After hearing the charge three times in the last 36 hours, it is obvious that attacking Barack Obama for “flip-flopping” on the issue of Jerusalem is going to be a major talking point for Republicans in the Jewish community this fall. But there’s one huge problem with it. While even Obama has acknowledged that, at the very least, he has clarified his stance on Jerusalem, his original position was more hard-line than John McCain’s — and his current one is exactly the same as the one held by his GOP opponent.

Obama surprised many people at the AIPAC policy conference in June when he told delegates that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

The next day, after he received criticism from Palestinians and others for the speech, Obama revised his remarks in an interview with CNN. “Obviously it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations,” he said. Asked whether he would be “against any kind of division of Jerusalem,” the candidate said, “My belief is that as a practical matter it would be very difficult to execute. And I think that it is smart for us to work through a system in which everybody has access to the extraordinary religious sites in old Jerusalem. But Israel has a legitimate claim on that city.”

That same week, McCain was asked for his thoughts on Jerusalem. After criticizing the Democrat for changing his mind, he said, “The point is Jerusalem is undivided … Jerusalem is the capital.” McCain then qualified his comments by emphasizing that regardless of his position, the status of the city is still subject to negotiation. “The subject of Jerusalem itself will be addressed in negotiations by the Israeli government and people,” he said.

One candidate says “Jerusalem will be a part of … negotiations.” Another candidate says “Jerusalem … will be addressed in negotiations.” Sounds remarkably similar — but not to Republicans.

Wednesday night in his keynote speech, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani told the crowd in St. Paul, “When speaking to a pro-Israel group, Obama favored an undivided Jerusalem, like I favor and John McCain favors. Well, he favored an undivided Jerusalem — don’t get too excited — for one day until he changed his mind.” He didn’t add “to the same position John McCain actually has taken.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Republican Jewish Coalition Matt Brooks also criticized Obama for changing his mind on Jerusalem, but when asked whether the candidates’ position on the division of Jerusalem were identical, said he didn’t think so but would check it out.

And earlier Wednesday evening, Sen. John Ensign (Nev.) leveled the same charge. He said the “flip-flop” indicated that Jewish voters are “not sure what they’re going to get with Barack Obama. There’s doubt — it depends on what audience he is talking to.”

Perhaps, but that would mean that on the division of Jerusalem, the two choices are either the same position as McCain — or a position that goes much further in allowing Israel to dictate the terms of a Jerusalem settlement than McCain has endorsed. Hardly a choice that should make voters concerned about Israel nervous.

To be fair, there is one major difference in the two candidates’ positions on Jerusalem. McCain has said he would move the embassy to Jerusalem when he enters office. Obama has not, and his campaign has called McCain a liar for suggesting he would. That’s because the last two presidents both made the same promise during their campaigns — and neither ever even made an attempt to actually carry that promise out in the last 16 years.

Not a lot of foreign policy in Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential acceptance speech on Wednesday night at the Republican Party convention in St. Paul, but what little there was nodded to pro-Israel concerns about her thin resume. (Palin met with officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Tuesday.)

Lots of red meat from Rudy, though.

And around the margins of the convention, Republicans are trying hard to make the case that it wasn’t all about John McCain, the man. (Much - no, make that just about all - of the convention has been about the extraordinary biography of Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.), with little room left for policy.)

In a special press conference Wednesday for foreign press (with an RNC official checking passes!) and at a session of the Center for U.S. Global Engagement (held at U-Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey Institute), top foreign policy advisers to the campaign said McCain was much friendlier to the notion of working with allies than - well, it was left unsaid, but certainly the Bush administration’s record of unilateralism hung heavily over the proceedings.

Key to making the case was Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), the onetime Democratic vice-presidential nominee - and McCain’s preferred running mate until the Arizona senator caved last week to party base demands for a conservative candidate (embodied in “hockey mom” Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin).

Lieberman was the star speaker at the event hosted by Global Engagement (a group that advocates for greater political investment in foreign policy and that held a similar event at the Democratic confab in Denver last week) and brought reassurances that McCain has been mis-characterized as a hawk. McCain, a former POW, “hates” war, Lieberman said, suggesting that as president, McCain would shift powers from the Pentagon to the diplomatic corps.

“He’s going to take a very close look at our foreign and defense policy,” Lieberman promised.

At the foreign press event, deputy foreign policy adviser Kori Schake was asked what foreign policy advice McCain would take from Palin. Schake evaded the answer, replying that McCain would keep trusted advisers close - chief among them, Lieberman.

