Reporting on the innuendo and attacks-by-proxy on Barack Obama's support for Israel yesterday, I highlighted this remark from an Obama speech to Jewish leaders in Cleveland:
I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt a 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 a honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make progress.
This is obvious wisdom to a true friend of Israel. The only relevant choices for Israel and the Palestinians are between a two-state solution along roughly the 1967 borders that ensures security for Israel and self-determination for the Palestinians, or else continued low-level violence with occasional flareups and prolonged mutual enmity to the benefit of no one, forever. Support for a peace process is the only objectively pro-Israel position, to borrow a favorite neoconservative locution. Yet the Likud charter calls for total annexation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. As such, it is an obstacle to the peace and prosperity of the Israeli people.
At TNR's blog "The Plank," Jamie Kirchick seizes on the same remark to claim that
Obama is "channeling Jim Moran," the Virginia Democratic congressman who covered himself in ignominy in 2003 when he blamed the American invasion of Iraq on "the Jewish community." Never mind that the chain of association between Moran and Obama is somewhere between tenuous and non-existent. Kirchick hears echoes in Obama of this attempt by Moran to cover his tracks:
I'm never going to satisfy people who think we should be giving unequivocal support to the Likud Party.
Thus Kirchick takes Obama to be expressing the same sentiment as Moran. The problem here is that Moran's invocation of "the Likud Party" was a transparently implausible means of suggesting that the unreasonable thing he had said about the Jewish community was really just a reasonable point about the diversity of views within Israel. Of course Moran tried to make the controversy about the Likud, because criticism of the Likud is reasonable, while blaming American Jews for provoking the invasion of Iraq is not.
Kirchick further interprets Obama's remarks as an "attempt to intervene in the domestic politics of our most important ally in the Middle East." He then asks:
Given that Likud will probably form the next Israeli government, why would Obama go out of his way to ridicule the party and declare that its sympathizers in America have a nefarious influence on our politics?
Which might be a good question if it bore any relationship to what Obama said. Far from declaring American Likudniks "nefarious," however, Obama was denying the claim that supporting any vision of Israeli policy other than the one favored by the Likud is automatically anti-Israel. In so doing, he was attempting to carve out a space for a foreign policy that is both pro-Israel and congenial to a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
To Obama's point that there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that construes any criticism of the Likud as anti-Israel, witness only Kirchick's suggestion that Obama's criticism of the Likud constitutes an outrageous intervention in Israeli politics, rather than the sound advice that it is.