Romney plays Israel card on Obama

Mitt Romney has criticized President Obama's treatment of Israel.

By AARON HECHT
Romney plays Israel card on Obama (photo credit: Reuters)
Romney plays Israel card on Obama
(photo credit: Reuters)
Locked in a close US presidential race focused primarily on the slumping American economy, presumptive Republican candidate Gov. Mitt Romney has decided to challenge incumbent Barack Obama on his foreign policy record, and particularly his bullying of Israel, in hopes of picking up Jewish votes in key swing states as well as solidifying his support among conservative Christians lukewarm over his Mormon faith.
At the end of July, Romney will leave American soil and pay a visit to Israel – an unusual move for any presidential candidate at this stage of a very heated campaign. But Romney senses that Obama is vulnerable on his foreign policy record, especially due to his public roughing of Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu. By coming to Jerusalem at this critical time to take a strong stand alongside Israel, he hopes to win over a lot of Jewish and Christian voters tepid until now over his candidacy.
During his brief stopover in Jerusalem, Romney plans to host a major fundraiser and then set out his approach to the Middle East’s many problems in an address to a public policy conference.
Even before the Romney campaign announced his travel plans, political analysts were already assessing the Republican hopeful could make some mileage on Obama’s weak record in the Middle East, even though the election at this point hinges mainly on the sagging domestic economy.
Then, two top Republican Jewish political consultants arrived in Jerusalem in mid-July to help lay the groundwork for Romney’s visit by drawing a clear distinction between him and Obama on Israel and to urge the estimated 150,000 eligible American voters in Israel to cast absentee ballots this November. Former Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Republican Jewish Coalition chairman Matt Brooks both stressed that the race is expected to be close and Israeli-American dual citizens could make a difference in hotlycontested states like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Indeed, although some three quarters of American Jews voted for Obama four years ago, those who have moved to Israel over the years tend to be more religious and conservative in their values and therefore went overwhelmingly for his GOP opponent Sen. John McCain in 2008, according to The Los Angeles Times.
Many also come from a handful of tossup states that could end up deciding the election.
So is there enough daylight between Obama and Romney on Israel to make a significant impact on the election? Given that many in the large Evangelical bloc are also looking for a reason to show up at the polls for Romney, it could be a gambit worth taking.
The view from Israel
Last month, Dr. Eytan Gilboa, a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv who specializes in US-Israel relations, delivered a review for the press of the Obama record in the Middle East from an Israeli perspective which found plenty of weak spots that Romney can exploit.
On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Gilboa noted that “so far, Obama is the first US president since 1967 not to have negotiations with the Palestinians in his term.”
“Obviously, for negotiations you need the two sides to cooperate. But he took it upon himself to restart negotiations, plus he even argued that Israeli- Palestinian peace is a condition for an effective American-led effort to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power,” said Gilboa.
Gilboa described Obama’s logic as being that a coalition with the Arab countries was needed against Iran, and the way to achieve this alliance was to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Yet he insisted that “this logic is baseless because, number one, it assumes that the Arab countries have no independent interest of their own vis-à-vis Iran; and number two, that they care about the Palestinians. They never cared about the Palestinians!” “To argue that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most important factor in the Middle East, and if only it could be resolved, then the Middle East would become the Garden of Eden – these are completely unfounded, baseless arguments about the Middle East,” he maintained.
Gilboa added that “when Obama argued that the key to renewed negotiations is the complete Israeli freezing of settlements, he selected the most irrelevant factor to the resumption of negotiations. The Palestinians told themselves: ‘Why enter into negotiations with Israel? Let Obama do the work for us.’” Regarding Iran, Gilboa assessed that there is broad agreement between Israel and the US on the dangers posed by its renegade nuclear program. But he also pointed out that there are sizable gaps over the “point of no return,” when it will become too late to prevent the Islamic Republic from building nuclear weapons, and over the best means to successfully confront the problem.
He outlined the four main options for dealing with Iran, including negotiations, sanctions, covert operations, and finally preemptive military action – which everyone agrees would further destabilize an already unsettled region and thus should be viewed as a last resort.
But Gilboa also cautioned that time was running out for sanctions and covert operations, after negotiations have proven largely fruitless.
Summarizing over a decade of Western talks with Iran, he frankly concluded that “they all failed.”
“People assumed that when two parties enter into negotiations, their goal is to get an agreement,” he stated. “But countries enter into negotiations for all kinds of reasons and not always to get an agreement.
The Iranians entered into negotiations not to get an agreement but simply to buy time to build the Bomb!” “When Obama took over the White House, he offered negotiations and engagement with enemies, including Iran, and the Iranians were laughing at him,” Gilboa jibed.
