I need to perseverate about Charlie Rose's show the other night. Both Robert Simon and Andrea Mitchell, his two media-elite Jewish guests that night, offered the same bluntly-honest statement about Israel's motivation: It is political in that Israel doesn't know what Obama's going to bring. They know that Bush will greenlight them, as he has. Mitchell seemed critical of Israel/the lobby, in her fairminded way. Simon said, One thing you can count on: This thing is over by January 20.
Now the staggering thing about this assertion is: We have just been through a bruising political year in which Sarah Palin's illiteracy and Rev. Wright's racial resentment were anatomized for the masses. The Iraq war withdrawal schedule was reviewed again and again; and I still can't tell you the difference between one candidate and another.
But here was a potentially stark wedge issue–where are you on Israel's militant conduct in the occupied territories–and it was never debated. The Republican Jewish Coalition and I wanted it debated, because they support that conduct with every fiber of their being and I oppose it fibrously. But Obama didn't want it opened up, and neither really did McCain, and the media elites respected this silence and did nothing to open it up even during the Khalidi flap near the end. The Democratic political leadership did nothing to open it up, didn't want to open it up. And as Glenn Greenwald says, they are now in lockstep on Gaza with the Republicans.
So this potential divide remains latent. And this was/is a decision of the elites. Because the divide is not latent in the American street: The political divide exists among the American people, we are arguing about it at delis and dinner tables now. Progressives are horrified by Gaza, and the Democratic Party faithful are against it, by 3-2, a good majority. And the centrist liberal New York Times, to its credit, is now showing some intellectual leadership on the slaughter, as of yesterday anyway. But all of this could have been discussed and we all could have angrily divided during the designated political season–around such questions as the brutal blockade of Gaza, or the wall being built on Palestinian land, or the "lovely" apartheid road system, as Simon characterized it with irony.
The reason no one opened it up during the political season (and Matt Brooks and Ari Fleischer and other neocons will agree with me here) is that it would have potentially divided Obama's Jewish media/financial support, and that would have been too destructive to his campaign. McCain had his own reason not to broach it: because voters would see that he was going to keep us in wars forever, and he didn't want to scare them. What I am saying is that the actual division between neocon/Reform/AIPAC Jews and J Street/anti-neocon Jews, which has now broken out into the open and forced people to take a stand, might have taken place during the campaign. Had the media hammered it ala Palin's illiteracy or Wright's black nationalism, Obama would have been forced to be somewhat more forthright about his views re the settlements/wall/siege of Gaza, and possibly he would have said something horrifying like, Palestinians are suffering in oppressive circumstances, and as a result the Marty Peretz/Jeffrey Goldberg wing of his coalition would have split off and gone to McCain. Sayonara.
But possibly too, non-Jewish Americans might have learned about Israel/Palestine and gravitated to Obama about the issue. The elites didn't want to take that risk. Some democracy.
As Alan Weisman notioned to me yesterday, What if Obama gave his race speech to Americans, explaining the history of Palestinian dispossession? What if he had been compelled to say to the American people what his friend Rashid Khalidi has said: that the same people who are being blockaded in Gaza were forced out of Ashkelon when it had an Arabic name 60 years ago? By giving such a simple historical speech, he would have taken this great moral issue of our time out of the possession of elites and allowed the people to learn and debate it. He would have dispelled what his friend Chuck Hagel calls "the fog that has
surrounded, dominated, and consumed the effort that all Presidents have
made since 1948" on Israel.
Of course he never gave that speech. But as Obama said of his race speech (and as Lincoln and the Republicans said of the slavery question in 1854): Some day these things must be said by an American politician. If not this year then in two years, or four years, or forty. Because this is rightfully a political question. One for the people to debate and divide over. Not one for elites to broker.
And now I will break the seal and tell you something else that will be in that great American speech, something else that Bob Simon said on Charlie Rose: Israelis do not want a democracy with one man, one vote. "It will never happen," Simon said.
Do Americans who have sacrificed so much blood and treasure in Iraq for the sake of purple fingers support such a religiously-exclusive political system? More to the point: Do they know about it?