Schake also emphasized that McCain would reach out to allies, but was uncompromising on facing down Iran’s suspected nuclear threat: “A nuclear Iran would be an unacceptable danger for all of us.” Pressed for details, Schake told reporters to dig up two speeches: one to the Los Angeles Council on World Affairs, and the other to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

• “It’s still iffy, which is freaking me out”: That, according to the New York Times, was what one Boca Raton precinct coordinator had to say about the attitude of some “lifelong Jewish Democrats” toward Barack Obama. The coordinator was attending a Hillary Clinton appearance for Obama in South Florida. More details on the rally in the Miami Herald.
• In a article entitled “The Shmegege Vote: 2008,” Susan Isaacs at The Huffington Post wonders how prejudice will affect Jews when they enter the voting booth.
• The Forward looks at the key Jewish behind-the-scenes players in the Obama campaign.
• The Forward also reports that historians and political observers believe Thursday will be the first time in political convention history that a rabbi gives an invocation before a presidential nominee acceptance speech.
• Rabbi Amy Schwartzman talks to the Washington Jewish Week about her participation in the Democratic National Convention’s interfaith gathering on Sunday.
• JTA looked in on the Democrats’ faith focus earlier this week, as did the the New York Jewish Week, with some finding the emphasis excessive.
• Daniel Burrell at The Huffington Post writes Obama should get tougher on Iran because it will help him with Jewish voters.
• Jim Besser at the New York Jewish Week says the McCain campaign seems to be taking tips from Mort Klein and the Zionist Organization of America in its attacks on Obama adviser Dan Kurtzer.
• Jay Michaelson, writing in the Forward, suggests that treating Israel as the pre-eminent “Jewish issue” of the campaign may be bad for Judaism.
• The blind rabbi running for Congress, Dennis Shulman, is using a parody of “The Office” to attack opponent Scott Garrett over his ties to “Texas oilmen.”

It’s not quite as big a stage as the AIPAC policy conference in Washington, but plenty of pundits and Jewish observers will be paying attention Wednesday as Barack Obama visits Israel (the first half of the sentence was a joke … I think).

Obama spoke at the AIPAC parley back in early June, the morning after the final Democratic primaries came to a close and most everyone in the country (except Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bill Clinton and a few loyalists) had recognized him as the party’s presumptive nominee.

That speech was supposed to be the final word — it was going to put to rest any doubts among Jewish voters about Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides. And not a moment too soon, with hawkish Jewish Democrats starting to think about their options in the fall and a Gallup poll showing Obama winning a bit more than 60 percent of the Jewish vote in a hypothetical matchup in the general election against John McCain — five points worse than Clinton and about 15 points below John Kerry’s numbers in 2004.

To be sure, judging from the applause, the AIPAC speech was well received by the 5,000-plus in attendance, but the subsequent flap over Obama’s call for a “united Jerusalem” — culminating with one aide saying Obama had misused the term and the candidate himself blaming “poor phrasing” — took some wind out of Team Obama’s sails. It also raised some legitimate questions about whether the campaign was ready to handle the prime-time balancing act required in navigating the domestic and international politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

So here we go again: Now the Obama campaign is facing yet another key moment with Jewish voters. And again it comes on the heels of a poll — this one commissioned by J Street, the fledgling left-wing Middle East advocacy group — showing Obama stuck at about 60 percent.

With that in mind, here are a few things to watch during Obama’s day in Israel and the West Bank, which is scheduled to include visits with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Likud opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad. Read the rest

The New York Times has a feature today on Barack Obama’s foreign policy team.

Behind the e-mail messages is a tight-knit group of aides supported by a huge 300-person foreign policy campaign bureaucracy, organized like a mini State Department, to assist a candidate whose limited national security experience remains a concern to many voters.

“It is unwieldy, no question,” said Denis McDonough, 38, Mr. Obama’s top foreign policy aide, speaking of an infrastructure that has been divided into 20 teams based on regions and issues, and that has recently absorbed, with some tensions, the top foreign policy advisers from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign. “But an administration is unwieldy, too. We also know that it’s messier when you don’t get as much information as you can.”

The article lists some of the top players:

Mr. Obama’s core team is led by Susan E. Rice, an assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Clinton administration, who has pushed for a tougher response to the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, and Anthony Lake, Mr. Clinton’s first national security adviser, who was criticized for the administration’s failure to confront the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and now acknowledges the inaction as a major mistake.

The core group also includes Gregory B. Craig, a former top official in the Clinton State Department who served as the president’s lawyer during his impeachment trial; Richard J. Danzig, a Navy secretary in the Clinton administration; Mark W. Lippert, Mr. Obama’s former Senate foreign policy adviser, who just returned from a Navy tour of duty in Iraq; and Mr. McDonough.

