Only in Haaretz. Shmuel Rosner has a good piece on a Jewish gathering in Ohio at which two congressmen, Obama surrogate Adam Schiff (California) and Hillary surrogate Andrew Anthony Weiner (from what Rabbi Ellen Lippmann calls "the holy city of Brooklyn"), tried to out-Israel one another. Noteworthy for a few comments.
--Weiner said that George Bush was good for Israel. This is a refrain in Israel. And it is the reason Hillary Clinton won't separate herself from a hawkish policy in the Middle East. Older, worried middle-of-the-road Jews like Bush's policy in the Mideast. (And alot of Hillary's people will follow Lieberman to McCain; and finally there will be a robust debate of Israel in the U.S.)...
--Weiner waved the bloody shirt of Jimmy Carter. Said that Obama had a "compromising approach" and would turn out to be a Jimmy Carter.
--If only. Obama's people are terrified about alienating Jews.
Schiff prefers carefulness over candor. No, he did not say that Obama supports settlements, but he also avoided saying otherwise. His candidate, he says, has never criticized the settlements as being the obstacle for peace. And he repeated what Obama keeps saying... Obama will not try to dictate a solution.
This is something I don't understand. The U.S. is the strongest country in the world. We dictate stuff all the time. Why not try and dictate a solution? These people have been unable to work out their differences except with violence for 80 years, and that violence is now threatening world peace. Israel just killed over 100 Palestinians in Gaza. Israel is landgrabbing the West Bank. The Arab world is justly enraged. Why not dictate a solution? Wouldn't most Americans get behind that? When cops show up at an apartment where a couple have been fighting, they don't talk the people down and then walk away. No, they lay down the law...
"Why not dictate a solution? Wouldn't most Americans get behind that? "
The US would have to have an answer that stood the light of day, beyond rhetoric to do that.
What do you propose?
How would you present Obama's campaign position to potential swing-state Jewish elderly voters?
.
"Schiff … did not say that Obama supports settlements, but he also avoided saying otherwise. His candidate, he says, has never criticized the settlements as being the obstacle for peace."
Well, that's not very presidential on Obama's part, because previous presidents have demanded a freeze on settlements — in fact, such a freeze has been a staple of every attempted peace deal. And Israel has never observed it.
Settlements are a MAJOR obstacle to peace. After forty years of occupation, zionist settlers have illegally grabbed about 30% of the West Bank, and moved in 460,000 Jews. Extrapolate forty more years, and perhaps a million settlers could grab 50% or 60% of the West Bank by then. The real crazies think they can just stampede all the Palestianians off into the desert, or starve them out, or impose some other kind of warped, inhumane Final Solution.
One can only conclude that the US remains silent in the face of Israeli defiance because Jewish money has bought sufficient influence, if not control, to dictate US policy toward Israel. Those of us who oppose this policy see no alternative to calling a spade a spade, and identifying Jewish money as the problem which hijacks America's best interests.
From what I've read, Obama has consistently opposed incremental annexation.
He seems to reject the idea that the US should dictate to Israel, in spite of the urge to impose an inadequate "solution".
Do you agree that George W is incapable of proposing and following through on the complexities of the conflicts in the region.
Except for the quagmire of Hamas and Fatah fighting, the Israel/Palestine conflict would be relatively easy to resolve satisfactorily to all parties.
The liberal approach, the civil, is the one that is most exposed to the rancors of fanatics.
And, the left presumes easy answers, conspiracies, and lobbying as explanation of why there is tension.
Its pretty trivial, more suitable for a GW Bush level of political sophistication and intent.
"Weiner said that George Bush was good for Israel. This is a refrain in Israel. And it is the reason Hillary Clinton won't separate herself from a hawkish policy in the Middle East."
In other words, Hillary isn't working for average America's best interests, she is working for Zionism's best interests. And she and the Neolib Clinton team have been for quite some time.
