Obama must be very certain that liberal Jews will enthusiastically support him no matter what. And there is evidence he is right. Josh Block, senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former AIPAC spokesman, e-mailed: “It [the speech] was a strong reaffirmation of the US-Israel relationship, and was an important and positive change from his remarks on Thursday. It reflected an important continuity of US policy going back to President Johnson.”
This is the sort of spin that pro-Israel Democrats use to justify voting for Obama. But there is a reality that can’t be avoided. This president once again has proved an apt negotiator on behalf of the Palestinians and a thorn in Israel’s side. Now is a time of choosing for the American Jewish community, for Israel and for Congress. And if Obama should be reelected in 2012 one can only imagine how hostile he will become toward the Jewish state.
So not only does Rubin stop about a micron short of accusing first African-American president of being an anti-Semite and an enemy of Israel, she stops maybe two microns short of accusing anyone of Jewish faith in America who supports Obama of being the same, calling on the American Jewish community to choose between their faith and Obama.
That's outrageous, the kind of spittle-flecked invective one expects to find from Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post. But the insinuation here is that the biggest single threat to the Jewish homeland is not the intransigence of Israel's righteous indignation, nor the continued justifications for the treatment of the Palestinians, nor the international community becoming bone-weary of a country that has flouted international law time and time again, but that the American President is saying these things in public. This alone makes him an enemy of all Judaism.
By no means are the Palestinians angels in this bloody idiocy. They have killed with suicide bombers and gone after civilians for the sheer shock value and fired rockets indiscriminately and taken pound after pound of flesh from their neighbors. They too are part of the problem, not the solution.
The issue is that the Palestinians aren't getting billions in military equipment, training, and cutting-edge technology from the United States, and that they aren't rounding up Israelis and putting them in armed camps, either. Jewish right-wing neo-cons say that they could never understand supporting Obama. I say given the tragic history of the Jewish people in the last century, I can't fathom anyone of the Jewish faith wanting to inter any group of people to single them out for collective punishment.
Imagine if the 12% of the nation's population that is African-American took over an American state, or if the nation's Native American population gathered together to do the same, or the nation's Latino or Japanese-American or any group took over an area of the country, declared it their new ancestral homeland, and then herded the people not of that ethnicity into separated, armed camps. The new state created demanded its own independence and UN recognition, while the basic civil rights of those who were not of the proper background were curtailed severely in the name of public safety. Trade of basic foodstuffs, livestock, building supplies, even information, would be arbitrarily monitored and controlled by the ethnic group in charge. Bad movie plots and "Second Amendment remedies" aside, this is the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian "conflict" right now, it's pretty one-sided.
But to even mention this unfortunate truth at AIPAC, well apparently this makes Obama and anyone who supports him an enemy of Israel and the Jewish people. And yet people like Jennifer Rubin wonder why no progress has been made on this front.
I can't imagine why.
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