by Edward Klein
If further proof of Jewish loyalty to the Democrats were needed, it was provided by the 2008 election of Barack Obama. On a key issue for many Jewish voters—support for Israel—the hawkish John McCain started off with a decisive advantage over Obama, whose past associations with the anti-Semitic Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the Israel-bashing Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi raised troubling questions in the minds of many Jews. And yet, when the vote was tallied, Obama trounced McCain among Jews by a staggering 57-point margin.
“After decades of involvement in the civil rights movement by American Jews, Obama stirred deep emotions in the Jewish community,” Bret Stephens, the deputy editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, told the author of this book. “The black-Jewish alliance was shattered in the late 1960s, and Jews have yearned ever since to restore it. Jews felt good about voting for Obama, for not only were they voting for a guy they agreed with and liked, but they were also voting for their own personal redemption.”
A sizable number of American Jews, however, are having a serious case of buyer’s remorse when it comes to Barack Obama. Recent polls of the Jewish community reflect a significant decline in support from 2008, when 78 percent of Jewish voters pulled the lever for Obama. According to one poll, Obama’s approval rating among American Jews has plummeted to 54 percent. Others, such as a survey of the American Jewish Committee, have cast it even lower.
Among the many factors driving down Obama’s numbers among Jewish voters was the president’s hostile attitude toward businessmen in general and Wall Street in particular. But what really appeared to irritate American Jews was the president’s roughhouse treatment of Israel.
As the 2012 presidential election drew near, Obama backed off from some of his public assaults on Israel, and hired a high-level Jewish outreach director to smooth over hurt feelings. But Obama was still in trouble with large segments of the Jewish community. The 2011 annual survey by the American Jewish Committee revealed declining Jewish support for Obama. Among its findings: • For the first time during Obama’s presidency, disapproval among Jewish voters exceeded approval by 48 to 45 percent
• Obama’s approval rating among Jews had dropped 10 percent in the past twelve months
• A majority (53 percent) disapproved of Obama’s handling of Israel-U.S. relations
• A plurality of Jews (45 percent) disapproved of Obama’s handling of the Iran nuclear issue
• A majority (55 percent) opposed establishing a Palestinian state “in the current situation”
Malcolm Hoenlein, co-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the coordinating body for fifty-two Jewish groups, estimated that Obama had lost the support of as much as one-third of Jewish voters. Sid Dinerstein, chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party, predicted that Obama would be limited to around 60 percent of the Jewish vote in 2012. While these estimates are just that, predictions, there is no denying the fact that many Jews are so annoyed with the Obama administration that they have closed their wallets and are seriously thinking of sitting out the 2012 election.
“President Barack Obama’s Chicago-based reelection campaign has a hometown problem: the donors and volunteers who have lost interest after launching his run for the White House four years ago,” Steven R. Strahler and Paul Merrion wrote in September 2011 in ChicagoBusiness.com. “And among Jewish contributors, a bulwark of his local donor base, some have been turned off by Mr. Obama’s call for Israel to give up part of its territory.”
“The assumption on the part of the Obama administration is that because Jews are liberals, they simply will not vote for Republicans,” said the Hollywood billionaire Haim Saban, one of the Democratic Party’s mega-donors. “Obama can invite the ten most prolific Jewish campaign bundlers to the White House for a discussion, and give a wonderful speech, and he’ll think that this may resolve all his problems with American Jews. And it may—or it may not.”
“The idea that we saw a black president in our lifetime is wonderful,” said New York City’s former mayor, Ed Koch. “It conveyed to us that this country has come such a long way. But I never fully accepted that Obama didn’t hear his minister [Jeremiah Wright] make those awful anti-Semitic statements over twenty years. I wanted to believe him. I willed myself to believe him.... What he has done is break that trust. Like Humpty Dumpty, once you break it, you can’t put it together again.”
The Jewish problem with Obama could be traced back to his first full day on the job. On January 21, 2009, he summoned his national security team to the Oval Office and laid out a tough new policy toward Israel. Obama said that in order to make good on his campaign promise to extricate 200,000 American troops from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. had to create a grand coalition of “moderate” Muslim states and Israel to isolate Iran, which had made no secret of its ambition to become the nuclear hegemon in the Middle East.
The only way to accomplish that goal, the president stated, was to eliminate the poisonous effect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which provided Iran with an excuse to stir up trouble. Thus it was “a vital national interest of the United States” to stop Israel from building settlements in the occupied West Bank and housing in East Jerusalem, and force the Jewish state to resolve the Palestinian problem.
Previous White Houses had made similar noises about bringing peace to the Middle East, and at first Jewish leaders didn’t pay much attention to leaks emanating from the new administration about a fundamental change in American policy. However, a clue to the president’s true intentions came in March 2009, when Abe Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, met with the president’s then chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.