This isn't just about Neocons. Dry rot has set in. The entire two-party political system is corrupt beyond salvation, and it is intent on sucking the last ounce of lifeblood from Americans before it goes down.
Jewish Zionism certainly deserves a huge portion of blame, but the lack of character and principles of both the left-liberals and the Neoconized Right made it all possible.
The Baby Boomers have duge their own graves.
"Except for the quagmire of Hamas and Fatah fighting, the Israel/Palestine conflict would be relatively easy to resolve satisfactorily to all parties."
It is aggravating, after having just read accounts of the massacre in Gaza, to have to read Witty's inane remarks as well.
The idea here that it is the Palestinians who prevent a settlement of the conflict is the official Israeli lie, endlessly repeated, in all variations, since the mendacity about "the three noes of Khartoum".
Arie Brand
Ed raises some good points.
Olmert's Willing Executioners and the Cowardice and Complicity Of The American Liberal Jew
"The Baby Boomers have dug their own graves."
Yes, the Baby Boomers.
America's Suckiest Generation!
Michael Blaine
www.rudelystamped.blogspot.com
Last January Shrub signaled for settlement freeze, but then he followed up his rhetoric by saying all the US could do was slightly nudge from the sidelines for the two sides too iron out their core issues (e.g. return, compensation & Jerusalem). Shrub's expansion of his visit into a platform to stump against Iran as a war of the civilization isms didn't help. Who's exposed on the front line in a war of the West against Islam? Israel. With friends like Bush (and his neocons), who needs enemies?
As for the current candidates. Obama at least hinted when not on prime time TV that being pro-Israel does not require backing the most bellicose possible Israeli position ( anymore than being "pro-American" requires backing the war in Iraq). To be "pro" means to support, to want a country to survive and flourish.
Obama at least stresses talking with your enemy. Has it helped Israel when Shrub, McCain, Hillary deductively sneer at affirmative, initiating peace talks with Syria, Iran?
Obama is the only one of the three main candidates that at least has implied (though not for primetime) that support for Israel does not mean support for West Bank settlement, for the Whole Land of Israel, for endless occupation. The mainstream Zionist vision was and is of a democratic state with a Jewish majority, with full rights for all citizens, a country living at peace with its neighbors. (Check out Israel's declaration of independence.) An official ethnocracy is not a democracy, but Zionists will not care as Shoah memory rules them, and understandingly so, however rule over the disenfranchised Palestinians of the West Bank undermines democracy beyond even such a traumatic neurosis stance. And every additional settler makes withdrawal more difficult.
Mild Palestinians who only recently supported a two-state solution now despair at the possibility of partition; they talk of political rights in a single state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. One reason for the Palestinian despair is that the Bush administration talks about two states, but has done close to nothing to push that program (e.g., no use of threat of foreign aid stoppage as a stick). A one-state "solution" means demographically the end of Israel. The conflict between the two national groups within one state is likely to look like Bosnia in the 1990s.
What's Israel's most basic strategic interest? Peace and withdrawal. Mainstream Israel seeks to avoid a one-state solution; this may be also in the best U.S. interest, assuming(?) Israel will remain the one country in the the Middle East that can be depended on to stay pro-American. This approach would assume it would not be the US interest to have a single state with an inevitable Palestinian majority and a built-in communal conflict. Yet given this scenario, neither our out-going President, nor the top likely replacements say or do anything energetically towards reaching a two-state agreement that is presumeably both pro-Israel and an expression of U.S. self-interest.
A pro-Israel policy needs use of incentives and pressures to get to an agreement. The pro-Israel candidates and sitting duck President need to have more courage, like the "anti-Semite" Carter who pressured Israel and Egypt toward a full peace agreement — an agreement that was the greatest American contribution to the security of both countries. It's no fun for the average poor American taxpayer to have to bear the cross of Israel's mistakes and Arab reaction, but, hey, let's look at the big picture.