According to Smith:

The president’s rising fortunes among Jewish voters, at least according to Koch’s brand of polling, may face a critical test in the coming months; whether Washington stands in support if Israel decides to take military action to halt Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons. In perhaps the most important sign of Obama’s strengthened pro-Israel credentials, Koch and others have come to believe that if the Netanyahu government bombs Iranian installations, Obama will back them; and that an American strike isn’t out of the question.

“This is an existential threat to Western civilization,” said Koch. “I think that the president and others have recognized that and will do whatever is required to keep our nation safe.”

Marc Tracy emphasized Koch’s influence in September, particularly the significance of his endorsement of Obama for re-election after playing a key role in New York’s ninth district electing a Republican in the special election:

And this is important for two related reasons. First, it’s a sign that the administration/campaign’s charm offensive—beginning with the embassy rescue, continuing to the unequivocal support Obama offered Israel at the United Nations in both his deeds and his speech, and going through the new revelations of heightened military-to-military cooperation—are having an impact on convincing fence-sitting American Jews that Obama is their friend. Second, it’s important because, as Tevi Troy presciently wrote many months ago in Tablet Magazine, Koch is the emblematic figure of this sort, whom Democratic candidates need on their side.

But let’s not lose sight of what is possibly the best part of this story: Ed Koch’s correspondence. BuzzFeed has a collection of several emails, which Koch’s assistant prints out and gives to him and upon which he writes responses by hand, which then get typed up and sent. That is dedication.

His best response? “Please point out one ‘canard’ in my statement.”

Israel hawks warm to Obama [Politico]
Ed Koch Defends Obama On Israel By Sending “Hand-Written” Emails [BuzzFeed]
Related: Koch Test [Tablet Magazine]
The Changeling
Earlier: Koch Back Obama for ’12

In December 2010, together with some 30 Israeli defense and political journalists, I boarded a bus that took us to a building on the top of a hill overlooking Glilot junction, five miles north of Tel Aviv. We had come to Mossad headquarters for a meeting with Dagan, who was then the head of the agency. It was supposed to be an off-the-record briefing. But this being Israel, within hours after the meeting ended, most of what Dagan told us was on the Web and in the papers.

What he said was shocking. The Mossad chief told us that Iran would obtain nuclear warheads by 2014 at the earliest, and thus, he argued, there was no need for an Israeli military strike for the time being. Dagan’s claim ran directly counter to the public line of Israel’s defense establishment: that Iran would obtain the bomb much sooner.

Since that meeting more than a year ago, Dagan has been on a crusade to stop Israel from launching an imminent military strike against Iran. He has reiterated the argument that he laid out to us in Mossad headquarters—against a strike and in favor of sanctions and covert operations—at various public events and private conversations over the past year. And though Dagan is no longer head of Mossad, his view carries tremendous weight: His perspective on a possible Israeli strike is shared by many of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet ministers and Israel’s security establishment.

Dagan’s campaign has enraged Barak and Netanyahu, who accuse him of undermining Israeli deterrence. Barak and Netanyahu support an Israeli military strike in the near future, and for the past few months, with increasing intensity, they have tried to create the impression that they are considering such an attack this year.

Which view will prevail? At stake is the future of Israel, the lives of Iranians and Israelis, the supply of oil to the United States and the West, and the stability of the whole Middle East.

***

The roots of the tension within the highest level of Israel’s political-military leadership go back nearly five years, when Barak, Dagan, and the rest of the Cabinet were faced with the delicate question of whether to bomb Syria’s nuclear reactor in the Dir al-Zur region. In summer 2007, the Cabinet, led by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, deliberated behind closed doors to discuss the assessments of Mossad and Israeli military intelligence of a big structure that Syria was secretly building near the Euphrates River. The undisputed conclusion was that Syria was constructing a reactor to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs and that the plans for the reactor had been provided by North Korea.

The Cabinet’s overwhelming decision was to order the Israeli air force to launch a military strike before radioactive materials would be introduced and it would be too late. Barak was the most senior Cabinet member to oppose the idea, and he argued that Israel could wait a few more months. Olmert, then-Chief of Staff General Gabi Ashkenazi, Dagan, and other Cabinet ministers were astonished to hear it. They suspected that Barak had a hidden agenda motivated by his own ambition to be prime minister. That summer, Barak and the Cabinet knew that within three or four months the findings of an inquiry commission investigating the 2006 Lebanon war would be released. They expected the commission would blame Olmert for major failures of the war, and thus he would be forced to resign. Barak hoped to replace him.

Over the course of a few weeks, Barak realized that he was in unsplendid isolation. Ultimately, he decided to join his Cabinet colleagues in approving the attack. (The Cabinet voted 13 to 1 to approve the attack. Avi Dichter, then minister of homeland security, opposed it.) In September 2007, eight U.S.-made Israeli F-16 fighter planes destroyed Syria’s nuclear ambitions when they bombed the reactor.

Barak’s behavior during that process caused Dagan and other military leaders to lose their faith in him. As one senior official put it, “If he zigzagged then, what assures us that his motives this time are pure?” Indeed, three years ago in private conversation, Barak opposed a military strike by Israel against Iran. So, what made him change his mind? It’s not clear. One possibility is that he wants to please Netanyahu in the hopes that the prime minister will take him aboard Likud and reinstate him in the Defense Ministry after the next elections, which are set for November 2013 but most likely will be sooner.

Continue reading: ‘When the sword is on our neck’

Kagan’s purpose in defending U.S. foreign-policy activism here is to deflect criticism of America’s unpopular engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is no easy task, and to perform it, Kagan adopts the two-stage approach to persuasion made famous by Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man: Establish first that there is trouble in River City, and then propose a solution, namely a marching band. Kagan also offers a marching band, but with 40 divisions behind it.

Where River City is concerned, Kagan’s argument is unexceptionable: Without American leadership, the feckless Europeans can’t be counted on to do anything, and the Chinese can’t be counted on not to do things badly. America shouldn’t abandon its position as the leading world power.

What America should do with that position is a different question. In his columns at the Weekly Standard and the Washington Post and in a series of books, Kagan has been the punditry’s most insistent advocate of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. After 6,400 U.S. dead and more than 30,000 wounded, and direct and indirect expenditures in excess of $3 trillion, nation-building is ballot-box poison. Kagan finds it easier to preach generalities. That makes the present volume read like a poor man’s cholent, with the meat of the matter lost in filler. His most important and controversial assertion is that Muslim democracy constitutes a new global wave of democratic advance, but he makes his case weakly and in passing.

“Americans have often been plagued by doubt [about nation-building],” Kagan allows. “They have resented the costs, both material and moral. Wars are expensive, and occupations even more so. A century ago it was José Santos Zelaya and Victoriano Huerta. In recent years it has been Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi.” That’s like saying, “Honey, I bought a lawn mower, a tennis racket, a Bentley, and a new set of patio furniture.” The highest estimate I have seen for the cost of America’s 1998 action against Serbia’s Milosevic, refugee resettlement and all, is about $25 billion, perhaps a hundredth of the combined costs of Iraq and Afghanistan—not to mention the near absence of casualties.

There was little opposition to bombing Serbia and sending peacekeepers afterward. But there has been impassioned objection from both left and right to a massive, multiyear commitment on the premise that America could engineer Muslim democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even worse, the Iraqi adventure exacerbated the Iranian nuclear threat. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, explained in 2009, America couldn’t strike at Iran’s bomb-building capacity: “We have lots of Americans who live in that region who are under the threat envelope right now [because of the] capability that Iran has across the Gulf.”

In 2004, Kagan lauded in the New York Times the “small but growing movement among scholars of Islam, a group diverse enough to include Gilles Kepel of France and [fellow Weekly Standard contributor] Reuel Marc Gerecht of the United States, that believes the real promise of democracy lies with devout Muslims.” And he continues to believe that the world revolves around the prospects for Muslim democracy. After the second great wave of democracy that followed World War II, and a third wave from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Kagan writes:

it is possible that in the Arab Spring we are seeing a continuation of the Third Wave, or perhaps even a fourth. The explosion of democracy is about to enter a fifth straight decade, the longest and broadest such expansion in history.

He has no illusions that Muslim democracy, should it materialize, will be friendly to America:

Americans, having helped topple dictators in the Middle East, are not sure how they feel about what may follow. The inevitable victory of Islamist parties in some Arab states will probably bring governments to power that are less accommodating to some American interests than the previous dictatorships had been.

But Kagan thinks this is a good thing rather than a bad thing: “Americans’ enduring interest in a liberal world order generally transcends other, more narrow and temporary interests. The United States can lose an Egyptian ally but still gain a healthier world order.” Indeed, he lauds the Obama Administration for helping to topple erstwhile Arab allies: “America found itself withdrawing support from longtime allies like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. … American power became a decisive factor shaping the regional and international environment in which the Arab political turmoil unfolded.”

One doubts if any outcome in the Arab world would change Kagan’s mind. In fact, an Islamist government may be the least of Egypt’s problems. With its economy in free fall and its foreign exchange reserves running out, Egypt may soon find itself with no government at all, like Somalia. The Deputy Supreme Guide (that is his actual title) of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood warned recently that economic collapse would “transform a peaceful revolution into a hunger revolution” and asked for American help. Nonetheless, Egypt also is prosecuting American democracy activists, risking the American aid it now receives.

Continue reading: Democratic processes

The gist of the email:

I heard from you directly, or through the grapevine, that you:

1) Are Jewish
2) Voted for President Obama in 2008
3) Might not vote for President Obama again in 2012.

If all three of these statements are true, are you willing to speak on the phone about your changing sentiment toward the President? The interviews will be used for informational purposes only — we will not publish your name anywhere or make the contents of your interview public. The study is being conducted by my friends at the Republican Jewish Coalition to better understand the frustrations some Jewish voters are experiencing with President Obama.

Will you be participating?

Republican Jewish Group ISO Discontented Jews [BuzzFeed]
Related: United Jewish Appeal [Tablet Magazine]

• Shmuel Rosner notes that Jews aren’t trending toward the Republicans so much as away from the Democrats (and toward independent status). He also notes that in the context of this Pew poll, the 2011 results actually see an uptick in Jewish identification with the Democrats over the 2010 results. It’s still down since President Obama’s election, though.

• Jonathan Tobin has no proof for his contention that Israel is the prime reason that, since Obama’s election, Jews have disproportionately turned away from the Democratic Party … but I largely buy it. What else would it be? (How many lefty Jews disgusted by Obama’s various compromises, for example, would have identified as Democrats in the first place? Also, c’mon?) I also agree that this is important because Pennsylvania and Florida are going to be in play.

• Tobin also writes, “Liberal Jews remain far more afraid of conservative Christians than Hamas terrorists.” I suppose this is technically, semantically true, but I think there is probably a fairer way of putting it, hmm?

• If we saw Jews turn away from a sitting Democratic president, the operative word might not be “Democratic” but “sitting”: as Dan Klein reported in Tablet Magazine, since Nixon, and excepting George W. Bush, Jews have disproportionately turned against every elected president running for re-election.

• The 2011 poll had a Jewish sample size of 330 and a margin of error of 6.5 percent.

Jews Shift Toward GOP, Survey Claims [Forward]
Related: Do We Now Have Proof Jews Are Trending Republican? [Jewish Journal Rosner's Domain]
Obama’s Israel Problem Cause of Democrat Losses Among Jews [Commentary Contentions]
Sitting Duck [Tablet Magazine]

But why talk about this stuff when we can talk about the Jews?!

Polling pundit extraordinaire Nate Silver noted early on last evening that Jewish turnout was low last night in comparison to the primary four years ago: in 2008, three percent of GOP primary voters identified as Jewish; last night, only one percent did. This, Silver concluded, “might mean that Jewish Republican voters in the state are not terribly enthusiastic about this group of candidates.” The line was pondered. On Twitter, the battle was joined. (Pssst, Gal: don’t engage him! He’s very good!) At Commentary, Jonathan Tobin responded. The explanation? The Rudy phenomenon: “the man who drove that mini-surge in Jewish Republican voters was Rudy Giuliani,” argued Tobin. “Though he flopped in the Florida primary four years ago, the former mayor of New York was a big favorite of the Jewish and pro-Israel community.”

I don’t know if that carries water. We don’t know for sure who won Florida’s Republican Jewish vote, either last night or in 2008—the overall Jewish franchise was unfortunately not large enough for exit pollsters to glean meaningful data from it. (Maybe the best we can do is to look at the extremely Jewish counties of Palm Beach and Broward, where Giuliani got 19 and 17 percent of the vote, besting only slightly his 15 percent statewide figure; he did put up a slightly more impressive 26 percent in Jewish-but-also-idiosyncratic Miami-Dade.) Even granting a Giuliani Bump, Tobin is suggesting that Giuliani was single-handedly able to increase the percentage of the Jewish vote—by a factor of three!—in an electorate roughly the same size as last night’s (about 1.9 million voted in the 2008 primary; it looks like about 1.75 million voted in last night’s). That seems pretty far-fetched to me, especially when you remember that Florida’s is a closed primary, open only to registered Republicans, so Giuliani could not have drawn Democratic and independent Jews in to vote for him (and when you remember, as Shmuel Rosner reminds us, that Sen. Joe Lieberman had endorsed John McCain). It’s roughly as plausible to suggest that Jewish turnout was depressed because Jews were going to go for Romney until they heard a disembodied voice on the phone tell them the former Massachusetts governor hates kosher-keeping Holocaust survivors. It didn’t play no role, it’s not impossible it played a huge role, and nobody can prove it either way. But it’s very unlikely.

The Forward’s Josh Nathan-Kazis tentatively concurred with Silver’s suggestion: “Fewer Jewish voters in the primary,” he wrote, “could correlate to a lack of enthusiasm among Jews for the Republican field.” Unlike the rest of us, Josh was down there reporting on this, so I’m more inclined to listen to him. But I’m still not going to put too much stock into the three-versus-one-percent dynamic. Most likely, it’s a combination of lack of enthusiasm among Jews, statistical noise, and a generally less excited Republican primary electorate (and one where those most excited—in the Tea Party—tend not to be Jewish).

But this does leave an open question regarding Tobin’s argument. He contends that it is possible to acknowledge that the Jewish vote changed while explaining it not by reference to larger trends or specifically Jewish or Israel-related policies or platforms or records, but, rather, to the arbitrary inflation (“mini-surge”) caused by an anomaly (in this case, the unusual presence of a moderate, ethnic, strong-on-Israel former New York City mayor from Brooklyn on the 2008 Republican ticket). I completely agree. In fact, I and many others have long suggested that while it’s certainly possible that in November President Obama will see a drop in Jewish support, that drop needs to be more than a couple points to be significant because the 78 percent of the Jewish vote he captured in 2008—higher than John Kerry’s 74 percent in 2004—was anomalously high due to the decisive nature of Obama’s victory generally as well as Jews’ “hatred” for a certain member of the Republican ticket. Given Tobin’s sensible sympathy to such external whims’ influence on voting figures, I assume that he will take all of this into account when he analyzes the returns in November. I won’t say one percent is small; he shouldn’t say 74 percent is.

Romney Wins Big in Florida Primary, Regaining Momentum [NYT]
Jewish Turnout Low in Florida [NYT FiveThirtyEight]
Low Jewish Turnout in Florida Doesn’t Help Obama in November [Commentary Contentions]
Florida Exit Polls Suggest Fewer Jews Vote GOP [Forward]

Only six months before, Koch’s displeasure with the president had become a national news story. On July 25, 2011, the former mayor offered his official endorsement of Republican Bob Turner for Anthony Weiner’s vacated seat in the House of Representatives following the latter’s unceremonious resignation. Despite the fact that Democrats outnumber Republicans there nearly 3 to 1 and have held the office for more than a century, Turner won the 9th District of New York in a landslide. “I didn’t know Bob Turner,” Koch would later confess. “It pissed me off that [Obama] made a demand on Israel that it go back to the peace table and accept the pre-’67 borders.” How else could a self-professed liberal have offered his support of a Tea Party member whose campaign platform included such progressive policies as cutting federal spending by 35 percent, opposing same-sex marriage, and advocating intelligent design? Koch explained: “I perceived [Obama’s] stance on Israel to be hostile. I decided we would send a message.”

The message was received. On Sept. 21, 2011, hours after delivering a speech to the United Nations general assembly in which he denounced the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood and temporarily restored the faith of Israeli loyalists across the country, Obama brokered a détente of his own with one of the Jewish state’s staunchest defenders. Their conversation, held at the New York Public Library, was frank. “He said that my voice was heard outside of New York and that he needed me,” noted the former mayor from his Manhattan office. During their talk, Obama expressed his distress that the Jewish community had grown unhappy with him. “He was surprised because he thought he was doing what they wanted,” said Koch. “I said ‘No, you’re not.’ ” Less than a week after their kibitz, Koch committed to campaign on the president’s behalf in 2012. For a man whose trademark question “How’m I doin’?” has long since fossilized, it appears that flattery—steady and effusive—heals all wounds.