Mr. McDonough and Mr. Lippert are paid by the campaign and based in Chicago, and the rest are outside advisers who volunteer their time from Washington.

The group no longer includes Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard human rights expert who resigned in March after she was quoted calling Mrs. Clinton a “monster.” But Mr. Lake still talks to Ms. Power, and Mr. Obama sent a long personal tribute that was read at her wedding in Ireland this month.

Plus we get some details about the role that Dennis Ross is playing with the campaign:

Dennis Ross, the Middle East envoy for Mr. Clinton and the first President Bush and a member of the Obama campaign’s Middle East team, is frequently asked by Ms. Rice, Mr. Lake or Mr. McDonough for help on framing Mr. Obama’s comments on Iran’s nuclear program and its potential threat to Israel.

“They’ve asked for substantive help: ‘Can I take a look at language on Iran?’ ” Mr. Ross said. “Or sometimes I’ve been asked questions to explain the administration’s approach on Iran.” Mr. Ross participated in a conference call last week with Mr. Obama and other advisers to prepare for the senator’s foreign trip, and he will travel with Mr. Obama in Israel and the West Bank city of Ramallah and at other stops. Mr. Ross described Mr. Obama in the conference call as focused on “drilling down” into the issues on the trip.

For those keeping score, another Clinton administration veteran, Dan Shapiro, and Obama campaign staffer Eric Lynn also play a role on Israel-related issues (no surprise, considering they are the ones manning the Jewish desk). And don’t forget former U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer.

Here’s a question: With all these people, how exactly did Obama end up needing to clarify his call at the AIPAC conference for an “undivided Jerusalem.” Kurtzer, for one, has said that Obama “misused” the term.

Kurtzer treated the issue as Obama’s personal goof:

Daniel Kurtzer, who advises Obama on the Middle East, said Tuesday at the Israel Policy Forum that Obama’s comment stemmed from “a picture in his mind of Jerusalem before 1967 with barbed wires and minefields and demilitarized zones.”

“So he used a word to represent what he did not want to see again, and then realized afterwards that that word is a code word in the Middle East,” Kurtzer said.

But, as the NYT’s article today makes clear, that explanation doesn’t wash. If indeed it was a mistake to use the term, responsibility rests with the entire foreign-policy apparatus that Obama has put together. I’ve been told that up to 40 people either had a hand in or looked over the speech. All of them misused the term (again, Kurtzer’s word, not mine)?

More likely, the way to understand what happened is to think of Obama’s campaign like an actual administration, with various players and groups attempting to influence policy, speeches, etc. The question is who was and wasn’t listened to (or even asked to vet the speech) beforehand, and who ended up on top afterwards. And, of course, what it all means for future power struggles down the road.

The Arab street may be enthused about an Obama presidency, but opinion makers in the Arab world are more skeptical, The New Republic reports:

They have been arguing that [Obama] is not so unconventional an American politician when it comes to the Middle East, and that the people of the region have reason to be worried about an Obama presidency.

The reasons? Apparent shifts in Obama’s stances on a firm timetable for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, on talking to Iran and — of course — on Israel.

Their conclusion?

Most Arab columnists writing about Obama have concluded that the exigencies of American politics undermine any efforts by politicians to change the country’s foreign policy in the region.

No word on growing Arab support for McCain, however. He’d likely be seen as even worse for the Arab world.

The other day I had a post titled “O.U. says Obama kosher on Jerusalem.”

Well, let’s just say the O.U. is either to keep up with on the kosher status of ham.

The Obama story has taken some twist and turns in the past day, making things difficult for the O.U.’s man in D.C., Nathan Diament, who went to law school with the presumptive Democratic nominee and also has been playing a lead role in his organization’s efforts to head off any deal on Jerusalem.

After reports suggesting that Obama appeared to backtrack from his call for Jerusalem to remain the undivided capital of Israel, Diament essentially declared that the Obama camp’s revised line was treif:

“The Orthodox Union is extremely disappointed in this revision of Senator Obama’s important statement about Jerusalem,” said Nathan Diament, director of public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. He had sent out a release Wednesday applauding Obama’s Jerusalem remarks in front of AIPAC.

“In the current context, everyone understands that saying ‘Jerusalem… must remain undivided’ means that the holy city must remain unified under Israeli rule, as it has been since 1967,” Diament explained.

“If Senator Obama intended his remarks at AIPAC to be understood in this way, he said nothing that would reasonably lead to such a different interpretation.”

But then Obama sought to clarify his clarification. So now we have a new statement from the O.U., this one sort of pareve:

Background:

On June 4, Sen. Obama addressed the AIPAC policy conference and stated: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” This statement was praised by the Orthodox Union and condemned by Palestinians.

