've had, particularly the staff ... over six, seven or eight meetings and phone calls with the local Jewish community" and representatives of AIPAC, Edwards said. "I don't understand the criticism."
The whole J Street fundraising e-mail can be seen after the jumpRead More >>>
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Blumen-journalism, back atcha—and what it really means
First, this is a lovely video-response to Max Blumenthal's "Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem," from Lahav Harkov, a Bar Ilan University student who blogs at The Jerusalem Post:
Years ago, studying linguistics, I learned that linguists had discovered that the best way to predict how speech patterns would evolve in a generation was to interview female students on university campuses. The reasons are self-evident: Universities attract elites, and mothers are (or at least were) the most important figures in a child's most formative years.
The same, I think, holds true of political views -- and note, too, that the students in this video are from Israel's most conservative campus, Bar Ilan.
As Harkov notes,
Israeli opinion isn't monolithic! Some like Obama! Some don't! Some aren't sure! This is because -- surprise, surprise -- Israelis are PEOPLE.
My own, earlier take on Blumenthal's video drew some fire, first of all, from Blumenthal himself:
Ron Kampeas at the JTA has written that I need “to grow up and put [my talents] to good use.” (While Kampeas praised some of my other video reports exposing right-wing Christians, this latest video revealing the extremism of some Israeli and American Jews seemed to hit too close to home.)
In fact, I said I didn't like the Christian stuff either; what I like is when Max faces off against conservatives who have some idea of what he's up to. He usually wins, and he wins because he's sending ideas into battle, not making fun of people who have no idea what he's on about. This is what I meant about putting his talent to use.
Richard Silverstein calls me a "center-right pundit." As my mother would say, in one of the few Ladino phrases that perpetuated into our everyday English conversation (the others are unprintable): Cualo?
More substantively, he asks:
The challenge I have to the Kampeases and Goldbergs of the Jewish world is: What are you going to do about this? Are you doing to dismiss it as testosterone-infused teen-aged horseplay; or are you going to engage in combat with this infected stream of nationalist Zionist thought?
I have two answers to this. First, "Oh please," and second, "But you do have a point."
"Oh please," because these neanderthals have been plying Jerusalem's triangle (Ben Yehuda, Jaffa, King George) since before it became a pedestrian mall, or midrehov. I remember them going back to 1978. I engaged with them in person since then and with their ideas in print since I started getting op-eds published in The Jerusalem Post in 1987.
And "Oh, please," too, because I have seen so much worse. I've seen real mobs put their thoughts to fists, sticks and stones and guns, in the settlements, in Jerusalem, in the refugee camps, in Belfast, in Kinshasa, in Mostar, in Kabul and on and on and on. How am I supposed to get exercised by the annual return of the buttheads to Ben-Yehuda?
The "but you do have a point" answer is, I should anyway. No one should get too jaded. And the gratifying thing about Max's video is that however unrepresentative it is, it is for sure embarrassing these yutzes back home, and prompting some aggrieved long distance calls. ("Did I teach you to be an idiot? Or was that your mother? And what, exactly, are you smoking?")
Over at the Magnes Zionist, Jeremiah Haber worries that I don't have the "moral decency" to be offended by what's in the video; I hope I've made clear here, that yes, it is offensive.
Haber has a more substantive criticism in the comments section of my post, but before I get to that -- whom do Blumenthal and his collaborator, Joseph Dana, believe they are portraying in this video? Haber and others have taken offense at those (like Harkov, above) who say the filmmakers are misrepresenting drunken American louts as Israelis. Dana and Blumenthal don't make it clear what culture it is -- Israeli or Jewish American or both -- they believe to be in dire need of reassessment. Is this video supposed to be representative of American Jewish thought? Israeli thought? In their explications they veer from one to another, and Dana suggests at one point that these are dual Israeli-American citizens (how does he know this?) and then that it is representative of views in Jerusalem in general. It is also true that one or two of the interviewees is clearly Israeli.
Another thing: The drunkenness. Blumenthal rsponds to critics who say he is exploiting the over-lubricated:
No amount of alcohol could make me express opinions that were not authentically mine. If anything, alcohol is a crude form of truth serum that lubricates the release of closely held opinions and encourages confessional talk.
Max, Max, Max. If this were true, how many of us would be bigamists? Oh, Max.
Others (see the comments section on my post) have noted the Jewish organizational treatment of Mel Gibson's drunken anti-Semitic rantings in 2006. From what I remember, though, the Jewish criticism of Gibson took his inebriation into account. And if any of these kids can tell the lens from the eyehole on a camera, much less produce a megablockbuster reviving genocide-inducing myths about blacks or Arabs, I'll spot Mel a Foster's. In other words, lehavdil.
Let me get to what I believe is Haber's substantive criticism of my post, from his comments:
Now that Max’s “immature video” has been witnessed over 100,000 times in the last two days, maybe you can take a deep breath and think a bit.
