AMERICA:IN DECEMBER 2008, Judge Abner Mikva, a former counsel in the Clinton White House and one of several Jewish mentors of Barack Obama, joked that Obama would "go down in history as America's first Jewish president". This week, Mikva's prediction seemed to come true, when the president aligned himself with Israel in his address to the UN General Assembly.
But Obama’s journey from the darling of liberal Chicago Jewry to Israel’s champion in the UN was an erratic one, marked by two and a half years of deteriorating relations with Israel and the US Jewish community.
In the last presidential election, 78 per cent of Jewish Americans voted for Obama, a proportion exceeded only by his standing among African-Americans. Then his relationship with Binyamin Netanyahu soured. For months, Republican presidential hopefuls have accused him of “throwing Israel under the bus”.
A Gallup poll last week showed Obama’s approval rating among Jewish voters had dropped to 55 per cent.
Ed Koch, the former Democratic mayor of New York who supported Obama in 2008, campaigned for a Catholic Republican candidate against a Jewish Democrat in a New York byelection this month, repeating that Obama had “thrown Israel under the bus”.
The Republican won the seat held by Democrats since 1923. Matt Drudge’s website published the headline “Revenge of the Jews”.
Although Jews represent only 3 per cent of the US electorate, they are huge campaign contributors, and are numerous in Florida and Pennsylvania, swing states that Obama needs to win re-election.
The White House is so worried about what New Yorkmagazine calls "Obama's Jewish problem" that they've hired Ira Forman, the former head of the National Jewish Democratic Council, to improve relations with the community.
One can argue, as John Heilemann of New York magazine does, that Obama has been an unerring ally of Israel all along. He never ceased declaring his undying friendship for the Jewish state, obtained the stiffest sanctions yet against Israel’s arch-enemy, Iran, and insisted on excluding Hamas from negotiations.
Obama came to office determined to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians. He appointed former senator George Mitchell – who was so important to bringing peace to Northern Ireland – as his Middle East envoy.
Mitchell told Obama that for peace talks to work Israel would have to stop stealing Palestinian West Bank land.
Obama demanded a settlement freeze. US administrations since Nixon had opposed the settlements, which the International Court of Justice declared illegal. Netanyahu and many US supporters of Israel were enraged.
But it is the Palestinians – not Israel – whom Obama has “thrown under the bus”. When Obama proposed the settlement freeze, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, told Newsweek last April, “I said, OK, I accept. We both went up the tree. After that, came down with a ladder and he removed the ladder and said to me, ‘Jump’.”
Israeli bitterness over the US demand for a settlement freeze was compounded by Obama’s June 2009 speech in Cairo, where he spoke of the daily humiliations endured by Palestinians under Israeli occupation. Israelis were angry Obama did not visit Jerusalem on the same trip.
Tension between the Obama administration and Israel flared in March 2010. Vice-President Joe Biden was in Jerusalem, attempting to launch “proximity talks” between Israelis and Palestinians when the Israeli interior ministry, which is run by the right-wing Shas party, announced it was authorising 6,000 new housing units in East Jerusalem.
Netanyahu condemned the demand for a settlement freeze as a “precondition”.
Yet when he addressed a joint session of Congress last May, Netanyahu set his own, impossible list of preconditions for talks with the Palestinians. The Israeli premier had displayed his power at the pro-Israeli lobby group AIPAC’s gala banquet the previous evening, where it took half an hour to read the names of the most prestigious guests, including 67 senators and 286 members of the House of Representatives.
Netanyahu made a casus belli of this sentence in Obama’s speech on the Arab Spring last May: “The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognised borders are established for both sides.”
Little matter that this had been official US policy since the Clinton administration. Netanyahu ignored the mention of swaps, and raged live on television from the Oval Office for seven and a half minutes about Obama supposedly wanting to impose “indefensible” borders on Israel.
Obama’s Middle East team were reportedly “apoplectic” over Netanyahu’s tirade. “The collective view here is that is a small-minded, fairly craven politician . . . who simply isn’t serious about making peace,” an administration source told Heilemann.
Yet Netanyahu has brought Obama to heel. US domestic politics – namely Obama’s desire for re-election – have triumphed over the greater interest of Israel and Palestine in making peace, and the US has relinquished all hope of acting as an “honest broker”.
