Obama And Israel ‘Friendship’

Sen. Barack Obama suggested this week that a pro-Likud line isn’t the only measure of support for Israel. Bibi Netanyahu, right, leads the Likud Party. Getty Images

Sen. Barack Obama suggested this week that a pro-Likud line isn’t the only measure of support for Israel. Bibi Netanyahu, right, leads the Likud Party. Getty Images

by James D. Besser/Washington

Could a presidential campaign that has featured mostly silence on the question of U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict be about to change?
In his private, hour-long discussion with 100 Jewish leaders in Cleveland Sunday, a week before Ohio’s critical primary, Sen. Barack Obama seemed to edge away from the don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach to the conflict.
“This is where I get to be honest and I hope I’m not out of school here,” he said in a transcript provided by JTA. “I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel, and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel. If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do

we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make progress.”
That prompted blasts from Ed Lasky, news editor for the American Thinker and a persistent Obama critic, who wrote that his Likud comments raise a “suggestion of dual loyalty” and that they echo the views of professors Walt and Mearsheimer, “who abhor the role that pro-Israel Americans (including Christians) sometimes play in the foreign policy discussion.”
But a top Jewish leader and defender of Israel said he had only minor quibbles with the candidate’s words.
The comment about Likud supporters was “ill advised,” said Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman. “That’s an unfortunate characterization of Jews who are nervous about any candidate who comes without a [Middle East] portfolio.”
And Foxman said he was bothered by Obama’s statement that “one of the things that struck me when I went to Israel was how much more open the debate was around these issues in Israel than they are sometimes here in the United States. It’s very ironic.”
Foxman said the debate is more open among Israelis because “they bear the consequences; the American Jewish community is more hesitant because we don’t.”
But he said that as far as he is concerned, there were no red flags raised by Obama’s comments. “They don’t undermine the essence of his support for Israel. I’m very comfortable with that.”
Obama also denied that Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter administration national security adviser, is a “key” foreign policy adviser. And he defended other advisers closer to the campaign such as former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and former State Department official Susan Rice as “people who strongly believe in Israel’s right to exist, strongly believe in a two-state solution, strongly believe that the Palestinians have been irresponsible and have been strongly critical of them.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization