AIPAC is nothing if not sensitive to what Israeli élites think and say. For several weeks now, the Israeli press has been oddly condescending toward him. A Haaretz review of Dreams From My Father focused on, of all things, the question of whether a 33 year-old could have "total recall," implying that authoring the book was a crafty anticipation of his run. Along the same lines, the curvy, sababa young anchor, who just took over at Channel One, made a show of her exasperation for Obama’s (mis)remembered story of his great-uncle being stricken with grief after liberating Auschwitz. The camp he really liberated was — here she raised a knowing, gorgeous eyebrow — Buchenwald.

As if most of her Tel-Aviv pals have a clue where these camps were or who liberated what. As if they know South Dakota from South Carolina, Michael Schwerner from James Earl Ray—as if they don’t think that Jim Crow is a bourbon.

Their real problem with Obama, of course, is that he has had the brass to insist on persistent diplomacy, not military action, against Iran. He would meet with Iranian officials and even lessen sanctions if they played ball. Israelis are not persuaded. Many would like to see a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities before Bush leaves office, or at least they think they would, or want a president who at least entertains the idea, which they imagine (rashly) can be something clean and decisive, like the strike against Iraq in 1981, or the one on Syria last year.

Obama has spoken of America's power to attract over its power to deter, the building of alliances over unilateral military attacks, the need (even Iran's need) to globalize economically, and, in any case, America’s need to stop bleeding treasure in far away places. McCain says he will be the Jihadist's worst nightmare. Obama reminds us that the war McCain supports has been their dream come true.

But ever since Rabin endorsed Nixon in 1972, most Israelis — even those on the center-left — have felt fine with tough talk from Republicans, the more rock-ribbed, the better. They've loved Bush for applying the lessons of Munich, even if his history comes in PowerPoint. They've liked Americans who know in their gut that the only thing those others understand is force. (If there is nuance in the region — honor cultures, Islamic theology, insider political intelligence, etc. — Israeli experts want to be relied on to tell, not just AIPAC, but all of Washington, what to think.)

Obama is also an African-American with a hybridized identity, indeed, a fierce cosmopolitan, the kind of person Jews ordinarily love, but whose election would not quite fit the nationalist logic Israelis think vaguely consistent with Zionism. Virtually all my Israeli friends, young and old, smart and smarter, have been willing to bet me that Americans are "not ready for a black president." Apparently most Israelis are not — not this man, no matter how many times, or how sincerely, Obama speaks of Jewish victimization, or Jewish support for civil rights, or his love for Philip Roth’s and David Grossman's books, or his Zionist camp counselor.

The reasons are many. Israelis instinctively fear charismatic leaders whipping up distant audiences. Or is it that Obama is tapping a pure strain of optimism that, as he told some young people after his speech, should make cynicism seem negotiable? When the Israeli press repeats, again and again, how "inexperienced" Obama is, this is code for their fears, the saddest of which is the fear of hoping for peace again.

In the back of their minds they fear that two generations of special pleading — about how Israel’s occupation should be rationalized as the Jews’ special need to (how does Prof. Yehezkel Dror put it?) "subordinate morality to survival" — may not quite work on Obama, much the way it did not work on Kissinger. Obama has heard Jabotinsky-like apologetics for victim exceptionalism from the Sharptons — indeed, from the Wrights — for two generations. It takes one to know one. The most frightening question is this: If democracy makes a black man a mainstream American, can it also make an Arab a mainstream Israeli?

So there is a peculiarly Israeli condescension for Obama just now, which I predict will dissipate as he grows in stature, and the world he is sketching feels more imminent. It is the same condescension most have, since Oslo, for people who trusted Arabs, or still trust politicians, or stop for pedestrians, or think voters are not just selfish. It is the condescension people in the peace movement endure day in, day out. The thing is, Obama is not a graying professor at a Van Leer Institute seminar. He is quite possibly the next president of the United States.

Not without Florida and/or New Jersey and/or Pennsylvania, however, so Obama came to AIPAC knowing that he had to make his case in a way that both reassured (better, enchanted) his audience yet did not undermine the very basis of what differentiates him from McCain. This he did.