“This is Israel’s moment of truth,” Emanuel told Foxman. “This President is determined to make peace between Israel and the Arabs.”
To many Jews, it seemed highly improbable that a brand new president would choose to alienate Israel, America’s oldest and most loyal ally in the Middle East. But then, in July 2009, when President Obama made his first overseas trip, he chose to visit three Muslim countries—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. During a landmark speech in Cairo, he announced his intention to seek “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.”
Understandably enough, American Jews were annoyed that the president had failed to include Israel in his Mideast swing. But what rankled them even more was that Obama seemed to adopt the Arab narrative to explain the existence of Israel—namely, that Israel was created because of past Jewish suffering in Europe, particularly during the Holocaust. Nowhere in his Cairo speech did Obama mention the fact that Jews had a 3,000-year history in the Promised Land.
Things went from bad to worse when the president called a meeting of Jewish leaders in July. Fourteen major Jewish organizations were represented at this meeting, including J Street, the newly formed left-of-center Jewish lobby. J Street is on the same wavelength as the Peace Now movement in Israel, which believes that continued occupation of the West Bank harms Israel both economically and politically and damages the values and fabric of the Jewish state.
Rabbi Eric Joffe, a Reform Jewish leader, asked the president why he had singled out Israel for public criticism.
“Look,” said the thin-skinned president, clearly annoyed by the question, “we have some very smart people on this. Don’t think that we don’t understand the nuances of the settlement issue. We do. Rahm [Emanuel] understands the politics there, and he explains them to me.”
Some of the Jews attending the meeting were shocked to hear the president admit that he had to be educated about Israel’s concerns.
“I agree with your goal to bring peace to the Middle East,” the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman told the president. “But the perception is that you’re beating up only on Israel, and not on the Arabs. If you want Israel to take risks for peace, the best way is to make Israel feel that its staunch friend America is behind it.”
&n
bsp; “You are absolutely wrong,” the president replied. “For the past eight years [under the Bush administration], Israel had a friend in the United States and it didn’t make peace.”
“I came away from the meeting convinced that Obama has introduced a new and dangerous strategy and that it’s revealing itself in steps,” Foxman told me. “Unlike other administrations, this one is applying linkage in the Middle East. It’s saying that if you resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the messiah will come and the lions will lie down with the lambs. All the president’s advisers on the Middle East, starting with George Mitchell, believe in linkage, and they’re telling the president you have to prove to the Arab Muslim world that you are different than previous presidents and you can separate yourself from Israel, distance yourself from the settlements issue. After all, settlements are something that American Jews don’t like anyway, so it’s a win-win proposition.”
The Anti-Defamation League was the first mainstream Jewish organization to openly criticize the president on the issue of the Middle East. Soon, other groups began to join the chorus. However, the great majority of Jews still remained steadfast behind Obama and his administration’s liberal agenda. They simply were not ready to criticize their country’s first African-American president, a man in whom they had invested so many of their own hopes and dreams.
On March 10, 2010, a relatively low-level official in the Israeli Interior Ministry issued a permit for 1,600 new housing units for Israelis in the Ramat Shlomo section of East Jerusalem. The ill-timed announcement came on the very day Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Israel to kick-start a round of indirect peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately apologized to Biden, who accepted his expression of regret. But Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority on the West Bank, called off the “proximity talks.”
The next day, at the regularly scheduled weekly breakfast meeting between the president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Obama made his feelings clear. He was livid. As he saw it, the Israelis had purposely humiliated his vice president and tried to sabotage his peace plan. It was a personal affront, and he wouldn’t stand for such treatment. He instructed Hillary to call Netanyahu and read him the riot act.
The following day, during a 43-minute harangue, Hillary delivered a set of ultimatums to Netanyahu. Prefacing each remark with the phrase “I have been instructed to tell you,” Hillary demanded that Israel release a substantial number of Palestinian prisoners as a token of goodwill; lift its siege of Gaza; suspend all settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem; accept that a symbolic number of Palestinians be given the “right of return” to Israel under a future peace treaty; and agree to place the question of the status of Jerusalem at the top of the peace-talks agenda.
“If you refuse these demands,” Hillary told Netanyahu, “the United States government will conclude that we no longer share the same interests.”
Netanyahu bit his tongue and remained noncommittal about the American demands, though he did eventually agree to ease the blockade of Gaza.
That same Friday, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, was summoned to the State Department and given a severe dressing down. Someone who saw Oren that night at a party described him as “shaken.”
And things did not end there. Ten days later, Netanyahu was invited to the White House, where he was treated to further browbeating and humiliation. Photographers were banned from recording the visit. And at one point, President Obama left Netanyahu to have dinner with Michelle and their daughters, Malia and Sasha.
“I’m going upstairs,” the president told Netanyahu. “Call me when you’re ready to talk substance.”
