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Obama: Good or Bad for the Jews?
By eyal
This week, Newsweek ran an article titled "Obama: Good for the Jews?" which reported on the efforts of operatives within Hillary Clinton's campaign to tarnish her rival's "pro-Israel credentials." At no point did the article bother to question what being "good for the Jews" – or, for that matter, being "pro-Israel" –means.
Does it mean unwavering support for whatever Israel does? That is the view of many neo-conservative Jewish pundits and of organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). It is not the view of most American Jews, nearly two-thirds of whom support a freeze of Jewish settlement activity in the occupied territories, according to a survey conducted last year by Americans for Peace Now. The same survey found strong levels of support for reviving the 2002 Arab League peace plan (which calls for normalizing relations in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from land conquered in the 1967 Six-Day war) and for engaging in diplomacy with Iran.
To the extent Obama or any American politician favors talking to Iran or, say, withholding US aid from Israel if it refuses to freeze settlement activity – a step taken by George H.W. Bush – he or she would not be causing the majority of American Jews to lose sleep, in other words. Nor would he or she be perturbing all Israelis. The question "What's good for the Jews?" should give way to the rarely-asked follow-up question, "For Which Jews?" argues the Haaretz correspondent Akiva Eldar in an excellent article published recently in Israel's leading daily newspaper.
(101) CommentsFebruary 26, 2008
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Don’t Assume a Centrist Lurks Behind the Bipartisan Curtain
By eyal
Here is a fact few liberals would dispute: Ronald Reagan was not a centrist. And here is another: Reagan had a peculiar knack for appealing to people who had seemingly no business voting for him. The Great Communicator was, unquestionably, a conviction-driven partisan. Yet he spoke a language of renewal that, to the great frustration of Democrats, resonated across the political spectrum. The combination of Reagan's capacious personality and his sunny rhetoric gave Republicans the best of both worlds: he could neutralize, even occasionally seduce, people who were not ideological conservatives, even as he advanced an unapologetically conservative agenda.
Barack Obama may or may not turn out to be blessed with the same skill - there are those on the left who wonder how progressive the charismatic Illinois Senator actually is, and who cringe every time he talks about an America in which red-blue divisions can be transcended. Did we not learn anything from the Bush years, critics of Obama's post-partisan overtures wonder, or for that matter from the reign of Bill Clinton, when Republicans grasped at every possible straw, however flimsy or imagined (Troopergate, Whitewater, Monica), to drive their nemesis out of the White House? The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has repeatedly taken Obama to task for naively imagining that toning down partisanship will somehow bring about progressive change. "If you try to find common ground where none exists... you end up being played for a fool," Krugman has reminded his readers. Sidney Blumenthal, a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton, implied much the same thing when he told the journalist George Packer of The New Yorker recently, "It's not a question of transcending partisanship. It's a question of fulfilling it."
Well, maybe, except that, as Reagan showed, Presidents who can reach across the partisan divide aren't necessarily fated to be vacillating centrists. By the same token, those incapable of bridging the divide aren't necessarily more likely to resist the urge to compromise their principles, as was vividly demonstrated during Bill Clinton's presidency and as may well be the case with Hillary Clinton. Both the Clintons inspire fierce partisan passions. Both have also tacked to the center when in office, in an arguably vain attempt to convince voters they are not the left-wing extremists conservatives make them out to be. For progressives, the result is often the worst of both worlds: the values they cherish are compromised, even as pundits lament the "divisiveness" in Washington and much of the country imagines the Presidency has fallen into the hands of the radical left.
(36) CommentsFebruary 18, 2008
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