“American officials have said many times that sanctions are working. It’s true that sanctions have caused great economic hardship in Tehran, but this is insufficient. It’s a two stage program. Stage one is to create an economic crisis. Stage two is to change Iranian nuclear policy.”
Gilboa estimated that Israel could not successfully deal with Iran alone, and that the Obama White House would not lend the necessary help ahead of the November elections.
“The regime in Tehran will stop the nuclear weapons program only if they perceive its continuation as a threat to their survival,” he grimly concluded.
“They think nuclear weapons would ensure the survival of the government. If they are persuaded to believe otherwise, then they may change their opinion. In my judgment, the only way to accomplish this is by very harsh sanctions and a credible military threat. But if Obama is saying ‘every option is on the table’ and the next day his advisers are saying how ineffective a military operation would be, then the Iranians have good reasons to believe that this is an empty threat.”
Commenting on the “Arab Spring,” Gilboa explained “this term was invented in the West, but from the beginning many of us knew it was complete nonsense. We have both theory and history to support the claim that democracy might come to the Middle East, but at least a generation from now… Previous examples have shown that autocracy is replaced by theocracy, not by democracy.”
“One argument that I hear often from American policymakers is that when extreme, even Islamic, organizations assume power, they become moderate. This doesn’t work in the Middle East. So where did this idea come from? There’s no evidence for this.”
The advance team
Meanwhile, Republican operatives Ari Fleischer and Matt Brooks showed up in Jerusalem the following week and offered their assessment of how the American presidential race is shaping up and how Israel and the region will play into it.
Explaining that they had come to Israel to motivate US citizens in Israel to cast absentee ballots in the upcoming elections, Brooks listed the regional challenges that Obama is failing to squarely meet, namely Iran’s troubling nuclear drive, the rise of Islamist factions in Egypt and other Arab states, and the civil war in Syria.
“The person who is [America’s] commander-in-chief in January 2013 is going to have to deal with these issues on day one,” he said, adding that Obama has been “naïve at best” in his approach to the threat from Iran and other foreign policy problems.
Even on domestic issues like the economy, Brooks remarked that “we seem to have a president who is just really not up to the job.”
Brooks conceded that a majority of US Jews would continue to vote Democratic this election cycle, but his goal was to maintain the pattern of a higher percentage of American Jews voting Republican each time.
“There is no doubt that Mitt Romney will do extremely well among Jewish voters,” Brooks said. “Success will be the continuing process of gaining market share at the expense of the Democrats, especially in key battleground states.”
While Obama’s defenders in the Jewish community argue that US military and intelligence cooperation with Israel have never been better than under this presidency, Brooks told The Christian Edition that most of the upgrades in defense systems and intelligence sharing were already in the hopper under his predecessor, President George W. Bush.
“Obama’s team has been dancing in the end zone about supplying Israel with the X-Band radar,” he quipped, “but it was the persistence of one man, Republican senator Mark Kirk (Illinois), which made that happen.”
“I don’t ever want to have a US president who makes us stop and scratch our heads and wonder, does he have Israel’s back,” chimed in Fleischer.
“These are the stakes in this upcoming election. The choice is between Gov. Romney and President Obama, between pushing Israel around as President Obama has done and has tried to do; or Gov. Romney, who will stand strong at Israel’s side, especially now when Israel is the only stable element in the Middle East.”
“That moral bond, that connection that is made, between America and Israel, sits firmly in Mitt Romney’s heart,” Fleischer assured. “This is why, when push comes to shove… there is nothing [Obama] would like more than to find a way to be neutral in the struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He would like to be the great man of the minute, as opposed to doing the right thing and standing on the side of the nation that is America’s ally, Israel.
Fleischer suggested that although Jews in Israel may have been as enamored with Obama in 2008 as most American Jews, they were some of the first to sour on him, due to the way the Obama administration decided to openly air its disputes with the Netanyahu government.
Citing polls as early as June 2009 which found that only a small percentage of Israelis still considered Obama to be pro-Israel, Fleischer said the drop in support among Jews in Israel acted as a harbinger for their counterparts in the United States.
“The polls in The Jerusalem Post reverberated around the Jewish community in America,” Fleischer said.
“They were an early warning signal in the US that there were cracks in Obama’s armor. In 2009, American Jews were so pro-Obama. Israelis saw the cracks first, and now the American Jewish community is going through a significant case of buyer’s remorse.”
Whether that change of heart among Jewish voters will be a decisive factor come November remains to be seen. But Romney has clearly calculated it is both fair and advantageous to question Obama’s support for Israel in a potential second term, when he would no longer have to face the electorate.
While Democrats are countering that neither party should ever play politics with the bipartisan issue of Israel, it does seem Obama has left himself open to attack on his suspect pro-Israel credentials.