Why do Israelis have an Obama problem?
Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project and former national director of the American Jewish Congress, thinks he knows why Israelis don't like Barack Obama. Here's what he wrote on the Web site of The New York Times:
But a White House campaign to ingratiate the president with Israel’s public could be far more damaging, because the reason for this unprecedented Israeli hostility toward an American president is a fear that President Obama is serious about ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Israelis do not oppose President Obama’s peace efforts because they dislike him; they dislike him because of his peace efforts. He will regain their affection only when he abandons these efforts. ...
The Israeli reaction to serious peacemaking efforts is nothing less than pathological — the consequence of an inability to adjust to the Jewish people’s reentry into history with a state of their own following 2,000 years of powerlessness and victimhood....
Ha'aretz's dovish columnist Bradley Burston objects, suggesting that maybe Siegman should try asking some tough questions of the Obama administration:
Siegman's thesis makes no room for the possibility that the administration may have made more major mistakes in handling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, than it has made in an other primary policy sphere.
There is no allowance for the sense that when Barack Obama made an early priority of his presidency a high profile visit to Cairo, its centerpiece an extended address to the Muslim world, a subsequent personal appeal to Israelis might have helped him advance his peacemaking goals.
There is no consideration of the possibility that the administration failed in doing requisite preparation with Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak prior to dropping on Israel the bomb of a blanket settlement freeze demand - which might have been well-received by the Israeli public, had it been accompanied by gestures on the Palestinian or wider Arab side. As it was, rumors of normalization moves were humiliatingly waved away by Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, who wrote that a settlement freeze, even if agreed to by Israel, fell far, far short of his key nation's minimum preconditions for any steps toward relations with Israel.
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Asking the Israelis why they have not warmed to Obama’s “peace-making” is equivalent to shtetl Jews being asked why they don’t like the Black Hundreds. A better question is: Why are Jews like Henry Siegman so besotted with Obama that they are incapable of seeing the kind of danger he puits Israel. Or, have Jews like Siegnman become so deracinated and de-Judaized that danger facing other Jews is no longer of concern to them?
As long as people like Henry Siegman can speak out, no one can deny that there is a Jewish conscience.
Jason, how very heroic of Henry to “speak out.” Against what exactly? Surely not against Islamofascism? Of course not. Against Arab repeated aggression against the Jewish state?
No, not really.
In an act of supreme perversion by the enlightened ones, Israel has become a colonialist state, while the Arabs - one of the most aggressive emperial powers known to history - have become passive victims of “Zionist aggression!” You buy into this garbage?
How noble to stand shoulder to shoulder with such defenders of human freedom and dignity as Sudan, China, Russia, Syria, Libya and other such paragons of liberty.
How courageous of him to join with sworn enemies of Jews and the Jewish state in alliance with other “clear-thinking” people in condemning “Israeli aggression” and “war crimes” while defending herself against a hundred-year assault by one of the most chauvinistic and cruel societies in human experience.
Let me ask you something, is it brains that all of you are lacking, or a total inability to empathize with your own people?
Have you become such a “member of the human race” that you’re incapable of feeling a kinship with the Jewish people?
Remember:
“If I am not for myself,
Who will be for me?”
Do you care?
Henry Siegman, J Street, and their ilk have every right to their views. They may even be right, who knows? But as long as they try to impose their views on an independent Israeli electorate, by making an end run around them using the U.S. government to do the imposing, they are illegitimate. They can promote their views directly to the Israeli government; they can move to Israel and put their views before the electorate, and take the same risks as the other Israelis if their policies prove incorrect. They cannot, however, work to put Israelis’ lives at risk, to test out their theories. And that is what they are doing, for their own benefit or self-agrandizement.
“If I am not for myself, Who will be for me?”
Mr. Shuster, I am sure that you are willing to sacrifice for your family, your country, and the Jewish people. There is a “me” that is greater than “me.” This is about your honor, your sense of morality, and your ability to empathize from an opposite perspective.
The state of Israel was established based on International empathy of the historic suffering of the Jewish people, particularly under the Nazi persecution. The international community is also fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself. But in the recent years, Israel has changed from a defender to an aggressor. The use of excessive forces in dealing with Palestinian civilians is only a superficial issue. The fundamental issue is that in Israel’s mind, it does not really want peace. When you have overwhelming power, you want a total victory. The question in the Jewish ultra nationalists’ mind is: What is the “final solution” for the Palestinian people?
Jason H.,
Hard to tell if you are serious. There is no basis for your assertion that the “Israeli mind” doesn’t want peace, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. As for the “ultra-nationalists,” the worst they have proposed is to transfer the Arabs out of Israel; hardly invoking a “final solution.”
Does it not bother you that no Arab country will allow any sizable number of Jews to reside there, and managed to kick out hundreds of thousands of Jews over the last 60 years?
Also, if Israel was so powerful, and such an aggressor, then why does it still endure rocket attacks, boycotts, a formal state of war from so many of its neighbors, etc. It isn’t the “occupation,” since this has been the state of affairs since, well, forever.
Jerome Whitson:
No. I was not serious. I happened to read http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072466.html, and watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mJp5d3ffP8. I found them hilarious.
Jason H:
You’re wrong, just wrong. Whatever possess you to take the side of the “international community” against Israel? At most, this “international community” is indifferent” about Israel’s fate (Note the number of non-Islamic states abstaing on UN votes of crucial value to the Jewish states.) At worse, they encourage Israel’s enemies to keep on their beligerancy. If you don’t see than, then you’re either a fool or worse.
Your responses suggest a naivety that is very dangerous in a Jew.
P.S. I have just returned from a visit to Israel. In Ashdot (site of Egyptian army’s fartherst penetration in 1949), after the 1979 Israel-Egypt agreement, Israel swooning at the prospect of peace, invited Egypt to erect a monument to their war dead who fell in the area. That monument stand undisturbed on Israeli soil. No need (or perhaps there is in your case) to tell you that no reciprocal gesture on the part of Egypt honoring Israeli dead fallen in a defensive battle exists anywhere in Egypt.
This tells me all I need to know about the aggressors and the defenders that in your mind has become completely perverted.
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Bill Pearlman
11/03/09 04:37 PM
I love the Siegman attitude. Which is basically this. I and Obama are just higher beings, moral guys. We’re just goodness and light. And the Israeli’s, what the hell do they know about it. They are just a bunch of fools who if they just listen to me would enter a utopian paradise.