Rarely do we see a supporter of Israel acknowledge that previous presidents (although he failed to include Nixon with the Rogers’ Plan) have tried to induce Israel into negotiating a peace plan and that all have failed because they pushed for Israel’s "acceptance of unpalatable concessions."
Moreover, that this article was written for the Jerusalem Post by Jonathan Tobin, a Jewish American fulltime polemicist on Israel’s behalf, is but the latest indication, at least since the development of the internet, that there is no fundamental ideological dividing line that separates Zionists from one another anywhere in the world, nor is there, in practical terms, any geographic division. Articles by US, British and Australian Jews appear regularly in the pages of the Israeli press while articles by Israeli Jews appear routinely in the American Jewish press. The same thing applies to institutes and foundations such as the Washington Inst. for Near East Policy and the Foundation for Democracies where one is as likely to find an Israeli or Western European Zionist enjoying a fellowship on a regular basis and American Jews taking jobs such as Dennis Ross did with the JPPPI and appearing at such forums as are staged regularly in Jerusalem and Herzliya. Tobin:
"As the dispute entered its third week, Obama’s anger and his determination to force Netanyahu to give in on the question of building in the eastern sector of Israel’s capital was apparently unabated. Yet this is hardly the first dispute between the two countries. Every administration since 1967 has proposed peace plans and negotiating strategies that Israel disliked or actively resisted. Genuine friends such as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, as well as less friendly presidents such as Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, all pushed hard at times for acceptance of unpalatable concessions.
"BUT IN spite these precedents, Obama has managed to go where no American president has gone before. For all of the problems created by all of his predecessors about settlements in the West Bank, no previous American leader has ever chosen to draw a line in the sand about the Jewish presence in Jerusalem. It is true that the US never recognized the annexation of the eastern sector of the city after Jerusalem’s unification in 1967. In fact, it has never even recognized western Jerusalem as Israel’s capital."
