The New York Jewish Week says that Democrats have failed so far in their efforts to pin Rev. Hagee on McCain, in the way that the rightwing has pinned Rev. Wright on Obama.
Don’t give up! Americans need to understand that Hagee’s views on the West Bank are more intolerant and dangerous than Rev. Wright’s views, and that they are shared by the neoconservatives, who don’t want to give up land for peace. The sooner this divide is explained and announced to Americans, the better for everyone.
The real news is that a left-center Jewish leadership that is allied with Obama’s broader progressive movement has emerged. Daniel Levy, IPF, and Ambassador
Kurtzer have
made an alliance across ethnic lines to try and save the two-state
solution. I’m not a Zionist myself, but as as a newsman I understand that IPF’s M.J. Rosenberg is an important voice in political Jewry/leadership right now. His piece yesterday is titled "Remember These Digits: 78-22," an obvious reference to the unfair division of historical Palestine (which is being chewed down further every day), and he writes:
It is
amazing that right-wing Israelis and their American enablers have
managed to convince even a single person that West Bank settlements are
not at the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict….
The very existence of Israel, Rosenberg concludes, is in jeopardy
because politicians in Jerusalem are intimidated by
fringe elements—not to mention the politicians here who are even more
intimidated by the status quo lobby in Washington, DC. [emphases mine]
A year back at Yivo, neocon Bill Kristol, a McCain pal, said presciently that Israel’s rightwing supporters have to link arms with new constituencies in the U.S. because of political changes in the U.S. He anticipated Hagee, the isolation of the neocons, and the emergence of the center-left. Hagee is the wedge.
Some day soon this issue will be on Chris Matthews…
