"Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart -- except in Israel -- from the rest of the population.
These beliefs are Zionist. They are surely part of Judaism, but many Jews don't believe them. For me, they have as much meaning as the American belief that blacks are 3/5ths of a man: they are ancient codes that are out of step with the way we live now.
It's obvious why Elliott Abrams and Michael Oren are attacking Obama. For them, the Israel lobby is the Jewish lobby. They are warriors for the people; and regard any criticism of the Zionist project in historic Palestine or its American support system as an anti-Semitic attack on Jewish life today.
But liberal Zionists are also not helping Obama out. They are uncomfortable with his daring. Why? Some are genuinely fearful that a full-on discussion of the Zionist lobby or the neoconservatives is a discussion of Jewish power; and there will be a rise in anti-Semitism if people start talking about who is trying to block the deal and why.
More important, liberal Zionists want to maintain the Zionist lobby in D.C., but reconstitute it. They want to see AIPAC broken so the lobby becomes an anti-occupation lobby that will get the U.S. to pressure Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and create a Palestinian state, or entity, or Bantustan. But liberal Zionists want the lobby around so that America will continue to support Israel, something Americans won't do without Jewish pressure.
Liberal Zionists surely love Senator Brian Schatz's statement supporting the deal. It repeatedly addresses Israel's security and bewails the influence of Iran over Hamas. Wait, this is a deal to end sanctions and allow Iran to have nuclear power but not nuclear weapons. What has Hamas fighting Israel have to do with that?
Liberal Zionists don't want American Jewish diversity because they don't want a conversation that includes non- and anti-Zionists. Imagine you suddenly had a bunch of Jews who had legitimacy in Washington saying, We don't need a Jewish state. That could destroy the American establishment consensus in favor of the special relationship.
If the American conversation were truly diverse, you would have a real discussion of Hamas's roots in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine: and Max Blumenthal would be debating Senator Brian Schatz about Hamas on MSNBC. Blumenthal spent weeks in Gaza last year and he writes in The 51 Day War that Hamas militants are the resistance that we saw in "anti-colonial struggles throughout history, from Vietnam to Algeria to South Africa."
If the conversation were truly diverse, you'd hear other challenges to the special relationship, and not only from Jews: realists saying that having Iran back in the community of nations is good for the entire Middle East; anti-proliferation activists describing the Israeli nuclear capacity; Palestinian-Americans telling about spending hours in the Israeli airport and then getting deported with a knock on the head"
Obama wants to open this conversation up not because he opposes or loves Israel (I can only imagine what he thinks of the Jewish state) but because his entire game right now is Democrats. And while Rothkopf is surely right that the Israel lobby is not the only opposition to the deal; in the Democratic Party, that's the Gordian knot. Zionist money and AIPAC are dominant factors in Democratic politics. And a foreign prime minister is actually calling on the allegiance of a highly influential group, American Jews, to his country. Even Gharib has a problem with that:
"...the charge that Obama is making 'dual loyalty' smears would seem to be undermined by the fact that Netanyahu made an explicit appeal to whatever loyalty American Jews may feel toward Israel."
President Obama needs to take on the special relationship in the name of world peace. Many Jews support him in this effort, and some of them are even anti-Zionists. It's time for Americans to hear our views.
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