The tension surrounding next week’s Obama/Netanyahu meeting continues to rise. Today, Ha’aretz is reporting that Obama couldn’t even wait until next week to tell Israel not to attack Iran. The Israeli press seems to be on the edge of its seat in the build up to the meeting, and is expecting the worst. Each day Israeli newspapers are full of prognosticators and politicians reading Obama White House tea leaves, making dire predictions and giving urgent advice for the Prime Minister. And what can lend more urgency to the situation than comparisons to the holocaust?
Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Isi Leibler uses a strategy that we witnessed in the recent AIPAC conference:
Obama’s new policies of “engaging” with rogue states
and striving to modify the behavior of tyrants by persuasion have
ominous parallels with the appeasement policies of Europe in the 1930s.
It is probably not coincidental that the Czech Republic is the European
country most supportive of Israel.
But Leibler doesn’t stop there. In a sign of real desperation, he attempts to shame the American Jewish community into supporting the Netanyahu/Lieberman government’s expansionism and militarism by blaming us for not doing enough to prevent the holocaust:
These are challenging times for American
Jewry. Its support is vital to resist those deluding themselves that
problems with the Islamic world can be overcome by sacrificing Israel
and transforming us into a new Czechoslovakia. American Jewish leaders
failed to speak up in defense of their brethren during the dark days of
World War II because they were intimidated by a popular American
president. We have every reason to believe that the vast majority of
strong and confident American Jews of our time will not be intimidated
or remain silent if the Jewish state is endangered.
Leibler understands the American Jews will be a very important constituency as Obama shapes his foreign policy, and he is also aware the consensus towards Israel among American Jews is crumbling. He lashes out at JStreet and other “organizations masquerading as Zionists” as weakening support for Israel and calls for them to be “exposed and isolated from the Jewish mainstream before they undermine Israel’s position.” Wow.
Leibler isn’t alone in deploying these kinds of scare tactics, and in the end it’s going to be up to the Obama administration whether this meeting with Netanyahu takes place in the context of 2009, where US and Israeli interests may be diverging, or in the context of 1939, where Israeli fears are paramount.
Writing in Ha’aretz, Aluf Benn recently had a good opinion piece entitled “The Holocaust is not a cliche.” It dealt with the dangers of framing today in the context of World War II. In that article he made the simple point “Netanyahu’s rhetoric is bringing Israel closer to not being able to refrain from going to war against Iran.” It will be up to the Obama administration, and the American Jewish community, to resist the pressure to view the world through this lens. There are signs that both may be willing to do so. Now’s the time.
(Thanks to Ali Gharib of IPS for passing along the Leibler article.)