Let’s assume that 90% of the viewers just stop at Max’s video. That leaves 10% who look into some of his other posts from Israel-Palestine, including his interviews with David Grossman, with members of Liberman’s party, with Israeli activists on the West Bank. That means that more people will get significant information about Israel because of the “immature video” in two days than read your blog in months.
He's right! More people should read my blog!
Haha.
No, he's right -- really right -- not because of what Max is purporting to argue with his video (I'm still a little confused) but because of what the video itself represents.
Let me back up a little, okay, a lot, and offer a quickie universal theory, this one about Israel and the West Bank.
First: Palestinians in the occupied areas do not receive equal treatment. They don't vote for a government that is able to defend them and represent their foreign interests. Or get just about anything done. It takes Arabs in the West Bank much longer to get to work, to till their fields, to get to the doctor, than their Jewish neighbors. And anyone who has traveled through the West Bank can attest to the weird Jetsons-Flintsones contrasts between settlements and Palestinian villages. Blame this on Palestinian intransigence, blame it on whomever and whatever you like, but pretending that West Bank Palestinians and the Israelis who live among them share equal status is delusional.
I'm not arguing for disengagement or against settlements here -- once upon a time, some Gush Emunim leaders and Likud politicians like Dan Meridor thought creatively about integration. Those ideas oxydized into dust about 25 years ago, and all that appears to be left is disengagement; but that's not my point. If anyone on the settler side wants to revive the circa-1970s ideals of living alongside the Palestinians as equals (anyone in addition to Rav Menachem Froman), it would be interesting to hear.
The solution may be Palestinian statehood, it may be the Netanyahu government's vision of a Palestinian society enhanced and empowered by economic development. Not my call. It's just that, in the age of Obama, stasis is not going to cut it. Which leads into...
Second: Once upon a time this separate and unequal status was acceptable, barely. The post-enlightenment age divides, I think, into three phases when it comes to how the West treated disenfranchised populations: The "benevolent dictator" phase, which ended in the late 1940s; at that time, some undemocratic arrangements, it was believed, were better than others. One product of this thinking is the Middle Eastern monarchy. (That worked!) Then, there was the Cold War phase, when the notion of democratic representation was so utterly twisted by the Soviet Union, that the West looked the other way at what was perceived to be lesser evils: Apartheid South Africa, the Latin American juntas, etc.
Against that reality, Israel could -- with some degree of success -- portray the occupation as relatively benign. Look, the Palestinians have a free press (sometimes). They go to universities (sometimes). They elect their own mayors (once).
And now we are almost two decades in the third phase, post-Cold War, post-Apartheid. And the qualifications, the "relativelys" no longer work. In the West, now, you lose points for disenfranchising people, for keeping minorities separate and unequal. Look at Yugoslavia. Look at Zimbabwe. No one turns away anymore.
It's true that Israel is dealing with a Palestinian polity that tolerates genocidal fantasies and murderous realities. But you can sustain that contrast only so long against the day-to-day grind of the segregated, inferior circumstances of the Palestinians.
So: Just as the TV crews made their way to the obscenely racist old Boer in covering the old South Africa, and abjured the thoughtful Wits professor; just as Radovan Karadzic's insane musings about the non-Serbian psyche preoccupied some journalists more than the privations of ethnic Serbs in Krajina; the Max Blumenthals of the world are going to seek out the neanderthals, and this will become Israel's image.
The obscene rantings of a few drunken frat boys, however unfair and unrepresentative, would not be getting this oxygen without the reality of unequal treatment. And the fact that Max is Jewish, I think, is also significant, just as it has been with Jon Stewart's satirical treatment of Israel. The cognitive dissonance is not going to play with a younger generation of Jews that expects equality for all, that spends time and money calling for protections of minorities in Sudan and China.
This is a tide, and one that won't be turned away by better Hasbara.
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Did the “natural growth” agreement ever kick in?
The back and forth in the past week or so over whether the Bush-era agreement on "natural growth" in the settlements should apply in the age of Obama raises a question: Was there ever such an agreement?
The answer, I think is yes, in principle -- but never in practice.
What prompted this train of thought was the Republican Jewish Coalition release today needling the Obama administration over whether it will uphold the alleged agreement. As Eric notes, Hillary Rodham Clinton has already answered, and clearly: No.
With respect to the conditions regarding understandings between the United States and the former Israeli government and the former government of the United States, we have the negotiating record. That is the official record that was turned over to the Obama Administration by the outgoing Bush Administration. There is no memorialization of any informal and oral agreements. If they did occur, which, of course, people say they did, they did not become part of the official position of the United States Government. And there are contrary documents that suggest that they were not to be viewed as in any way contradicting the obligations that Israel undertook pursuant to the Roadmap. And those obligations are very clear.
So why is the RJC asking? Well, the RJC should enlighten us. But let me venture a guess, based on how the RJC release conflates two separate issues:
* Will the Obama administration reaffirm the Bush administration's April 2004 letter recognizing that it would be unrealistic for Israel not to hold on to some settlemnent blocs in a final status agreement -- a letter that was published at the time and, as the RJC notes, endorsed by Congress;
* And will the Obama administration recognize what may have been an agreement to allow some settlement growth; an agreement that -- if it ever really existed -- was never made explicit, at least in public.
