The Amateur (21 page)
Authors: Edward Klein
“For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics,” Weisel wrote.
It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture—and not a single time in the Koran. Its presence in Jewish history is overwhelming. There is no more moving prayer in Jewish history than the one expressing our yearning to return to Jerusalem. To many theologians, it IS Jewish history, to many poets, a source of inspiration. It belongs to the Jewish people and is much more than a city; it is what binds one Jew to another in a way that remains hard to explain. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it is not the first time; it is a homecoming.
I interviewed Weisel following a private lunch that he had in early May with President Obama at the White House. “The invitation came before my public statements on Jerusalem,” Weisel said. “It was a very good lunch. No small talk. Everything was substance. I understood his position. We didn’t agree on everything. The president wanted to know why Bibi [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] didn’t fire the minister who made that Jerusalem announcement [about expanding Jewish housing during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit]. I said he would have had to go to his party and say, ‘Give me anyone else.’ But he didn’t and then there was a chain reaction.
“Most of the problems [between America and Israel] remain, but the intensity on both sides and the recriminations are gone,” Weisel added. “During our lunch, it was clear that the President does at least know that Jerusalem is the center of Jewish history, and he knows you can’t ignore 3,000 to 4,000 years of history. I believe the only way to attain peace is to put Jerusalem at the end of the negotiations, not at the beginning.”
Since the shellacking it suffered in the 2010 midterm elections, the Obama administration has softened some of its more controversial Mideast policy initiatives. For instance, on Jerusalem, the White House conceded that the question of the city’s status should come at the end of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, as Elie Weisel desired, rather than at the beginning, as the president originally wanted.
Along with this apparent U-turn in substance, the White House launched a charm offensive to win back the allegiance of the Jewish community. The president set the tone. He sent a personal letter to Alan Solow, the former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, in which he reasserted his support for Israel’s security. And he followed that up with a warm message of greeting on the occasion of Israel’s sixty-second independence day.
Meanwhile, pro-Obama rabbis from local communities all over America were invited to the White House for schmooze fests with Rahm Emanuel, Daniel Shapiro, the deputy national security adviser who dealt with the Middle East, and Dennis Ross, the White House’s top Iran policy official.
“The three men told the Democratic rabbis that the administration has three priorities in the Middle East,” Caroline Glick reported in
The Jerusalem Post
. “First Obama seeks to isolate Iran. Second, he seeks to significantly reduce the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq. And third, he seeks to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel.”
The Jerusalem Post
. “First Obama seeks to isolate Iran. Second, he seeks to significantly reduce the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq. And third, he seeks to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel.”
As part of its PR campaign, the White House had David Axelrod do a limited
mea culpa
. “With some of the leadership of the Jewish community there’s been some bumps in the road over the past fifteen months,” Axelrod admitted in a phone conversation with the author of this book. “Some of those bumps resulted purely from a lack of communication on our part. I don’t think we’ve done as good a job as we could have in our communications with the Jewish community during the first year or so of the administration. We’ve had a sustained and vigorous round of communications in the last few months, and I think that’s been helpful.”
mea culpa
. “With some of the leadership of the Jewish community there’s been some bumps in the road over the past fifteen months,” Axelrod admitted in a phone conversation with the author of this book. “Some of those bumps resulted purely from a lack of communication on our part. I don’t think we’ve done as good a job as we could have in our communications with the Jewish community during the first year or so of the administration. We’ve had a sustained and vigorous round of communications in the last few months, and I think that’s been helpful.”
The crowning moment in Washington’s charm offensive came in July 2010, when Prime Minister Netanyahu returned to Washington and this time was given the red-carpet treatment. He was honored with a working lunch in the Cabinet Room and a photo op with Obama in the Oval Office. But things didn’t work out as the White House had planned. As the TV cameras recorded the scene, Netanyahu wagged his finger under Obama’s nose and lectured the president on the Middle East. Obama sat there, saying nothing and looking like a weak, immature schoolboy.