It’s easy to dismiss Obama’s overtures as lip service to one of the nation’s most recognizably Jewish politicians—the political equivalent of visiting your doddering grandfather in Boca. Still, Koch’s influence is irrefutable. Just last week, Beit Morasha, the Jerusalem-based educational center, honored him for his “public service, leadership and commitment to the State of Israel and the Jewish People” during a separate dinner event at Guastavino’s, a banquet hall under the 59th Street bridge that—essentially like Koch himself—has been declared a New York City landmark. The former mayor has proven he will defend Israel against any threat, real or imagined, even if it means cutting off the schnoz of the Democratic Party to spite its face. In the deep winter of his political career, it may be the only issue on which his famously nasal voice still resonates.

***

On an unseasonably warm afternoon this fall, I met Koch at his law firm, Bryan Cave, in midtown Manhattan. (My father is a partner there.) The walls of the former mayor’s corner office were lined with photographs and plaques, their frames practically touching. Above his computer hung a signed picture of President George W. Bush as well as a letter by William F. Buckley typed on stationery from the National Review: “Just an idle note to tell you that I’ve had hours of pleasure and edification reading your lyrical bulletins. You make me feel absolutely useless if I contrast my own nugatory work with your spicy and learned columns. I’ve been ill, but I will recover and descend on you, and we’ll have a good, nostalgic meal.” Below that, in a considerably smaller frame, sat a photo of Barack Obama. An oversized, silver menorah stood on the radiator along the near window.

If Koch’s office doubled as a museum of contemporary political history, then its featured exhibit was Ed Koch, meticulously preserved in all of his ’80s splendor. The former mayor sat motionless behind his desk, a big, chestnut-colored number adorned with family photos, a bottle of Purell hand sanitizer, and a copy of The Little Red Book of New York Wisdom by Former Mayor Ed Koch. He wore a dark gray suit with a two-toned shirt and a set of black suspenders. From the neck down, it almost looked as though he had never left office. From the neck up was a different story. More than 20 years past the normal age of retirement, Koch continues to work five days a week, and all the extra hours on the clock have begun to take their toll. His face looked gaunt, his eyes puffy. Tiny constellations of liver spots now dot his forehead and cheeks. While he insists there have been no residual effects from his assorted heart failures, his speech has grown slower and more deliberate. “I have a balance problem,” he said. “I’ve never fallen, thank God. Breaking a hip is a major fear. But I rarely miss a day of work.”

Of the nearly two dozen titles in the “Ed Koch library,” a term he uses (fondly) for the collection of books that have been written by and about Ed Koch, only 1999’s I’m Not Done Yet! co-authored with Daniel Paisner, attempts to chart his post-mayoral career. The book’s subtitle, Keeping at It, Remaining Relevant, and Having the Time of My Life, serves as a kind of mission statement for Koch. Since leaving office in 1989, he has served as, among other professions, an adjunct professor at New York University, a television judge on The People’s Court, a children’s book author, a political commentator, and a radio host. Then, of course, there’s his ample body of film criticism—much of it archived at the appropriately titled website The Mayor at the Movies. Many of these reviews seem to dance on the edge of self-parody. Take, for example, his thoughts on Terrence Malick’s Oscar-nominated Tree of Life:

What’s the movie about? Got me … The story of the cosmos is better told at the Rose Planetarium in the Museum of Natural History. It didn’t do well with me, although I have to be truthful about it. The audience at the end of the show applauded. I thought to myself, am I the little Japanese boy who said ‘but the king is naked?’ The emperor of Japan. Naked! I thought it was a put-on or a put-down of the audience, but maybe I’m alone. Go see it. You might like it. I didn’t, and I’m giving it a minus.

You can remove Ed Koch from office, but you can’t remove the office from Ed Koch. “People like me because I’m a lot tougher than the major critics,” he said. “I don’t pretend to be an expert.”

Continue reading: Building, and naming, bridges

And pointing to that line also masks the more complex reality. Mainly: Israel is officially antsy, as it is telling us through Ronen Bergman’s absolutely must-read New York Times Magazine feature published this morning. Israel now believes Iran has less than a year before it reaches “immunity zone,” when a military attack would no longer substantially postpone its alleged nuclear weapons program. (Yes, even Israeli officials who support the prospect of an attack admit they’d only be delaying it, for now.) The United States, perhaps reflecting its superior firepower, thinks there is more than a year of opportunity. Make no mistake: This is scary stuff. “According to Israeli intelligence,” Bergman reports, “Iran and Hezbollah have also planted roughly 40 terrorist sleeper cells across the globe, ready to hit Israeli and Jewish targets if Iran deems it necessary to retaliate.” But one can see how an Iranian bomb seems like even scarier stuff for Israel. And Bergman, in agreement with Austin Long and Anshel Pfeffer writing late last year in Tablet Magazine, predicts an Israeli attack this year. Which means what, exactly, for the United States? “Our ironclad commitment—and I mean ironclad—to Israel’s security has meant the closest military cooperation between our two countries in history,” went the president’s sole mention of the Jewish state last night.

And the U.S. options are limited, as laid out expertly by Helene Cooper this morning. In a nutshell: Even as it increases financial sanctions and imposes a vast oil embargo, the West, and particularly Europe, seems to be preparing itself to live with an Iran that would resemble Japan in lacking a nuclear weapon but possessing the means and technology to make one—the trouble being that Iran ain’t exactly Japan (which is why part of the bargain would have to be sustained inspections). The sanctions and embargo will further hurt the badly bruised Iranian economy but are as likely to push the Iranian regime up against a wall and lead it to fast develop a bomb as to break down and comply with Western wishes; ditto the covert assassinations and sabotage aimed at the weapons program. After all, Pakistan and North Korea have the bomb, and we don’t bomb them; Libya gave up its program, and we bombed the crap out of it. The debate over whether the Iranian mullahs are rational or irrational becomes less relevant if you decide that an irrational Iran would use its weapons aggressively while a rational Iran would at least move to obtain them, making the region a more unstable place. Really the only good news is that by most accounts Iran is more than a year away even from prospective Japan-status, meaning, as Jeff Goldberg argues, there’s still time to try to reach a deal. Unless Israel bombs Iran.

In public, Israel has essentially committed itself to not accepting even a Japan-like Iran (and can you blame it?). Yesterday, Prime Minister Netanyahu marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day by imploring the world not to let Iran commit a second Shoah, while U.N. Ambassador Ron Prosor chastised the U.N. Security Council (to its face! he’s got a pair!) for its inaction on the Iran question. The untidy scenario in the previous paragraph of a precarious, U.S.-led balancing act would be very rapidly mooted by Israeli jets screaming across the Qom, Natanz, and Bushehr skies.

As for last night’s speech, the other notable Jewish content came upon the president’s ceremonial entrance, which involved him adorably hugging not one but two wonderful Jewish women. Above is his greeting of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and here’s the other:

I can’t wait for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to run for office again. She shall return.

President Obama’s State of the Union Address [NYT]
Will Israel Attack Iran? [NYT Magazine]
Sanctions Against Iran Grow Tighter, but What’s The Next Step? [NYT]
How a Nuclear War Would Start in the Middle East [Atlantic Goldblog]
Israel to Iran: Tomorrow Will Be Too Late for Action Against Iran [Haaretz]
Related: Will They? [Tablet Magazine]
Can They? [Tablet Magazine]

Ronn Torossian, the New York-based founder of 5WPR and public relations guru, is not unpracticed at expressing distinctly right-wing views of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. But his latest op-ed, published in the Jewish Reporter, goes further than just condemning President Obama for allegedly trying to force the Israeli leadership to accept unacceptable concessions (“Its [sic] only extreme self-hatred or praying at the altar of liberalism which could make any sane Jew vote for Obama”). It also references “[t]his administration which called for a return to the Auschwitz borders.”

Leaving aside the fact that this is not an administration which called for this—last May, Obama called for the 1967 borders to be a starting point for negotiations that would include land swaps—the term “Auschwitz borders,” originated by Abba Eban and brought out of the attic last May by the Zionist Organization of America, are fightin’ words, to say the least. More to the point, they compare the Obama Administration to the West that watched passively as European Jewry was slaughtered, and the Palestinians to the Nazis.

I asked Leonard Stern, a businessman and philanthropist who underwrote an excellent recent history of anti-Semitism called A Convenient Hatred, what he thought of the remark, given that a company he owns is represented by Torrosian’s 5WPR (he no longer owns it). “I think any reference to Auschwitz in connection with the State of Isreal is inappropriate,” Stern emailed back. “There are much better ways to frame issues that would not be so inflammatory.” He did not respond to a follow-up question of whether he still feels comfortable being represented by Torossian. (Again, this is my fault: He isn’t represented by Torossian.)

I wanted to reach several of Torossian’s other clients who might be offended by such a remark. But contacting them for this through their publicist seemed to be a prohibitively tricky proposition.

Bibi, Peres, Barak Support for Obama? [The Jewish Reporter]

A nervous Adler told me over the phone that he wasn’t advocating Obama’s assassination by Mossad agents. “Of course not,” he said.

But do you think Israel should consider it an option? “No.”

But do you believe that Israel is in fact considering the option in its most inner circles? “No. Actually, no. I was hoping to make clear that it’s unspeakable—god forbid this would ever happen. I take it you’re quoting me?”

Yes. “Oh, boy.”

This man can barely speak for himself, let alone anyone else. And now Adler, who to judge from that interview never expected a spotlight outside of his small paper, is being hounded online—and presumably offline too—by angry hordes. I suppose it’s appropriate, in a dotting the “i” way, for the Secret Service to be involved, but the folks who really need to have their motives investigated are the readers, including all of those righteous tweeters sharing their livid reactions to the tossed-off comment of a patently simple man. These people, one presumes, want to be spoken for by more responsible, thoughtful journalists, and yet not enough of them have been interested in actually paying for this expertise. Barely a year goes by without news of yet another Jewish newspaper folding—the most recent of which, in Portland, actually died as the community itself grew. How loudly can I scream this from a rooftop? Journalism is hard and expensive, and communities that don’t pony up adequate resources for this privilege have only themselves to blame when they find unskilled men and women making un-thought-through comments ostensibly in their name.

But Gawker is a different story. Cook—who knows his way around trenchant, often excellent reporting and criticism—had the chance, on a site dedicated to covering the media, to make an important point about the desiccation of communal journalism. Adler is clearly no great thinker and no skilled journalist. Once Cook realized this, he might have dug for a teensy bit more backing before presenting Adler as any sort of communal voice, and indeed, in the tradition of worthwhile media criticism, might have made many of the points I made in the previous paragraph. Instead, Cook wrote a post that may not have been meant as a dog whistle for anti-Semites, but which certainly had that effect. (“Why the American tax payer has to pay billions each year to maintain peace for Israel comes down to one thing,” asserted an average commenter: “Israel’s lobby in the USA and the willingness of many American Jews to put another country’s interests over the one they were born in.”) If some random Muslim writer from a local giveaway in Dearborn called for jihad against the United States, would Cook have highlighted it in this same manner? I’d hope not. That’s the kind of tactic for which far-right lunatics like Pamela Geller are regularly, legitimately denounced. So, why is it acceptable to treat the Jewish community in this shoddy way? To tacitly present Adler as representative of anyone—particularly the day after Barack Obama effortlessly raked in a half a million dollars at a Jewish fundraiser—is so facile that it’s hard not to view it as purposefully malicious.

I have to imagine that isn’t the case. This is, at least in part, because Cook is married to Allison Benedikt, who last year caused a firestorm with an essay about her disillusionment with Israel. Whatever your feelings about that piece—and, by the way, most of the published reactions to it were either moronic or reprehensible—there is no debating that Benedikt was honestly grappling with an important personal and communal conflict. In doing so, she subjected herself to the harsh limelight of an increasingly vicious conversation about the relationship between American Jews and Israel, but because she is a real journalist, she did so with actual knowledge, insight, and measured awareness of the consequences of her argument. With her as one of the best examples, I’d argue that any media writer, and particularly one with the privilege of sharing Benedikt’s breakfast-table, should be able to discern what a genuine journalist is, and what one isn’t—and, given the differences, make the requisite responsible decisions about his or her coverage of this landscape.

Goodbye to All That

For generations, the Jews of Caracas had idyllic weather, prosperity, and vibrant communal organizations. Things have changed under Hugo Chávez.

By Vox Tablet

During a recent trip to Bogotá, Colombia, where I’d lived for years, I discovered that the wealthier parts of the city were filling up with an odd sort of super-refugee. The new arrivals were mainly rich Venezuelans fleeing an increasingly chaotic situation in their home country: oil execs booted out by nationalization, industrialists frustrated by the corrupt and now hostile business environment, successful entrepreneurs and others displaced by a newly minted Russian-style oligarchy loyal to Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez. These transplants, many of them Jews, were arriving in the Colombian capital and prospering because they had tremendous skills and valuable international connections—and because they were coming with their social and business ties intact. Their first complaint was invariably about what they called “the security situation” in Caracas. That they found Bogotá to be an island of safety and peace by comparison was alarming.

Through some of these new Colombians, I was introduced to a man named Alan Vainrub. In 2005, Vainrub’s parents sat him down in their spacious apartment in Caracas, on the lush lower slopes of Ávila mountain, to talk about his future. Vainrub, then 23, held an engineering degree from the local Universidad Metropolitana and was happily employed at Procter & Gamble. He had designs on an overseas MBA, after he’d gained more work experience. But Vainrub’s father, a doctor, told him that the domestic political situation was getting worse under Chávez; by the following year, Vainrub’s father said, there might be hundreds of upper-class Venezuelans applying for business degrees, all looking for a way out.

Vainrub was in no hurry to leave. After all, he was the comfortable heir to one of the great flowerings of the Jewish postwar diaspora, third- and fourth-generation Venezuelans with education, social clout, and roots. Jews had first arrived in Venezuela from Curaçao, a haven from the Inquisition, in the 19th century. “Turcos”—the catch-all term for anyone of roughly Middle-Eastern coloring or north African descent, regardless of their religion—had been arriving in the country since the 1900s. And a long tradition of lenient immigration policies—especially after World War II, based in part on the need for expertise and manpower to exploit the country’s single most important resource, oil—meant that Europeans, Iberians, Chinese, Russians, and other Latin Americans were all welcome there. Venezuelans came in all colors and had intermarried for centuries, fashioning a fully mestizo culture brewed from the descendants of indigenous people, Spanish colonials, African slaves, and 20th-century immigrants. Jews were a tiny, accepted minority. People called each other affectionately demeaning nicknames, instead of epithets: mi vieja, mi gorda, mi negra.

But by the time Vainrub’s father sat him down, the Jewish community of Caracas, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, was in precipitous decline. The major cause of this decline was the 1998 election of Chávez—now the longest-serving head of state in the Western hemisphere. After surviving an ouster by coup in 2002, and pushing through constitutional reform to end presidential term limits, Chávez, who declared his recent battle against cancer won, now openly projects his rule into the middle of the 21st century. He has proclaimed the next 10 years to be the Bronze Age of the Bolivarian Revolution, a hybrid of populism and socialism soldered onto a Napoleonic personality cult. The Bronze Age is to be followed by an intermediary Silver Age, and then concluded, beginning in 2031, with the Golden Age of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Over the years, as Chávez’s brash populism has been buoyed by income from Venezuela’s vast, nationalized oil reserves, an object of his political manipulation has become the Caracas elite—“estos ricachones,” roughly translated: those fat cats, as he has dismissively referred to the upper class. In 2004, Chávez made his first official visit to Tehran and struck up a personal friendship and diplomatic alliance with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, whom he welcomed to Venezuela this month. This came after decades of political tutelage from another Holocaust denier, the Argentine ultra-nationalist Norberto Ceresole, who died in 2003 but who managed to instill a conspiratorial, amalgamated view of Jews in his pupil. Chávez has seemed to find in anti-Zionism, and later anti-Semitism, a valuable political tool, one that enhances, or makes more precise, his love of straw-man rhetoric and open hostility toward the United States, first against the bellicosity of George W. Bush and then against President Barack Obama, who remains an avatar of “imperialismo yanqui,” which has abetted “las oligarquias” in Latin America.

And so in 2006, Alan Vainrub entered Harvard Business School, hoping to return to Venezuela after graduation and rejoin the Jewish community of Caracas. But the intervening five years have made that dream seem foolish, if not suicidal. As the reality of Chávez’s durability has set in, nearly half of Venezuela’s Jewish community has fled from the social and economic chaos that the president has unleashed and from the uncomfortable feeling that they were being specifically targeted by the regime.

