Washington watch: US-Israel rift spreading to Jewish community
Washington watch: US-Israel rift spreading to Jewish community | JPost | Israel News.
12/04/2013 22:17
The widening rift between Washington and Jerusalem threatens to create fissures within the Jewish community here.
There is a growing feeling among some pro-Israel groups that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s strident attacks on President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry in the wake of their diplomatic opening to Iran may be harmful not only to bilateral relations but to their institutional interests as well as Israel’s.
Recent polls show the American public, by large margins, agrees that the interim Geneva agreement between the leading world powers and Iran to freeze the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program is an historic opportunity, and not, as Netanyahu insists, an “historic mistake.”
The agreement calls for six months of negotiations to produce a permanent arrangement to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Netanyahu’s call to immediately impose tougher sanctions is making a growing number of pro-Israel activists, Jewish leaders and political figures uneasy. Unlike the saber-rattling prime minister they know their constituents don’t want to see another war this country can’t afford.
Jewish activists see a number of problems ahead: • A growing rift within the Jewish community between the mainstream and the hardline Netanyahu supporters on this and other issues, particularly settlements and peace with the Palestinians.
• A potential loss of access to the administration and alienation from important contacts in the government, which means a loss of influence on the broad range of other issues on their agendas.
• An anti-Israel backlash if Israel is seen trying to torpedo a deal with Iran and push the United States into another war.
Many American Jews support the agreement not because they trust Iran but because they want to give diplomacy a chance.
Some of the most vocal opposition to the agreement is coming from Capitol Hill. The Republicans reflexively oppose anything Obama does and may be tempted to try to sabotage the agreement by enacting tough new sanctions for just that reason.
Democrats don’t trust Iran, either, and support tough sanctions, but they are more open to working with the administration.
Netanyahu’s full court press in Congress is putting many lawmakers in a politically awkward spot – another factor jeopardizing Israel’s long-term interests in Washington.
The White House is vigorously lobbying Congress to delay any new sanctions and to give negotiations a chance. After all, they’re telling lawmakers, the purpose of the sanctions was to force Iran to engage in serious talks.
The Geneva agreement requires a halt in any new sanctions for the duration of the negotiations. If the talks succeed, more won’t be necessary, Obama is telling them, and if they fail, he’ll back stringent new measures.
One strategy being considered on the Hill, as reported here earlier, is to enact new sanctions and put them on hold for the duration of the talks. An alternative may be to shelve new legislation for the duration of the talks. But Republicans may press for immediate steps that would force Obama to choose between a signature that would kill the negotiations or a veto they and Netanyahu could use to brand him as anti-Israel.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC ), the leader of the sanctions movement, was the first to put some distance between itself and Netanyahu. It has said the negotiations should be given time to work or fail before imposing new measures.
The group may have been warned off by its own failure to muster enough congressional support to force Obama to bomb Syria as punishment for using poison gas. The result was a defeat for AIPAC and Netanyahu but a victory for Israeli security because Syria was forced to give up its chemical weapons arsenal, which was the greatest present threat to Israeli security in the region.
AIPAC also appears to be distinguishing between a civilian and military Iranian nuclear program instead of the zero-tolerance it previously advocated. Netanyahu has been vague on that point.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York), who likes to describe himself as Netanyahu’s closest friend in Congress and often echoes his views, appears to be following the AIPAC line, as are many mainstream Jewish organizations.
Congress can play bad cop to Obama’s good cop, but it has to be careful not to go farther than the war-wary American public will tolerate. Also Congress can’t ignore the concerns of our European allies, who are critical to maintaining the sanctions regime.
Some of Netanyahu’s former colleagues and rivals are cautioning him to end his strident attacks on the American government and the Geneva agreement. Former prime minister Ehud Olmert said Netanyahu has “declared war on the US.” He said “picking a fight with Israel’s number one ally and to incite the American congress against the president” is dangerous.
Dan Meridor, a former deputy prime minister under Netanyahu, said “embarking on an offensive of attacks, criticism and scorekeeping” only benefits Iran.
The self-righteous Netanyahu shot back, “I won’t shut up.”
Another recent development that should make Netanyahu and his hardline supporters nervous is the waning influence of the evangelical movement, which AIPAC and the Israeli Right have ardently courted for years and expected to protect their interests in Washington. Overtaking the religious Right is the rising tide of the tea party movement, which is pulling the GOP in a more isolationist direction.
