Topic: U.S.-Israel relations

Stopping Iran is America’s Responsibility

Jonathan S. Tobin 04.23.2013 - 9:00 PM

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is in Israel this week, and the man who was opposed by many friends of the Jewish state when he was nominated seems determined to make a good impression. Hagel came bearing “gifts” in that he brought the official permissions for $10 billion in arms sales to Israel including vital anti-radar missiles, aircraft for mid-air refueling as well as other planes that can rapidly transport troops and firepower. Just as important, he said all the right things in public including the reaffirmation of Israel’s right to decide how to defend itself, and he seemed on his best behavior as he met with his counterpart Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s minister of defense.

No one should doubt these arms sales greatly strengthen Israel’s defenses as well as its ability to project air power if it should prove necessary. President Obama has made good on his promise to maintain Israel’s qualitative military edge and it is incumbent on those of us who have criticized him for his predilection for picking pointless fights with the Jewish state over the peace process throughout his first term to acknowledge that. Nor can one point to the other pieces of the arms package that included sales of missiles to Saudi Arabia and F-16 jets to the United Arab Emirates as proof of bad will since it is obvious those weapons are intended to strengthen the ability of those monarchies to defend themselves against Iran, not to attack Israel.

But, as an article in today’s New York Times made clear, there are still grounds for concern about the U.S.-Israel relationship. Although the administration is helping maintain Israel’s defense deterrent, they did not grant everything on Jerusalem’s wish list. The most prominent item missing from the weapons that are to be delivered is a Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a giant bunker-busting bomb that is exactly what is needed to take out Iran’s underground nuclear facility at Fordow. That and the “fundamental difference of views” between the two countries about the level of risk that Iran’s program poses are complicating the Hagel visit.

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Obama Channels Clinton, Not Carter

Jonathan S. Tobin 03.22.2013 - 1:15 PM

In the wake of President Obama’s speech in Jerusalem yesterday, Israeli leftists are hoping for a new lease on life for a peace process that was left for dead by the country’s voters in January. But given the unenthusiastic reaction from Palestinians to the speech, any idea that negotiations will be revived anytime soon seems far-fetched. That’s especially true since most of those cheered by the president’s call for a new commitment to peace ignored the fact that the one tangible shift in American policy was that Obama backpedaled on his desire to force Israel to freeze settlement building. Much to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s displeasure, he also echoed Prime Minister Netanyahu’s call for negotiations without preconditions.

But one thing has undoubtedly changed in the aftermath of the presidential visit to Israel: Barack Obama’s image as an antagonist of the Jewish state. In terms of his attitude toward Israel, in the past three days Obama has altered his status in that regard from being the second coming of Jimmy Carter to that of another Bill Clinton. That won’t exempt him from criticism, nor does it mean that he will have even a remote chance of succeeding in moving the region toward peace. But it does mean that many of his Jewish and Democratic defenders have been to some extent vindicated and his critics chastened, if not silenced.

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Both Right and Left May Be Wrong About Obama’s Speech

Jonathan S. Tobin 03.21.2013 - 6:45 PM

Jewish left-wingers are cheering President Obama’s Jerusalem speech in which he once again made the case for a two-state solution. Some are hoping that this will mean a renewed campaign of U.S. pressure on the Netanyahu government. With a new secretary of state in John Kerry who may well be foolish enough to believe he can succeed where so many other American peace processers have failed, perhaps they are right. But it is also possible that although Obama was eager to reiterate his ideas about the necessity of peace, the only real insights about the impact of the presidential visit may be coming from Palestinians and some of their cheerleaders.

While they will also welcome the president’s reassertion of the right of the Palestinians to a state of their own and his criticisms of Jewish settlements, it is far more probable that the part of his address today that will resonate with them is the section in which he laid out at length not only a defense of Zionism but a case for Israel’s right to self-defense and America’s ironclad guarantee of its security. Though there may be some in the Muslim and Arab worlds who will take to heart the president’s sermon on coexistence and shared goals, the chant of demonstrators that greeted him in Ramallah today, in which the crowd chanted for rocket propelled grenades, not more cooperation with the U.S., was perhaps a more accurate reading of public opinion.

Were Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, whom the president inaccurately praised as a “partner for peace,” really interested in pursuing a two-state solution, he would take up the president’s challenge and agree, as Obama insisted during their joint press conference, to a new round of peace talks without insisting on preconditions. But the odds that the embattled Abbas, who is far more worried about Hamas than he is about Israel or the U.S., will do that are slim, making any new U.S. initiative a fool’s errand.

