True, Obama won't enable Israel to strike Iran, but that doesn't mean he's untrustworthy.
By SAMUEL FREEDMANobama pensive 224 88(photo credit: AP)
The past few weeks, my son has been telling me about a new television show called Life on Mars. The premise is that a cop in 2008 gets hit by a car, knocked unconscious and wakes up in 1973. Maybe the reason I haven't watched yet, unless you count checking out the ads at bus stops, is that I was starting college that year and it'd just be too painful to be reminded of a time when a walrus mustache was considered cool. (And I didn't even have enough facial hair to grown one.)
I can only guess that all the chatter about the show is what has got me thinking so much lately about Richard Nixon's trip to Egypt, which might've been in '74, but that's beside the point. When the whole Watergate mess was falling on his head, when the whole country despised him, Nixon went off to visit Anwar Sadat in Egypt and got a hero's welcome. I swear, I can still see him tooling through Cairo, waving from an open car, ticker tape all around. OK, maybe not ticker tape, but you get the idea. There was still one place in the world where they loved him.
We both know that Israel has been that place for W. - the one place where he could take a victory lap while his approval ratings here in the US sank into the 20s. (All right, I grant you even those numbers look good compared to Olmert's.) But it's not even Bush I'm really talking about. He and his incompetent presidency will be history soon enough, thank Jah.
No, I'm thinking about how differently you and I are experiencing the race to succeed him. You're pulling for John McCain, I'm with Barack Obama, and there's nothing idiosyncratic about our choices. I was just looking at some recent poll numbers. In Israel, according to TNS Teleseker, Jews favor McCain by 46 percent to 34%. In America, the latest Gallup survey has Obama ahead with Jews by 74% to 22%.
You think we've all lost our minds, I realize that. You think we've all gone soft and wobbly. You think we're turning into a bunch of appeasing Europeans. And it's hard to hear that, not only because I think you're wrong but because we're used to agreeing on so much.
I'VE NEVER been one of those American Jews who just laid aside Israel as an embarrassment, or one who sat in mute agreement when my liberal friends went on about it being an apartheid state. We agreed, you and I, about the necessity of Operation Defensive Shield, the legitimacy of the Second Lebanon War and the dangerously mistaken way it was waged. Your combination of patriotism and dissidence set an example I admired and tried to follow, even from afar.
On this election, though, I know we're irreconcilable. For you, it's a one-issue campaign, and that issue is Iran. You want McCain because you figure he'll either bomb Iran himself or get your back when Israel does, and I have to admit you're probably right. Does it make me less of a Zionist, or less of a friend, to worry about what Israel will look like the morning after? Is mutually assured destruction really worse than actually enacted destruction? Do you really want a president who'll urge you into a war that I fear will be more of a murder-suicide pact, leaving Israel both victorious and ruined?
For you, a green light to attack Iran has become the one proof of a president who supports Israel. I just don't accept that as the sole definition. You're right, I'm fairly certain, that Obama won't enable Israel tp strike Iran, but you're wrong to extrapolate from this that he's an untrustworthy ally. Someone who takes counsel on the Middle East from Dennis Ross and has been endorsed by Marty Peretz and has chosen Joe Biden as his running mate isn't my idea of a security risk.
Look, paranoids do have enemies, and you're well within your historical rights to worry about betrayal. But I have to remind you that you worried, too, about George W. Bush - that his father's "Arabists" like Jim Baker were going to run Middle East policy, that he was an oilman who was too close to the Saudis. You and Israel even survived Bush the Elder, who genuinely was hostile. There's a deep reservoir of support for Israel in this country that you don't quite trust and I do. It runs deeper than Bush or McCain, and a lot wider than the Christian Zionist movement.
SPEAKING OF which, I'm not sure you realize what a blunder McCain made by picking Sarah Palin. I don't mean for the obvious reasons - her inexperience, her lack of depth - but for her fundamentalism. Yes, she brought around the Republican base, but even without her, on Election Day that base would've had nowhere else to go. A lot of moderate to conservative Jews did.
In my hometown in New Jersey (a real stronghold of the modern Orthodox), you should have seen the McCain lawn signs come down, and I mean the morning after Palin got selected instead of Joe Lieberman. Israel may be one emotional trigger for American Jewish voters, but the Christian Right is another, and the minute you heard about Palin's church hosting events with Jews for Jesus you knew the Semitic swing voters were going to swing the other way.
And then came the crash. Why do you think Florida is suddenly in play? All those elderly Jews along the coastline, all those alter kackers you thought wouldn't vote for a schvartze, well they know when green trumps black. They're watching their retirement money evaporate at the very time they need it. And when they see Obama there with Robert Rubin and Larry Summers talk about having a Yiddishe kup, they trust it more than a white candidate touting the same economics that brought on this mess.
Social Security will win a lot more Jewish votes than Sarah Silverman.
We'll see next week who turns out to be right. There's plenty of reason to believe a lot of whites are lying to pollsters and the election will be much closer than anticipated. The one thing we do know, you and I, is that for the next four years at least we're going to have to agree to disagree.
www.samuelfreedman.com
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