In this significant migration I saw the seeds of a story of dispossession and loss unlike any other in the hemisphere, a tale spanning five generations—from Europe to Israel to the Americas and back. What I found was at stake for people like Vainrub, his sister, his parents, his Caracas-born grandmother, and her German-born Jewish parents, was the very idea of a “Venezuelan Jew”—a patriotic, Latin-inflected, Holocaust-surviving, entrepreneurial, cosmopolitan, privileged, devout, convivial, passionate, Merengue-dancing, carefree, and idiosyncratic species. How dangerous must a situation get for a Jew to cast off the identity he had constructed for himself and his family as a person rooted in a particular place? I asked this question of everyone I met: What is your limit? When do you leave? On the one hand, there was the Jewish leader who made religion his measure. “I won’t stop being Jewish,” he told me. “If by staying I can’t be Jewish, then I’m not staying.” But many more seemed to have the tolerance of community association President Salomón Cohen Botbol. Just three weeks before I met him, Botbol’s oldest son, who had graduated from high school, had been kidnapped—allegedly by ransom-seeking delinquents. Understanding the situation of what they call “secuestro express,” Botbol said, meant he knew that the assault would be no more than a few unpleasant and costly hours—“the scariest of my life,” he said, but nothing out of the ordinary. An arrangement was made—Botbol declined to offer the details—and the family resumed its life. “In this case it wasn’t traumatic,” he said. “But there are traumatic cases.”

Wasn’t finding your son in mortal danger reason enough to abandon a sinking ship? “I’m not thinking of leaving,” he answered.

***

On Dec. 2, 2007, the day a constitutional referendum was held to abolish term limits, the Chávez government raided the undisputed hub of Jewish life in Caracas, the Colegio y Centro Social, Cultural y Deportivo Hebraica, the site of the main Jewish school and club. It was the second such invasion. This time, masked and armed police piled over the walls as elementary-school children arrived for class. The government claimed it was acting on a vague, anonymous tip that the club was harboring weapons, or was a front for Mossad. In both cases, the raids were officially declared “unfruitful.”

Continue reading: Inside the Jewish islands

Bátora’s letter, signed by members of a far-right organization that goes by the acronym D.O.S.T., (meaning “enough” in Czech, and whose symbol is a clenched fist hitting a table), claimed that the festival was “organized by groups of homosexuals and lesbians whose demands against the Czech public significantly exceed the framework of mere tolerance.” Citing Ronald Reagan, whose anti-Communism has made him an enduringly popular figure in the Czech Republic, Bátora wrote that Eisen had betrayed the former president’s legacy and threatened to rupture the “good relations between our nations.”

American ambassadors, particularly those in small European countries, aren’t supposed to be in the business of stoking controversy. Not so for President Barack Obama’s appointees. Early last year, a State Department investigation revealed that the former ambassador to Luxembourg, a major Democratic Party fundraiser named Cynthia Stroum, had so demoralized her staff that some career foreign-service officers working under her fled for posts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last month in Belgium, Ambassador Howard Gutman provoked a firestorm in the United States when he intimated that Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe was largely a response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the surface, Eisen and Gutman have much in common: Both are prominent Democratic Party fundraisers, lawyers, and the children of Jewish Holocaust survivors. But their respective controversies could not have been more different: Whereas Gutman’s remarks provided fodder for those who seek to blame Jews for the hatred directed at them, Eisen’s intervention bolstered liberalism in a country that, still seeking its place in the post-Communist era, badly needs it.

The Czech Republic is known for its carefree attitude toward sex and sexuality: It has the highest divorce rate on the continent; it’s a popular destination for British stag parties; nearly half the population identifies as atheist; and it’s a major hub for the production of gay pornography. But these ostensible signifiers of social tolerance belie what is in fact a deeply conservative society.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, for one, took umbrage at the fact that Eisen, along with 12 other Western ambassadors, voiced support for Prague Pride. The same day that Bátora marched on the U.S. Embassy, Klaus, a founder of the country’s biggest right-of-center political party, issued his own statement, declaring: “I can’t imagine any Czech ambassador daring to interfere by a petition with the internal political discussion in any democratic country in the world.” (Klaus had made his own views on the parade well known the previous week by defending an aide who had referred to gays as “deviant fellow citizens.”)

Eisen, 51, whose mother is a Czechoslovak Holocaust survivor, was now thrust into the center of a political controversy that had been roiling the country for months. Bátora had already been fingered as a man with unpalatable views: A group of Czech senators called for his dismissal from the Education Ministry a week before he delivered his missive to Eisen. The senators had raised concerns about Bátora’s involvement with a now-defunct far-right political party that promoted the expulsion of Czech Roma citizens. Bátora had also praised as “brilliant” a 1925 anti-Semitic book called The Adulteration of the Slavs, which approvingly cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, and the works of German writers who would later go on to become leading figures in the Nazi Party.

Bátora’s presence in the Education Ministry threatened the country’s fragile center-right coalition government. (The most admired Czech in the world, Vaclav Havel, denounced Bátora from his sickbed.) Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, a distinguished Czech political figure and founder of the center-right TOP ’09 party, reportedly called him an “old fascist.” But it was Ambassador Eisen’s provocation that ultimately led to Bátora’s downfall.

Continue reading: The brouhaha moves to Facebook

• Tebowing.com founder (and Rocky Mountain Hebrew Academy alum!) Jared Kleinstein will have some free time now that Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos are out of the NFL playoffs. [Time]

• Gilad Shalit has joined Facebook. [JTA]

• Milwaukee Brewer Ryan Braun, currently appealing his 50-game suspension for violating drug rules, will accept the award for National League MVP this weekend. [NJ Jewish News]

• An op-ed highlights the close ties between the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, and the Obama administration. [NY Post]

• More thoughts on Matt Gross’ trip to Israel. [NJ Jewish News]

But according to occasional Tablet Magazine contributors Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel, there is still the fundamental disagreement over the red lines: enrichment for Israel; weapon development for the United States. They note that Iran appears to be using Hezbollah to try to goad Israel into attacking. Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon complained about the Obama Administration’s unwillingness to take a tough enough stance again Iran (although, in a robust display of ignorance about American politics, he attributed this to election-year concerns). And reports have it that the United States has not received assurances from Israel that it won’t attack.

And what to make of the weekend’s news that the two countries are postponing joint military exercises scheduled for the spring? “Because it was not the right time,” was a Netanyahu spokesperson’s explanation. And the initial announcement was made by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who is no stranger to going rogue. If even he has been brought around to cooperating, then one suspects the U.S. administration has offered its own guarantees. But doing some reporting, Laura Rozen questioned the official Israeli line (which initially also included a reference to budget issues) and wondered whether the cancellation is a sign of strain between the two militaries, as well as Israel’s plan to take the “games” out of “war games.”

U.S. Warns Israel on Strike [WSJ]
Israel and U.S. at Odds Over Timetables and Red Lines for Iran [Haaretz]
Major U.S.-Israel Military Exercises Delayed [NYT]
U.S. Coordinating Iran Policy With Israel More Closely Amid Rising Tension [Bloomberg]
Earlier: “Bibi? It’s Barack”

“Bibi? It’s Barack.”

“Hey, whassup? It’s been, like, forever. Did you see that crazy shit about the Iranian physicist getting offed?”

“Yeah, actually that’s what I was calling you about. I mean, I, uh, I don’t know if you were involved, or anything, but if you were, I mean, it would be nice to get a heads up about it, you know? Given the unshakable bond and deep friendship between our two countries.”

“Oh, totally. I mean, no, it wasn’t us, but yeah, I get you, I get you, man! We’d totally tell you if we were gonna pull anything that obvious.”

“I mean, because it just makes it harder for us to do some things in the Strait of Hormuz and—I know this is delicate, but—those negotiations in Turkey.”

“Oof. Yeah, man. You sure you wanna bring that crap up?”

“Sorry. But there are other things, as you know. And we had such a good week with the rescues at sea and the Times coverage—”

“Oh, the Times, man, I can’t even believe you read them any more after what they said about your wife and all.”

“Yeah, I know, we’ve got that covered. Anyway, I was just trying to say that, like, if you were gonna do anything more, you know, serious—”

“Like what do you mean? What’s more serious than offing several fuckers in daylight in Tehran?”

“ … ”

“Which isn’t something we did or anything, just asking.”

“Well, you know, anything military … ”

“OHHH. You were … I got it! Yeah I get you, yeah, I totally feel you. No, we aren’t even. Don’t worry about it.”

“OK, OK, cool. Thanks, Pr— Bibi. All right, well, that was it. I guess I’ll see you in March?”

“Totally, totally. Take it easy, dude.”

“OK. Bye.”

The United States and Europe’s leading countries condemned the new enrichment at the U.N. Security Council, but Russian and Chinese vetoes will likely forestall another (fifth) round of sanctions. Beyond that, the Obama administration has been putting forth slightly mixed signals. Appearing on a Sunday morning talk show, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta took a hard line, with rhetoric to match: if Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, “we will defeat that;” if they try to build a bomb, “they’re going to get stopped.” Yet, reflecting the most recent National Intelligence Estimate, he surmised that Iran has not yet started to develop an actual weapon. Meanwhile, a Washington Post article earlier this week created some confusion: a senior administration official was quoted as saying sanctions were intended to stoke public resentment and lead to regime change; then, this quote was changed to reflect the intention that the sanctions stoke public resentment merely in order that “the Iranian leaders realize they need to change their ways.”

The message from Iran is also mixed. The bluster likely masks panic. Closing the Strait of Hormuz would surely be the quickest way to halt Russian and Chinese protection, given the number it would do on world energy markets; it would be a pure desperation move, and so even threatening it can be seen as a desperation move, “Crazy Ivan”-style brinksmanship. The economic sanctions are slowly ruining Iran’s currency, financial system, and overall economy. In Venezuela this week, Presidents Ahmadinejad and Chávez joked, “That hill will open up and a big atomic bomb will come out.” Keep laughing, guys.

Domestically, President Obama does face some pressure to act, as the presidential campaign gears up and Republican candidates talk military action (Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman yesterday introduced a bill that would put the Senate on record as opposing “containment” of an Iranian nuclear bomb). Anne-Marie Slaughter suggests giving Turkey, which cut a fuel swap deal with Iran (in contravention of Western wishes) some time ago, another opportunity—limited negotiations are actually due to begin there anyway, although yesterday’s assassination may postpone them. Contributing editor Jeff Goldberg proposes that Obama make a show of giving Iran a “last chance” to seriously come to the table with the goal of coming into line with all international nuclear treaties (which it currently is violating). Such a threat should seem credible: accounts are that if it came down to choosing between a military strike and Iran’s crossing a U.S. red line in its nuclear weapons program, Obama would choose the military strike.

Iran Trumpets Nuclear Ability at a Second Location [NYT]
Iran Reports Killing of Scientist in ‘Terrorist’ Blast [NYT]
U.S., EU Slam Iran Nuclear Enrichment Activity at Security Council Meet [Haaretz]
Panetta: U.S. Will Not Allow Iran to Develop Nuclear Bomb [Haaretz]
Public Ire One Goal of Iran Sanctions, U.S. Official Says [WP]
Sanctions Begin Taking a Bigger Toll on Iran [LAT]
Slaughter: Saving Face and Peace in the Gulf [CNN]
To Avoid All-Out War Give Iran One Last Chance [Bloomberg View]
Ex-Adviser: Obama Ready to Strike to Stop Iran [Bloomberg/JPost]

Rational, of course, is not the same thing as reasonable. A regime that shoots its own people in the streets, as the Iranian government did in June 2009, is not reasonable. In the policy debate, rationality refers to a regime’s interest in preserving itself. A regime is rational, therefore, if it understands that using a nuclear weapon would elicit a response that might spell its doom. An irrational regime is one that can’t be deterred because it may use a nuclear weapon regardless of the consequences.

Thus, the Islamic Republic’s threat last week to close the Strait of Hormuz—a move that would send oil prices skyrocketing—struck many as strong evidence of the regime’s irrationality. Interrupting the world’s oil supply would compel the United States, the guarantor of Persian Gulf security, to take military actions that might mean toppling Iran’s ruling establishment. On Sunday, U.S. Joint Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said in no uncertain terms that if Iran tries to close the Strait of Hormuz, the United States “can defeat that.”

Others look at Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz as having little bearing on the country’s rationality. Since the Iranians know the Americans would have no trouble breaking through a blockade, their argument goes, Iran doesn’t actually have any intention of trying to close down one of the world’s most strategically vital waterways. This regime understands, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Sunday, that closing down the Strait of Hormuz is an American red line. If Iran crosses it, it jeopardizes its own existence—and so it won’t.

Those that argue the regime is irrational point to the fact that the Iranian regime regularly threatens to destroy Israel, which would retaliate by obliterating Iran. Those that claim Iran is rational write off such threats as mere rhetoric. A nuclear Iran, they say, poses little threat to a much more powerful Israel, never mind the United States. Membership in the club of countries with nuclear weapons might even make Tehran more responsible.

The reality is that it doesn’t matter whether the regime is rational or not. The issue is not whether the Iranians would use the bomb, but how Tehran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon would enhance the regime’s already reckless behavior. Moreover, it would severely limit the ability of the United States to respond to the provocations of this dangerous regime. For instance, if a nuclear-armed Iran actually closed the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. officials would be much less confident in their ability to re-open shipping lanes. American policy-makers already worried about high oil prices are not likely to risk the chances of a nuclear incident and even higher oil prices.

It’s pretty easy to make a strong case that the Iranian regime really is suicidal. This is the same ruling clique, after all, that pioneered the use of the suicide car-bombing during the course of the Lebanese civil wars from 1975 to 1990. The Iranians tapped their local allies, namely Hezbollah, for martyrdom operations against Israel, the United States, and other Western powers. The Iranians spent their own blood even more recklessly in the war with Iraq when they dispatched wave after human wave of teenage boys to march through minefields, clearing a path with their bodies. Perhaps most tellingly, the plummeting Iranian birthrate—from 6.5 children per woman a generation ago to 1.7 today—suggests that it is not just the regime, but an entire nation, that no longer wishes to live.

No country sets out purposefully to bring about its destruction. And yet history is nothing but the record of nations that have misunderstood the limits of their own power and the resources of their adversaries. Nazi Germany may have been suicidal, but the British Empire was not, and yet at the end of World War II both were finished. No one thinks that the rulers of Athens were irrational, but by the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War, their actions had effectively cashiered Athenian democracy.

Jewish leaders between 66 C.E. and 135 C.E. were not irrational, but their revolts against Rome put an end to Jewish sovereignty for two millennia. Furthermore, who is to say that renewing Jewish sovereignty in a sea of Muslim hostility is an entirely rational act? But the rationality of any given government is irrelevant. The question of rationality moves the debate from the real to the speculative—i.e., might a given nation use the bomb at some point? The fact is no one knows beforehand whether any regime is likely to use a nuclear weapon.

The only question American policy-makers should concern themselves with is whether or not a given regime seeking nuclear weapons is already hostile to U.S. interests. If it is, U.S. policy-makers should do everything in their power to prevent that regime from acquiring a bomb. The apparent injustice that Israel has the bomb while the world rues the prospect of a nuclear Iran is a quandary for academics and ethicists—and an entirely inappropriate concern for U.S. officials, whose concerns are much more specific: protecting U.S. citizens, allies, and interests. There is little debate in Washington over Israel’s nuclear-weapons program because Jerusalem has never posed a threat to American strategic interests. Iran, however, has threatened U.S. interests for 30 years.

If or when Iran gets a nuclear weapon, it might drop the bomb on Tel Aviv—or Riyadh, for that matter. But that’s not the main problem. The issue is that Tehran will act in precisely the same fashion as it has since 1979—hostile to the United States and its allies—only now on a much more ambitious scale. And the range of responses available to the United States and its allies will be seriously limited.

Imagine Iran with a nuclear weapon: Tehran will continue to support terror, except that Iranian assets like Hezbollah and Hamas would now be operating under a nuclear umbrella, which will shape Israeli responses. In planning its military strategy, Israel already has to take into consideration world opinion and the strain warfare puts on Israeli society and the economy. Now Jerusalem will have to wonder if crossing the border into Lebanon or Gaza will elicit nuclear threats from Iran.

The Iranians will further extend their reach into Africa and Latin America, where Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in the midst of a regional tour. Allies like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez will be emboldened to take otherwise unimaginable risks in Washington’s direct sphere of influence in the Americas. The recently unveiled Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington would be only a taste of things to come.

In other words: If Tehran gets a nuclear weapon, will U.S. policy-makers be prepared to ensure that the Islamic Republic doesn’t make good on a threat to close the Strait of Hormuz?

