Following on from my post about Obama’s game… British deputy foreign minister Ivan Lewis, who is Jewish, has been in the U.S. lobbying American Jews to support Obama on the two-state solution. JJ Goldberg reports in the Forward.
It was when Lewis described the reception he was getting from his New York audiences that his reserve gave way to flashes of emotion. Even though he had been aware of the bitter debates dividing Americans — his portfolio includes North America along with the Middle East — he seemed taken aback by the vehemence of the anti-Obama rhetoric he was encountering…
Critics of Obama’s Middle East policies, he added, “cannot hide behind the shield of Zionism.”
“True Zionists should support rapid progress towards a negotiated two-state solution and normalized relations with the Arab world as the best way of securing Israel’s future,” Lewis said. “They should support President Obama, safe in the knowledge that no settlement will be promoted or accepted which puts Israeli security at risk.” In any case, he said, Israel would never agree to sign such an agreement.
Notice: not a word about Gaza here. JJ Goldberg doesn’t care, the British foreign office doesn’t care, Obama doesn’t care. The game is reconfiguring the Israel lobby to gain support for a push on 2 states. And what are they up against: NY Jews, conservative, ethnocentric.
What does it mean that both our Foreign Minister and our Deputy Foreign Minister are Jewish? Not to say that I’m unhappy by this fact, I just think it’s interesting.
We should be less concerned what community they’re from and more concerned whether they’re acting in our interest. Lobbying a section of the US public to support the policy of their President? If I was American I don’t know what I’d think. As a Brit I’m not sure what I think.
Finally, I get to namedrop Ivan Lewis.
He was the only one in our class in Prestwich to publicly support Manchester City. The mainstream were all fans of Man. United.
He got hell for it.
The reception he got in New York can’t have been half as bad.