He chose his words carefully. He checked off all the ways he is committed to Israel's security, which indeed any American president must be. He also made sure to emphasize that a friend of peace is a true friend of Israel; he promised that he would not wait until the end of his term to get involved in the peacemaking. He spoke compellingly about the need for a diplomatic surge with Iran. He also recommitted himself to a two state solution. He did it all with a grace that earned a standing ovation and made me wonder why I was not a member of AIPAC myself.

But even the most apparently contentious thing he said — contentious, at least, outside the room — was carefully worded. Obama said that in any two-state solution Israel would have an “undivided” Jerusalem as its capital. He did not — note well — say a "united" Jerusalem, which would have pushed him from the Democratic Party to the Likud.

Indeed, let's be clear about this, since some (including Mahmud Abbas, alas) have interpreted his phrase to mean exclusive Israeli sovereignty in the city. Again, when Israeli rightists say that Jerusalem should be exclusively theirs they say the city should be Israel’s capital and united. "Undivided" is the Labor Party euphemism for a city whose Arab and Jewish quarters are not separated by a wall, as before 1967 (and — though this is not usually mentioned in this context — the wall Israel has more recently thrown up).

"Undivided" does not prejudice the question of who is awarded formal sovereignty where. The Geneva Initiative, for example, proposes an undivided Jerusalem with international forces helping to keep the place an administrative whole.

Obama, to be sure, didn't make any new friends in the Arab world yesterday. But he is likely to be the only president who will get something of a honeymoon from the Arab world nevertheless, as with the rest of the world. He is establishing himself as the Mohammed Ali of conflict resolution. If anyone expected the jabs to start landing yesterday, nobody laid a glove on him.

(Cross-posted at Bernard Avishai Dot Com)

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So reasonable people are preparing themselves for the possibility that Olmert will soon have to resign. This would be bad news — and good.

First, the bad: I have not hidden my personal fondness for Ehud Olmert, which makes me completely unremarkable. Olmert is a likable, glad-handing centrist, a poster-child for Israel's rising professional and entrepreneurial élites, who has cultivated Western journalists and back-and-forth Israelis like myself for years. But this is not personal. It is business. Waiting in the wings, liking the polls, is the worst government imaginable, a Bibi Netanyahu coalition of Likud's hardest-liners, back-to-the-Land-of-Israel cultists, ultra-Orthodox claustrophiles, Russian reactionaries and oligarchs, and general opportunists. Resignation could bring the demise of the Kadima Party, as former Likud people scurry back to the fold.

True, Olmert's prosecution would be a tribute to Israeli democracy, in a way — to the rule of law and the procedures for electing what's next. But new elections would almost certainly bring to power the most antidemocratic coalition in Israel's history, just at a time when negotiations with the Palestinian Authority hang by a thread, a new administration is coming to Washington, and Israel's own Arab minority is inching toward wholesale alienation. I am not sure Israel could take five more years of this. I am sure the West, Arab moderates, etc., cannot take five more years of this Israel.

The good news, however, is that there is an obvious replacement for Olmert, who has always stood a much better chance of holding Kadima together by the force of her popularity. I mean, of course, the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, a straight-talking, very bright, and evolving politician (profiled here by the New York Times' Roger Cohen).

Livni, unlike Olmert, was not tarnished by the 2006 Lebanon fiasco. As Akiva Eldar implies, she might well revive Kadima and draw new, younger forces to it. She is also more likely to advance the peace negotiations (which she nominally runs), or at least bring them to the national agenda. She provides Labor's doves a leader to rally to while their own leader, Ehud Barak, continues to posture as the new Ariel Sharon, the IDF's real commander, the scourge of terrorists. She could add the leftist Meretz Party, which said it would never join a government led by Olmert after Lebanon.

Indeed, the best scenario is not unlikely — not if the Bush administration supports it actively, and helps keep restless ministers (like former Likud defense minister Shaul Mofaz) bailing water instead of abandoning ship. It is that Livni and Barak will govern together for a year or so, and reconstitute the Israeli center, while putting the taint of corruption behind them. Only this will deny Netanyahu his second act. Something must.