Emanuel, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Rahm Emanuel: On Nov. 4, 2008, a mainstream Greek paper infamously heralded the election of Barack Obama as “the end of Jewish domination.” The elation, however, was short-lived: A few months later, President-Elect Obama would tap Rahm Emanuel, congressman from Illinois, as his first chief of staff. Few choices could have been better designed to incense global anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists. After all, unlike even the staunchest of Jewish or pro-Israel politicians, Emanuel is the only one who can credibly say that “Israel” is his middle name.

Emanuel’s pride in his religion and national identity is well-documented. His parents used to take the entire clan to Israel for the summers, and Emanuel served as a civilian volunteer at an Israeli military base during the 1991 Gulf War. In 2005, as part of a political fundraiser poking fun at his future chief of staff, Obama noted that “Rahm is very serious about [his faith]. He keeps the Sabbath. He goes to synagogue. He doesn’t just talk about the Ten Commandments, he lives them. With some modifications. The one ‘thou shalt not kill’—unless he’s a target. ‘Thou shalt not covet’—unless absolutely necessary.” (Obama then added that “every year, Jews celebrate Passover recalling the day that the angel of death passed over their homes in ancient Egypt; today, Republicans celebrate when Rahm passes over their district.”)

But perhaps the most quintessential Emanuel story is told by Asher Lopatin, the modern Orthodox rabbi of Congregation Anshei Sholom B’nei Israel—where Emanuel and his wife are members—who recently delivered the first invocation at the Chicago City Council after Emanuel was elected mayor there. Lopatin recounts how one Yom Kippur, Emanuel, in attendance for the entire day of services, was accosted by an acquaintance during davening. His reaction? “Rahm in his inimitable fashion said, ‘shut [the] *something* up, I have a lot of repenting to do.’”

Bolten, 2006 (Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)

Joshua Bolten: Less popularly known for his Jewishness is Joshua Bolten, President George W. Bush’s second chief of staff and Emanuel’s immediate predecessor. And with a middle name like “Brewster,” this isn’t exactly surprising. But Bolten’s Jewish commitments are no less substantial and have been evidenced throughout his long political and post-political career.

As recounted in Laura Bush’s authorized biography, when Bolten first began serving as Bush’s policy director in 1999 in Texas, the future first lady noticed that he would consistently pass on certain dishes during meals at the Bush family ranch or governor’s mansion. As it turned out, Bolten would not eat shellfish or consume meat outside kosher homes or restaurants. From that point forward, Laura made sure to have a vegetarian alternative on hand; at campaign barbecues, there would be pork on the grill for staffers and vegetables for Bolten.

Bolten became one of the Bushes’ sources on Judaism. The subject particularly interested the first lady, who would quiz him about aspects of the Jewish holidays or the meanings of rituals. In her biography, Bolten recalls how “whenever I was over for a meal, they would say grace. They would ask me to say grace in Hebrew and ask for the translation.” Once, during a stay at Camp David, Laura asked Bolten to recite the Shehechiyanu blessing to mark the occasion.

At the White House, where Bolten, like Lew, first served as OMB director before becoming chief of staff, he placed a mezuzah on his office door, brought dreidels and gelt to staff meetings during Hanukkah, and, in 2006, participated in a White House Megillah reading for Purim.

Since the close of the Bush presidency, Bolten has served as the vice chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. In this capacity, he spoke this past May at the annual Days of Remembrance ceremony at the United States Holocaust Museum, where he presided over the joint lighting of six symbolic candles by congressmen and Holocaust survivors. All in all, not bad for a guy who started off funding the production of his teenage band’s LPs by playing covers at bar mitzvahs.

***

It’s hard not to wonder what the funniest Jewish anecdote from Lew’s tenure in the White House will be. If you’ve got a prediction, leave it in the comments. Winner gets a free copy of … you guessed it: Jews and Power.

Lew, who is 56, is widely known as a straight-shooter and, during his time in the Clinton White House, has earned a reputation as an able go-between for the White House on Capitol Hill. Last summer, he played a key role in the fraught debt-ceiling negotiations—a critical point in his favor when it came time to selecting Daley’s replacement, administration officials told Politico. Obama, speaking from the Dining Room of the White House, said he expects Lew to continue working on economic issues: “I have every confidence that Jack will make sure we don’t miss a beat and continue to do everything he can to secure our economy and help the middle class and keep America safe.”

A Queens native, Lew got his start in Washington working for Bella Abzug. He will be the first Orthodox Jew to hold such a senior West Wing position, according to Nathan Diament, the director of the Orthodox Union’s Washington operation. “That is a wonderful testament to Jewish life in America, as well as to his record and his experience,” Diament said.

Lew to Replace Daley as Chief of Staff [NYT]

Here is where the Spider-sense goes off. For wasn’t Lesser one of the “Obama 20-somethings” profiled in that New York Times Magazine article a couple years ago? Indeed, he was. (He led his group house’s weekly Shabbat dinners.) In a certain cohort, this piece was much discussed. And the most-discussed sentences—the lines that seemed to confirm the whole conceit, and to condense the ways in which the hectic life of young overachieving Millennials working for America’s most multitasking presidency force all points to converge—was this parenthetical from author Ashley Parker: “(Disclosure: Lesser is dating one of my housemates. They met while I was reporting this story and began seeing each other shortly thereafter.)” The story was published in April 2010; Silber and Lesser’s engagement, after “dating for two years,” was reported in April 2011, so this is indeed them (you call it creepy, I call it reporting). What is there to say? If Kennedy had Camelot, Obama’s got The West Wing. Mazel tov to the happy couple!

Alison Silber, Eric Lesser [NYT]
Related: All the Obama 20-Somethings [NYT]

One thing I’ve heard in informal conversations with several prominent Jewish Republicans is a comparison of Obama, whom they accuse of having no feel for Israel, to President Clinton, whose love of the country and kinship with the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin were undeniable and conspicuous. Allison’s reporting further bears this out:

visuals and rhetoric—the kishkes factor—have taken on outsized importance. Here, too, Obama has an unusually thorny political problem: the specter of Bill Clinton, specifically of Bill Clinton in a kippah, weeping for Yitzhak Rabin with the words, “Shalom, haver.” “We have the record against the aesthetics here,” said David Saperstein, executive director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center. “The Clinton-Rabin relationship was something extraordinarily special, and it set a very high bar.” It’s a gap Republican partisans know they do well to exploit. “I’ve been asked, ‘Who is the best friend Israel has in the White House?’ ” Fred Zeidman, a Houston oil executive who handled Jewish outreach for McCain and is now assisting the Romney campaign, told me last week. “And I say, ‘Hillary Clinton.’ This is the woman who kissed Suha Arafat. But that’s why, I hate to say it, she’s the best we’ve got.”

Here, too, the facts tell a different story:

The truth is that aside from Clinton and Rabin, no recent president has had that kind of chemistry with a leader of Israel. Reagan paid tribute at a German cemetery at Bitburg that included the graves of SS soldiers, drawing promises from Rabin and then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres that the Jewish people would never forgive him. The first George Bush went to blows with Yitzhak Shamir over the government’s settlement policy, and George W. Bush, with a major assist from his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, forced the catastrophic miscalculation that allowed Hamas to hijack Gaza’s elections in the wake of Ariel Sharon’s 2005 pullout. Bill Clinton, for his part, actually sent his own star political advisers—James Carville and Stan Greenberg—to Israel in 1999 to work for the defeat of [current Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, then a sitting prime minister, in favor of Ehud Barak and the Labor Party. “Excuse me,” said David Luchins, a longtime aide to the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Obama is no better, and no worse.”

But that may not matter, and if it doesn’t, Obama in part has himself to blame.

United Jewish Appeal [Tablet Magazine]

With Election Day less than a year away, the core of the Obama campaign’s play for Jewish votes is simple: Overwhelm what the Obama camp sees as Republicans’ bald emotionalism on Israel with a flood of facts and figures. Obama’s campaign website has a section devoted to Jewish issues that includes a seven-page PDF documenting the president’s support for Israel, with a six-page supplement titled “President Obama’s Stance on Israel: Myths vs. Facts.” (“Myth: President Obama believes that Israel is at the root of all problems in the Middle East today. Fact: President Obama declared Israel a source of inspiration for the American people as the sole true democracy in the Middle East.”)

Obama is heading into what promises to be a tough campaign, in which he will need all the enthusiastic support he can get—especially in crucial swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, all of which include substantial Jewish electorates. And while it’s hard to imagine a majority of Jewish votes going to Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich, a lukewarm showing among the people of the three Velts makes his task that much harder. A recent Gallup poll, conducted in September, showed Jewish support for Obama had plunged 29 points since his inauguration in January 2009. And this fall, in the most Jewish district in the country, disgraced Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner’s seat went to a neophyte Republican candidate, a result voters—albeit Orthodox and therefore not representative of the Jewish vote nationwide—there said they intended to be seen as a referendum on the Obama Administration’s stance toward Israel.

Ask anyone in Obamaland about what is now commonly referred to as the president’s Jewish problem, and the same answer will inevitably follow: “It’s not us, it’s you.” Or, more typically, “it’s them”—the vocal cadres of the Emergency Committee for Israel, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and similarly hawkish groups that, in the administration’s view, have turned Israel into an emotional wedge issue for Jewish voters, in much the same way right-wing groups used abortion to pull Catholics and evangelical Christians away from the Democratic Party in the 1980s. “To the extent we have a problem,” Wasserman Schultz told me last week, “it’s being created by individuals who know that Republicans can’t appeal to Jews on their domestic issues and are attempting to mischaracterize, distort, and lie about the president’s record to create enough distrust in the community to shave off a little bit of support here and there.”

But ask actual voters, and even ardent supporters of the president say the problem is acute. “You say he’s against Israel enough times, and eventually people believe it,” one Obama donor told me earlier this month in Los Angeles, where a recent cover of the local Jewish Journal featured the headline “Angry Jews” on an image of mad-as-hell Howard Beale. “In this town,” the donor went on, “he’s got a Jewish problem.”

Some Jewish voters have sharp policy disagreements with the White House, whether over the president’s early decision to condition Israeli-Palestinian talks on a settlement-construction freeze or his initial commitment to engaging the Iranian regime in talks over its nuclear ambitions. But it is the seemingly endless series of diplomatic and rhetorical faux pas that has reinforced an anxiety among many Jewish voters—including lifelong Democrats—that Obama is somehow not on their side. There was the notorious photo op-less summit between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2010. Just this month, the administration’s ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, the son of a Holocaust survivor, gave a speech drawing distinctions between classical anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, which was criticized by Obama antagonists as blaming Israel for contemporary Muslim antipathy toward Jews. Days later came Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s exhortation, at the end of an evening seminar at the Brookings Institution, for Israel to “get to the damn table.”

That these mini-controversies continue to reverberate suggests that Obama’s “Jewish problem” is, at base, an emotional one: a failure to connect with and respond to the concerns of his Jewish constituents. These are voters, it seems, who would find it easier to tune out Republican smears of Obama as anti-Israel if only they had an image of the president addressing the Knesset, or, better yet, splitting a hummus with Benjamin Netanyahu on Jaffa Road.

***

David Axelrod is still perplexed by how hard it was to sell his man to Jewish voters last time around. “We had to work for that vote,” he told me just before Thanksgiving, when we met in the empty conference room he uses at Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago’s Loop. “There was sort of, you know, ‘Where’s he coming from?’ ”

Continue reading: Obama’s kishkes factor

His advisers have been suggesting such a peroration to a Jewish audience ever since his May speech calling for negotiating on the basis of the 1967 borders and the subsequent fallout. He couldn’t have asked for a better audience. This is the Reform crowd: the pre-game show was all about the history of the Religious Action Center and the crucial support Jewish activists lent to the civil rights movement—without which, Obama said, he probably wouldn’t be president. There was a warmup act of camp songs, which, as the delay wore on, extended to “Maoz Tzur” and “Great Balls of Fire.”

He discussed domestic issues like fair pay and he discussed Israel. But the overwhelming thrust was the journey—“journey” would dominate a word cloud of the speech—he has been on with this group since he first began to run for the White House.

In other words, this was the equivalent of a hometown speech. He gave a shout-out to AIPAC’s executive director, Howard Kohr, but also to NFTY, the organization for Reform teens. When I walked out, I heard one young man remark, “How about that shout-out to NFTY!” To which another young man replied, “I can’t wait to use that video clip.” Shabbat Shalom, bro.

Related: Disunion [Tablet Magazine]

Yet even as America has stood by Israel in the past … and even as Israel faces these new threats to her very existence, a critical element of future U.S. support may now be in jeopardy.

As we are all aware, the United States is in the midst of a challenging fiscal period. Lawmakers are under severe pressure to make steep cutbacks across the board.

And that means that despite a 10-year agreement, America’s security assistance to Israel may very well be cut.

Perhaps the most prominent bloc associated with scrutinized aid in the context of larger austerity is the Tea Party, whose members are overwhelmingly Republican and which counts among its ranks the presidential candidates Rep. Ron Paul and Rep. Michelle Bachmann. Talk of deficits threatening aid followed a Republican debate last month, when several candidates mused on having all foreign aid “start at zero”—something AIPAC opposes even when it’s not Israeli aid (the letter also defends “the overall foreign aid budget”). Those candidates, notably Mitt Romney and Gov. Rick Perry, subsequently clarified that they have no intention of cutting aid to Israel; at a Republican Jewish Coalition forum last week, six candidates vigorously affirmed the importance of Israeli security (though not Paul, who was not invited and who sticks by his questioning of aid).

“All of the leading Republican presidential candidates said that we should start Israel’s foreign aid budget at zero,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee, yesterday. “This upends long-standing U.S. support of our important ally, Israel—support that President Obama has dramatically strengthened and increased during his presidency—and would deeply undercut Israel’s safety and security.”

“This is a totally fabricated controversy on the part of the Democrats and particularly the DNC,” said Matthew Brooks, executive director of the RJC. “If you read what Mitt Romney said in his policy papers, he is unequivocally for increasing aid. Rick Perry clarified, and was unambiguous, that aid to Israel under a Perry administration would be increased. Newt Gingrich led the charge in Congress to increase aid.” The RJC has also cited the ten-year Memorandum of Understanding, which sets annual aid.

AIPAC apparently believes that the political climate, in which not a few voters— and most prominently Tea Party members who may prove crucial to deciding the Republican contest—is disquieting enough that they can at least raise money off of it. The letter does not mention either party or any proper names, citing only “the Administration” and “Members of Congress.” AIPAC had no comment.

It is notable that the Democrats are in the position of feeling vindicated by the group that to many represents the last word in being pro-Israel in American politics. Some Republicans have accused the Democrats of abandoning the U.S.’s traditional staunch support for Israel. A new ad from the GOP Emergency Committee for Israel asks, “Why does the Obama administration treat Israel like a punching bag?”

There seems little reason to be concerned about aid under any of the leading Republican candidates (other than Paul, who is running second in most Iowa polls—he is an exception even the RJC’s Brooks allowed). The suggestion that any of them might fiddle with the billions the U.S. sends Israel’s way each year “clearly does not jibe with the candidates nor the efforts of the Republican Congress right now—even with a lot of new members, they’re unequivocal in their continued support for aid to Israel,” Brooks said.

But the Obama campaign and Wasserman Schultz have cast the question more as a matter of Republicans’ need to pander to their voters. “These guys are so eager to please the most extreme elements of their Tea Party base that they’d forget about one of the most loyal allies our country has,” the chairwoman said in a recent email to supporters.

It’s not like AIPAC has no reason to bring up this fear—it’s a fundraising letter.

AIPAC may fear congressmen and senators the most. “We all agree that America faces a tough budgetary environment,” AIPAC’s Missner says in a post-script. “But any budget cuts should be made thoughtfully and with America’s long-term interests in mind.” He adds, “Unless we work with members of Congress, security assistance to Israel may be cut at exactly the time she needs it most.”

Related: Pro-Israel Group Running NYT Ad Slamming Obama [Politico]
Earlier: GOP Debate Prompts Clash on Israel, Iran

• Israel cracks down on illegal immigration. [NYT]

• Several politicians whose blocs together secured the majority of the Egyptian vote in recent elections want to promote “sin-free tourism.” Good luck with that, guys. [AP/The Republic]

• This cycle could see the election of several new Jewish Republican congresspersons. [Roll Call]

• The last Jews of … Gibraltar! [JTA]

• Lea Michele explains why she doesn’t go by her given name, Lea Sarfati. A million Ashkenazic girls would kill for that name! [6 Degrees No Bacon]

Gov. Rick Perry’s despicable anti-gay ad (below) has background music inspired by the well known (Jewish) homosexual Aaron Copland. (I also love that his objection is to gays serving “openly” in the military. If they want to risk their lives for their country while in the closet, then no big deal!)