But neither the White House’s charm offensive nor the minor adjustments it has made in its policies can obscure an irrefutable fact: the changes are tactical and tonal, not substantive. The goal is still the same—to conclude successful peace talks by applying pressure on Israel.
“In my view, the Obama administration has not pulled back from its desire to ingratiate itself with the Arab world,”
5
said Kenneth J. Bialkin, chairman of the American-Israel Friendship League. “Yes, they’ve pulled back from saying that Israel’s conduct endangers the lives of American soldiers in the Middle East. But most of its charm offensive was aimed at damage control.”
5
said Kenneth J. Bialkin, chairman of the American-Israel Friendship League. “Yes, they’ve pulled back from saying that Israel’s conduct endangers the lives of American soldiers in the Middle East. But most of its charm offensive was aimed at damage control.”
Domestic politics surely played a role in the president’s calculations vis-à-vis the American Jewish community. But Obama was also influenced by his major foreign policy conundrum: how to contain a resurgent Iran. In pursuit of that goal, Obama expected Israel to strike a peace accord with the Palestinians and their Arab allies—no matter how real or unreal that expectation might be.
“Obama and his people believe the Palestinian leadership is genuinely ready for historic compromise,” says David Horovitz, the London-born former editor of
The Jerusalem Post
. “The unfortunate consensus in Israel—and not just the hawks—is that while we wish [the Arabs] were [ready], they aren’t.... [To] our great sorrow—and to our great cost—we are not convinced that even the relative moderates like Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad have internalized the idea that Jews have historic rights here too.”
The Jerusalem Post
. “The unfortunate consensus in Israel—and not just the hawks—is that while we wish [the Arabs] were [ready], they aren’t.... [To] our great sorrow—and to our great cost—we are not convinced that even the relative moderates like Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad have internalized the idea that Jews have historic rights here too.”
Indeed, in the days just before a new round of peace talks began, Palestinian leaders went out of their way to declare that while they might be prepared to negotiate with Israel, they would never recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the Middle East. In other words, nothing fundamental has changed in the Arab approach to Israel’s right to exist since the creation of the State of Israel sixty-two years ago.
In March 2012, with the threat of a nuclear war with Iran hanging over both Israel and the United States, Netanyahu was invited back to the White House for yet another face-to-face with Obama. It was, said Jonathan S. Tobin on the “Contentions” website of
Commentary
magazine in February 2012,
Commentary
magazine in February 2012,
impossible to ignore the political implications of this summit. With evidence mounting that Obama and the Democrats have been bleeding Jewish support in the last year, the visit [took] the president’s charm offensive aimed at convincing the Jewish community he is Israel’s best friend to a new level. Netanyahu [had] good reason to play along with Obama’s pretense, as he may have to go on dealing with him until January 2017. But the question remained whether the two men [could] sufficiently paper over their personal hostility and policy differences in order for the visit to have the effect the president’s political handlers are aiming for.
CHAPTER 16
ALL IN THE FAMILY
This president runs from race like a black man runs from a cop.
D
uring the months I spent researching and writing this book, I was frequently asked the same question: What surprised you the most about Barack Obama? My answer was always the same. I said that I was surprised by how badly America’s first black president had bungled his relations with black America.
uring the months I spent researching and writing this book, I was frequently asked the same question: What surprised you the most about Barack Obama? My answer was always the same. I said that I was surprised by how badly America’s first black president had bungled his relations with black America.
“Early on in his presidency,” wrote Randall Kennedy in
The Persistence of the Color Line
, “Obama was pressed by some activists and politicians to offer race-specific policies to address the disproportionately high rates of unemployment that have long plagued black and other racial-minority communities. He steadfastly refused to do so.... ‘I can’t pass laws that say I’m just helping black folks,’ he responded when asked about Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) criticism of his employment policy. ‘I’m the president of the United States. What I can do is make sure that I am passing laws that help all people, particularly those that are most vulnerable and most in need. That in turn is going to help lift up the African American community.’
