Gaza War Surges As Questions Mount

A Palestinian man looks at the government ministry compound in Gaza City, which was hit by Israeli air strikes. getty iamges

A Palestinian man looks at the government ministry compound in Gaza City, which was hit by Israeli air strikes. getty iamges

by James D. Besser
Washington Correspondent

Pro-Israel groups launched a massive public relations campaign this week supporting Israel’s air offensive aimed at stopping missile attacks from Gaza — and an unspoken target of the hasbara effort was President-Elect Barack Obama, who now faces the prospect of taking office amid another raging Mideast conflict and worldwide demands for strong U.S. action to end it.

In conference calls, one-on-ones with reporters, and press releases, Jewish groups and Israeli diplomats alike reminded the incoming president of his supportive comments during a visit to Sderot this summer. In private, several leaders suggested one factor in the timing of the new Israeli offensive was concern Obama might try to put more limits on the offensive than a Bush administration that has flashed a green light.

Gilbert

Kahn, a Kean University political scientist, said he believes the presidential transition was not a factor in the timing of the Israeli action, but agreed much of the public relations effort since the fighting began has been aimed at the incoming president.

“I’m certain if Hamas didn’t break the cease fire, Israel wouldn’t have gone in,” Kahn said. “But once they did, Israel was determined to do several things. First they wanted to maximize the good will and support they expected from Bush administration. Secondly, they wanted to maximize the likelihood that the incoming administration would continue to display a strong sensitivity to the need for Israeli leaders to defend their citizens in the south, while at the same time setting a positive tone for their relationship with the new administration.”

Evidence of an all-out PR assault was everywhere.

Pro-Israel groups like the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs held daily conference calls with reporters and activists to make the case that that Israel is justified in using military force to stop the ongoing missile barrages from Hamas-controlled Gaza.

The Israeli embassy, according to several reports, was urging congressional officials to issue statements supporting the Israeli action — at press time, several had complied — and was distributing video clips of Obama’s statement in Sderot that “If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that.”

Other groups focused on the international community.

The Israel Project (TIP) was actively mining its contact list of 76,000 reporters in 53 countries.

“I’m not so much worried about the next administration as I am about the Europeans and the United Nations right now,” said TIP founder and president Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi. “Our focus is on building support to allow Israel to win this war, so people don’t have to face rockets on an almost daily basis.”
Implicit in her group’s message is the claim that the 2006 Lebanon war was a failure for Israel because the international community forced an end to the conflict before Israel was able to complete the job of neutralizing Hezbollah.

There were also the usual concerns about a United Nations that has virtually ignored the thousands of rockets fired at Israel over the last seven years but which quickly demanded an end to the fighting when Israel finally responded in force.

On Monday Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice complaining about what he termed “U.S. acquiescence to the press statement issued by the [United Nations] Security Council this past Sunday.”

That statement expressed “serious concern at the escalation of the situation in Gaza” and called “on the parties to stop immediately all military activities.”

In his letter, Foxman chastised the administration for not vigorously condemning the UN statement, saying it “creates an unwarranted and dangerous equation between Hamas’ intolerable terrorism against Israel and Israel’s exercise of its sovereign right and duty to protect its people.”

Foxman told The Jewish Week that he was pleased with the strong statements of support from President Bush — but “we are concerned there may be a different message being sent to the international community” through the tacit U.S. endorsement of the UN statement.

But while major pro-Israel organizations were justifying Israel’s right to take strong action against ongoing rocket barrages, groups on the left were asking a different question: Is the offensive the best option for neutralizing the Hamas threat?

“We agree that Israel has a right to protect itself,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder and president of J Street, the pro-peace process political action committee and lobby. “But these groups aren’t talking about whether this is a smart thing to do. The question we are raising is this: is Israel’s military response ultimately counterproductive?”

With echoes of the 2006 Lebanon war still echoing across the Jewish world, Ben-Ami said his group believes it is.

In a statement, J Street called for “immediate, strong diplomatic intervention by the United States, the Quartet and allies in the region to negotiate a resumption of the ceasefire which dramatically reduced violence and preserved quiet for over five months.”

Ben-Ami said the “world community must not wait — as they did in the Israel-Lebanon crisis of 2006 — for weeks to pass and hundreds or thousands more to die before intervening.”

Debra DeLee, CEO of Americans for Peace Now (APN), warned that Israel could get “bogged down in an open-ended mission in Gaza.”

The presidential transition in Washington was also an unspoken element in the outreach efforts of the pro-peace process groups.

“If the Israeli military action is ongoing, it will put this front and center for the new administration on January 21,” said Daniel Levy, director of the Prospects for Peace Initiative of the Century Foundation. “The whole world will be watching what he does. There will be tremendous pressure on President Obama.”

While major Jewish groups were publicizing Obama’s statement of sympathy for Sderot last summer, Levy said one goal of pro-peace process groups is to convince the incoming administration that while support for Israel is a consensus priority for American Jewish groups, there are differing opinions about the U.S. role in resolving conflicts like this week’s Gaza war.

“His Sderot statement tells us he thinks the U.S.-Israel relationship is important, that he’s a friend,” Levy said. “That still leaves a huge space in which to operate that doesn’t have to look the same as the Bush administration way of expressing friendship. It leaves room for an American role in de-escalating the conflict, and in particular in dampening the rage that is directed not just at Israel, but at the United States.”

The unquestioning U.S. support for the Gaza offensive, he said, “means that once again, America finds itself almost alone in the international community, pouring fuel on the flames.”

Despite the indirect pressure from both sides, the Obama transition team wasn’t tipping its hand about how it might respond to the Gaza conflict if it is still raging on January 20

Obama political adviser David Axelrod, speaking on Meet the Press, was mostly noncommittal.

“Well, obviously it’s a serious situation,” he said. “But we’ve said repeatedly through this transition period that ...there’s only one president at a time, and President Bush speaks for the United States of America until January 20th, and we’re going to honor that moving forward.”

M.J. Rosenberg, an official with the pro-peace process Israel Policy Forum, said “David Axelrod seemed to go out of his way on the Sunday news shows not to endorse the [Israeli] action. Obama is keeping his options open. He is a man who believes in exhausting every possible form of negotiations before taking military action. Bush believes in responding militarily almost as a first response. That could be why Israel took this action now. This approach will be a tougher sell with Barack Obama.”

But Dan Senor, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former top Bush administration official in Iraq, said the message for Obama is that if he wants to fulfill his pledge to take a more active role in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, he has to let Israel deal with the problem of ongoing rocket attacks first.

“The whole notion of a two-state solution is on the line,” Senor said during a CFR teleconference on Monday. “If Israelis can’t be convinced that the United States and the international community will let them defend against Gaza, then I think the international community can forget about a serious process that would also involve disengagement from the West Bank.”

Senor continued: “That is the posture the Israelis are going to take with regard to the Obama administration: you have these grand designs, these big hopes for a very direct, robust process, but before you begin, you have to let us take care of this operation and give us a lot of space to do it. If you don’t, all your grand designs sound wonderful, but we’ll never be able to convince our public.”

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