The Republican Jewish Coalition is distributing a flyer in Pennsylvania quoting peace-processor Aaron David Miller saying that Obama does not love Israel, under a headline that reads, “All Jewish. Supported Barack Obama. But Not this Time.”
I found the flyer on my parents’ door this afternoon. It tells Jewish voters they should not “feel guilty” about voting for Romney and features three photographs of seemingly-average Jewish voters saying that Obama is putting Israel in danger and that he’s not a friend of Israel.
Under the “All Jewish” headline is a column titled “What are the experts saying?” It quotes Abe Foxman, Ari Shavit of Haaretz, and Aaron David Miller, who worked for George W. Bush and Bill Clinton but is generally associated with Democrats. He is affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson Center these days. Miller says, “Obama really is different. Unlike Clinton and George W. Bush, Obama isn’t in love with the idea of Israel.”
The quote comes from this piece by Miller in Foreign Policy, saying that Obama will take on Netanyahu if he gets a second term.
I’ve watched a few presidents come and go on this issue, and Obama really is different. Unlike Clinton and George W. Bush, Obama isn’t in love with the idea of Israel. As a result, he has a harder time making allowances for Israeli behavior he doesn’t like.
I can’t imagine Miller has endorsed Romney, nor approved his use in the piece. I sent him a note yesterday but haven’t heard from him.
talk about a revealing remark:
“he has a harder time making allowances for Israeli behavior he doesn’t like”
Why should any president have to “make allowances for Israeli behavior” ?
It implies that such behavior is antithetical to US interests
No, Phil, I can imagine you can’t, considering your exuberant praise of Miller, or was it Miller’s book. You will forgive me, but this reminds me of two things.
One: Norman Finkelstein’s experience and harsh critique of Miller on Z-net.
Two: your article of a meeting with Norman in his flat, if I remember correctly. By that point I had come to appreciate your portraits of encounters with people, or your interviews quite a bit, but that one left me with a bad taste, I have never managed to get rid of. Search your soul, what was it, that made you portrait Norman that way?
Miller is a known AIPAC flack. He’s working the Democratic party to ensure that they never get to moments of genuine democracy like at the DNC.
Why you want to pretend he’s a great peacenik is beyond me.
Miller, by the way, was the same guy who recently wrote an Op-Ed in the NYT where he complained that there were ‘too many Arabs’ in Israel.
First you praise Remnick wildly for basically opposing Bibi and the Iraninan war based on Israeli arguments – rather than American ones – and now you praise a man who laments too many non-Jewish minorites(would you praise him if he lamented too many blacks in America?).
Phil, you’re veering off from bad to worse in recent days.
Get a grip. You shouldn’t defend a racist.
Yet here you are.
i was trying to post some news krauss.
Krauss, please show where he is “praising” this zio because I am not seeing it.
Miller is not an AIPAC hack. Read his book.
Aaron David Miller is a bit of a weasel in the cited piece.
First he explains at length that Netanyahu is basically an Israeli version of Mitt Romney: a putative right winger with no true convictions, and thus despised on the left, right and center of Israeli political spectrum.
Would Obama instinctively love Israel, that would not be a problem, alas, he does not.
But Miller does explain if it is good or bad, just that one should expect “turbulence”. So the question becomes: should USA allow a relationship with an ally to cool a bit merely because the leader of that ally is a piece of garbage that is widely despised by his own people?
Similarly, Miller does not explain if he recommends to view Israel as a “tiny state living on the knife’s edge with the dark past”. I suspect that he was ironic, but also sufficiently elliptic to avoid being heckled by the members of his own congregation. Actually, this is a great example of weaselly prose: do Israel and “the dark past” live together on the knife’s edge, or it is the edge that has a dark past, or is it Israel? I suspect that this sentence contains strategic ambiguity.
great parsing piotr
weasel language indeed
dennis ross also weaseled on obama.
Yeah, great parsing Piotr. No relationship to truth or reality, but great parsing.
When one of you has two decades of peacemaking behind you, maybe someone will take you seriously.
When the subject of Israel comes up, I sometimes hear myself say, “I’m not a fan of Israel.” I think I’ll switch to “I’m not in love with the idea of Israel,” it has a nice ring to it.
Ha :}
Krauss, if the linked article is representative, than indeed Aaron David is a liberal Zionist who has to sail in dangerous waters for living. In particular, the issue of “too many Arabs” can have very different interpretations.
One is that on simple empirical bases we can see that Israel has difficulty in absorbing Arabs as citizens with equal rights, and thus it is beneficial to structure future peace solutions with no annexations whatsoever. That would be 2SS on green line, a relatively nice position. With swaps? Swaps can hack West Bank to unviability. The more swaps and annexations are proposed the closer we come to the utterly obnoxious interpretation, which is the “transfer”.