• Items from the 1960 capture of Adolf Eichmann will soon be on display at the Israeli parliament. [Washington Post]

• “Hello, it’s the Jew,” and other Barney Frank quotes. [NYT]

• At a New York City fundraiser last night, President Obama said the administration had done more to protect Israel than any previous administration has. Here’s what else he said. [White House]

• A Nazi-era bunker in Hamburg, Germany is being turned into an eco-friendly energy hub that will provide electricity for 3,000 homes. [Green Source]

• Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) is not at all happy with President Obama after the administration publicly opposed legislation that would sanction Iran. [YouTube]

Combine all this with the genuine flux in the Republican race—with Herman Cain stubbornly sticking around the top and Newtmentum capturing the country’s imagination—and we may have the first genuinely exciting GOP debate tonight. In anticipation, a few days ago I talked to Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, about Jewish Republicans’ stake in the race and what he hopes to hear tonight.

How did you feel about the “start at zero” comments?
I think there’s a big difference between the Romney comments, which if you look back were in reference to Pakistan, not in terms of what Gov. Perry was advocating. But the thing that is important to realize is that, first of all, the attacks by Congressman Wassermann Schultz are extraordinarily disingenuous: It is absolutely false for her to assert that the Republicans want to zero-out aid to Israel. If you look at Mitt Romney’s position paper, he talks about increasing aid to Israel. What Perry said, which was probably articulated in an inartful way, is that we are giving foreign aid, to his mind, to a lot of countries that don’t further the strategic values of the United States.

Secondly, I think in a broad, general view, yeah, OK—does that mean we are giving aid to countries that are not acting in our best interests? Maybe. The reality is that in the dire economic times we find ourselves in, we don’t have the luxury as a nation to do everything as business as usual all across the board. As we’re looking to make huge sacrifices domestically, it would be irresponsible not to look at other areas. Support to Israel, though, is not one of those areas that is really threatened by that discussion.

What are you hoping to hear from the candidates tonight?
We’re looking for some clarification on some of the questions of foreign aid. I’m sure it will come up, and I think it will put to bed any question about the commitment of the Republicans on critical aid to Israel. These are very dangerous times, and I think the Jewish community will be looking to see how the Arab Spring is looking to be more like an Arab Winter. We see Syria now teetering on the edge. Libya, Egypt: The rise of radical elements there pose tremendous risks to Israel. It goes without saying the issue of Iran is critical, not just for the countries in that region, but for the United States and our allies around the world. In terms of the peace process, you will start to see from the Republicans a vision that is very different from the direction of the current administration. The contrast will be very striking.

What do you see a Republican administration doing on the peace process that the Obama administration hasn’t?
You’ve got to make very clear that you need a partner for peace. One of the things that George Bush clearly understood is that trying to force a process forward when you don’t have two parties willing to make a lasting and meaningful peace isn’t good, and by action and by deed we can say the Palestinians are not ready to be true partners for peace. They snubbed this president, they snubbed the United States by moving forward on the unilateral declaration at the U.N. The notion that we’re going to force a process forward in this climate is naive and reckless.

What do you expect these candidates to do, if president, that Obama doesn’t on Iran?
The president keeps talking about these crippling sanctions and how all the pressure of the international community is one of the achievements of his administration so far. But every day we get closer to Iran having a nuclear weapon. This administration has sent mixed messages regarding the military option, whether it’s on or off the table. I think right now because America is seen as a much weaker player globally, our ability to really impact Iran through sanctions is hindered. Clearly our ability to get folks like the Russians and the Chinese onboard is creating a safety valve for the Iranians. We can’t seem to build a unified international coalition. I think you’ll see the Republicans onstage talk about that and show a very clear and distinct difference.

What did you make of the Obama-Sarkozy hot-mic gaffe? The defense an Obama supporter would make is that Obama was having the conversation in the first place because he was persuading President Sarkozy to back him and Israel at the U.N.
I mean regardless of the context, I don’t know if that’s a defense of the comments and the feelings. What everybody got to see was really an uncensored, raw look into how the president of the United States and how the president of France truly feel about Prime Minister Netanyahu. I think the president showed his true colors. I think anybody, Republican or Democrat, would be hard-pressed to think that had that happened with George Bush or President Clinton, they wouldn’t have pushed back and responded to Sarkozy—to come to Netanyahu’s defense or at least take issue, not agree with the president calling him a liar. I could very easily see Bill Clinton coming to his defense, as many in the Jewish community could see him doing.

The RJC doesn’t endorse primary candidates, correct? But it does in the general?
Correct.

Earlier: GOP Debate Prompts Clash on Israel, Iran
Iran Report, Gaffe Provide GOP Opening

• Today a State Department spokesperson called the IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear weapons program “alarming” and vowed that the United States would pursue further sanctions. [Haaretz]

• An inside look at how the Security Council failed to support the Palestinian bid for membership. (Hint: U.S. opposition was a big deal.) [FP Turtle Bay]

• Mario Batali compares bankers to Hitler. Predictors estimate that his inevitable apology will be sincere but a bit showy and stuffed with too many ingredients. [Grub Street]

• Want a good reason for not attacking Iran? Aaron David Miller has five. [FP/JI Daily]

• Posters for the new Tintin movie in Beirut have the director’s name blacked out. Some guy named Spielberg. [The Jewish Chronicle]

Elliott Gould was a friend to Groucho Marx when the latter was on his deathbed. What a mensch. And resourceful!

• Immensely good essay by ace Times reporter Anthony Shadid on Syria, the Assads, and the fear Arab dictators have inflicted on their peoples. [Frontline]

• The famed 1980s New York City graffiti artist who went by “Neo” turns out to have been a cop named Steven Weinberg. [HuffPo]

• An argument for releasing jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti. [IHT]

• An essay about trying to conceive when both of you are Tay-Sachs carriers. [Kveller]

• Jewish South Florida gentleman demands more Hannukah-themed stamps. [The Palm Beach Post/Vos Iz Neias?]

The famous (in that world) Nazi-themed episode of Star Trek, complete with a threatened planet called Zeon, will be aired in Germany for the first time. All that’s left are Tribbles!

And as if they did not have enough ammunition, you have an open-mike moment yesterday, in which French President Nicolas Sarkozy was overheard confiding in Obama (who is in Paris), of Prime Minister Netanyahu: “I cannot stand him. He is a liar.” To which Obama reportedly replied: “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day!” That Obama finds Bibi frustrating is about as newsworthy as the fact that the subway took too long and was too crowded this morning on my way to work. But it still serves to (further) confirm the impression that Obama and Bibi have a bad personal relationship and that, under their leadership, their countries have experienced a weakened one (surely U.S. ambassador Dan Shapiro was protesting a bit much when he insisted yesterday that the “special relationship” is “stronger than ever before”); and with just a little imagination, you could call this Obama’s fault.

At this point, the list of alleged personal slights at Bibi—the missed photo-op, the 45-minute Hillary Clinton phone call, the “‘67 borders’ surprise, and on and on—is long enough that this is just another drop in the bath. But it’s what we’re talking about today instead of, say, how Obama may very well be completely committed to preventing Iran from getting the bomb, even if it means the use of U.S. military force (such is Jeffrey Goldberg’s argument in his latest column). Which means it’s a good day for the GOP.

GOP Field Attacks Obama Foreign Policy With Tough Talk on Iran [NYT]
Report: Sarkozy Calls Netanyahu a ‘Liar’ [Ynet]
Why Obama Might Save Israel From Nuclear Iran [Bloomberg View]
Earlier: Perry’s Ascent Heralds Israel’s Rise as Issue
Frontrunning Romney Picks Fight on Israel

Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky was born in Jerusalem on Oct. 17, 2002. Two months later, his mother, Naomi, an American citizen like her husband, went to the embassy in Tel Aviv to request a passport for her newborn. Where the form asks for place of birth—specifically, “City & Country as it is presently known”—Naomi wrote, “Jerusalem, Israel,” and requested that the official document designate the birth place by the country. Naomi’s request was not abnormal; it is standard operating procedure for Americans born in other foreign cities. Those born in Rome list Italy as their place of birth, just as those born in Tel Aviv list Israel.

But Naomi’s request was denied. “This is the only group that is being denied the right to say, ‘This is how I want to be described, this is where I was born,’ ” says Alyza Lewin, who, along with her father, Nathan Lewin, makes up the daughter-father legal duo representing the Zivotofskys.

The State Department’s concern is political. “The status of the city of Jerusalem is one of the most sensitive and longstanding disputes in the Arab-Israeli conflict,” the department’s lawyers wrote in their brief to the Court. “For the last 60 years, the United States’ consistent policy has been to recognize no state as having sovereignty over Jerusalem, leaving that issue to be decided in negotiations between the relevant parties with the peace process.” More than 52,000 current U.S. passports list Jerusalem—no country—as the place of birth.

Congress tried to change this passport policy only months before the application for baby Menachem’s passport was submitted. Tucked away in the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003, Congress included the following provision:

RECORD OF PLACE OF BIRTH AS ISRAEL FOR PASSPORT PURPOSES.—For purposes of the registration of birth, certification of nationality, or issuance of a passport of a United States citizen born in the city of Jerusalem, the Secretary shall, upon the request of the citizen or the citizen’s legal guardian, record the place of birth as Israel.

The language could not be clearer: If a passport applicant requests Israel on his passport, and he was born in Jerusalem, his wish must be granted.

And yet for the past nine years, the White House has argued that the decision isn’t Congress’ to make. President George W. Bush signed this piece of legislation—but after disavowing the passport provision with a signing statement arguing that it “impermissibly interferes with the President’s constitutional authority to conduct the Nation’s foreign affairs and to supervise the unitary executive branch … [to] speak for the Nation in international affairs, and determine the terms on which recognition is given to foreign states.”

President Barack Obama’s State Department seeks to continue Bush’s policy on the matter. The department is arguing that enforcing the 2002 law will alter U.S. foreign policy in a way that the executive branch does not intend, sending a message to the Palestinians that the United States has sided with Israel over who gets Jerusalem in a future final-status agreement. The petitioner, on the other hand, contends that the issue at stake is far more limited: The Lewins argue that the congressional act is “an extremely narrow and limited correction of a discriminatory State Department practice.”

It did not always apply only to Jerusalem. Alyza Lewin points to the precedent of Taiwan, toward which the United States has largely maintained a policy of “strategic ambiguity” about the island’s relationship with China. “In 1994,” she explained, “Congress passed a law that said that if individuals born in Taiwan want to put Taiwan down as their place of birth on their U.S. passport, then they should be allowed to put Taiwan.” At the time, the State Department argued that the law would negatively interfere with the executive branch’s foreign policy. Seventeen years later, the petitioners point out, there is “no apparent harm to relations with China” because of the law. The government contends that Zivotofsky is not a parallel case, since the Taiwan policy is “consistent with the United States’ recognition that the People’s Republic of China is the ‘sole legal government of China’ and ‘Taiwan is a part of China.’ ”

So far, the case attracted the most public attention in August, when the White House was caught changing photo captions on its website so that “Jerusalem, Israel” would simply appear as “Jerusalem,” an apparent attempt to conform with the State Department’s position before today’s case. The website scrubbing carried over to the State Department’s own site and other government archives.

The only organization to file an amicus brief in support of the State Department is Americans for Peace Now, a left-wing advocacy group. The Zivotofskys, however, have attracted widespread support, including from the Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, various religious groups of all denominations, members of Congress (at least 28 U.S. senators and 11 members of the House of Representatives), the Zionist Organization of America, and the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, among others.

But despite the popularity of the petitioner’s position, the government will likely win this case. The Court won’t rule that Jerusalem is not in Israel. Rather, it will avoid getting involved in an intra-government squabble between Congress and the White House. And if that happens, then the only person capable of changing the rules to allow Menachem to put Israel on his passport is the president.

At their respective pulpits, physical and virtual, Andy Bachman, senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Marc Tracy, Tablet Magazine’s Scroll blogger, have had a lot to say about the movement since its inception. This week on Vox Tablet, the two join host Sara Ivry to lay out their arguments for and against the movement. (Of course, being liberals, neither man is unequivocal in his position.) [Running time: 27:00.]

On the eve of the 2008 election, Ben Greenman reintroduced A.L. Levine—a traveling salesman turned politician who wins the 1988 Democratic nomination and just might become the country’s first Jewish president in Michael Halberstam’s 1978 novel, The Wanting of Levine. “There’s no point in reading The Wanting of Levine as a shadow history of Barack Obama’s candidacy,” Greenman wrote. “But there’s also no point in detaching it entirely, not when an author has gone to all the trouble of speculating on the national reaction were a major party to nominate a minority candidate.”

Three years later, it is certainly worth a look back at Levine, a character whose Jewishness—defined culturally by Halberstam, like his status as Northerner and businessman—proves central to his hypothetical responsibilities if elected, if not overtly to his campaign. “Can he be a credit to his people?” Greenman prodded. “Can he be a credit to all people and by doing so erase the sense that his people are somehow separate?” Your move, Levine.

Read Baruch Obama, by Ben Greenman

Scheyer was referring to his new team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, the wildly successful basketball organization that signed Scheyer to a two-year contract this summer. Playing at the highest level is something Scheyer has done for years: He led Duke to college basketball’s 2010 national championship as the team’s captain. At a reception for the team at the White House Rose Garden, President Barack Obama called Scheyer his “homeboy from the Chicago area.”

Many think Scheyer has the chops to become one of the best Jewish basketball players ever. At 24 years old, Scheyer has already been honored twice by the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, so it wasn’t surprising that a crowd greeted him at Ben-Gurion Airport when he landed in July. On the day he moved to Israel, immediately after he declared citizenship, the website ynetnews.com published a news story with the headline “ ‘Jewish Jordan’ Jon Scheyer Makes Aliyah.”

There is no Israeli basketball team quite like Maccabi. “Every team is coming at us every night,” Scheyer said. “It’s just like Duke.” It’s the last undefeated club in the Israeli League and one of two unbeatens left in the Adriatic League. What’s more, Israel has never sent a team besides Maccabi to the Euroleague final, but Maccabi has five Euroleague titles of its own. Last season, it lost in the championship.

This isn’t the first time Scheyer has combined Judaism and basketball. Before he joined Duke’s legendary team, Scheyer guided Glenbrook North High School to the 2005 Illinois state championship, the first title for a North Shore suburban school in 27 years. The feat was all the more remarkable for another reason: All five of Glenbrook North’s starters (plus the first player off the bench) were at least half-Jewish. It’s hard to imagine another championship basketball team with a starting lineup that knows the difference between a chest pass and Passover.

Scheyer was raised in the sort of town where two bar mitzvahs per weekend was not uncommon. Scheyer’s father is Jewish, and Scheyer became a man on a November weekend in 2000. “I always joke with him that I’m going to get his bar-mitzvah invitation signed and sell it on eBay,” said Sean Wallis, a captain on Glenbrook North’s championship team, who now works as a consultant in Chicago. The day of his bar mitzvah, in fact, was particularly chaotic for Scheyer’s seventh-grade class. In the afternoon was the sports-themed bar-mitzvah shindig for Zach Kelly, who would go on to become Glenbrook North’s starting forward in 2005; Scheyer’s bash was that night. For party favors, he gave out T-shirts printed with the phrase “Jonathan in the Zone.” His theme was basketball.

How could it not be? Scheyer and his buddies grew up in the Chicago suburbs when Michael Jordan and the Bulls won six NBA championships between 1991 and 1998. “We were really in an age when we didn’t know any different,” said Kelly, who played professional basketball in England last year. “Michael Jordan and the Bulls were the only thing we knew.”

It wasn’t long before Scheyer was forging a profile of his own. He dropped 21 points in his third varsity game and attracted serious attention from colleges as early as his sophomore season. “He was tall and really, really skinny,” said Dave Weber, his high school coach. “I thought he was going to break in half sometimes.” But his lanky frame didn’t stop him from scoring. Scheyer led the team in points and assists as a freshman and finished as an all-state selection the next season. He ended up rewriting Glenbrook North’s record books; his 3,034 points in high school was the fourth most in Illinois history.

It was during his junior year, in Glenbrook North’s improbable run to the state championship, that Scheyer established his bonafides in a Jewish sports community that adores its own. The Spartans were so popular that they received police and fire-truck escorts during their victory parade. “No one ever thought it could happen,” recalled Weber, who still coaches the team. “It was bigger than anything I’ve ever been through in sports.” The allure of Glenbrook North wasn’t just that it was reminiscent of Hickory High School with its own Jimmy Chitwood. It was more like Hoosiers meets The Chosen. Even the rabbi from a local synagogue showed up at the school’s first playoff game with a sedimentary keepsake from Israel. He named it the Rally Rock.

“Jewish, white, none of that matters to me in terms of a basketball player,” Scheyer told me over Skype. “I didn’t want our team to be popular because we were all Jewish. I wanted our team to be talked about because of how great of a team we were.”

