Avigdor Lieberman may have come in a surprising third in the elections in Israel, but he knows where the ultimate power base is. So today he has an op-ed in the New York Jewish Week trying to overcome the criticism of him here. He says his proposed loyalty oath is no different from what the U.S. and Britain require of new citizens.
Lieberman is turning out to be a wedge issue for the Israel lobby. Good people are taking a stand. J Street stands out, as it did during Gaza. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the group's director:
Avigdor Lieberman’s op-ed in the Jewish Week on shared values between Israel and the United States is as genuine as a Bernie Madoff lecture on business ethics.
Let’s set the record straight: Avigdor Lieberman has advocated
transferring Israeli Arab citizens out of Israel. He wants to ask
current citizens of Israel to take a loyalty oath. He campaigned on a
platform that only he “understands Arabic” and that there should be “no
citizenship without loyalty.” There is no doubt what he meant and who
he’s targeting.
Beautifully stated!
Lieberman gets one thing right: the strong and historic Israeli-US
relationship has been based on shared values and interests. But his
values are not my values – neither as an American nor as a Jew.
J Street is joined by the rabbi with whom it parted ways so acrimoniously on Gaza–Eric Yoffie of the Union for Reform Judaism is very strong against Lieberman–and of course by the academic leaders of "Support Israeli Democracy," an American petition drive against Lieberman that we have reported here before. Even the American Jewish Committee is uncomfortable with the Yisroel Beiteinu leader.
But Lieberman is finding defenders in the U.S., in the usual places. The JTA reports:
[Malcolm] Hoenlein [of the Conference of Presidents] added, Lieberman is “far more moderate than the media has presented it.”…
“I find a lot of apocrypha but very little in actual detail” about
the alleged danger of Lieberman, said the Anti-Defamation League’s
national director, Abraham Foxman. He said Lieberman's proposed loyalty
oaths would be required of everyone, not just Arabs, and thus were not
discriminatory singling anyone out.
In the same piece, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post is in the J Street camp. He tells Eric Fingerhut that the
"inclusion of Lieberman in an Israeli government would be 'very,
very counterproductive' to the Jewish state and that Jewish leaders
should be speaking out strongly on the matter."'I could defend the operation in Gaza,' Cohen said, but 'I'd have a
very hard time' defending a government including someone who has
demanded citizens take a loyalty oath."
I find Cohen's language revealing. Since when is he advising Jewish leaders and announcing what he can and can't defend? Well–since he is an important columnist who feels some sense of allegiance to Israel. Two years ago he said that Walt and Mearsheimer's book left him singing "Hatikvah." And these quotes remind us, that there really is an Israel lobby–which includes Jewish writers who feel real responsibility for standing up for Israel in this country.