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Obama’s Mix of Reality and Fantasy

Jonathan S. Tobin 03.21.2013 - 1:55 PM

President Obama continued his charm offensive with the people of Israel with his speech to an audience of students in Jerusalem that reaffirmed his support for Zionism and Israel’s “unbreakable” alliance with the United States. But however far he may have gone toward reassuring Israelis of his concern for their security during this trip, many of the headlines today will be devoted to the part of his address that attempted to prod the Jewish state to recommit to the peace process.

The speech demonstrated that, despite the new warmth between Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, there is still considerable distance between their positions. But even the section devoted to advocacy for a renewed peace process showed that there is even greater distance between the United States and the Palestinians.

In a transparent effort to go over the heads of Israel’s government by appealing to the public, the president made the argument that peace and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel were both just and necessary to secure the country’s future. He urged the hand picked left-leaning audience of students to pressure their leaders to pursue peace. He spent the first half of his speech extolling the legitimacy of Zionism as well as highlighting the threats to its existence from terror groups and hostile neighbors as well as Iran. But his clear purpose was to establish his bona fides as a friend of the Jewish state primarily in order to give him the standing to advocate for a reinvigorated peace process in which the country would once again take “risks for peace.” This was both clever and effective and there’s no doubt that, as many pundits seemed to say in its aftermath, is was a better exposition of the liberal Zionist position on the peace process that had been given in the country in many years.

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Has Obama Reversed Cairo?

Jonathan S. Tobin 03.20.2013 - 5:10 PM

Four years ago during his first visit to the Middle East as president, Barack Obama not only snubbed Israel but gave a speech in Cairo to the Muslim world in which he made it clear that he viewed the plight of the Palestinians as morally equivalent to that of the Holocaust. In doing so, he didn’t merely elevate the Palestinian claim to statehood as his diplomatic priority but downgraded the Jewish claim to their homeland as purely a function of international pity in the aftermath of the slaughter of European Jewry. This slight was not lost on the people of Israel who regarded these statements as much as the fights the president picked with the government of Benjamin Netanyahu over the following years as evidence of his utter lack of sympathy for the Jewish state.

But after years of tilting the diplomatic playing field in the direction of the Palestinians the president arrived in Israel today singing a very different tune. He may have come into the presidency determined to open up daylight between the positions of the United States and Israel and succeeded in doing so. But his opening remarks upon arriving in Israel today effectively closed the gap between the two countries to the minimum. Even more important, his recognition of Israel’s rights effectively dashed the hopes of many in the Arab and Muslim world that this president, especially after his re-election, would further downgrade the alliance between the two nations.

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Obama Visit Signals Nadir of Israeli Left

Jonathan S. Tobin 03.19.2013 - 1:30 PM

Many on Israel’s right are viewing the arrival of President Obama in their country with suspicion. They look at his record of antagonism toward the Netanyahu government and his past attempts to tilt the diplomatic playing field in the direction of the Palestinians and think no good can possibly come from an event that will give someone they view as inherently hostile to the Jewish state a bully pulpit from which to put forward his ideas. They may be right about Obama’s long-term intentions toward Israel. But for a better idea of who are the real losers as the president puts the country in the spotlight, it might be better to look at what pundits on the left are saying about it. As unhappy as some right-wingers might be about the arrival of what has undoubtedly been the least sympathetic toward Israel of any president in the last generation, it is the left that is really unhappy.

Look at just about any one of the many opinion columnists writing in the left-wing Haaretz or read the lament of veteran journalist and author Gershom Gorenberg in The American Prospect and you quickly realize that the left understands that the presidential agenda signals the nadir of their influence in Israeli politics and policymaking. A couple of years ago they would have cheered an Obama visit, certain that the president would use the occasion to bash the Netanyahu government and strong-arm it into far-reaching concessions to the Palestinians. Now they read of his decision to put the peace process on the back burner and concentrate instead on making sure the two countries are on the same page on Iran, and tell him to go home. The uncontroversial nature of the Obama visit and the lack of expectations that it will do a thing to advance the moribund peace process means the decades-old hope of the Israeli left (cheered on by Jewish liberals in the United States like the J Street lobby) that America will “save Israel from itself” is officially dead.

