Just Foreign Policy, a realist/prog group, headed by former Maine congressman Tom Andrews, is circulating a petition that calls on Obama to have "new faces" in his team negotiating Israel/Palestine. My friend Ira Glunts sees this as the anti-Dennis Ross petition. And urges all to sign it.
Meantime, Glunts, an IDF veteran (yes, I'm pathetic; I need to signal to my readers that someone is Jewish) critiques an Obama speech to AIPAC in 2007 in which the then-senator (Obama just resigned!) extolled Fassuta, a northern Israeli village that he visited on his first trip to Israel, as a model of multicultural harmony:
Sounds very binational and forward-thinking. But Glunts says the village is all Palestinian Arab, and that during the '06 war, Israel didn't even provide bomb shelters for these people, who were in range of Hezbollah missile. That was Obama's I-love-Israel trip, pushed by the Chicago Jewish community.