The Persistence of the Color Line
, “Obama was pressed by some activists and politicians to offer race-specific policies to address the disproportionately high rates of unemployment that have long plagued black and other racial-minority communities. He steadfastly refused to do so.... ‘I can’t pass laws that say I’m just helping black folks,’ he responded when asked about Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) criticism of his employment policy. ‘I’m the president of the United States. What I can do is make sure that I am passing laws that help all people, particularly those that are most vulnerable and most in need. That in turn is going to help lift up the African American community.’
“Here Obama was engaging in the old trick of creating a straw man to knock down,” Kennedy continued. “The CBC was not requesting policy aimed at ‘just helping black folks.’ It was requesting policy that would be intended to assist Americans as a whole but ‘particularly those who are most vulnerable’ in economic downturns.... ”
Despite Obama’s failed economic policies, grievances between black leaders and the black president were kept under wraps for quite some time. White Americans were hardly aware of the family squabble. But those grievances finally surfaced in a dramatic way in the summer of 2010, when Shirley Sherrod, the black Georgia state director of rural development for the United States Department of Agriculture, was forced to resign under orders from the Obama White House.
During a speech that Sherrod had delivered at a meeting of the NAACP, she related her experience with a white farmer who came to her for help. Andrew Breitbart, the late conservative blogger, got hold of the tape of Sherrod’s speech and, through selective editing, made it sound as though Sherrod had refused to help the farmer because he was white. In Breitbart’s telling, Sherrod was a black racist. However, when the complete tape of Sherrod’s speech was released, it became clear that she was nothing of the sort. In fact, she had worked hard to save the white farmer’s land.
By firing Sherrod without looking into the matter more carefully, Obama once again revealed himself to be politically inept. Unknowingly, he had picked a fight with the wrong black person, for not only was Shirley Sherrod falsely maligned by the White House, but it turned out that her husband, Charles Sherrod, had played a significant role in the 1960s civil rights movement. Charles Sherrod had been a Freedom Rider along with John Lewis, a prominent member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a longtime Georgia congressman.
As might be expected, the African-American political elite quickly came to the defense of the Sherrods. “I’ve known these two individuals—the husband for more than fifty years and the wife for at least thirty-five, forty—and there’s not a racist hair on their heads or anyplace else on their bodies,” Congressman Lewis said.
“I don’t think a single black person was consulted before Shirley Sherrod was fired—I mean, c’mon,” said Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina, who had ditched Hillary Clinton to support Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary campaign. “The president is getting hurt real bad. He needs some black people around him.... Some people over there [in the White House] are not sensitive at all about race. They really feel that the extent to which he allows himself to talk about race would tend to pigeonhole him or cost him support, when a lot of people saw his election as a way to get the issue behind us. I don’t think people elected him to disengage on race. Just the opposite.”
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the representative from the District of Columbia, concurred: “The president needs some advisers or friends who have a greater sense of the pulse of the African-American community, or who at least have been around the mulberry bush.”
Never one to graciously admit his mistakes, Obama finally phoned Shirley Sherrod and spoke to her for a grudging seven minutes. Obama said he felt that the incident had been blown way out of proportion, and he refused to apologize personally for the national humiliation Sherrod had suffered. When he offered Sherrod another job in the Agriculture Department, she politely declined.
In the wake of the Sherrod incident, Maureen Dowd, usually a liberal voice on the op-ed page of the
New York Times
, unleashed a blistering rebuke of Obama.
New York Times
, unleashed a blistering rebuke of Obama.
“The Obama White House is too white,” wrote Dowd.
It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran. But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand “the slave thing,” as a top black Democrat dryly puts it.... The president shouldn’t give Sherrod her old job back. He should give her a new job: Director of Black Outreach. This White House needs one.
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