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The American Public, Not the Realists, Understands the Middle East

Jonathan S. Tobin 03.18.2013 - 6:00 PM

The idea that America’s Middle East policy is purely the result of the machinations of a shadowy “Israel Lobby” was once again proven to be a canard with the release of a new poll that shows that an overwhelming majority of the American people sympathizes with the Jewish state. The Washington Post/ABC news poll published today on the eve of President Obama’s visit to the country shows that Americans sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinian Authority by a margin of 55 to 9 percent, with 35 saying they liked both or had no opinion. It also showed that a plurality of those polled thought the U.S. needed to pressure the Palestinians to make peace more than the Israelis. Most interestingly, an even more resounding majority thought the U.S. ought not to be the prime mover of the peace process, with fully 69 percent saying the decision should be left to the parties while only 26 percent thought it should play a leading role.

The results, especially with regard to support for Israel, are consistent with previous polls. But the number of those who want America to be running the peace negotiations has plummeted in the last decade as the futility of trying to coax the Palestinians to abandon terrorism and embrace a two-state solution has been amply demonstrated. This gives the lie to both the “Israel Lobby” theories as well as the notion that Americans want their president to be twisting the arm of the Israeli government to make concessions to revive a process that the Palestinians have shown no interest in.

The basic numbers illustrate why those who claim the across-the-board bipartisan support for the alliance with the Jewish state in Congress is bought and paid for by Jewish campaign finance donations (as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it) is a lie. Israel has the backing of every political and demographic group measured by the poll showing that backing Israel is simply a matter of political survival irrespective of how many Jews vote or donate money in a given district or state.

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Like Bibi, Obama May Just Want to Manage Middle East Conflict

Jonathan S. Tobin 03.08.2013 - 1:40 PM

There are conflicting reports about a meeting held yesterday between President Obama and some 25 figures from the American Jewish community, including many of his supporters, in advance of his trip to Israel later this month. The Times of Israel says that one of the participants claimed the president said he would present a comprehensive peace plan for the Middle East sometime in the next year. But JTA’s report based on a larger sample of participants dishing about the event contradicts that statement. That was backed up by a denial issued by a senior administration official who told the Times of Israel that there was no “framework” for peace mentioned at the meeting.

The consensus about the meeting is that, as one person who quoted the president to JTA said, there would be no “grandiose” plans for peace presented to the Israelis when he arrives for his long-awaited visit. Though the president will be holding out hope that the current “bleak” prospects for peace will improve, the notion that Obama would risk any of his scarce political capital by trying to impose terms of a peace plan on Israel that the Palestinians are not interested in is absurd. Though Obama will put himself on record as opposing Israeli settlements as well as Palestinian attempts to avoid negotiations via the United Nations, he appears to be only interested in keeping the situation calm. After four years of antagonism with the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the president seems to have arrived at a similar conclusion as his Israeli counterpart. At least for now, he’s done trying to solve the conflict and only wants to manage it as well as possible.

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Hagel’s Critics Are Still the Winners

Jonathan S. Tobin 02.21.2013 - 3:50 PM

With the defection of one more Republican from the ranks of those opposing the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense, it appears the saga of the battle to stop the Nebraskan from taking office is coming to a close. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby announced today that he would vote for Hagel when the nomination comes to the floor. Shelby’s support is yet another blow against the hopes that the 10-day delay caused by last week’s failed cloture vote would result in a game changing event that would sink the chances of Hagel’s confirmation. Of course, the fate of this struggle was probably already sealed last Sunday when Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham said they wouldn’t try to extend the filibuster when Congress reconvened next week. And if that left any doubt about the final outcome, it was removed when New York Democrat Chuck Schumer reconfirmed his support for Hagel with a speech that was as dishonest as it was morally dubious.

This will, no doubt, lead some on the left to crow about the failure of the pro-Israel community to stop the advancement of one of its worst critics. Others will say the effort was itself a mistake, since even after a concerted campaign to undermine support for the nomination and a disastrous confirmation hearing performance by Hagel his critics were unable to pry a single pro-Israel Democrat from the ranks of his backers. The result, we will be told, demonstrated the impotence of the vaunted “Israel Lobby” and will only encourage President Obama in the belief that he need not fear the consequences of another campaign of pressure on Israel or a decision to reverse course on containment of a nuclear Iran (the policy that Hagel has always supported and flubbed his recantation of at his hearing).

But those who will say the fight wasn’t worth it are wrong. Far from suffering a defeat, the last six weeks of close political combat on the issue have only strengthened the position of the pro-Israel community.

