Philip Klein responds to the post below, mostly glossing over the majority of points that I was making.  I want to focus on one part of his reply where he says the following:

Surely, public opinion would influence his actions as president and make it difficult for him [Obama] to adopt an anti-Israel posture, but Obama has given supporters of Israel have every reason to fear he would be the most hostile president toward Israel since Jimmy Carter.

Actually, Obama hasn’t given anyone any reason to think that.  Based on the isolated, frequently de-contextualised comments of certain Obama advisors, Obama’s critics have strained to find reasons to think that Obama would be pushed in an anti-Israel direction if he were elected.  Similarly, those who hope that Obama might alter policy towards Israel have been forced to read some pretty obscure tea leaves.  This has required quite deliberately discounting what he has said and the public positions he has taken in the Senate.  Setting aside what Obama says and paying attention mainly to what his advisors say are essential to demonstrating that Obama is somehow inadequate in his support, because no one can actually point to anything concrete that he has said or done that demonstrates that he agrees with anything that could be construed by the most uncharitable critics as anti-Israel.  Klein was right that Obama’s record is thin and this makes discerning his definite views more difficult, but that’s all the more reason to pay closer attention to what the candidate himself actually claims to believe.        

I would add that the assumption that Jimmy Carter was hostile towards Israel in any meaningful way when he was President (and more “hostile” than, say, George H.W. Bush for that matter) is one that uses a very peculiar definition of what it means to be pro- and anti-Israel.  This is a definition that must say supporting a negotiated peace between Egypt and Israel, agreed to by that weak appeaser Menachem Begin, reflects some kind of hostility towards Israel.  Of course, President Carter did once call for a return to 1967 borders, a position that Obama has never endorsed and one that I doubt he ever would support, but if that is what constitutes hostility towards Israel then Israel must necessarily have very few friends.   

As a side note, the discussion between Bob Wright and Gershom Gorenberg on Israeli views of the two Democratic candidates may serve as a useful counterbalance to this growing anxiety about Obama’s attitude towards Israel.

Update: Philip Weiss, an occasional TAC contributor, unsurprisingly takes a dim view of the Goldberg article:

Goldberg is enforcing a code of political correctness, and using the red flag of antisemitism to do so. Sorry– smart Americans have now learned that there’s a difference between criticizing Zionism and being antisemitic.

Well, perhaps some have.  I think Weiss is being far too optimistic in his expectations of “even-handedness” from Obama, and he is far too optimistic about the “groundswell” of people who are interested in the sort of “even-handedness” he describes.  His post reminds of the kind of the thinking of some antiwar conservatives who support Obama (i.e., he should be supported because he is perceived to be representing a certain policy position), except that in this case Obama has not even given any public indication that he agrees with the people who are rallying to him.  Meanwhile, the fact that such people are rallying to him creates the “zeitgeist” (as one AIPAC official put it) around the campaign that gives the (false) impression that there is something bad for Israel (as defined by AIPAC and the like) in an Obama victory.   

Weiss also cites Richard Silverstein, who makes a point that I would have liked to make in my earlier post:

If McPeak made any sort of mistake here it was trying to use shorthand to encapsulate a very complex issue. 

Filed under: foreign policy, politics