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That word, frankly, is what poker players call her tell. When she says it, you know she is about to bluff: advance a charge that would be just plausible if we didn’t know her, a charge she is counting on 24-hour-cable-coiffed-heads to play dumb about for excitement’s sake. Oh, by the way, John McCain just agreed with her: Obama is elitist. And now Maureen Dowd.

I can’t really imagine a time attacks like this wouldn’t annoy me. If you are worldly, erudite, discriminating, articulate, etc., then you presumably have rare gifts. But since these are rare, and worthy, then you must be part of an elite. So, na, na, how can you be elite without being elitist?

As it happens, though, I just finished reading Dreams From My Father, the younger Obama’s extraordinary memoir, and these particular attacks strike me as foolish and brazen in way that borders on dangerous. Do we really — proudly — credit politicians this much for their ability to manipulate us? Do we really want — as Richard Gere twinkled at Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” — a “professional”?

I picked the book up in an airport out of curiosity; I was a strong supporter anyway and thought I might learn a thing or two about his past. I did not expect to be utterly absorbed by the third page, by his story and, even more important, his style. Imagine Orwell combining his autobiographical essay about his public school, “Such, Such, Were The Days,” and his reflections on British imperialism “Shooting an Elephant,” with The Road To Wigan Pier. Imagine Orwell having the religious humility to look back without rancor.

So now imagine that Orwell ran for Parliament in a working-class district after the war, and gave an interview in which he said that poor people sometimes cling to religious dogmas or xenophobia to try to make sense of their world. Imagine his Tory opponent — knowing full well that few people in the working-class actually read essays or books — suggested that Orwell, that author, was elitist. Imagine that a columnist for (of all places) the Times of London picked up the story and accused Orwell of being — how did Dowd put it? — less a candidate than an anthropologist.

I guess the idea is that if you are brilliant enough to write, and write movingly, about your years in poverty, your gratitude for the transcendent life of the mind, your decision to organize against despair with compassion and mentoring, your years defending people downtrodden by forces they cannot control, your loved ones in far-flung parts of the world, pitting their magic against alcohol — indeed, if you can write anything without a ghostwriter — then you must think you are smarter than ordinary people, and must therefore be “out of touch.” (On the other hand, if you are accustomed to privilege, and educated to triangulation, so that you know how to buy a ghost writer who'll make you appear a populist, then, by definition, you don’t think you’re so smart, and must therefore be close to ordinary people.)

So here is an anthropological question for you. What do you say about the future of a democracy that buys this stuff?

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Many have noticed the decline in the profile of Israel’s peace movement during the past 20 years. What could be expected when Israelis are so obviously spurned in the region and under attack by bombers and missiles? Does it not seem unrealistic to expect a peace movement to get traction without a change in Arab attitudes?

Imagine, though, the effect of an Arab leader coming to the Knesset today and delivering a speech like the one given by Anwar Sadat on November 20, 1977. Apart from the stirring compassion of the speech, notice Sadat’s approach to the so-called “core issues,” now ostensibly being negotiated under the Annapolis framework. They are, more or less, the lines of policy one has heard for years from the Palestine Authority and from the Arab League’s 2002 initiative.

Which brings me back to the Israeli peace movement. The waning of interest in Peace Now seems much more the result of its belated success than its failure. Why take to the streets when the government, and the broad center—Tel-Aviv, professionals, the more educated—now espouse your approach, if only in principle? How different are Peace Now’s ideas—and Sadat’s, for that matter—from the approach Ehud Olmert’s close friend Vice-Premier Haim Ramon has hinted at in various interviews?

Menachem Begin, remember, responded to Sadat with a vision of a region in which “we shall all live together—the Great Arab Nation in its States and its countries, and the Jewish People in its Land, Eretz Israel—forever and ever.” This was code for the Likud’s platform. (Here is Begin’s whole speech: judge for yourself.) There was no occupation to acknowledge in Begin’s response. Israel would deal with the Arab states, not with the Arab stateless. Jerusalem, too, belonged to the Jews; other religions would have access to their holy places.

Nor was there a Palestinian people. (“I invite genuine spokesmen of the Palestinian Arabs” to come along with King Hussein, etc.; I remember distinctly that Begin used the Hebrew phrase Arviyeh Eretz Yisrael, “the Arabs of Eretz Yisrael,” though it is translated differently here.) “We took no foreign land,” Begin instructed Sadat; “We returned to our Homeland. The bond between our People and this Land is eternal.” Oppose this way of looking at Jewish history, Begin went on, and you were being cavalier about the holocaust.