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Obama’s Israel Visit Not That Big a Deal

Jonathan S. Tobin 02.06.2013 - 10:20 AM

There is some debate as to what the announcement that President Obama will be visiting Israel in a few weeks portends. Those on the left, both here and in Israel, ardently hope it is intended to signal a new U.S. push to revive the Middle East peace process during which the president will personally twist the arms of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. However, the lack of any real preparation for such talks, or signs that there is a ghost of a chance that they might succeed, make such expectations seem highly unrealistic.

There is little doubt that the peace process will be on the agenda when Obama goes to Israel. But the notion that the president will be seeking to implement a set plan to force concessions on the Jewish state or that it, as one hysterical left-wing columnist put it in Haaretz, means the “centrality” of the conflict with the Palestinians will be reaffirmed is pure fantasy. It is far more likely that the main point of it will be reaffirming the U.S.-Israel alliance at a time when conflict with Iran, instability in Egypt and civil war in Syria makes coordination between the two governments more essential than ever. That explanation doesn’t speak to the hopes of leftists who want Obama to hammer Israel or the fears of friends of the Jewish state who believe he plans to use his second term to bring it to its knees. But given the timing of the trip, this more humdrum explanation makes a lot more sense.

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Anticipating More Obama-Bibi — Part Three

Jonathan S. Tobin 01.18.2013 - 4:31 PM

As I noted in parts one and two of this post, there are good reasons to believe that tension between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will continue to simmer during their respective terms. The disconnect between the president’s view of the region and the consensus of the overwhelming majority of Israelis about the future of the peace process has created a gap between the two countries that continues to cause trouble. The fact that the two men don’t like each other also doesn’t help. But as I wrote, the Palestinians’ refusal to make peace on the one hand and the determination of the Iranians to push toward their goal of a nuclear weapon may render the disagreements between Washington and Jerusalem moot.

But even if we don’t assume, as I think we should, that Israel’s enemies will continue to force the United States and Israel into the same corner whether the president likes it or not, there is another important factor that will also put a limit on how far any quarrel can go: the overwhelming support for Israel among the American people. As much as some in the administration and its cheerleaders on the left may believe that the “Jewish lobby,” as President Obama’s nominee for secretary of defense put it, has too much influence, the fact remains that the U.S.-Israel alliance remains a consensus issue in this country. As we have seen over the past two years, no president, not even one as personally popular as Barack Obama, can afford to ignore it or blow it up.

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Anticipating More Obama-Bibi — Part Two

Jonathan S. Tobin 01.18.2013 - 3:40 PM

As I wrote in part one of this post the all but certain prospect that Benjamin Netanyahu will be re-elected prime minister of Israel next week will be viewed with dismay by President Obama. But the assumption that four more years of the Barack-Bibi show will worsen relations between the two countries may be exaggerated for three reasons. The first was, as I wrote in part one, the very real possibility that Obama may have learned his lesson about trying to pressure the Israelis in order to entice the Palestinians to make peace. It hasn’t worked and probably never will and though the president may think Netanyahu is wrong, he would have to be an incorrigible ideologue to want to waste any scarce political capital on more fights with Israel over the peace process when he knows it will lead nowhere.

The second factor that might act as a brake on U.S.-Israel tension is Iran. There is more than a little irony in this. Disagreements between the United States and Israel over the timetable of Iranian nuclear progress, the futility of diplomacy and the ultimate necessity of an attack have divided the two governments for years. Many assume, not without reason, that the president’s reluctance to get tough with Iran (a belief bolstered by his nomination of a new secretary of defense in Chuck Hagel that previously opposed both sanctions and the possibility of using force against Iran) will only make things worse in the future as Israel gears up for the possibility of having to forestall a nuclear Iran if the United States won’t. But as much as this issue appears to be the one which will do the most to escalate tension between Washington, there is also the very real possibility that Iran’s refusal to negotiate seriously and its determination to push ahead toward its nuclear goal will leave the president little choice but to work with Israel to eliminate the threat.

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Anticipating More Obama-Bibi — Part One

Jonathan S. Tobin 01.18.2013 - 2:30 PM

The final polls before Israel’s election were published today and the results will provide little comfort to Benjamin Netanyahu’s many critics in the United States. All the surveys of opinion before next Tuesday’s vote point in one direction: Netanyahu will win. Even the most pessimistic estimates of his party’s vote shows the Likud getting approximately twice as many seats in the next Knesset as the next largest competitor and the parties that make up Netanyahu’s current coalition will gain a decisive majority. Netanyahu will be in charge of a comfortable majority that is, if anything, more right-wing than the government he led for the past four years.