The Scheyer frenzy hit a fever pitch at the famed Proviso West Holiday Tournament during his senior year, which happened to fall on the fourth night of Hannukah. By that time, Scheyer had committed to play at Duke for Mike Krzyzewski, another Chicago native, and the coach was part of the standing-room-only crowd that watched what the Chicago Tribune called “the greatest performance in the 45-year history of the Proviso West tournament.” Scheyer scored 21 of his tournament-record 52 points in the game’s final 75 seconds. A Duke improv troupe later filmed a sketch, titled “Jon Scheyer in 75 Seconds,” that features him riding a bicycle into the campus Hillel, emerging in a tallit and a flowing beard, and spinning a dreidel that lands on a gimel. (The clip has been viewed more than 160,000 times on YouTube.)

Maccabi began courting Scheyer before he graduated from Duke last spring. He was coming off a four-year career that he capped with a national championship, but Scheyer went undrafted by NBA teams. While playing in the 2010 NBA Summer League, he suffered an eye injury and moved home for most of the year. He joined an NBA Development League team in February and averaged 14 points per game while wearing protective goggles.

That’s when Maccabi came calling again. With the NBA in a lockout that shows no signs of letting up anytime soon, his friends and family sold him hard on the opportunity to play in Israel. Some of them had visited on Birthright trips and told him how much they cherished their two-week visits. The process took more than a year, but in July Scheyer finally signed with Maccabi.

Starring immediately in Tel Aviv would be like earning All-American honors as a freshman at Duke—not even Scheyer did that—and the transition to the Israeli basketball court hasn’t been as glamorous as his arrival. He has yet to play in Maccabi’s two Euroleague games, and he has averaged about 10 minutes per game in the Adriatic and Israeli Leagues.

“When I was going to Duke, you know it’s going to be such a high level, but you don’t know what to expect until you get to your first practice,” Scheyer said. “No matter how many times you watch, or your teammates have told you, you just need to experience it. The game is played differently. It takes a little time to get adjusted.”

In the meantime, Scheyer says he is savoring Tel Aviv. He insisted that he is not looking past his time abroad, much as he’s striving for an NBA contract some day, and he has been particularly pleased with his new homeland’s culinary fare. “Being a picky eater, to say I like the food here, that says a lot,” Scheyer said. “Italian, a Thai restaurant that’s very good, some American restaurants.”

Then he remembered where he was. “I haven’t had a falafel yet,” he admitted. “I’ll probably be made fun of. I need to have a falafel and shawarma.”

• As expected, UNESCO voted to accept the Palestinian Authority as a full member; as expected, the United States pledged to withhold its funding (as required by law). And UNESCO’s only the start. [NYT]

• Israel is reportedly postponing a broader military operation aimed at the people launching rockets from Gaza in order to give Egypt time to mediate a truce. [AP/WP]

• Israel is not an apartheid state, says some guy named Goldstone. [NYT]

• Baruch Lebovits, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi accused of sexual abuse, is out on bail following numerous procedural irregularities in the case against him. [Forward]

• Dimi Reider argues that whistleblower prosecutions are stifling Israel’s free press. [NYT]

It is déjà vu all over again. The Occupy Wall Street movement has pirouetted onto the political center stage just as France is marking the 75th anniversary of the mass strikes that accompanied the electoral victory of the Popular Front government led by Léon Blum. The many parallels between then and now, particularly in the personalities of Blum and Barack Obama, cast the OWS movement in a new and intriguing light.

To better understand them, we’d do well to look at France in the mid-1930s. The country’s economy, still staggering under the weight of the Great Depression, was in a shambles. The policies of France’s deficit hawks had come home to roost with a vengeance. Entrenched conservative distrust of deficit spending had catastrophic consequences for French workers: By the summer of 1936, at least 2 million men and women—one out of six citizens—were unemployed. The lives of those who still had jobs were flushed with anxiety. The French philosopher Simone Weil, who worked for a spell as a power press operator at a Paris factory in the 1930s, was ordered at the end of her first day at work to double her output if she wished to keep her job. The employer, she told a friend, “makes a favor of allowing us to kill ourselves and we have to say thank you.”

Popular Front poster from 1936. (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

In order to underscore the nation’s economic inequality, leftist politicians denounced the power of the nation’s “two hundred families.” While the phrase at first designated the 200 shareholders who ostensibly oversaw the monetary policies of the Bank of France, it came to crystallize the popular anger of those who suffered the consequences of a global financial meltdown. At the same time, the Taxpayers’ Federation, an organization funded by the manufacturer François Coty—a great fan of Mussolini—declared that France could recover only if the government cut taxes on the wealthy. Given the abysmal state of national debt, successive centrist governments concluded that they had no choice but to retrench. As credit tightened, the building industry cratered, as state and municipal bureaucracies began to shed workers.

In May 1936, a series of strikes upended France. Business and industrial interests were horrified, claiming that the strikes were the work of communists. But the communists were terrified as well: The leaders of the French Communist Party, along with those of the trade unions, were caught flat-footed by the speed and magnitude of the strikes. As the social media of the era—newspapers, radio, and letters—carried news of the rapidly unfolding events, workers elsewhere were mobilized to follow suit. By June, nearly 2 million French workers had either walked out of their workplaces or simply sat down: Along with Edith Piaf and Pastis, interwar France also gave the world the sit-down strike.

By early summer, as the nation lurched to a halt, the party began. The events of May and June had far more in common with Mardi Gras than with Molotov cocktails. Far from establishing soviets along the Seine, workers instead dressed in drag and did the jig on factory floors. Instead of taking the Bastille, millions of protesters took a break. It was a revolution only insofar as the world was, if only temporarily, turned upside down.

The vast and unruly movement known as Occupy Wall Street is yet another American remake of a French original: OWS has grown in political, ideological, and economic circumstances that echo those 75 years ago in France. The character of the strikes is also remarkably similar. Just as American unions and some Democratic politicians have been playing catch-up with OWS, so too were French Communists, Socialists, and trade unions. As for the carnival-like behavior, it is hard to decide which wins first prize for outrageousness: OWS protesters wearing Superman suits (or nothing at all), or muscular Renault workers donning skirts and bras.

There are, of course, differences. The French workers had specific demands: a 40-hour work week, paid vacation, and higher wages. Yet, like the OWS, French workers expressed a more systemic dissatisfaction with the economic and social inequities tolerated by their republican state. And, like America’s Occupiers, they suddenly saw themselves as actors, not passive bystanders, in a political process indifferent to their material needs and social aspirations. Both then and now, protesters were flush with hope and believed, in the famous French phrase of the era, that “tout est possible.”

Perhaps one English translation of that slogan would be “We are the change we are waiting for.” Which brings us to the most striking parallel of all: the two men leading their nations at these critical moments.

Léon Blum, the French prime minister, was a formidable intellect trained in law and a remarkably eloquent writer. He was a committed socialist, but cautious and consensual to a fault. He was, in brief, a humanist who lacked a human touch, a man who embraced the left less for reasons of the heart than of the mind.

Much of this portrait resembles Barack Obama: His sharp analytical mind, his tendency to didacticism, and his attachment to deliberation match Blum’s character. So too does his ethnic background. Blum was not just the first socialist to become prime minister, but also the first Jew. He immediately became the target of the interwar equivalent of our own “birthers.” French pundits and politicians questioned Blum’s Frenchness, insisting he was instead Hungarian. Their accusations and attacks proved so distracting that they forced Blum to publish an open letter in a newspaper, with documents at hand, titled “I am French.”

The novelist and political observer André Gide’s remark about Blum—“He is never sure, he is always seeking; too much intelligence and not enough character”—has also been echoed by supporters of the current American president. But as historian Tony Judt noted, this was Blum’s strength as well as his weakness. Allergic to dogma, Blum recognized the provisional nature of most political truths, yet never lost sight of his particular brand of socialism, believing that all human beings have basic rights, including that of dignity.

Yet Blum’s moment was short-lived. In June, he used the strikes as a stick, forcing French industrialists to accept all the demands made by the striking workers. It was a remarkable moment—too remarkable, tragically. Historians take Blum to task for doing both too much—by hiking up wages and shortening the work week—and too little by refusing to devalue the franc until it was too late. It’s a very similar situation to the reaction of our own left and right to Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan. Ultimately, the resistance of French banks and the massive flight of capital overwhelmed Blum’s reforms. A year after he came to office, France’s first Jewish prime minister was forced to resign. It turned out that everything was not possible.

The institutions that challenged Blum are, of course, the very same ones whose power and apparent immunity are now being challenged by the carnival we call OWS. Just as the expectations stirred by the strikes in France were probably too great an aspiration to be met by any government, so too might this be the case with the hopes raised by the men and women, young and old, employed and unemployed now occupying public spaces across the country. But as Blum might have told Obama, this is no reason not to take a stand—one more forthright and determined than he himself took.

It was entirely different for Ben-Gurion. The state he led from its birth until 1963, with a fateful gap in 1954 and 1955, had to be created from the ground up, and he had to do much of the creating. The British left abruptly without any organized handover, evacuating their camps and abandoning their offices after taking away all removable equipment. To find clerks and office furniture was nowhere near as hard as finding weapons for an army, air force, and navy—and double-quick because Arab armies were already advancing. Stringent British and U.S. embargoes in the name of peace (with the already equipped Arab armies, including the British-officered Arab Legion left unmentioned) were meant to ensure the expected outcome. But even that near-insurmountable challenge was overcome under Ben-Gurion’s leadership by a variegated cast of unlikely characters that briefly included Josef Stalin (to hurt the British), the irrepressible Hank Greenspun of Las Vegas, the frighteningly smart secret agent Ehud Avriel, a British gentile RAF pilot who could fly any transport any distance, and others worthy of full-scale biographies.

Yet the greatest obstacle to the creation of the Jewish state were the Jews, or rather the Zionist leaders themselves. For all their talents, many were so conditioned by deeply rooted mental habits of dependence that they simply did not understand the absolute imperative of possessing state power. Some, including the religious, could not bring themselves to accept its inevitable military aspect. Guns were for Cossacks, not Jews—an attitude, or mere pose, that long lingered and indeed lingers still in benighted recesses, such as the editorial office of the New York Review of Books.

As late as the Zionist Congress of 1946, held in Basel in the immediate aftermath of the most terrible demonstration of the ultimate survival risk of statelessness, Ben-Gurion met strong resistance when he pressed for a maximum effort to secure an independent state in Palestine. He was the leading Labor party politician, head of the World Zionist Organization, and chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which actually built settlements and funded most Jewish institutions, including the Haganah militia. But in Basel, where everything had to be done democratically, the immensely prestigious Chaim Weizmann, who valued his easy access to the halls of the mighty in Britain as elsewhere, preferred continued British control, even as the British continued to block Jewish immigration into Palestine (nobody was impeding the many Arab migrants). As for the very strong Marxist contingent, newly reinforced by the reflected glory of the victorious Red Army, with its powerful kibbutz movement, and the coolest youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair, ennobled by leading the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, it wanted an indefinite U.N. mandate over the whole of Palestine to pursue the binationalism that some still long for. Then there were the non-socialist Zionists, many of whom much preferred caution to action. Outside the Congress, Menachem Begin’s Revisionists were very eager for a state, but only over the whole of Palestine, a non-starter.

Shimon Peres’ new Nextbook Press biography of Ben-Gurion earns its price in its very first pages by describing what happened next in Basel. Though there are much fuller accounts, Peres was actually there as head of the Labor party’s youth wing and as Ben-Gurion’s aide, and he saw it all at closest range. For Ben-Gurion, there was but one way of reconciling his utter certainty that the Jews needed a state with the widespread opposition he was encountering at the Congress.

Peres recounts that Ben-Gurion’s formidable wife Paula suddenly rushed down into the basement where the Labor caucus was meeting to tell a startled delegate that her husband had gone mad (“meshugge gevoren”). Instead of settling for a weasel-worded resolution, Ben-Gurion announced he was packing his bags and leaving Basel to start forming a new Zionist organization that would pursue independent statehood unhesitatingly. Faced with that, his many opponents among the Basel delegates dropped their objections and started working to make it happen.

***

For a true leader in a great crisis, the whole world is but a very narrow bridge, and the only important thing is not to be afraid, to reject ignominious retreat and useless face-saving compromises alike. When Ben-Gurion came to the narrow bridge at Basel, it was only his supremely courageous resolve to abandon the Congress and start all over again that won the day.

Ronald Reagan came to his narrow bridge at the very outset of his presidency. European leaders, his own secretary of State, academia, and the quality press were all telling him that in the nuclear age there was no alternative to coexistence with the USSR, hence it was imperative to resume talks leading to a summit meeting with Brezhnev. Having campaigned against détente, Reagan was being told to resume it—and quickly. Ignoring the establishment, Reagan flatly refused, embarking instead on a tenacious campaign to delegitimize the Soviet Union. His “evil empire” speech that must now be judged prophetic was universally ridiculed at the time.

Yesterday Israel approved a deal, seemingly hastened by the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap, which will free Grapel in exchange for 25 Egyptian prisoners. And if all goes according to plan, Grapel will be released Thursday. Some former U.S. intelligence officials believe Grapel may really have been an Israeli spy, but Israeli soldiers, never mind the Jewish state’s clandestine agents, are seldom returned alive. The Egyptians know he’s not a spy, but he’s a valuable card anyway, which is why they captured him. It is logic and behavior befitting a terrorist organization.

If Hamas and Hezbollah can get the Zionist entity to release their associates, the thinking goes, why can’t Egypt’s interim ruling body, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, do the same for Egyptian prisoners? The problem in the Middle East, then, isn’t that the Islamists are on the verge of taking over and thereby transforming Arab societies. The problem is that these societies are already governed by the passions that make the Islamists so popular.

Longtime U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt, would not have dreamed of taking an American citizen hostage. It’s true that things have changed in Egypt, but let’s not overstate the case: Grapel’s arrest is not a sign that the Supreme Council of Armed Forces is joining hands with Iranian-backed terror organizations. The purpose of the exchange, from Cairo’s perspective, is to placate the mobs that have already laid siege to the Israeli embassy, burned Coptic churches, and may in time cause even worse problems for the ruling military council. The way to calm the situation, they believe, is to show that Egypt’s problems are manufactured by the West, and that Cairo’s ever-competent rulers managed to unearth a plot before the foreigners could once again unleash their mayhem.

Why Cairo chose Grapel as its test case seems to be merely a matter of convenience. Yes, the Queens native served in the Israeli Defense Forces in the 2006 war, where he was injured fighting Hezbollah. Yet the fact that Grapel, a law student at Emory University in Atlanta, had taken a job in Cairo in May with St. Andrew’s Refugee Services, a Christian organization that mostly provides legal aid for Sudanese refugees, is perhaps what first attracted the attention of Egyptian authorities. African refugees—Christians and Muslims—are a sensitive issue for the Egyptians, not least because their mistreatment in Egypt has caused many of them to flee to friendlier vistas across the border in Israel.

While some believe the Shalit deal set the precedent for the Grapel exchange, it’s a mistake to see the two cases in the same light. For Israel, the point of freeing a thousand prisoners in exchange for one is not merely a moral calculation, but also a form of strategic communication intended to dishearten Israel’s foes. The message it sends is not only that Israel values life above all, but that the Jewish state can afford to put its enemies back on the street because in the end, no matter how numerous, those enemies have no chance of winning.

The Grapel deal is something else—straight-up extortion with domestic political benefits. For Egypt, getting prisoners released for Grapel is more like Libya winning intelligence agent Abdelbasset al-Megrahi’s freedom from the Scottish government as part of an oil deal in 2009, or Iran’s kidnapping three American hikers and accusing them of espionage two years ago. Here the point is to face down the West publicly, and generate popular support at home. The message is: Western actors are trying to sabotage the people of the Middle East, but the ruling authorities are proud heroes of resistance who have exposed the designs of the imperialist or Zionist oppressors and have made them publicly pay for their crimes.

The Egyptian army probably didn’t want to get into this game of political extortion, but with Mubarak’s downfall it became necessary to win the affections of a very demanding audience: Egypt’s middle-class urban youth, a constituency to whom Mubarak never paid much attention, which is precisely what led to his demise. The Obama Administration believed that Mubarak’s exit would have little effect on an Egyptian political system still dominated by an army dependent on $1.3 billion in American military aid each year, but the problem should now be as obvious to the White House as it was to the Egyptian military from the outset. As angry as the army was at Mubarak for trying to install his son in the presidential palace, it also understood it was dangerous to give the mob a de facto veto that would allow it to shape the Egyptian political system however it saw fit.

