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Jewish World Review Oct. 13, 2008 / 14 Tishrei 5769 Ignore the Grandchildren
By
Jonathan Rosenblum
What grandparents being put upon by their darlings -- and any other non-reflective voter -- need to know about Obama's positions on Israel
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The Obama campaign is encouraging Jewish kids to fly to Florida to visit
their grandparents over Columbus Day weekend. The website for the
initiative, thebigschlep.com, features comedienne Sarah Silverman
instructing Jewish youth in Lysistrata-style tactics: Threaten to withhold
future visits unless Granny agrees to vote for Obama. Here's another
suggestion from Silverman: Tell them that if they don't vote for Obama, "the goodest [sic] person
we've ever had as a presidential choice," it can only be because they are
racists.
My guess is that Bubbe and Zaidy will not be too impressed by such bullying;
nor should they be. The grandchildren will seek to prove that Obama will is
good for Israel, but their identification with Israel bears no relationship
to that of their grandparents. For them the Holocaust is the stuff of
history books, not a living memory. Ditto the U.N. vote on Israel's
creation. They did not huddle anxiously around TV sets listening to the U.N.
debates leading up to the 1967 war, when a second Holocaust seemed all too
possible and 10,000 graves were dug in Tel Aviv in anticipation of war
casualties. Many have never heard of Entebbe.
A 2007 study by sociologists Steven Cohen and Ari Kelman found that more
than half of non-Orthodox Jews under 35 would not view the destruction of
the State of Israel as a personal tragedy. The death and/or expulsions of
millions of fellow Jews is something they can live with. By those standards,
they probably would not see the Holocaust as a personal tragedy either.
Indifference to Israel, Cohen and Kelman found, "is giving way to downright
alienation" among the under 35 cohort. Israel complicates the social lives
and muddles the political identity of young Jews. Only 54% profess to be
comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state at all. These are not the people
to be telling their grandparents who will be good for Israel.
The grandchildren will cite Senator Obama's high rating from AIPAC as proof
of his pro-Israel bona fides. Irrelevant. Every senator with national
ambitions has such a high-rating, which is based on nothing more than voting
for appropriation resolutions. Far more relevant to determining a
candidate's likely relationship with Israel as president is his worldview.
Obama views talk as a universal solvent, and seems to believe that most
conflicts can be solved by sitting people down around a conference table to
air their grievances. That makes him remarkably sanguine about resolving the
Arab-Israeli conflict, which he says would be a high priority from day one
of his administration. The last time an American president made solving the
conflict a high priority Israel ended up with the Al Aksa intifada and open
warfare.
If Obama thinks there is an easy solution to the conflict it can only come
in one form: Israel's return to its 1967 "Auschwitz borders." He basically
confirmed that in a June interview with Jerusalem Post editor David
Horowitz, in which he allowed that Israel might justify "67 plus" in terms
of a security buffer, "but they've got to consider whether getting that
buffer is worth the antagonism of the other party."
Yet an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would almost surely result in a
third Iranian-armed and financed adversary confronting Israel, just as
previous Israeli withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza led to the
takeover by heavily armed Iranian proxies in the form of Hizbullah and
Hamas. Israeli intelligence officials estimate that absent an Israeli
presence in the West Bank Hamas would takeover almost as quickly as it
seized Gaza. From the Israeli point of view, withdrawal from the West Bank,
at present, would be a classic example of Einstein's definition of insanity
- the repetition of the same action with the expectation of different
results.
Obama assumes that Israeli settlements, not Israel's existence, are the
source of Palestinian "antagonism." But Palestinian polls tell a different
story. A June 5-7 poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey
research found that three-quarters of Palestinians do not believe that
reconciliation with Israel is possible in this generation, even after the
conclusion of a peace agreement and the creation of a Palestinian state, and
nearly two-thirds think it could only happen after many generations or
never.
Nor is acceptance of Israel any greater among the senior political echelons
with whom Israel is supposed to conclude some kind of peace treaty. The
Palestinian Authority recently sent its warmest congratulations to
child-murderer Samir Kuntar on his release from an Israeli jail and
announced plans for festive celebrations in honor of Dalal Mughrabi, the
mastermind of the 1973 Coastal Road massacre in which 37 Israelis were
murdered. Those gestures make it difficult to understand how Obama could
credit Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister
Salaam Fayd with doing everything possible "to address some of the systemic
failures of the Palestinian Authority," (unless ceaseless incitement against
Israel is not one of those systemic failures in his eyes) .
Senator Obama's faith in the power of words is equally dangerous with
respect to the Iranian threat. In June, Obama told the AIPAC convention that
face-to-face negotiations with Iran would be necessary before any military
response could be justified. In the last presidential debate, he dropped any
reference to military action and said negotiations must precede any strong
sanctions, and must include the Russians and Chinese.
But the Europeans have been engaged in futile, unconditional negotiations
with Iran over its nuclear program for six years. If Obama has a tastier
carrot to offer than the Europeans, he should at least say what it is. As
for the Russians and Chinese, they have made clear that their economic
interests lie in supporting Iran, and that they will stymie any further U.N.
Security Council sanctions.
The only result of yet another round of face-to-face negotiations, after six
years of Iranian stonewalling, would be to give Iran with more crucial time
to complete its nuclear weapons project and provide Ahmadinejad greater
internal legitimacy.
An Obama presidency, then, would almost surely result in an Israel living
within indefensible borders and in the crosshairs of a nuclear Iran. Bubby
and Zaidy should tell their progeny that in Jewish tradition wisdom flows
from the elders to young, not vice versa.
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JWR contributor Jonathan Rosenblum is founder of Jewish Media Resources and a widely-read columnist for the Jerusalem Post's domestic and international editions and for the Hebrew daily Maariv. He is also a respected commentator on Israeli politics, society, culture and the Israeli legal system, who speaks frequently on these topics in the United States, Europe, and Israel. His articles appear regularly in numerous Jewish periodicals in the United States and Israel. Rosenblum is the author of seven biographies of major modern Jewish figures. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Yale Law School. Rosenblum lives in Jerusalem with his wife and eight children.
© 2008, Jonathan Rosenblum | ||||||||||