That’s a bitter pill for an Obama administration that believes, as the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported earlier this week, that the president knows what is in Israel’s “best interests” better than Netanyahu and which spent much of its time in office battling him. It makes sense to think the two leaders will continue to distrust each other and to quarrel over the peace process and how to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat. The rightward tilt of the next Netanyahu government and what appears to be the aggressive and confident tone of the second Obama administration in which the president appears to be surrounding himself with people who agree with him rather than centrists or those who have different perspectives both seem to argue for more rather than less conflict between Washington and Jerusalem. But the doom and gloom scenarios about four more years of this tandem may be exaggerated. There are three good reasons that may serve to keep tensions from boiling over.

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Morsi’s Context of Hate

Jonathan S. Tobin 01.16.2013 - 6:00 PM

The truth about the disgusting anti-Semitism that is at the core of the belief system of the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt is finally gaining the attention it deserves. As we wrote yesterday, the belated coverage given by the New York Times yesterday puts the Obama administration’s embrace of the regime of President Mohamed Morsi in an extremely unflattering light. But when put on the spot about the video in which Morsi employed a standard Islamic epithet for Jews calling Israelis “the descendants of apes and pigs,” the White House and the State Department both condemned the Egyptian president’s statements, as did the Times in an editorial. But when a delegation of visiting U.S. senators confronted Morsi today over his hate speech, they got the sort of answer that ought to make Congress as well as the administration reconsider the continuation of the massive aid package that Egypt receives.

According to Reuters, Morsi told a group of senators, including John McCain and Richard Blumenthal, that his remarks were taken out of context. What conceivable context could justify this sort of hate? Morsi said his comments should be understood as an understandable response to Israel’s counterattack against terrorist rocket fire from Gaza. In other words, in the view of Egypt’s president an Israel willing to defend itself against the rocket attacks launched by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas ally is excuse for any sort of vile slander against the Jewish people or the United States. That may make sense in an Egyptian political culture in which anti-Semitism has become so drilled into the minds of the people by groups like the Brotherhood as to be unexceptionable. But it can only be a reminder to Americans that while we desire friendship with the Egyptian people, there can be no question of further American subsidies for a regime that is built on hate.

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Why Hagel is Doing a 180 on Israel, Iran

Jonathan S. Tobin 01.15.2013 - 8:15 AM

How badly does Chuck Hagel want to be secretary of defense? As Politico reports, the answer comes in a letter he wrote to Senator Barbara Boxer that won the California Democrat’s support for his confirmation. In it, he didn’t merely apologize for his bragging about standing up to the “Jewish lobby,” but also backtracked from previous stands on the U.S.-Israel alliance, the threat from Iran and even specified that he now considers Hamas and Hezbollah to be terrorist groups.

As expected, Hagel flipped on his anti-gay stance as well as his opposition to abortion rights for members of the armed services—issues that are important to the liberal Boxer. But by explicitly reversing his positions on Middle East issues that he had held throughout his years in the Senate and after he left Congress, Hagel has made it clear that he is willing to say anything necessary to win the approval of pro-Israel Democrats without whom he cannot win confirmation. The man who once popped off about how he was not like all the members of the Senate when it came to embracing the pro-Israel and anti-Iran consensus now can’t be loud enough in his professions of support for that line.

This tells us two things.

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Why Hagel Is a Fight Worth Having

Jonathan S. Tobin 01.14.2013 - 10:50 AM

The stakes will be high when Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for secretary of defense, meets with New York Senator Chuck Schumer. Along with Republican John McCain, Schumer is the key to the question of whether critics of the appointment can rally enough votes to derail Hagel’s chances. Though he is understandably reluctant to pick a fight with the Obama administration, Schumer takes a dim view of Hagel’s antagonism toward Israel and the pro-Israel community as well as his soft stands on Iran. The question is whether Hagel’s rapid backtracking from these positions is persuasive enough to convince Schumer that trying to take him down is not worth the effort.

But regardless of the outcome of that meeting, the discussion about Hagel is bound to heat up in the coming days and weeks. Hagel’s past bragging about standing up to the “Jewish lobby” and his history of opposition to sanctions or the use of force against the Iranian nuclear threat places him outside of the mainstream of American opinion and also could create the dangerous impression that U.S. policy could be shifting. But there is a still a genuine reluctance on the part of many in the Jewish community to turn this nomination into an all-out battle that would pit the administration against the pro-Israel community. The dangers of such a confrontation, especially if Hagel were to survive a close vote, are real. But the argument here is that win or lose, this is a battle worth fighting.

