The Amateur (20 page)
Authors: Edward Klein
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.
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:
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.
That courtship brought Obama the support of some of the wealthiest Jews in Chicago. They included Penny Pritzker of the Hyatt Hotel chain family; Betty Lu Saltzman, daughter of the late real-estate baron Philip Klutznick; former Congressman Abner Mikva; Lester Crown, a billionaire benefactor of Jewish charities; and Lee Rosenberg, a media and entertainment mogul, who accompanied Obama on his 2004 senatorial election campaign visit to Israel, where Obama placed a handwritten prayer for peace in the cracks of Jerusalem’s Western Wall.
Few of these early Jewish sponsors have since publicly criticized the president for his tough line on Israel. But at least three of his Chicago backers—Penny Pritzker, Lester Crown, and Lee Rosenberg, the president of the powerful pro-Israel lobby AIPAC (America-Israel Public Affairs Committee)—expressed their distress in private conversations with Obama.
Some people blamed Obama’s Jewish problem on his advisers, including his former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, whose Israeli father was a member of the Irgun underground during Israel’s struggle for independence, and Valerie Jarrett, who made no secret of her close ties to the Jordanian royal family. But veteran journalist Richard Z. Chesnoff, who has had more than forty years of experience reporting from the Middle East, and who’s done extensive research on Obama’s management style, didn’t agree with that assessment.
“In my opinion,” said Chesnoff, “Obama’s problem in dealing with the Arab-Israeli conundrum doesn’t come from the advice he’s getting from his advisers, but rather from his one-man style and his inflated view of his own leadership talents. Obama believes that no matter what the odds against it, he can bring everyone together, kumbaya style, so that we can solve hitherto insoluble problems. Perhaps even more egregiously, he seems to have an exaggerated sense of his own depth of understanding of the Middle East, which is simply not borne out by his background or experience.”
“The problem is naïveté in the Obama administration,” added Robert Lieber, professor of government at Georgetown University. “The president came into office with the assumption that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is by far the most central urgent problem in the region—which it is not—and that it is the key that unlocks everything else in the region. And he and his advisers believed the [Israeli-Palestinian] situation was ripe for progress, which it absolutely isn’t.”
By the end of March 2010, most of the organized Jewish community was in full cry against the Obama administration’s treatment of Israel. However, the voice of New York’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, one of the most influential elected Jewish officials in Washington, was conspicuously silent. That gave Ed Koch, an incurable gadfly, the opportunity to taunt his frenemy Schumer in his blog, “Ed Koch Commentary.”
“Chuck Schumer resented my blog,” Koch told me. “He called me and said, ‘How can you say this? I’m a protector of Israel.’ And I said, ‘Chuck, you’re not speaking out!’ And he said, ‘I’m doing it behind the scenes.’ He was upset because there was a piece quoting me as saying, ‘It’s obvious Chuck wants to be the majority leader in the Senate if Harry Reid leaves, and Chuck doesn’t want to criticize the president and diminish his chances.’”
Throughout April 2010, the pressure on Schumer continued to mount. Finally, when P. J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, announced at a press conference that the relationship of Israel and the United States depended on the pace of peace negotiations, Schumer could no longer hold his tongue.
“This is terrible,” Schumer said. “That is a dagger, because the relationship is much deeper than the disagreements on negotiations, and most Americans—Democrat, Republican, Jew, non-Jew—would feel that. So I called up Rahm Emanuel and I called up the White House and I said, ‘If you don’t retract that statement, you are going to hear me publicly blast you on this.’
“You have to show Israel that it’s not going to be forced to do things it doesn’t want to do and can’t do,” Schumer continued. “At the same time, you have to show the Palestinians that they are not going to get their way by just sitting back and not giving in, and not recognizing that there is a state of Israel. And right now, there is a battle going on inside the administration. One side agrees with us, one side doesn’t, and we’re pushing hard to make sure the right side wins and, if not, we’ll have to take it to the next step.”
