theworldismine13
God Emperor of SOHH
How Chuck Schumer Lost on Iran
How Chuck Schumer Lost on Iran - The New Yorker
How Chuck Schumer Lost on Iran - The New Yorker
You know, my name comes from the word shomer: guardian, watcher,” Senator Chuck Schumer told the host of a Jewish radio program in 2010. “My ancestors were guardians of the ghetto wall in Chortkov. And I believe Hashem actually gave me that name. One of my roles, very important in the United States Senate, is to be a shomer, to be the shomer Yisrael”—the guardian of Israel—“and I will continue to be that with every bone in my body.” Schumer and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s efforts to rally Democratic opposition to President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal have now failed. On Tuesday, the support of Senators Richard Blumenthal, Ron Wyden, and Gary Peters assured Obama that any Republican resolution of disapproval would not even come up for a vote. But the extraordinary identity Schumer was claiming—to be a “guardian of Israel,” without apparent fear of being at odds with American foreign policy or the Democratic Party—may be the greater loss. It’s hard to see how AIPAC, and Schumer, come out of the Iran fight with the authority they had going in.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s story, which he is sticking to, is that Israel and AIPAC have won a moral victory. Dore Gold, the director-general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, told Israel’s Army Radio that Netanyahu never intended to keep the deal from being approved but rather to raise awareness about its perils. “Most of Congress is against the deal,” as is Isaac Herzog, who leads the opposition in the Knesset, Gold added. He then returned to the claims that Netanyahu made in his speech before Congress in March—that the deal was bad, that it endangered Israel—which might have been mistaken for an attempt to convince American legislators to reject it.
AIPAC’s influence was first advanced, in the nineteen-seventies, by hard-line Democratic senators like Henry Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who felt that the State Department was controlled by Eisenhower-era Republicans who were too indebted to oil interests and not adequately sympathetic to Israel’s plight. Ever since AIPAC managed to coördinate the defeat of Republican Senator Charles Percy, in 1984 (Percy was then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and had argued that Jewish settlements preëmpt Palestinian rights), AIPAC has been able to present itself as a powerhouse, flush with money, focussed on Congress, and with strong claims on both Republican hawks and evangelicals and the Democratic center. Tom Dine and Steven Grossman, AIPAC leaders in the eighties and nineties, were Democratic operatives; Grossman went on to become the chairman of the Democratic National Committee under Bill Clinton. President Obama courted AIPAC’s support in 2008, assuring attendees of its yearly conference that Jerusalem would be “undivided.”
Israel, in AIPAC’s playbook, is the best judge of its defense needs, a sister democracy, and, besides, a strategic asset in a volatile region. (It proved this for the first time in September, 1970, when Israeli jets helped protect the Jordanian monarch from a Palestinian insurgency and Syrian invasion.) Schumer’s opposition to the Iran deal was supposed to signal that AIPAC remained influential among Democratic principals and fund-raisers, and that the man who chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee from 2005 to 2009, and is now the favorite to lead Senate Democrats when Harry Reid retires, could still fend off challenges to Israeli policy—if, for example, the U.N. Security Council were to vote on another resolution condemning West Bank settlements. The signal, meant to be cautionary, seems rather weak.
Even if, as some claim, Schumer came out against Obama only because he knew he could not muster the votes to override a Presidential veto, he surely expected to make a better showing. Now progressive groups like MoveOn have rallied Democratic insurgents to call Schumer’s prospective Senate leadership into question. AIPAC officials know that Netanyahu is to blame for emancipating Democrats from AIPAC’s embrace. “Netanyahu’s speech in Congress made the Iranian issue a partisan one,” an AIPAC official told Israel’s Walla!News. “As soon as he insisted on going ahead with this move, which was perceived as a Republican maneuver against the President, we lost a significant part of the Democratic Party, without which it was impossible to block the agreement.” AIPAC’s efforts to exploit Herzog’s opposition to the deal were almost as counterproductive, given that the deal has the support of Israeli Army and intelligence leaders. Amos Yadlin, the man who Herzog said would have been his defense minister, had he defeated Netanyahu, said that the deal should not be opposed.* As Channel Two’s veteran analyst Amnon Abramovitch told me, “Herzog’s effort to gain some reputation for ‘security’ and lean to the center is an understandable political move. But Iran is a subject that inevitably involves Israeli-American relations, and here Herzog got messed up.”