The conflation is clumsy and renders the statement virtually nonsensical, but it gets at an embarrassing truth: The Obama administration is equivocating over whether it will abide by the Bush administration's 2004 letter.
So why not nudge Obama on the letter alone? Because -- and I bet the RJC recognizes this -- it's entirely likely that the Obama administration will come around to reaffirming the Bush letter, as soon as the Netanyahu administration recommits to a two-state solution.
Such statements (and of course the National Jewish Democratic Council has done the same in the past) are not meant to elicit a real answer, they're meant to draw blood. And say in three or six or even 12 months, the Obama administration explicitly recommits to the Bush letter; within an hour, you can bet the NJDC would dig up any RJC call for a recommitment to the letter and demand an apology, if not outright abject recognition by the RJC that the Obama administration is God's gift to the Jewish people, yadda yadda yadda. (I exaggerate. Slightly.)
On the other hand, the Obama administration -- as Clinton attests -- is not likely to ever recommit (at least publicly) to settlement growth. So by mashing the two discrete issues together, however inartfully, the RJC gets a thorn under Democratic skin that (it evidently believes) will not come out without blood.
So why am I mindreading the RJC? Because it raises the issue of what, exactly, is the status of the "look the other way" agreement that the Bush and Sharon governments supposedly made in 2004.
Over at the Middle East Forum, Steve Rosen has a terrific post that does much of my work for me.
First, Steve quotes Elliott Abrams as telling the Washington Post that "there was something of an understanding realized on these questions, but it was never a written agreement." That comports with Clinton's view.
They may, however, both be wrong; a written reference to the agreement does exist, after a fashion.
Steve notes that Dov Weisglass, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's top adviser at the time, alludes to such an agreement in the (then little-noticed) letter he wrote to Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser:
Restrictions on settlement growth: within the agreed principles of settlement activities, an effort will be made in the next few days to have a better definition of the construction line of settlements in Judea & Samaria. An Israeli team, in conjunction with Ambassador Kurtzer, will review aerial photos of settlements and will jointly define the construction line of each of the settlements.
"Restrictions on settlement growth" suggests much greater leeway than "stopping" or "freezing" settlement growth. Additionally, defining construction lines would only apply if it was agreed construction could take place within those lines.
Furthermore, as Steve notes, Daniel Kurtzer, then the U.S. ambassador to Israel argued - and from a vantage point of opposing such a deal - that the Bush administration's mere acceptance of Weissglass' letter implied agreement. Here's Kurtzer to the Washington Post:
Daniel Kurtzer, then the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said he argued at the time against accepting the Weissglas letter. "I thought it was a really bad idea," he said. "It would legitimize the settlements, and it gave them a blank check."
So there you have it: An agreement exists.
Or not.
Kurtzer goes on to say that he and Weisglass never took those West Bank flyovers; the Bush administration (all too typically) wasn't keen on following up:
In the end, Kurtzer said the White House never followed up with the plan to define construction lines. "Washington lost interest in it when it became clear it would not be easy to do," he said.
So the critical element of this agreement -- defining where settlements could "naturally" grow -- never kicked in.
A conditional agreement, absent fulfillment of the condition - definition of settlement lines - is no agreement at all.
Israeli officials, as I've reported, are proposing reviving the condition, or a version of it. Israel will publish periodic reviews of settlement activity; American officials will validate the reports on the ground.
I also understand that under this formula, the Americans will continue to call the arrangement a "freeze" while the Israelis are likely to call it a "freeze, with waivers."
And here's a prediction: Neither side will ever confirm this formula on the record.
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RJC to Obama: Will you honor settlement understanding?
The Republican Jewish Coalition is asking the Obama administration "to give a clear and unambiguous answer to the question of whether they will honor the understanding established by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon regarding settlements," noting that State Department spokesmen have "refused to answer the question" about whether stopping settlements includes "natural growth" in certain major population centers.
"We are seeing a steady, step-by-step withdrawal by the Obama administration from key elements of the U.S.-Israeli alliance," said RJC executive director Matt Brooks. "The President who promised 'transparency' in his administration should be forthcoming about his intentions, his position, and his policies regarding these very sensitive issues. It is time for a clear and unambiguous answer to the question of whether the U.S. will stand by its past agreements and stand with our ally Israel."
In fact, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a fairly clear answer in recent days: No, the understanding on settlements is not valid.
"There is no memorialization of any informal and oral agreements,” she said Friday. “If they did occur, which of course, people say they did, they did not become part of the official position of the United States government.” She made similar remarks in an interview that aired over the weekend on ABC's This Week, in which she said, "That was never made a part of the official record of the negotiations as it was passed on to our administration. No one in the Bush administration said to anyone that we can find in our administration..."
The RJC's press release is after the jump:Read More >>>
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