That vision, unfortunately, is very popular in the Muslim-majority Middle East. It’s generally anti-Israeli and anti-American, to be sure, but Israel and the United States are details in a larger architecture of resentment of the West.

Hatred of the West, and of its local proxies, has been a central part of political Islam’s program from the outset. The Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1928 in the midst of Great Britain’s 72-year-old occupation of Egypt. But long before London took an active role in Egyptian politics, 18th- and 19th-century Muslim intellectuals and activists counseled the masses to be suspicious of the West. Take their science and technology, they advised, but forgo the West’s secular values, which undermine you and your faith.

Today, those who advocate for engagement with Islamists argue that groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Nahda Party have matured and are now willing to play by the rules and act like democrats. The Islamists may not like the West, but they have no choice but to uphold agreements and partake in the international system. On the other side of the debate, skeptics fear that the Islamists are talking out of both sides of their mouth, and once in office they’ll never willingly forsake power. But both of these arguments miss the point.

Yes, Islamism is already turning out to be the most powerful political current across the region. But the attraction of Islamism is not simply that it appeals to conservative and traditional Muslim societies, but that it draws freely on the sources of resentment that have been part of the political language of the region for more than two centuries. It was not Egypt’s Islamists who led the charge against the Israeli embassy in September, but young and nominally secular Egyptians. And it is that mob, potentially in the many millions, with whom Egypt’s ruling body was currying favor when it arrested Grapel.

The other strikes me as a bigger deal, especially as we enter an election year early next month. The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee jointly issued a “National Pledge for Unity on Israel” in order “to encourage other national organizations, elected officials, religious leaders, community groups and individuals to rally around bipartisan support for Israel while preventing the Jewish State from becoming a wedge issue in the upcoming campaign season.” The Republican Jewish Coalition responded to the statement with a strong rejection. “Allowing the American people to see where candidates stand, pro and con on critical issues, is the hallmark of our free and democratic political system,” said head Matthew Brooks. “For this reason, the RJC will not be a signer to this pledge. This effort to stifle debate on U.S. policy toward Israel runs counter to this American tradition.” Yikes!

Given President Obama’s political missteps when it comes to Israel, it seems undeniable that a call to prevent Israel “from becoming a wedge issue” is pro-Democratic in effect, and so likely in intent. The last time somebody prominently played the “Israel should be nonpartisan” card, it was Democrats bickering with Republicans in front of Prime Minister Netanyahu in May.

At the same time, much of the statement reads as “politics stops at the water’s edge”-type boilerplate, and indeed the Jewish establishment has historically been especially adept at instilling a view of Israel that crosses party lines; even Commentary, which takes the RJC’s position (and which, I can’t resist adding, was for most of its life published by the AJC), admires much of the pledge’s sentiment for that precise reason.

Moreover, the AJC and especially the ADL are not the first two organizations you would peg as Democratic or Obama shills. The ADL is a group seen as centrist or even center-right on Israel and likely has funders that reflect that. If this is the sort of thing it is calling for, then it could reflect a genuine backlash at the recent hyper-politicization of the Israel issue at the hands of groups like ECI that surrounded events such as the U.N. General Assembly and the special election in New York.

For pro-Israel Americans of a right-wing, Republican bent, the conundrum is this: You don’t want to so successfully cast President Obama as Israel’s foe and then have him win re-election. Because then the American people will have elected an anti-Israel candidate; in that scenario, the president owes you nothing; worse, he would have been elected despite being who you say he is, and therefore his mandate, if anything, would be to do all the things the right says he secretly wants to do, like divide Jerusalem, support the terrorists, etc.

I sense the pledge is a warning shot: At some point, it says, politicization of Israel could cross the appropriate line. At the same time, the RJC’s easy dismissal of the pledge proves that we haven’t even approached that point yet. If and when it’s AIPAC pushing the “water’s edge” line, that’s when you’ll see GOP backtracking.

UPDATE: After J Street Declares War, ECI Punches Back [Washington Jewish Week]
National Pledge for Unity on Israel [ADL]
RJC Rejects ADL/AJC Pledge: ‘We Will Not Be Silence’ on Israel [RJCHQ]
Earlier: Why Israel Makes For a Lousy Partisan Issue
N.Y.-9 Voters Think Obama ‘Not Pro-Israel’

It’s strange the White House would miss an opportunity to pose as Israel’s worried and protective friend and ally, especially facing a presidential election campaign that some worry is losing Jewish support and money. After all, administration figures like Vice President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta can’t insist strongly enough that Israel is isolated from the rest of the world and that the United States is the only one in its corner.

Amid all the different theories concerning the Iran plot—that the Iranians aren’t really behind it because they’re too smart, or that it was orchestrated by a rogue element of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards looking to embarrass Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—it is perhaps most useful to look at this recent effort as the final test Iran will face before it gets a nuclear weapon. Seen this way, it is clear that the White House wouldn’t want to highlight Israel’s spot in Iran’s crosshairs, because no matter how many times President Barack Obama tells Israeli officials and Jewish audiences that an Iranian nuclear bomb would be unacceptable, his administration’s real policy position has just been exposed. A demand for more sanctions against Tehran in response to an operation intended to slaughter hundreds of American allies in the U.S. capital—in a series of attacks that would have also caused hundreds of American casualties—makes it clear to everyone, especially the Iranians, that Washington isn’t going to do anything serious about stopping Iran’s nuclear-weapons program.

Because Washington doesn’t want to do anything about Iran, it has little choice but to ignore it—or deny its machinations. Let’s look at the Iranian record in Iraq, and how former and current U.S. officials chose to explain it away. In 2007, Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he doubted that the Iranian government knew about the Iranian-manufactured IEDs killing American soldiers. The same year, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and a National Security Council staffer under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, claimed that the “The involvement of these outside actors”—that is, Iran-backed militias—“is not likely to be a major driver of violence” in Iraq. And most recently, Biden told a veterans group last summer that “Iranian influence in Iraq is minimal. It’s been greatly exaggerated.”

This gives rise to the notion that the Iranians are endowed with supernatural powers that allow them to wage operations around the world so clever and sophisticated in their planning and execution that they barely show any fingerprints. But it is not Washington’s lack of evidence that creates this idea; rather it is absence of will.

The 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack of the U.S. embassy there the year before, as well as the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, all bore the imprint of the Islamic Republic. The 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran and the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie clearly did. Indeed, the whole point of Tehran’s policy of terror is to lay claim to its actions and dare the United States to respond—which Washington doesn’t. What Ayatollah Khomeini said about the embassy hostage crisis more than 30 years ago still holds true: “The Americans can’t do a damn thing about it.” Admitting Iran’s involvement in repeated acts of terror would require the United States to act—something American policymakers believe that we are unable to do.

But the reality is that the United States can do something about it, if Washington wanted to. American taxpayers would be rightly aggrieved that our defense budget is so high if our elected leaders can’t stop an adversary that speedboats to harass a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf and includes Toyota pick-up trucks in its order of battle. Surely the far-superior American military is capable of bringing Iran’s armed forces to heel.

The problem is that Obama’s White House, like George W. Bush’s, fears that taking too active a role against Iran and its assets will put U.S. military personnel at risk of Iranian retaliation in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to some U.S. intelligence estimates, Shiite Iran is responsible for far more American deaths and injuries in America’s two Middle East combat theaters than al-Qaida or other Sunni factions. That means that American strategists, civilian and military, no longer consider the U.S. military a deterrent to Iranian actions; rather, the presence of American troops in theaters where the Iranians also operate has effectively deterred the United States from taking action against Tehran.

U.S. involvement in the Middle East and Washington’s policy of not confronting Iran about its openly aggressive behavior have created a situation in which our troops are now effectively being held hostage, a situation that Iran underlines with each new act of aggression and terror. Which is why U.S. policymakers cannot recognize the pending withdrawal from Iraq—or what is effectively the liberation of many thousands of American hostages—as an opportunity to go after Iran. Instead, Washington will continue to wage clandestine operations against Tehran—like killing Iranian nuclear scientists and sabotaging Iranian centrifuges with a computer worm. None of those operations will stop the Islamic Republic from getting the bomb—rather, that secret war, presumably conducted in tandem with Israel, is meant only to deter the Jewish state from attacking Iran in earnest.

Yes, the Iranians hate the Saudis, who reciprocate the sentiment, and the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, targeted in the disrupted plot, seems especially detested by the Islamic Republic. As the WikiLeaks cables showed, it was al-Jubeir who reminded U.S. diplomats that Saudi King Abdullah “told you to cut off the head of the snake,” meaning Iran. The point of the Iranian plot was to show that the Americans are incapable of protecting their allies, even in the U.S. capital. But as mad as the Saudis are at Washington for not doing anything about the Iranians, sometime down the road they’ll be prepared to grit their teeth and cut a bargain with their foe. There is no such deal in the offing for the Jewish state.

More to the point, the Iranians recognize that unlike Saudi Arabia, Israel is capable of doing something about the Islamic Republic’s ambitions. In the last five years, Jerusalem has waged war against two of Tehran’s clients, Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 and Hamas in the winter of 2008-09. Also, it’s worth remembering that the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 attack on a Jewish community center there were retaliations for Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s then-leader Abbas Mussawi. (Iran and Hezbollah left their fingerprints on those operations, too. The issue in Argentina was not insufficient evidence but police and prosecutorial incompetence.)

If the only country able and willing to go after Iran’s nuclear program is Israel, the only one who is capable of stopping the Israelis, Tehran realizes, is the United States. And so Iran and the United States now find themselves in one of the Middle East’s oddest alliances, with the United States unwittingly aiding Iran in its effort to get the bomb. If this happens, Tehran will use this new weapon to remake the political map of the Middle East in ways that are very unlikely to benefit the United States, and will directly threaten the survival of its closest ally.

• Countries ranging from the United States to European nations to Turkey berated Russia and China for vetoing the U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria this week. [AP/WP/AP/WP]

• Field Marshal Tantawi, Egypt’s de facto ruler, announced that the governing military would not field a presidential candidate in the forthcoming elections. [NYT]

• Following a report that he had pushed for clemency for Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard only to be rejected by President Obama, Vice President Biden agreed to meet with Jewish-American leaders on the issue. [JTA]

• Nick Kristof apportions a significant amount of the blame for Israel’s current woes to Prime Minister Netanyahu. [NYT]

• Apple impresario and inventor Steve Jobs died at 56. He was inspired to work in personal computing after reading a 1971 article by Tablet Magazine contributor Ron Rosenbaum. [NYT]

In spite of the Obama Administration’s snubs and slights, in the wake of the U.N. meeting Oren believes that “relations between the two countries are closer than any time in the last two and a half years.” Differences between the Obama Administration and Netanyahu regarding the peace process have been “tactical,” he told me. “Both agreed on the principle of two states, but the question was how to get there.”

Oren says that the White House and Netanyahu’s office closely coordinated their efforts to dissuade Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas from making his unilateral bid for statehood, which the United States also sees as contrary to its national interests. Both sides of the aisle in the U.S. House of Representatives support President Barack Obama’s stance on the matter. Rep. Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat, has already threatened to suspend aid to the Palestinian Authority. I asked Oren if he thinks that’s a good idea, given that the relative stability currently prevailing in the West Bank is generally attributed to American financial support. “We believe that if the Palestinians breach their commitments, avoid negotiations, and make an end-run around the peace process, there should be consequences,” the ambassador answered, suggesting that cutting off aid to the P.A. is hardly anathema to Israel.

Oren said his transition from life as an academic with opinions to being a statesman with official policy positions is a little like going from “writing slam poetry to composing rhymed haiku—it takes a lot of discipline.” He is certainly disciplined about his workout regiment: The 56-year-old New Jersey native looks about as trim as he did when he won a gold medal in rowing at the Maccabiah Games in 1977. Oren said he still rows every day, adding that the only way to keep up with a daily grind that includes a busy evening social schedule is to stay in shape.

Oren had to renounce his U.S. citizenship in 2009 when he accepted Netanyahu’s offer to take the job he’d dreamed of since childhood, but he said there was little in academia (including teaching posts at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown) or the think-tank world (the Shalem Center in Jerusalem) that prepared him for the challenges of his current job.

“Sure, I had a couple advantages,” Oren admitted. “I knew America very well. I not only grew up here; I also knew about American foreign policy from a historical perspective. For instance, I knew that this was the third time that America had been involved in Libya, and that back in 1801 Thomas Jefferson was talking about bringing democracy to the Libyans.”

Even though Oren understood that America’s relationship with Israel was the closest and most multifaceted relationship with a foreign country in post-World War II history, “It’s hard,” he said, “to understand the vast breadth and depth of the position until you’ve actually begun it.” He pointed to his desk and explained that the innocuous-looking piece of furniture is the “nexus among 535 members of Congress, the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, the U.S. intelligence community, the American Jewish community, and American churches” on one hand and, on the other, “the Israeli government, the IDF, the Knesset, 30 ministers, and Israeli society and culture.”

In the American context, at least, Israel is anything but isolated as far as the ambassador is concerned. He’s hosted first-time events for Americans not typically known as natural friends of Israel, like the gay community. Oren explained that Israel isn’t merely a regional leader in gay rights—not a particularly special distinction, given that many of its neighbors consider homosexuality a sin punishable by death—but also an international leader. “We never had anything like ‘don’t ask don’t tell’,” he noted.

Oren hosted the Israeli Embassy’s first iftar last month, with 65 Muslim leaders in attendance, and he recently reached out to the Muslim community at the University of California, Irvine. Last week, 10 Muslim students in the so-called Irvine 11 were found guilty of misdemeanor charges for disrupting Oren’s February talk at the school. “That was the community I was intending to address,” said Oren. “I issued another letter to the students at Irvine and said I was willing to go back, and discuss anything, everything, as long as they were civil. The offer still stands.”

The Israel of the popular international imagination is the one held responsible for alienating Turkey when Israeli commandos boarded a Gaza-bound boat in May 2010 and killed nine activists after being attacked. It is apparently lost on most of Israel’s critics that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has deliberately turned his country’s foreign policy against the Jewish state in order to project power throughout the Muslim world. Still, Oren said, “It’s hurtful because Turkey was a long-standing ally.” Moreover, explained the ambassador, “There’s the friendship between Jews and Turks that goes back hundreds of years. It was Turkey that took in the Jews when we were banished from Spain.”

Losing Turkey has opened up other opportunities for Israel, like building strategic relationships with longtime Turkish adversaries Greece and Bulgaria. Still, Israel’s immediate region, Oren said, “is a particularly flammable Middle East, where all our assumptions as of a year ago are called into question.” Egypt is perhaps the biggest wild card, and Oren demurred when I asked what the consequences might have been if the staff of the Israeli embassy in Cairo hadn’t been rescued by Egyptian commandos. But he did challenge reports that the Egyptian military neglected to answer Netanyahu’s calls. “We eventually got through to the Egyptians,” he said, adding that Israeli officials are in close regular contact with Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which rules the country. “They are as committed to keeping the peace as we are,” he said.

Most daunting—for Egypt and Israel—is the prospect of a weak and disorganized democratic current in that country coming up against a well-funded and well-disciplined Islamist movement. That movement includes the Muslim Brotherhood and assorted Salafist organizations, which, said Oren, “want to see a universal sharia state in the Middle East, and one without Israel in it.”

Syria is one of the few places in the region where Oren and Israeli officials are guardedly optimistic. “The opportunity there,” he said, “is seeing a leader who is not Bashar, weakening the link with Iran and dealing a blow to Hezbollah.”

Israel’s key strategic concern remains Iran. “The Iranians have overcome their technical difficulties and are experimenting with missiles capable of reaching throughout the region and beyond,” Oren said. An Iranian bomb, he added, is “a game-changer. We have some time to stop them but not much time.”

When I asked if the Arab Spring has pushed concerns over Iran out of the news cycle over the last six months, the ambassador looked at me incredulously. “We’ve been shouting about Iran as much as possible,” he said. “And in this country, too, there’s a firm awareness of the threat posed by Iran.”

I mentioned a recent poll, conducted by the American Jewish Committee, which found that among Jewish voters a plurality of 45 percent disapproved of how the White House has handled the Iranian nuclear issue. Oren said that those polled don’t understand what’s going on behind the scenes. “The administration’s policy has unfolded,” he said. “First, it was the president believed an Iranian nuclear program was unacceptable, which morphed into Obama is determined to stop the nuclear program, which reflected substantive movement. Now the U.S. is ratcheting up sanctions. Our policy and the U.S.’s is that all options are on the table—and we remain committed to that policy.”

• Note to John Mearsheimer: when you’ve lost Andrew Sullivan … [The Daily Dish]

• Koch elaborates on his endorsement. He spoke with President Obama last week: “I said to him: ‘Mr. President, that’s the one guy [Gov. Perry] you won’t have to worry about. Jews will never vote for anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution.’” [NYT City Room]

• Jason Gay chats with Scroll hero Larry Merchant. [WSJ]

• All about the TriBeCa SuKaAh. [NYT City Room]

• Why putting the Dead Sea Scrolls online is more than just neat, but actually really important and useful. [Wired Cloudline]

President Obama wishes us a happy new year. Spoiler: Israel comes up!