Schumer’s declaration of guardianship is not only a political but also a personal statement, and part of how many Jewish Americans of his generation understand their secular Jewish distinctiveness. It conjures the embattled, vulnerable Jews of their parents’ generation, in what often appears to be a passion play. If there is a Netanyahu at the center of this history, it is not Benjamin, the son, but Benzion, the father, who, in the early nineteen-forties, was one of the leaders of the Revisionist Zionism movement in the U.S. and, with Hillel Kook (then known as Peter Bergson), helped found the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. Kook and Netanyahu publicly railed against American Jewish leaders like Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was close to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for not doing enough to raise public consciousness about the plight of European Jews. “They cannot claim, with a clear conscience, to have done everything within their power to save those condemned people,” Benzion Netanyahu wrote in 1944. “They have been too cautious, too appeasing, and too ready to swallow the meaningless statements of sympathy that were issued from high places.”
American Jewish leaders of his son’s generation won’t make that mistake again. AIPAC’s push against the deal included a write-in campaign and a multimillion-dollar stream of television ads, under a new 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization called Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran. When Obama and the Administration’s nuclear experts appeared to be persuasive on nuclear issues, AIPAC tried to shift the conversation from Iran’s nuclear threat to its capacity, if sanctions were lifted, to fund violence in the region. (“Iran will receive up to $150 billion,” an AIPAC fact sheet warns. “Iran could then dramatically bolster its support for international terrorism.”) More and more, the Iran deal became more symbolic than strategic: if the President really cared about Israel, then he would take its side. “He accommodated radical Islamist theocrats when he should have insisted on the opposite, that the survival of Israel is non-negotiable. In effect, he betrayed the trust of the Jewish state,” Mort Zuckerman wrote even before the deal was done. In other words, as Leon Wieseltier told a reporter last month, Obama is “the first U.S. President who doesn’t really have a special feeling for Israel.”
Fortunately, that sensibility has not passed down easily to younger generations. AIPAC’s liberal rival, J Street, strongly advocated for the deal; it has an endorsement list that has grown from about two dozen candidates in 2008 to nearly a hundred for the coming election year. On the whole, Todd Gitlin and Steven M. Cohen wrote last month in the Washington Post, Jewish Americans are more likely than other Americans to support the deal. Only a fifth of Jewish Americans under forty, who are also less likely to be affiliated with synagogues and communal organizations, oppose it, according to an L.A. Jewish Journal survey from mid-July, which Cohen directed. But Jewish leaders tend to be older and more conservative than the Jewish population as a whole, as Cohen found in an earlier study, and more grounded in what the historian Salo Baron famously called the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history.”
(Ironically, Hillel Kook, who died in 2001—and whom I knew at the end of his life—could not adjust to AIPAC’s rhetoric, either. He had returned to Tel Aviv in 1948 and sat in the first Knesset, but he rejected Likud’s evolution, including its satisfaction with a religious “Jewish state,” with which American Jews easily identified. For Kook, Zionism meant a secular “Hebrew republic,” which would have a Western-style constitution with a Bill of Rights, and exist beside a Palestinian state. He hoped Israelis would avoid what the writer Arthur Koestler called “claustrophilia.” Kook lacked, presumably, “a special feeling for Israel.”)
Netanyahu wants us to believe that the fifteen-year duration of the Iran deal is a historical “blink of an eye,” as he told Congress in March. His implicit message is that he does not expect the regional status quo to significantly change: he assumes that the settlement project will continue growing, that Palestinians will remain in despair and disarray, and that ayatollahs will remain fixated on Israel. Democrats have rejected that message, but Netanyahu retains some influence over the deal’s eventual implementation. “The provisions are complex,” Steven Simon, the former senior director for Middle East and North Africa affairs in the Obama White House, told me. “Iran will exploit this, and Israeli analysts will claim cheating.” If Iran can be presented as not in compliance, it does “raise the spectre of military action,” Simon added. Still, the presumption that any Israeli government deserves the benefit of the doubt seems obsolete. In 2010, after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complained about Netanyahu’s settlement policy, Schumer told a conservative radio host that he had persuaded three-quarters of the Senate to sign a letter “rebuking the Administration for these confrontational stances toward Israel.” Would he even attempt this today?
i hope someone blows israel off the face of the planet so we don't have to keep up this charade