Last night Barack Obama made an appearance at the Israeli embassy in Washington on Holocaust remembrance day in an event meant to show the unity of Israel and the United States. A few months ago, Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer lobbied against the Iran deal on Capitol Hill. No worries, mate. It was the first time a president has spoken at the Israeli embassy:
To Ambassador and Mrs. Dermer, to Nina Totenberg, our friends from the Israeli Embassy and Yad Vashem — thank you so much for hosting us today.
So you can lobby against the President’s signature foreign policy initiative, thumb your nose at his policy on two states, and he will still kiss your behind. “[W]e stand up forcefully and proudly in defense of our ally, in defense of our friend, in defense of the Jewish State of Israel,” Obama said.
Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio was there, as was Steven Spielberg. They represent the Israel lobby’s strength: the belief on the part of an empowered generation of American Jews that Israel is a liberation story. That’s who Obama is kissing up to, a domestic constituency among the blue-state elites.
Even the New York Times coverage of the Obama appearance noted his obeisance to people who had worked against him:
Mr. Obama was welcomed warmly by Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, who, with Mr. Netanyahu, spent much of last year working to defeat the president’s highest foreign policy priority. It was the clearest sign to date that both governments are working to heal their relations.
“We know we have no better friend than the United States of America,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a video message. Addressing Mr. Obama, he added, “Your being here reflects the unbreakable bond of friendship between Israel and the United States.
Reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis also notes that Obama once offended Israel supporters in his Cairo speech of 2009 by saying the rationale for Israel’s creation was the Holocaust, thereby rejecting the “Zionist ideals and biblical underpinnings of Israel’s history.”
What about all the people who were offended by Obama’s deference to the lobby last night, to political forces who are supporting Palestinian persecution? Commemorating the Holocaust by reverencing Israel? As Donald Johnson writes, “The way Israel gets to link itself with resistance to the Nazis is such a part of the pro Israel narrative you have to report it, but it is free propaganda for apartheid. I’m trying to think of any other case where this would happen and am failing.”
The event was attended by officials of AIPAC, the leading Israel lobby group, as well as the Time Warner executive who has written speeches for Netanyahu. Jewish Insider spotted: Gary Ginsberg & Susanna Aaron, AIPAC’s Howard Kohr, AIPAC’s Bob Cohen, Likud politicianTzachi Hanegbi, Maj. Gen. Yaacov Ayish, Jeffrey Goldberg.
Speaking of using anti-Semitism to justify apartheid, here is Netanyahu saying yesterday that criticism of Israel equals anti-Semitism; and Iran is threatening another Holocaust.
We see anti-semitism directed against individual Jews, and we also see this hatred directed against the collective Jew, against the Jewish state. Israel is targeted with the same slurs and the same libels that were leveled against the Jewish people since time immemorial…
Even respected western opinion leaders have become afflicted with hatred for the Jewish people and the Jewish state. The obsession with the Jews, the fixation on the Jewish state defies any other rational explanation….
We are no longer a powerless people, begging others to offer us protection. Today we can speak out against the voices of hatred…
We have changed, and we stand and speak out and we defend ourselves. But where’s Europe? Where’s the rest of civilization?
Thanks to Peter Voskamp and Scott Roth.
Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer?
“So you can lobby against the President’s signature foreign policy initiative, thumb your nose at his policy on two states, and he will still kiss your behind”
Oh no. Did President Obama just undermine your sky-is-falling negativity? Did he suggest that maybe the vast majority of Democrats aren’t supportive of BDS? Boo-hoo.
I don’t really understand why the Israel lobby was so nuts against Obama in his early years. He has proven himself a loyal tool of the lobby. Not a total tool like Dubya and Bill Clinton, but more or less pliant. Maybe they have become so arrogant that anything less than complete servility is now seen as hostility?
Either way, I/P will not become an election issue until 2024. The liberal educated base have already moved on, but its still concentrated among the young. The older folks are still totally shitting their pants about upsetting their Jewish peers. Plus half of them sleep with Jewish spouses and need to keep the house peace.
Consider it in a way like the Howard Dean movement in 2004. It took slightly over a decade for it to mature into the Sanders movement, now it’s a genuine force. It has continually forced Clinton to the left and will continue to do so as the primary process moves on. Even if Sanders will lose(which isn’t as assured as it was a few months ago), it’s clear of which direction the party base is taking.
We saw the early rumblings of change during the 2010-2013 years on I/P, especially on campuses. Now it’s a done deal. We need to wait a decade for this to mature. As usual, you’re too optimistic, Phil. But your fundamental instinct is correct, just a matter of being wrong on timing.
BTW, a general comment on Obama. I believe Tavis Smiley’s criticism of Obama was basically correct. Obama did nothing for black people, which is ironic, considering how much the GOP right demonized him as somekind of Nation of Islam covert operative.
But it’s not like Obama has been sucking up to white people either. In the end, he’s mostly comfortable among the coastal Jewish establishment. He even joked a bunch of J Street Jews were his “cabal”. He has said to Axelrod that he’s the closest thing to a Jewish president the country ever got. (Delusional, but still telling of his mindset).
With hindsight, it shouldn’t be so strange after all. He even complained to past girlfriends that he doesn’t have a single black bone in his body. The Jewish community is still a monolithically white community, but since it is a liberal, urban and highly educated one, it is easier for Obama to fit in. And then you have the religious/ethnic minority factor.
Even if American anti-Semitism is a fiction at this stage, which is why the ADL is all about Israel(they lose a purpose to exist otherwise), it nevertheless give some contact of reference for someone like Obama.
He can go back to his white roots, the community he was raised in, but still seperate himself within an ethnic minority community.
You saw this during the 2011-2012 years when the black community was devasted. Obama just kept lecturing black people to “take off their slippers” and other stuff a white republican president would never get away with. Although I’m grateful for the ACA and the less-atrocious foreign policy than would have happened under a McCain or a Romney, Obama in so many ways was never really a change candidate in the same way that Sanders is. And as many pointed out, the actual difference between him and Clinton were never really large, which is why it makes sense he has essentially endorsed her.
Surely anti-Semitism was never “directed against individual Jews”? At one time it was directed against a whole religion by bigoted Christians. After the Enlightenment slowly changed these modes of thought, (chiefly by undermining all religion) it was directed at supposedly powerful cliques that supposedly controlled banking, and even the entire capitalist system, or alternatively at the socialism that sought to undermine capitalism. Yet here we have Netanyahu proclaiming the power of Israel, which he foolishly equates with the Jewish people as a whole. Do we see Obama scuttling round European embassies on St. Patrick’s Day, or St. George’s Day or Bastille Day? Perhaps he should, because then he would meet friends who, for the most part, share key American values and do not dream of interfering in American electoral politics, much as we despise many of its candidates.