Would you trust Sarah Palin with the fate of Israel or even your savings?
By MARTY PERETZpalin 63(photo credit: )A JPost.com exclusive blog
Jews value "smarts." They value it in their children and in their doctors, in their lawyers and in their brokers. A "chochem" or a "chacheyma," when it is not said ironically, is one of the highest compliments bestowed from one human being on another. "Chochma" connotes wisdom and knowledge. Combine "chochma" with "seychel" and you have the beginnings of a very fine person. Add "eydelkeit" and "koach" and you have what it takes to be a friend. And a leader.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden certainly have these character traits. And so does John McCain who, like the latter two, is a friend. I don't have friends who are 'am hortzim.' What's the point? You can't learn anything from them. And you surely don't want an "am ha'aretz" (boor) for a leader.
Now, it is true that I haven't met Sarah Palin personally. I haven't even been in a room with her and a thousand other people. So my impressions are from the newspapers and television. Please don't dismiss my second-hand knowledge. I have been watching a lot of television and reading a lot of newspapers and many magazines, including "The New Republic," the magazine I've been editing for 34 years.
I got my job right after the Yom Kippur War. So I can tell almost on first look who is a reliable ally of Israel. Despite the Sinai settlement, I knew from the beginning that Jimmy Carter was, as my mother would say, a "soyneh Yisroel" (Israel hater). And Carter is that still, largely because his literalist Christianity encourages him to think of the chosen people as a people who are burdened by their sin against Jesus. I don't suppose that Sarah Palin believes anything that crude. But she did go to her church to listen to a leader of "Jews for Jesus" explain why Jews have suffered in history.
Yes, the old excuse. A politician who thought about the banning of books in Alaskan libraries and schools might just think to ban from her mind the message of "Jews for Jesus." She also welcomed Pat Buchanan to her town. Believe me, Pat Buchanan does not like Jews or Zionists, and he does make that clear. Listening to such crude individuals is not a crime. But it does tell you that Sarah has crude bad taste. She could have not come and made a point of it. But, then, she wouldn't be Sarah Palin.
What is most frightening about Sarah Palin is that she might become president of the United States. But this is especially frightening because she is an ignoramus. A person who hasn't the foggiest notion of what the Bush Doctrine is cannot be trusted to grasp the intricacies of America's relations with the world. Or, for that matter, America's relationship. Most of the citizenry couldn't really explain the calamity now unfolding in the country's economy. Long established merchant banks, transformed into gargantuan institutions, go out of business.
Do you remember Governor (then Senator) Herbert Lehman? His grandfather and grand uncle founded the institution. It survived the great depression. But it did not survive this economy. If you were to ask Sarah Palin why Lehman and other banking houses are passing into dead history she would not have a word to say. She would not know to whom to term. And, believe me, this crisis is far from over. It will last a long time. This is not a board game like Monopoly. The folks sitting around the table are playing with real money, other people's real money. Would you trust Sarah Palin with your savings and your pension annuity? I wouldn't.
And, so, I also wouldn't trust her with the fate of Israel. I know she can see Russia from her living room. But it doesn't reassure me. You have to know something about its ambitions, its weapons capacity, the extent of its realism, its own view of itself. Looking at the steppes doesn't mean a thing.
But knowing history does. And Palin palpably knows none. She understands nothing about Jewish history. Or about the hundred years of conflict between the Arabs of Palestine and its Jews. Does she even know that the Arabs were offered a state by the UN General Assembly in 1947 and did not even give the body the courtesy of a reply. From Gamal Abdel Nassar to Nasrallah, from Haj Amin Husseini to the two Assads: are these names she can identify? What about their beliefs and strategies?
Palin would be in several worlds of which she had never heard. The cartography of the modern world is simply too complicated for her. Sorry to bring you the bad news. Alas, it is also true news.
The write is Editor-In-Chief of The New Republic
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