The key to all of this was settlements. Eretz Yisrael still beckoned. Then, the number of Jewish settlers beyond Jerusalem and Gush Etzion was only about 2000; by 1979, 6000. Today it is a quarter of a million. I remember thinking that Sadat’s face said it all: listening to Begin, he looked as stricken as many of us felt.

And it was in response to Begin’s response that 348 junior officers signed a letter imploring the prime minister to seize the moment. Their letter launched Peace Now, and prompted demonstrations that numbered in the hundreds of thousands in the late 7os and eraly 80s.

PEACE NOW'S EFFORTS did not save the ensuing peace process, which foundered largely on the settlements policy. Settlements precluded any implementation of the Palestinian autonomy plan that Sadat and President Carter extracted from Begin at Camp David. They were the reason why Sadat refused to travel to Oslo with Begin to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. They were a major reason for the collapse of Oslo. Olmert has claimed to have stopped settlements, too—though not within the extensive boundaries of Jerusalem. His policy is too little and far too late.

The real problem, now, is nothing Peace Now activists can do anything about. They have won the battle of public opinion in Israel, at least among those who are not in the third of the country for whom the process of forming opinions is itself suspect.

Olmert knows what he must do eventually, but he likes his job, and does not like enraging the residents of Jerusalem, who support the settlers, and who make up a good many of the third in question; he continues to develop Jerusalem’s suburbs across the Green Line and pander to Shas, his rightist coalition ally, while undermining the already shaken reputation of Mahmud Abbas. He has asked, and apparently got, assurances from Secretary Rice that the US will back his desire to leave this problem of Jerusalem “to last,” as if there is a first that can be negotiated without including East Jerusalem in Palestine’s borders. As if blurriness about US policy and interests helps him.

Haaretz chief editor David Landau, for one, had enough a little while back . He told Rice in Jerusalem that his "wet dream” would be that the US “raped” Israel, that is, simply imposed a settlement. Landau may have broken protocol (and also revealed the repressed state of mind of former British yeshiva students). Anyway, he lost his job last week. But what the peace negotiations need, at least for now, is not just a clear head but a strong hand. And the US—still unable to grasp that in getting tough about the shape of a deal it is actually strengthening Israeli leaders who claim the need for peace now—is getting hustled for the 30th year in row.

* Cross-posted at BernardAvishai.com 

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What then of the future of American Jews? Podhoretz wasn’t sure, but then he also wasn’t sure why he should be sure. “I think I know why the Jews once wished to survive, though I am less certain as to why we still do. They not only believed that God had given them no choice, but were tied to a memory of past glory and the dream of imminent redemption.” Podhoretz thought it unnecessary to add that educated American Jews did not think this way anymore. Except for the (quaint) Orthodox—or except in the metaphorical sense—Jews did not really believe they had commandments to perform. The categorical imperative was to get a degree.

Indeed, Jews now had choices, not the least of which was how to make something interesting of Jewish origins once they had moved to Manhattan—to a world far removed from the Manichaean street fights of an immigrant childhood. This was a world where (as Podhoretz would put in his 1967 book, Making It) one might give orders rather than take them, have money rather than live in poverty, gain fame rather than die in obscurity. To call oneself a Jew was also a choice, of course. His childhood persecution—a tiny American token of the immense persecution just ended—made this somewhat daring and even cool.

But was it really interesting being, as Jonathan Miller put it, Jewish? Simply to spite anti-Semites? What would hold the next generation of American Jews together if organized synagogue life felt vaguely faked; if, for all the differences, one could feel oneself in a shared culture with James Baldwin—who admitted, at least according to Podhoretz, that all blacks hated whites; if the Ethics of the Fathers seemed okay, but not quite up to Whitman? “In thinking about the Jews,” Podhoretz wrote, “I have often wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth the hair on the head of a single infant.”