Netanyahu has accepted Obama’s invitation to send a national security team to Washington to discuss the upcoming negotiations. Meanwhile there are reports out of Jerusalem that the prime minister has ordered the Mossad to find the smoking gun that will derail the Iranian deal.
Seeing he wasn’t making progress in that direction, Netanyahu on one occasion tried to take credit for the agreement, saying it is a “bad deal” but better than expected because of his influence. He couched that with another threat to take military action.
Netanyahu risks getting to the point where the administration – and the other big powers – become convinced that nothing they do will satisfy him, so why even bother. That would be the most dangerous development of all – for Israel and for the Jewish groups here that are increasingly uncomfortable with the prime minister’s bellicose leadership.
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WarSclerotic 
December 5, 2013 at 4:06 PM
The essay incorrectly states that there is “A growing rift with the Jewish Community between the mainstream and the hardline Netanyahu supporters”. No, the rift is between the majority of American Jews whose sense of history does not go back further than what they had for breakfast, who are sitting with their nice fat rear ends filling up a chair in some fancy home, who do not want the boat to be rocked, and if Israel disappeared today t would just shrugged their shoulders and go back to their bridge games against a minority of Jews, who mostly do not truly know what political beliefs are held by Netanyahu, but understand that the Jewish people are facing a very dangerous adversary in Iran on many different levels.
I think that most Israelis understand that the vast majority of American Jews today only care about themselves. Contrast today to the 1970’s when demonstrations in support of Soviet Jewry would have hundreds of thousands of people. Today, politics is corrupt here in America. You are a fool if you trust AIPAC, a group being put to shame by Christian Republicans.
December 5, 2013 at 5:20 PM
The AJC is doing us proud. See yesterday’s piece attacking AIPAC.
December 6, 2013 at 5:14 AM
This isn’t so much an article as a press release/leaks by the US Jewish establishment that is worried about their standing in their country clubs. Combine that with the US Reform movement which is today predominantly just an American phenomenon and was always anti-Israel from the outset. They were against yearning for Zion and proclaimed that loudly at their founding. They actually took Zion out of their early prayer books. Today if you ask the average American Jew what he is, he will tell you, “Well, I don’t keep kosher, I don’t fast on Yom Kippur, I don’t go to temple. I GUESS THAT MEANS I’M REFOREM.” Bingo. Instant inflated poll numbers for Reform. If you’re ever not going to temple, your local Reform temple is one BEAUTIFUL temple you’re not going to.
But Reform and Conservative are collapsing. They have far fewer kids. Today a PLURALITY of young American Jews are orthodox and they are all pro-Israel. Alan Dershowitz reported on a study that showed that if you took 100 members of each denomination, after 3 generations they would all be decimated in numbers, nearing single digits, except for the 100 orthodox Jews who would have risen to 911 Jews, thanks to massive dedication to yeshiva education and large families. A lot of people in Reform temples aren’t even Jewish, they just went through “quickie” conversions to please the in-laws. I’m not a Shas supporter but they had a hilarious ad about that, spoofing instant quickie “fax conversions”:
Too many American Jews know nothing about their heritage. Then they shut down their temples because “everyone moved to Florida anyway.” So they sell their temple buildings to Chabad. Two weeks later the place is packed.
Jews increasingly are hungering for tradition. They don’t want watered-down. If you’re busy walking around “with your tail between your legs” afraid to speak up for Jewish rights, and try to protect your country club membership by telling news services you don’t support “hard line” Israeli policies, you may get a few headlines but you’re irrelevant to the struggle. The Maccabees weren’t a majority at first either.
But for those Jews who insist on trashing a hard line on Iran, go ahead, let Iran nuke Israel. See what you get. Because the moment they do, it will be open season on all the other Jews in the world.
As for the struggle for Soviet Jewry, there was a reason for all those protests. The Jewish establishment was embarrassed by the protests against the Soviets by the JDL. They organized their more namby pamby protests so they wouldn’t look like they were doing nothing.
Today if there were “uppity” protests by Jews in front of the White House against the Iran deal, Jews chaining themselves to the White House fence in protest, setting free in front of the White House a live goat with a sign on its neck reading, “I am a Jewish scapegoat,” stuff like that, the US Jewish establishment would again shriek in protest, how dare you do this! And then they would make their own more namby pamby protests to cover themselves. Unfortunately, nobody is going to do that this time. In fact, for many Jews the whole Democratic party is one big giant country club so Jewish Democrats will be quiet as mice.