Netanyahu and his entourage were then left to cool their heels in the Roosevelt Room. At one point, the Israeli delegation asked for food and something to drink. They were served non-kosher food, which some of them couldn’t eat.
The White House seemed strangely indifferent to the feelings of resentment that its treatment of Netanyahu aroused in the Jewish community. For shortly after Netanyahu returned to Israel, President Obama risked provoking even greater Jewish outrage by insinuating that American troops were dying in Iraq and Afghanistan because Israel refused to agree to peace with the Palestinians. The Israeli-Arab conflict “is costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure,” the president said.
A perception began to spread throughout the Jewish community that the Obama administration was not only outwardly hostile to Israel, but perhaps, without even knowing it, hostile to Jews as well. This thesis was forcefully argued by Jonathan Kellerman, bestselling novelist and a professor of clinical pediatrics and psychology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine:My personal opinion... is that the bifurcation of Israel and Judaism is structurally fallacious. The Land of Israel is an essential ingredient of Judaism practiced fully. Thus, it is impossible to be anti-Israel and not be anti-Jewish. And in fact, the war being waged against Israel by the Muslim world is, at the core, a religious dispute. Radical Islamists no longer talk about Zionists; they come right out and broadcast their goal of eradicating worldwide Jewry.
The impression of an anti-Jewish bias at the highest echelons of the Obama administration, though unproved, was given added force in April when James Jones, the retired Marine Corps four-star general who then served as President Obama’s national security adviser, delivered a speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He opened his remarks with a joke that was widely interpreted by many Jews as being flagrantly anti-Semitic. Said Jones:I’d just like to tell you a story that I think is true. It happened recently in southern Afghanistan. A member of the Taliban was separated from his fighting party and wandered around for a few days in the desert, lost, out of food, no water. And he looked on the horizon and he saw what looked like a little shack and he walked towards that shack. And as he got to it, it turned out it was a little store owned by a Jewish merchant. And the Taliban warrior went up to him and said, “I need water. Give me some water.” And the merchant said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have any water, but would you like a tie? We have a nice sale of ties today.”
Whereupon the Taliban erupted into a stream of language that I can’t repeat, but about Israel, about Jewish people, about the man himself, about his family, and just said, “I need water, you try to sell me ties, you people don’t get it.”
And impassively the merchant stood there until the Taliban was through with his diatribe and said, “Well I’m sorry that I don’t have water for you and I forgive you for all of the insults you’ve levied against me, my family, my country. But I will help you out. If you go over that hill and walk about two miles, there is a restaurant there and they have all the water you need.” And the Taliban, instead of saying thanks, still muttering under his breath, disappears over the hill, only to come back an hour later. And walking up to the merchant says, “Your brother tells me [you] need a tie to get into the restaurant.”
At a certain point, many Jews began to wonder if there was something more behind the Obama administration’s confrontational approach toward Israel than a simple difference of policy. As a result, they began to take a second look at Obama’s past for clues to his present behavior. In particular, they were curious how Chicago’s bare-knuckle politics had shaped Obama’s outlook.
“Maybe Jews and blacks were once the closest of allies in Chicago,” said Joseph Aaron, the liberal editor of The Jewish News, Chicago’s largest Jewish newspaper. “But in the years that Obama was being shaped, a lot of young blacks, especially in the South Side neighborhood where Obama lived, harbored animosity toward Jews and Israel.
“Two central issues divided blacks and Jews in those years,” Aaron continued. “Blacks saw affirmative action as a way to overcome prejudice, while many Jews saw it as a quota system designed to keep them out. It was also a time when Israel, snubbed by many nations, especially in black Africa, chose to forge close
ties with the apartheid regime in South Africa. That included selling Israeli arms to South Africa. We never realized the degree to which those links to South Africa hurt black sensitivities.
“Add it all up and you don’t come up with an anti-Semitic Obama. That is not who Obama is. What you do come up with is someone who doesn’t really understand our attachment to Israel or Israel’s importance to Jews as a people, a president who doesn’t have a gut love for Israel like some of his predecessors, but someone who understands the Palestinian position better than any president we’ve had, someone with no natural affinity for Jews or Israel, and someone who approaches the Middle East, as he does most everything else, dispassionately and with a burning desire to fix the problem.”
As the New York Times wrote about Obama in the months leading up to the 2008 Democratic National Convention:The secret of his transformation [from a newcomer] to the brink of claiming the Democratic presidential nomination can be described as the politics of maximum unity. [Obama] moved from his leftist... base to more centrist circles; he forged early alliances with the good-government reform crowd only to be embraced later by the city’s all-powerful Democratic bosses; he railed against pork-barrel politics but engaged in it when needed; and he empathized with the views of the Palestinian friends before adroitly courting the city’s politically potent Jewish community.