Podhoretz has grown ashamed of his article, I bet, but I always thought it qualified as poignant—not, clearly, for his extrapolation from schoolyards to public policy, or his creepily sexualized panacea, or the histrionic way he grasped intermarriage. Rather, I was (and remain) impressed by the open-spirited way he questioned the future of American Jews, indeed, the way he unselfconsciously seemed to confuse American Jews with open-spiritedness itself. For the up-and-coming audience Podhoretz knew he was writing for, it was Jewish to be ill at ease, to be for the underdog and against phonies. As Lenny Bruce had it, Ray Charles was Jewish, Eddie Cantor was goyish, fruit salad was Jewish, lime Jell-O, goyish. Making sense of these distinctions made us tortured. Tortured was also cool.

Was this Jewish culture? Well, it was culture made by Jews. We had Bernstein and Bellow. Roth had Bernstein and Bellow. As my late friend (and Podhoretz’s eventual foil), Dissent’s editor Irving Howe put it, American Jews lived on “the questions.” Israel, for its part, was providing something more like answers, something more resilient and demanding, rooted in Hebrew, there for the long haul if it could survive its siege. But for American Jews before 1967—whose Major Organizations had not yet turned Jerusalem into their Epcot Center—it was American liberalism that was the triumph. Israel’s victories were admired all the more because, after the European horrors, the country was seen as something that remained distantly valiant and progressive. The Weavers sang the songs of Jezreel Valley pioneers in a medley with anthems of Republican Spain. This made Israel a really Jewish state.

And those of us who were younger, who came into our own in the Sixties, also took for granted this amorphous, self-critical enlightenment that Podhoretz took for granted. It fit with the natural defenses of classical liberalism we experienced at the university. We were citizens, there was a commonwealth: nobody had—as JS Mill had written—a monopoly on the truth. No book was sacred, but the right to interpret books was. The constitution was our real Torah, Justice Brandeis, our Rashi.

Our parents loved Brandeis too, of course. They counted -steins and -bergs during the Nobel announcements; they circulated, half-conspiratorially, the real names of Jack Warner and Bennett Cerf. Which was fine with us. If Sandy Koufax wouldn’t pitch on Yom Kippur, then there wasn’t much we needed to add. Yet we, in contrast (or in spite), spoke also of Mill or Orwell or William James at the dinner table; we plotted a graduation somewhat more ambitious than the one our parents had planned for us. Some of us even thought to take our dream of civil society to, of all places, Israel, which Commentary’s articles by liberal young Israelis (e.g., Amos Elon) seemed to invite—but that’s another story.

Most of all, I suppose, we loved the civil rights movement, for all the obvious reasons, and not only because Rabbi Heschel marched with Martin Luther King. Actually, few of us knew who Heschel was except for the fact that he marched with Dr. King. Podhoretz tried to tell us, in his 1963 article, that our “abstract commitment to the cause of Negro rights will not stand the test of a direct confrontation,” that Jews would flee to the suburbs, send their kids to private schools, etc. But here he was missing his own point. The civil rights movement was not something we did for “Negroes.” It was the very way we defined ourselves, defined the civil society we fervently saw ourselves helping to shape. Our problem was not—as Sophie Portnoy (the real spiritual guide of the neo-cons) had it—that Jews were at fault for being “too good.” Our hunger was to live in certain kind of America. It would be spacious enough for “the questions,” for a sense of tragedy, for self-criticism, for anomalies like us, free at last.

I am recalling Podhoretz’s article now because there is something about the current presidential election that is teasing out a moment of truth for American Jews much like the one that article once punctuated. Specifically, there is Barack Obama, whose personification of integration in this old liberal sense can’t help but make Jews question not only what they want, but who they are.

It did not take long for the young Podhoretz to conclude that, instead of marrying African-Americans out of existence, it was simpler to push them around in ways that, as a child, he could not imagine doing. By the 1970s, his magazine was, among other things, challenging affirmative action and publishing tendentious articles about race and IQ, turning Stokely Carmichael and Ocean Hill-Brownsville into a new assault by Negro gangs. (I wrote about all of this at length in “Breaking Faith: Commentary and the American Jews,” Dissent, Spring 1981, from which some of these ruminations are borrowed.)

Still, Podhoretz’s real breakthrough came, not when he reimagined blacks as more or less permanent adversaries, but when he reimagined Jews as a more or less permanent interest group—when he reimagined the old liberalism as a trendy behaviorism and argued that “Jewish interests” (protection of wealth, “support for Israel,” etc.) required nothing more than a common sense use of power.