The piece was just the latest bit of evidence of the rift in the Republican Party between the establishmentarians who once defined it and the right-wingers who have largely taken it over. And perhaps no one in Washington is more sensitive to that rift than David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter and prominent neoconservative.

A few weeks after Lofgren’s piece was published, I called Frum to ask what he thought of it. “I think there’s a lot of truth to it,” he said. It’s a “little too much of a stark morality play,” he added. “The story I would tell is not of a golden age that ended in 2009. What I see is a gradual accumulating breakdown.”

Even with the caveats, it was a striking admission. Frum, a man who dedicated years of his life to the GOP, has, over the course of President Barack Obama’s tenure, been inching toward the conclusion that his party is full of cranks and an obstacle to the normal working of government. He’s still a conservative, he says, and he still wants the Republican Party to succeed. But as the Tea Party has come to dominate the GOP, Frum has been transformed in a remarkably short period of time from right-wing royalty to apostate.

Frum’s website, Frum Forum, which launched on the day of Obama’s inauguration, is a quixotic outpost of sober, anti-populist, pragmatic conservatism far removed from the prevailing tone of the conservative media. His writing, once aggressive and hyper-confident—he co-authored a book with Richard Perle in December 2003 titled An End to Evil—now seems almost elegiac.

Meanwhile, his wife, Danielle Crittenden, once best-known for her criticism of feminism, has now turned her fire on the right. In a 2010 piece defending her husband from his conservative detractors, she blasted “the thuggish demagoguery of the Limbaughs and the Becks … a trait we once derided in the old Socialist Left.” She recently took a job working for the liberal doyenne Arianna Huffington as managing blog editor of the Huffington Post Canada. Though they were once a conservative power couple—Frum says they have a “mind meld”—it’s no longer clear where the Frums belong. “I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog,” Frum says. “I have three dogs.”

Frum is deeply critical of Obama in his writings, but his criticism often dovetails with the discontents of the left rather than the fevered accusations of the right. While many conservatives see the president as a socialist bent on radically transforming American life, Frum faults Obama for being passive and equivocal in the face of an obstructionist Congress. “A big part of my criticism of him is simply on the grounds of being good at the job of being president,” Frum explains. “The president has to be effective, and he has to use the instrumentalities of presidential power.”

Had Lyndon Johnson been in the White House during the debt-ceiling debate, Frum argued to me, Johnson might have called powerful congressmen into a back room and explained how the administration would allocate funds when the money started running out. Frum imagined him taking charge: “I just want you all to know that any bill with a South Carolina ZIP code, that’s going to be a lower priority. Any bill with a Texas ZIP code, that’s going to be a lower priority. Any bill with a California or New York ZIP code? That’s going to be a high priority.” Obama clearly has no taste for such hardball. Frum is one of very few Republicans who finds this disappointing.

Frum often seems to share the liberal perception of the Republican base as febrile and unhinged—and he’s unafraid to say so publicly. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 2009 about various anti-Obama conspiracy theories, he denounced the “wild accusations and the paranoid delusions coming from the fever swamps.” In Canada’s National Post this August, he wrote that Michele Bachmann’s “religiously grounded rejection of the American state finds a hearing with many more conventional conservatives radicalized by today’s hard economic times.”

Of course, the right-wing populism of the Tea Party is hardly a new thing. And Frum himself hasn’t always been turned off by the conservative id—quite the opposite. He served the proudly anti-intellectual George W. Bush and then painted an admiring portrait of him in the 2003 book The Right Man, concluding that the president’s courage and rectitude trumped his tendency to be “dogmatic” and “ill-informed.” It’s true that the GOP has moved even further rightward in recent years. But Frum has changed too, and reading him one often senses a man in the midst of a painful ideological evolution.

***

Born in Canada to successful parents—his father was a wealthy real-estate developer, his mother a well-known broadcast journalist—Frum came of age in the 1970s, a time he chronicled in his 2000 book, How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life—For Better or Worse. It was a time when liberalism seemed calcified, unable to adjust its deepest assumptions in the face of rising social disorder. “One of the things that moved a lot of people in my cohort to the right was the encounter with fossilized thinking on the liberal left,” he says. Neoconservatives fancied themselves clear-eyed realists, unwilling to be bound by dishonest pieties and cant.

Flash forward to 2010, when Frum was fired from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, for disparaging Republican intransigence on health-care reform. Frum was not, it is important to note, advocating liberal policies. Rather, he was pointing out that Obama’s health-care reform plan drew on ideas that came out of the Heritage Foundation, another conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. Frum argued that if Republicans took part in the process of reform, they could push the resulting law in a more conservative direction. “David subscribes to old-fashioned notions like when your ideas have an opportunity to make it into law that you see that as a good thing,” says Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein. “A lot of people don’t if the other party is going to be the one with its name on the bill.”

Of course, it’s not as if Frum was a political innocent, suddenly shocked to his senses by the discovery that partisanship could trump civic duty in Washington. His conflict with his former confreres goes beyond tactics. Unlike many conservatives, he’s keenly aware that our current economic catastrophe began under Republican leadership. And unlike many conservatives, he’s chastened by it.

“A lot of conservatives are trying to cope with the disappointing economic results of the first decade of the 21st century, and the final catastrophe of 2008,” he says. “It’s sobering that part of that decade saw the longest period of unified Republican power at the national level since the 1920s.” Some conservatives are coping through denial: “Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are now trying to move the economic crisis forward in time,” in order to lay the blame at Obama’s feet, argues Frum. Others have doubled down on their orthodoxies. Frum shifted his thinking.

In April, he published a piece on his website titled “Two Cheers for the Welfare State,” the culmination of a seven-part response to “Beyond the Welfare State,” a National Affairs essay by Yuval Levin. Frum’s piece explained how the economic crisis prompted his move away from the “radical free-market economics I embraced in the late 1970s.”

“In the aftermath of the catastrophe, the free-market assumption and expectation that an unemployed person could always find work somewhere has been massively falsified: at the trough of this recession, there were almost 6 jobseekers in the U.S. for every unfilled job,” he wrote. “Nothing like such a disparity had been seen since the 1930s. The young faced the worst job odds. … GK Chesterton once wrote that we should never tear down a fence until we knew why it had been built. In the calamity after 2008, we rediscovered why the fences of the old social insurance state had been built.”

Frum has come to embrace some quintessentially liberal ideas about the role of chance as opposed to virtue in economic fortune. “Success is not always a matter of luck,” he says. “But as I get older, even the ability to work hard is itself a product of luck. Being born with a certain set of mental attributes, brain chemistry. Every once in a while you encounter a little kid who’s not that likable. Their life is going to be so much worse because they’re not that likable. Did they ask to be not likable?”

And yet, despite all of this, he remains a committed Republican. Frum hopes for a President Mitt Romney who will govern the country as a technocratic moderate, as he did Massachusetts. (A record, of course, Romney is now running from.) “There’s a style and a sensibility in the Republican Party right now that I find myself removed from,” he says. But, he insists, “you can do more good for the country by working for a better Republican Party than by leaving it to the extremists. What have they done to deserve that inheritance?”

Yet the power of individuals to define a political party, or a political movement, only goes so far. Despite Frum’s devotion to the GOP, the gulf between his ideas and actually existing Republicanism may not always be bridgeable. He can barely countenance the idea that the 2012 Republican nominee might be Rick Perry, and he is convinced the Tea Party phenomenon is more transitory than it seems. But what if it’s not? What if the choice comes down to Obama or Perry? Could he really vote Republican then? “As a parent of teenagers,” he says, “I’ve gotten very good at postponing difficult questions.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu returned the favor, appearing on the Meet the Press and insisting he did not want to get tied up in American domestic politics—which, if you look at his actions last May, isn’t actually true, meaning it was his way of making nice with the Obama administration. “They’re all friends of Israel,” he said of the Republican presidential aspirants (as well as Obama). And he took additional care to denounce his own Likud colleague (albeit rival) Danny Danon for appearing with Gov. Perry last week.

And if you don’t think Israeli and U.S. leaders are working on their frequently acrimonious relationship, take a look at Eli Lake’s inaugural Newsweek blockbuster (bunker-buster?), reporting that the administration, through the thick and thin of the diplomatic relationship, has continued the trend of increasing military-to-military cooperation, and has even sold Israel bunker-busting bombs—weapons that would be mighty useful if Israel found itself wanting to destroy, say, underground Iranian nuclear weapons facilities. I don’t come to slight Lake’s reporting—he’s one of the very best, and some of the details concerning the hardware transacted no doubt is stuff that he, and we, aren’t supposed to know (especially since a WikiLeaks-released cable reported that neither side wanted the sales to become public). But his piece does fit into the narrative the nascent Obama re-election campaign is trying to tell when it comes to Israel, and it would make sense if that was the result of the Israelis trying to make nice with the folks who just got their backs at the U.N., and are continuing to do so with regard to the peace process.

This feels like a zany week, as opposed to the seriousness of last, so let’s close with Perry dancing with Chabad rabbis (it comes toward the end). Who said he’s a fair-weather friend?

Palestinians Roll Out Hero’s Welcome for Abbas [NYT]
Plan for Mideast Talks Gets Mixed Reception [WP]
White House Briefs Jews on Quartet [JTA]
Netanyahu: All W.H. Contenders ‘Friends of Israel’ [Politico Live]
Netanyahu Rebukes Perry Ally [Ben Smith]
Let’s Make a Deal! [Newsweek]
Israel and Middle East Falsehoods [Attack Watch]

• Ten members of the so-called Irvine 11, who disrupted Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at the University of California-Davis, were found guilty by a jury of two misdemeanors. [JTA]

• More (since we first linked Wednesday) on how John J. Mearsheimer, of The Israel Lobby fame, has blurbed a book by an honest-to-God, self-proclaimed self-hating Jew who has some particularly troubling things to say about the Holocaust. [Adam Holland]

• Meet Shelly Yachimovich, the new leader of Labor, who has her work cut out for her. [NYT]

• Prompted in part by the Emergency Committee for Israel’s campaign, several Jewish leaders have cautioned that Israel ought not to be turned into a partisan wedge issue. [Forward]

• Last year, at his press availability in New York, President Ahmadinejad served bagels and lox. [The New Yorker News Desk]

• President Clinton major-league disses Prime Minister Netanyahu. [FP The Cable]

• Peggy Noonan praises President Obama on Israel and chastises Gov. Perry. Wait, what? [WSJ]

• A new study found that younger Conservative rabbis may be more politically left than their elders, but are still staunchly pro-Israel. [Forward]

• Prominent Jewish journalist Ruth Ellen Gruber was honored by the government of Poland. [JTA]

• Israel has pledged $1 million to Auschwitz’s upkeep. Which, read the wrong way, comes off sounding pretty ironic. [AP/WP]

• The German fashion company Hugo Boss has formally apologized for its onetime ties to the Nazis. [Imprint]

• What are you doing next Wednesday? You’re watching Rush Hashanah on VH1, of course. [The Daily Swarm]

• Did Germany’s reunification in part lead to a neo-Nazi resurgence? [Jewish Chronicle]

Happy 62nd birthday to a man who is frequently mistaken for a Jew but is always accurately captured when deemed the Boss.

It’s the sort of piece of politicking that goes barely remarked upon. But instead, the American Jewish Committee released a scathing condemnation. “AJC is a strictly non-partisan advocacy organization. But we cannot be silent. This ad is highly objectionable, indeed counter-productive, to its stated aim of supporting Israel,” said executive director David Harris. “As the U.N. session begins and high diplomatic drama is expected, to choose this moment to assail the Obama administration, when it laudably has announced its intention, come what may, to block Palestinian ambitions in the Security Council and work against a Palestinian-initiated resolution in the General Assembly, makes us wonder what are the true goals of the sponsoring group.”

Yesterday, Harris confirmed to me that his statement was highly unusual: “This is not something AJC does in a matter of course. In fact, I can’t remember the last time we responded to a full-page ad in the New York Times, and I’ve been in this position for 21 years.”
Noah Pollak, of ECI, told JTA, “David Harris says that the AJC ‘endorses policies we agree with and opposes those we don’t.’ So we at ECI were curious which of our five suggestions for President Obama Mr. Harris opposes.”

Harris argued that his objection wasn’t to the policies advocated but the timing of the advocacy. “We have been very heavily involved for months in dealing with the challenges that have all bubbled up this week at the U.N. with the Palestinian unilateral strategy,” he said. “We knew and know the essential role being played by the United States in trying to forestall this. And consequently, when I saw the ad on Monday morning, I was shocked that precisely as this critical week begins, this group chooses exactly that time to air its more general grievances about the administration’s policy on Israel. I thought that the timing could not have been worse.” He added, “It was not about partisan politics. It was simply trying to shield the key issue of this month from what I thought was an ill-advised, ill-timed assault.”

Where would he locate Gov. Rick Perry’s prominent criticisms of the administration’s Israel policy, which the Republican candidate also chose to level this week? “I don’t want to get involved and be misunderstood in what’s becoming a very fierce partisan debate over Israel and policy toward Israel,” he said, emphasizing that the AJC does not endorse (or oppose) candidates. “I welcome every candidate’s support for Israel. But in the meantime, we’ve got one president at a time. And I simply must tell you, listening to the president’s speech at the General Assembly today, it was a fine speech, and I don’t think anyone could have asked for more from that speech.

So, timing aside, he is okay with the increasing politicization of the issue? “For me, the goal has always been to try to help ensure that the U.S.-Israel relationship is a core principle of both political parties,” he said. He noted that this would not be the first (nor, he predicted, the last) presidential election in which Israel was a factor. He observed that frequently it is the challenger who attempts to outflank the incumbent on the issue, as is happening in this cycle. “Issues like the American embassy [and moving it to Jerusalem, as Perry seemed to pledge he’d do] would almost inevitably become the campaign pledge of the challenger,” Harris remembered. “And then they have to govern!” (No president has moved the embassy from Tel Aviv.)

“Our goal is to try to ensure that the Israel relationship is a bedrock value of both political parties,” Harris added. “On the other side, I think it’s healthy that the Jewish vote is seen as a vote that candidates of both parties seek. The worst thing in the world would be obscurity.”

ECI Ad
AJC Criticizes Full-Page Ad in Today’s ‘New York Times’ [AJC]
AJC Slams Pro-Israel Group’s Attack on Obama [JTA]
Earlier: Is Obama Vulnerable on the Israel Issue?
The Company Rick Perry Keeps

• This is the moment that will define Mahmoud Abbas’ legacy. [NYT]

• An exhibit of photgraphs of children from around the world opened at Park51, otherwise known as the Ground Zero mosque—which is to say, it opened—to little fanfare or protest. [Forward]

• The TV and radio host Shelly Yacimovich won the Labor Partly leadership. [AP/WP]

• Lars von Trier clarified that he is not sorry for his remark at Cannes identifying with Hitler, only for not making it clear he was joking. [NYT ArtsBeat]

• Judging by the troop buildup, Syrian protesters are due for a new crackdown. [DPA/Haaretz]

• Diplomats are working to craft an apparatus whereby the Palestinian resolution would be postponed in the U.N. Security Council, in order to allow for direct talks to resume. [LAT]

• The remaining hikers in Iran were released. [Yahoo! The Envoy]

• The Obama campaign had a massive conference call yesterday in order to begin its efforts to shore up the Jewish vote. [WP The Plum Line]

• Iran’s ambassador hewed closer to the Hamas line on President Abbas’ plans, declaring U.N. recognition merely one step toward eliminating Israel. [Investigative Project on Terrorism via Ben Smith]

• Turkey has joined sanctions against Syria and is on the verge of erasing relations with its neighbor. [Ynet]

• Sorry for all the Rick Perry stuff today, but this article’s important: Despite extensive ties to Israel, the Texas governor has had real trouble—at least in part because of his strong, public religiosity—cultivating Jewish support stateside. [Politico]

• New reports suggest Jonathan Pollard approached Australia about spying for it before he began his work for Israel. If true, it sorta calls his motives into question (and those weren’t great to begin with). [Ynet]

• The campaign launches a new blog. [Jewish Americans for Obama]

• Iran went on the offensive today at the International Atomic Energy Agency, accusing Israel of assassinating many of its top nuclear scientists. [AP/WP]

• This story about a thief trying to fence a Hasid’s hat is actually a Jackie Mason routine, and nobody can convince me otherwise. [NY Post]

The Emmys provided just the latest instance of the horrible abuse of “Hallelujah.” Let’s go back to the original.