The White House trial balloon to test support for former senator Chuck Hagel’s
nomination to be the next secretary of defense has been taking withering fire
from all directions, the most over-the-top criticism coming from those
questioning his support for Israel, and it appears to be losing air.
If
the barrage of attacks succeeds in shooting down the former two-term Nebraska
Republican’s hopes to run the Pentagon, it will mark the second time this month
President Barack Obama has been forced to abandon plans to put a trusted adviser
and friend in his cabinet.
Late last week he nominated Sen. John Kerry to
be the next secretary of state after his first choice, UN Ambassador Susan Rice,
withdrew in the face of bitter and largely unfounded attacks from Senate
Republicans.
Hagel came under fire from some of his former GOP colleagues
and Democrats were in no rush to come to his defense, but it was friends of
Israel and the Jewish community that did the most damage, with complaints that
included offensive claims that the former senator is a closet
anti-Semite.
To be sure, there were other critics. A Washington Post
editorial said he was “not the right choice” and his views “well to the left” of
Obama’s, particularly on issues involving dealing with Iran, the use of force
and sanctions. Those issues were part of the case made by many friends of
Israel, but they were bundled with charges of bigotry.
It was suggested,
and often more than suggested, that Hagel is a borderline
anti-Semite.
The evidence was not just that he was sometimes critical of
Israeli policy and didn’t consistently toe the Likud line, but that he had
referred to AIPAC as “the Jewish lobby,” accused it of “intimidating a lot of
people” in Congress and insisted “I am a United States senator, not an Israeli
senator.”
The latter was almost exactly the same phrase I heard from a
prominent Jewish senator when he first came to the Senate and wanted AIPAC to
know he wasn’t there to do its bidding.
Hardly a closet anti-Semite, he
had a long history of leadership in Jewish causes.
The conservative
Weekly Standard quoted an unnamed Republican Senate aide’s email warning, “Send
us Hagel and we will make sure every American knows he is an
anti-Semite.”
What’s the evidence? “He believes in the existence of a
nefarious Jewish lobby that secretly controls US foreign policy.”
The
reference was to a comment Hagel made in a 2008 interview with former US Mideast
envoy Aaron David Miller: “The political reality is that...the Jewish lobby
intimidates a lot of people up here.”
The ADL’s Abe Foxman, who should
know better, said, “The sentiments he’s expressed about the Jewish lobby border
on anti-Semitism.” And then came the big insult: Foxman compared Hagel to Jimmy
Carter.
Miller said that the quote in his book had been “hijacked”
because it left out the previous sentence which said, “Hagel is a strong
supporter of Israel and a believer in shared values.”
Hagel, he said, is
not an anti-Semite, not an enemy of Israel, not even hostile to the state of
Israel.” That view was echoed by Dan Kurtzer, the former US ambassador to
Israel.
The term “Jewish lobby” is commonly used around the Hill and in
Israel AIPAC is known as “ha lobby hayehudi,” the Jewish lobby. As for
intimidating, just ask two Jewish congressmen who got visits from wealthy AIPAC
officers warning them they’d be unable to raise money in the Jewish community if
they dared to run for the Senate in their states against the board’s preferred
candidates.
It’s true Hagel was never an enthusiastic supporter of Israel
during his two Senate terms, although he consistently voted for economic and
security assistance.
A major criticism is that he didn’t sign all the
letters AIPAC and others circulated on the Hill to produce shows of strength. He
even had the temerity to call one of them “stupid.”
The Republican Jewish
Coalition circulated a list of charges against Hagel this month that resembled
one its Democratic counterpart circulated when it looked like the then-senator
might be planning a run for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. This
time the National Jewish Democratic Council was silent.
Both sides in the
debate brought out their own Nebraska Jews. The Huffington Post quoted
Israeli-born Rabbi Aryeh Azriel of Omaha’s Temple Israel, who said Hagel is a
good supporter of Israel and any notion that he is anti-Israel or anti-Semitic
are “extremely stupid.”
Algemeiner, a conservative Jewish website, quoted
the former editor of the Omaha Jewish Press, Carol Katzman, saying Hagel
“basically showed the Jewish community that he didn’t give a damn about the
Jewish community or any of our concerns.”
Among the most self-serving
attacks were those from a pair of stridently anti-Obama columnists. Isi Leibler,
writing in Sheldon Adelson’s newspaper, Israel HaYom, said Hagel’s nomination
“will be a litmus test of whether President Barack Obama is poised to resume his
anti-Israel campaign,” conveniently – or intentionally – ignoring the fact
US-Israel security cooperation has achieved new highs under this “anti- Israel”
president.
Bret Stephens wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Hagel’s
nomination will confirm the author’s earlier charge that “Mr. Obama is
not a friend of Israel.”
There are a lot of good reasons why Hagel should
not be the next secretary of defense, but flunking the Likud loyalty test
shouldn’t be one of them.
Columnist David Ignatius questioned whether he
is the right person to run the Pentagon at “a delicate moment of transition in
defense policy and spending.”
I, for one, hope the president doesn’t
nominate Hagel. I don’t think he has the temperament for the job and he seems
out of sync with the president’s policies on a number of fronts. Most notably,
he advocates containment of Iran and acceptance of its nuclear ambitions as a
fact of life.
Obama and Hagel became friends when they served together on
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee along with then-chairman Joe Biden and
future chairman John Kerry, who, like Hagel, is a decorated Vietnam combat
veteran.
The president values Hagel’s advice and made him co-chairman of
his Intelligence Advisory Board. He should remain there.
©2012 Douglas M.
Bloomfield bloomfieldcolumn@gmail.com www.thejewishweek.com/blogs/
douglas_bloomfield
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