This may seem an academic point but its implications cut very close to the bone now. For what exactly do Jews (or all of us, really) mean by a society of choices? The liberalism we once knew assumed fallible citizens, skeptical of received wisdoms, struggling to come up with some common, provisionally defined good. Podhoretz assumed us to be atomized bundles of appetites, organized into “socialized” groups, getting what we can from a competition for inherently scarce goods (like money, power and fame). Old liberals were interested in rights; now we were right to have interests. Hannah Arendt once wrote that this behaviorism can’t be realistic, but it “can win.” More recently, Jon Stewart put things more sweetly when he told Chris Matthews that his world of power, interests, and manipulated perceptions (so much like the one Podhoretz embraced in 1970s), was “sad.”

What’s the Jewish interest? I’ll leave that to Podhoretz and (the latest tough he’s attached himself to) Rudy Giuliani to tell Florida today. But what if this was always the wrong question? What if American Jews are not an interest group but restless, loosely connected citizens—curiously proud of (what Aharon Appelfeld calls) their “fate,” not Christian but not unChristian, no longer immigrants, educated and well-off, to be sure, but still not quite comfortable, looking to make sense of themselves in an evolving America? What if, by choosing, they show themselves who they are?

This is, perhaps, a very roundabout way of saying that Barack Obama got me with hello. Pretty much everything he’s said and done since he started his campaign makes me proud to have voted for him (by absentee ballot, from Jerusalem). But I would be less than honest if I did not explain why voting for him makes me feel like a Jew in America, and in Israel for that matter, in a way I haven’t felt for a very long time. I think of Obama’s candidacy a little like the way I think of my first vote for Pierre Trudeau in 1967, or the emergence of the European Union in my lifetime. It is a kind of show-me-don’t-tell-me proof that the essential premises of liberalism, which Jews have championed since 1848—by which they have defined themselves since Heine—are, well, true.

I know there is something terribly uncool about this. I should, presumably, focus on the subtle differentiators of Obama’s policies, like Paul Krugman and the mandates. I would shrug off Obama’s attacks on anti-Semitism and at least take seriously that his church once honored Farrakhan, as Richard Cohen warns us. I would be skeptical about callowness, as Leon Wieseltier warns himself, plumping for the new McCain; I would, like Wieseltier, not be taken in by Obama’s suave, since Wieseltier (“I am myself not unsuave”) troubles to instruct us on “how much it accomplishes and how little.” I am old enough to know better, or certainly old enough to know how suave it is to show off that I know better.

Indeed, if I weren’t uncool I would just focus on Obama’s political virtues, his detailed progressivism, his efforts to run without polarizing electors, his hundreds of thousands of donations, his courses on the constitution, his intellect, his story, his cadences. I would, like Andrew Sullivan, want to see his as the face of America, as we try to redeem America’s place in a dangerously small world. Since I live half my life in Israel, I would emphasize his evolving approach to Middle East peacemaking, his hint that we all know what the deal is, that it is time to get it, his reliance on foreign policy people who seem both realistic and fair, his even-handedness, his cosmopolitanism, his willingness to talk with all parties, his insistence that the Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed cannot be ignored any longer.

But none of this gets at the big opportunity here. Imagine, by analogy, what it felt like for Frenchmen, a couple of generations after the Dreyfus Affair, to vote for Leon Blum in 1936. Don’t tell me that the only thing at stake was who was the most experienced Social Democrat to govern “on day one.” (And please, New Republic editors, if you are reading this, don’t respond that Blum had failed by 1938; Obama will have the first Congressional majority without Southern Democrats ever, not a tragic alliance with Communists following Stalin’s zig-zag line.)

Anyway, to those of us who’ve been heartsick since the assassinations, the debasement of commercial television, the political triangulations, the vaguely reciprocal threats of creationism and hip-hop, Obama’s voice sounds just prophetic enough. Der mensch tracht und Gott lacht, my father used to say, “Men strive, God laughs.” Fair enough. But I have, I’m afraid, a dream.

* Cross-posted at BernardAvishai.com

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