FEATURED JOBS
Long-time Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Correspondent Herb Keinon had some interesting words at a lunch meeting today, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and the Baltimore Jewish Council.
Only days after President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy were heard – when they thought the microphone was off—insulting Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Keinon gave a “so what” response. As the product of Denver’s Jewish community and Israeli since the early 1980s said, whose surprised? Sure, it’s news, he added, but it doesn’t really matter because leaders don’t have to like each other; they just need to work together and by all accounts the U.S.-Israeli relationship in the sphere that counts most – the military one – is thriving.
And, I add, if the U.S.-Israel relationship is only as strong as the person in the White House, it’s pretty fickle – which it’s not.
But Keinon’s further analysis of Obama and the Jews was spot on. He noted how the President first did outreach to the Moslem and Arab world by visiting Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the latter venue where he gave an important address to a gathering of Moslem leaders and intellectuals.
That actually was good, Keinon said, because if America is stronger Israel is strong. What was bad was that not only did Obama skip Israel on that trip (and every journey since becoming President), but he linked the creation of Israel to the Holocaust. “The Zionist movement was founded some 70 years before the State of Israel,” he said. “It wasn’t created by the Holocaust.”
He’s right. But Keinon – to the surprise of some – gave Obama a thumbs up for recent actions. Obama came into office, he said, with a very different worldview than Israelis and Netanyahu; the American believed negotiations can work while he did not understand that Israel presented a public battered and untrusting of dialogue with a people whose leaders for decades have said they want to wipe them out. (And he gave a fascinating aside as to how he – with a self-described liberal upbringing and now a resident of the West Bank suburb of Ma’alei Adumin – has strived to educate his four children to understand that not all Palestinians or Arabs are evil.)
Obama’s “good behavior” began with the September U.N. speech in which the president gave full and staunch backing to Israel’s right to exist (absurd that it even had to be mentioned), rejection of the U.N. declaring a Palestinian state (thus mocking negotiations) and strong language that the U.S. would never remove itself from Israel’s side.
“President Obama stood up and gave the most pro-Israel speech of the past three years,” Keinon said. “You can say it doesn’t matter and you don’t put much stock in it. You can say it was about the 2012 elections. You can say it came after what happened in the New York election [where a Democratic, Jewish district went Republican]. Or he didn’t mean it. Certainly some of that may be true, but I say, `So what?’
“It sends an important message to the Egyptians and the world that the President of the United States is not an autocrat, that he has limits on what he can do.”
And that is a product of American Jewish networking, lobbying, politicking and coalition building. That, in fact, is remarkable – particularly when looking at the course of modern Jewish history. Despite the ups and days and the headlines of the day, it shouldn’t be forgotten.
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