On June 5, Obama campaign advisers stated that the intended interpretation of the statement was that Jerusalem is to “remain Israel’s capital [and should] not to be divided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was 1948-1967.”

Later in the day, Sen. Obama appeared on CNN and, in response to questioning on this matter, personally stated: “Obviously it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations.” Sen. Obama further stated that with regard to any division of Jerusalem: “My belief is that as a practical matter it would be very difficult to execute. And I think that it is smart for us to work through a system in which everybody has access to the extraordinary religious sites in old Jerusalem. But, Israel has a legitimate claim on that city.”

Responding to Sen. Obama’s comments, the Orthodox Union issued the following statement:

Sen. Obama is correct that the re-division of Jerusalem is impractical. Jerusalem is a diverse city where Jewish and Arab neighborhoods are scattered in a patchwork. It is not only impractical to divide such a city, it would be unwise. Sen. Obama is also correct that we must ensure that people of every faith have access to all of the extraordinary religious sites of Jerusalem. Recent history has shown that such access and freedom of worship has only existed with Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty. Merely four decades ago, when Arabs controlled the Old City, sacred places of worship were sacked and people were denied access to their holiest sites. And more recently, when synagogues in Gaza or Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus came under Arab control, they too were destroyed. The Orthodox Union would ask Sen. Obama to consider these facts as he continues to consider his position with regard to the fate of Jerusalem.

The Republican Jewish Coalition and the National Jewish Democratic Council are clashing over Barack Obama’s AIPAC speech.

First, the RJC issued this statement accusing Obama of attempting to rewrite his Iran policy:

Obama Tries to Rewrite His Iran Policy

Washington, D.C. (June 4, 2008) — The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) issued the following statement today:

“Today before the pro-Israel community at AIPAC, Senator Obama tried to run from his Iran policy. In September 2007, a bipartisan effort in the Senate passed the Kyl-Lieberman resolution designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. At the time, Obama vehemently opposed this effort and used the opportunity as a political diversion to attack Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Now that he has the Democratic nomination, Obama is attempting to rewrite his history and pretend his opposition to Kyl-Lieberman never happened. But in truth, when given the opportunity to demonstrate principled leadership and judgment, Obama instead worked against the bipartisan effort to increase the economic pressure on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.”

And, right on schedule, the NJDC fired back (though it failed to address the actual claim made by Jewish Republicans) [UPDATE: The NJDC does have a more direct response up on its blog. Below is the non-response response.]

More Fear and Smear from RJC and Other McCain Supporters

WASHINGTON, DC - Ira N. Forman, Executive Director of the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC), released the following statement:

This is just more of the same fear and smear that we hear from RJC and other Sen. John McCain supporters. It is clear from Senator Barack Obama’s speech yesterday to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that he will continue to be a great friend of Israel from the White House.

I urge you to listen to his speech where he explains:
“My strong commitment to make sure that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, unbreakable tomorrow, unbreakable forever….That the bond between Israel and the United States is rooted in more than our shared national interests. It’s rooted in the shared values and shared stories of our people. And, as president, I will work with you to ensure that it is this bond that is strengthened.” (AIPAC Speech 6/4/08)

With regards to Iran Senator Obama said unequivocally that, “Finally, let there be no doubt: I will always keep the threat of military action [against Iran] on the table to defend our security and our ally, Israel. Do not be confused.” (AIPAC Speech 6/4/08)

These words are supported by a perfect pro-Israel voting record, a deep passion for Israel and an impeccable understanding of the policies that will succeed where Bush/McCain policies have failed.

Looks like Obama’s AIPAC speech has cost him that Hamas endorsement.

Rahm Emanuel ends his “erotically neutral” behavior with an endorsement of Obama — and takes him to meet with the AIPAC bigs (with Hillary Clinton’s blessing).

Listen to Joe Lieberman’s response to Barack Obama’s AIPAC speech.

The Orthodox Union is praising the section of Barack Obama’s speech in which he declared that Jerusalem must “remain the capital of Israel” and “remain undivided”: Read the rest

Here’s the complete audio of Obama’s speech to AIPAC today:

Video and text after the jump.

Read the rest

It does seem like the news in Hillary Clinton’s AIPAC speech was this line: “Let me be very clear: I know Senator Obama will be a good friend to Israel.”

Clinton may not have dropped out of the race, but she spoke as if Obama would be the Democratic nominee and aimed her criticisms at GOP policies.

UPDATE: The perils of live blogging … Wonkette picks on us (me) for an earlier typo in the headline of this post.