The problem in making a living as a professional liberal Zionist is that for outright nice position you can be fired, blacklisted, heckled etc. It really reminds me “revisionists” in Communist block countries in 1960s who were proposing “Communism with human face”. This was a viable position during early de-Stalinization, but as the years were passing, the preposition that regimes could be even more. was harder and harder to pass through censorship, and less satisfying for people who wanted to dispense with Communism altogether. For that reason revisionist advocacy was using coded language.
No, it can’t. It means: “there are too many Arabs”.
“Obama isn’t in love with the idea of Israel”, although the neocons and AIPAC propagandists regularly claim this then why has Obama prostrated himself before AIPAC, had his people change “DNC” platforms at the last minute against popular will to pronounce statements clearly in direct violation of established international law (United Nations Security Council Resolution 478, for example), and done nothing but INCREASE US taxpayers’ military “aid” to the Zionists and particularly today’s fascist Likud steady increase in illegal settlements, apartheid, and generalized racism and calls for another Nakba. Yet after all of this Obama is according to them “against Israel” blah blah blah. I guess it just comes down to that he and his administration MAY be putting up SOME “resistance” to launching another illegal, immoral war (this time against the nation of Iran, which has not attacked another country in all of modern history) for the sake of Israel and the Israel-firsters oh I mean “concerned ‘citizens of America’ who support Israel” (and I do use the term “American citizen” lightly for this AIPAC, Likudnik ilk inside the US).
And as for being “in love with the idea of Israel”, what exactly is that “idea”?! Because anyone who knows history and is attached to reality can see that this “idea” is a racial supremacist state with an open brand of apartheid so clear that even Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela have called it “beyond apartheid”. And is this “idea” also the mythology that “Jews” are “returning” to their “ancient homeland” of 2,000 years ago (I have a bridge to sell you if you buy this, as people considered Jewish are just as mixed with all kinds of different people as your average “Gentile”, and the Palestinians themselves have been shown to be indigenous to the land of Palestine even by Israeli academics, researchers, etc. And as academic Robert Pollack has stated on the “fallacy of biological Judaism” that “there are no DNA sequences common to all Jews and absent from all non-Jews. There is nothing in the human genome that makes or diagnoses a person as a Jew.”). While putting aside that individuals even trying to use said “Biblical” mythology also discounts that even the Bible (that many Zionist propagandists try to base themselves on to some extent) says the Canaanites, Jebusites, Amorites, etc were already living in Canaan/Palestine first to start with anyway link to youtube.com. And as others have noted Americans who support this mythology of Jews supposedly “returning” to Palestine after 2,000 years at the same time in a stunning act of hypocrisy not only won’t allow (in just one example of many that could be cited) Mexicans (or Hispanics) to have the southwest of what is today the United States; not only that but the “Tea Party Patriots” etc. whine and cry about small Mexican groups like Aztlan and Reconquista that call for taking back territory that was taken from Mexico LESS than 200 years ago! link to upload.wikimedia.org
And also putting aside that said “Tea Party Patriots” (who are often major backers and supporters of Zionist colonialism and apartheid) even go crazy complaining not just about Mexicans maybe wanting what was their territory less than 200 years ago back; but simply about migrants and undocumented immigrants in said territory of what many Hispanics historical refer to till today as simply “Mexico Norte”.
Abdul-Rahman, you bring up a lot of very good points here, but the following comparison is unfair:
When the United States annexed the Southwest from Mexico, the people who were already living there became citizens of the United States, equal (at least in principle) under the law. One of these people even became governor of California. There was no large-scsale ethnic cleansing.
The paragraph quoted above is actually reminiscent of the verbal sleight-of-hand we hear in Zionist apologetics:
“Americans … won’t allow … Mexicans … to have the southwest of what is today the United States …”
If you’re talking about individual Mexicans who are living in what’s now the southwestern U.S., and are descended from people who lived there when it was part of Mexico, and never left, then these people already do “have” that area.
But if you’re talking about individual Mexicans who have no ancestral ties to the land that’s now the southwestern U.S. but have moved there in recent years from what’s left of Mexico, then there is no compelling human-rights reason to allow those individuals to do that.
The Zionist myth is that the Jews of today are descended from people who lived in Palestine thousands of years ago but were forced out. Unless I’m missing something, the Aztlan Reconquista people are not saying that the people living in what’s now Mexican territory are descended from people who were forced out of what’s now the southwestern U.S. So it’s unfair to call this “a stunning act of hypocrisy”.
I want as amicable a divorce as possible.
“Miller says, “Obama really is different. Unlike Clinton and George W. Bush, Obama isn’t in love with the idea of Israel.”
Haha…I would bet half of my worldly goods that neither Clinton nor Bush I or even II ‘loved’ Israel. This kind of stuff by those like Miller is just like how zios always claim Americans love Israel….they want their audience to think it’s “odd” Not to love Israel.