After Schumer’s J’accuse, it became clear that the inexperienced Obama had once again overplayed his hand. In part, the president had allowed himself to be influenced by the growing volume of anti-Israel anger coming from the left wing of the Democratic Party, especially from radical students on campuses, where calls for the “delegitimization” of the Jewish State were almost
de rigueur
. In part, too, the president probably placed too much weight on recent sociological studies that indicated a shift in American Jewish attitudes on Israel.
de rigueur
. In part, too, the president probably placed too much weight on recent sociological studies that indicated a shift in American Jewish attitudes on Israel.
In May 2010, under mounting pressure, the president agreed to meet with Jewish members of the Democratic caucuses in the House and Senate. Thirty-seven of the forty-three Jews in Congress met with Obama, the largest such gathering of Jewish lawmakers ever held in the White House. One of the attendees, who took notes during the meeting, made them available to the author of this book. Here is a transcript of what Obama said to the Jewish congressmen and women:
[Palestinian Prime Minister Salam] Fayyad and Abu Mazen [Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Mahmoud Abbas] are as moderate as we are going to get.My policy on settlements is no different than George Bush’s, but I won’t wink or nod.You want me to be explicit on Iran, but as the guy with his finger on the button, I am not going to say anything. When I say [an Iranian nuclear weapon is] unacceptable, it’s unacceptable.Bibi’s speech at AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] on Jerusalem was belligerent.I’m pro-Israel not pro-Shas [an ultra-orthodox religious political party in Israel that opposes any freeze on Israeli settlements in the West Bank].My job is to protect the national security of the United States.I fundamentally believe the key to the Middle East is being an evenhanded broker.I’m pained that people don’t think I support Israel. I take responsibility for stubbing my toe on messaging. My views are distorted.I feel close to the Jewish community. I wouldn’t be here without many of you.There are legitimate differences between the United States and Israel and [between] me and Prime Minister [Netanyahu]. I’ve spent more time with him than any other foreign leader.Everyone knows two states is the only solution.I can’t impose a settlement but I may outline a solution for the parties.Our public disagreement with Israel gives us credibility with the Arab states and compels them to act.What most disturbed the Jewish members of Congress was that last comment by Obama—namely, that by haranguing Israel in public and portraying it as a villain in the peace process, Washington gained credibility and influence with the Arabs. No one in the room believed that to be true. Quite the opposite, they believed that the bad blood between the Obama administration and Israel encouraged the Arabs to be more, not less, intransigent.Indeed, after the meeting, Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, one of Obama’s most loyal backers, shook her head and admitted: “He doesn’t understand that ally-to-ally differences should not be aired in public. He’s isolating Israel and putting Israel in a weakened position.”When word of Obama’s views inevitably spread beyond the Capital Beltway, it sent shockwaves through the Jewish community. Said one prominent Jewish leader: “You can draw a straight line between that meeting and Obama’s fundraising problems with Jews today.”
“The majority of today’s American Jews don’t see themselves as outsiders or victims anymore,” said Binyamin Jolkovsky, the publisher and editor of the widely read Internet magazine
JewishWorldReview.com
. “That’s positive. But that feeling of equality has also produced a communal negative. The fear that came with being an outsider also gave most Jews, even nonreligious ones, a cohesive sense of responsibility regarding their Jewish identity in general and Israel in particular.
JewishWorldReview.com
. “That’s positive. But that feeling of equality has also produced a communal negative. The fear that came with being an outsider also gave most Jews, even nonreligious ones, a cohesive sense of responsibility regarding their Jewish identity in general and Israel in particular.
“That’s changed,” Jolkovsky continued. “I’m no senior citizen, but today’s generation didn’t witness the Holocaust, they don’t understand what was entailed in the birth of Israel, they don’t even remember the real threats of the 1967 Six Day War, they probably never read the novel
Exodus
. The majority of young American Jews think that somehow Israel will always be there. They don’t understand that when your enemies say they want to destroy you, they mean it.”
Exodus
. The majority of young American Jews think that somehow Israel will always be there. They don’t understand that when your enemies say they want to destroy you, they mean it.”
Most of all, what Obama didn’t count on was that, for all the changes taking place among younger “progressive” Jews, Jerusalem remained a third rail in American politics. The person who seemed to understand that better than anyone else was Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor, who took out full-page ads in April 2010 in major American newspapers to express his views on the city of Jerusalem.
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