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Hagel Backers Trying to Redefine Pro-Israel

Jonathan S. Tobin 01.08.2013 - 1:10 PM

Yesterday Chuck Hagel told the Lincoln Journal Star there wasn’t “one shred of evidence that [he is] anti-Israeli.” President Obama’s nominee to be secretary of defense claimed the criticism of his record and statements on both Israel and Iran is nothing but “falsehoods and distortions.” That’s a message that is being taken up with gusto by Hagel’s defenders on the news talks shows this week. In particular, some of those who are fighting for his confirmation are taking the position that not only is Hagel pro-Israel but that those who have criticized his positions are in fact a noisy, extremist minority that doesn’t speak for American interests or those of American Jewry, or even the people of Israel.

This is a nasty piece of business that was best exemplified by journalist Carl Bernstein who, during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program today, denounced Hagel’s critics as “Likud” supporters that didn’t speak for American Jews like him. Bernstein’s diatribe in which he claimed the prime minister of Israel also didn’t speak for Israel was then praised effusively by fellow guest Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose own reputation as a bitter critic of Israel seemingly gave him the authority to decide what is and isn’t pro-Israel (something that could perhaps only happen on a show hosted by his daughter). Bernstein—a typical example of a public figure who only cites his Jewish heritage so as to enable him to bash supporters of Israel—has as little authority to speak on the subject as Brzezinski, but his comments go to the heart of the effort to push back at criticism of Hagel. The point here isn’t really about false accusations, since Hagel’s opposition to Iran sanctions or the use of force to stop its nuclear program as well as his boasts about standing up to the “Jewish lobby” are a matter of record. The issue here is one more attempt by Israel’s critics to change the terms of discussion on the issue, in order to make those who are outside the national consensus on the U.S.-Israel alliance appear to be mainstream thinkers while those who support it are castigated as extremists.

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AIPAC’s Hagel Dilemma

Jonathan S. Tobin 01.07.2013 - 3:35 PM

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg homed in on an interesting aspect of the fight over President Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense this morning when he noted how the issue put AIPAC in a tough position. There’s little question that the pro-Israel lobby is alarmed by the prospect of having a man running the Pentagon who thinks the U.S. ought to be tough on Israel and soft on Iran rather than the other way around. But, as Goldberg rightly pointed out, AIPAC is in the business of working with Congress and the White House, not fighting them tooth and nail.

Goldberg correctly notes that it would be bad judgment for a group that applauded Obama’s promises on Iran to attempt to thwart him on his choice to head the Defense Department. While Obama’s support for positions on Iran and Israel in the past year and a half have often seemed grudging, AIPAC is eager to maintain decent relations with the White House. That would, as Goldberg seems to imply, argue for the lobby to stand aside during the upcoming donnybrook over Hagel. But the problem with this reasoning is that it ignores what is fairly obvious to both friends and foes of the nominee: his appointment signals that the administration’s election year Jewish charm offensive during which the president stopped picking fights with Israel and pledged not to contain Iran, but to stop the Islamic Republic, is very much over.

The last thing AIPAC wants to do is to fight a losing battle over Hagel in which it would get the worst of both worlds—a bad appointment and a White House that will be interested in payback for being thwarted. But the stakes are sufficiently high that it ought not be too difficult a decision. If there is any chance that the nomination can be defeated—and if reports about pro-Israel Democrats being willing to jump ship on this issue are true, he can be —then those who wish to send the administration a message that the country will not tolerate Obama breaking his promises on Iran must do whatever they can to accomplish this goal.

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Is Hagel Obama’s Cover for Iran War?

Jonathan S. Tobin 01.07.2013 - 1:00 PM

Pro-Israel Democrats are in a difficult spot this morning as President Obama prepares to nominate one of the least friendly members of the United States Senate in the last generation to the post of secretary of defense. Hagel’s comments about his antagonism toward the “Jewish lobby,” his votes against sanctions on Iran and Syria and his refusal to condemn anti-Semitism are a matter of record and make difficult reading for those who spent the last year working hard to persuade pro-Israel and Jewish voters that President Obama could be relied upon to maintain the alliance with Israel and to take action on the Iranian nuclear threat. At the very least, Hagel’s nomination complicates the narrative in which administration supporters claimed the president was prepared to go to the mat to stop Iran.

That’s why many Democrats as well as Republicans are casting doubt on the ability of the White House to ensure his confirmation. But some resourceful souls have been floating a counter-intuitive argument in order to smooth the way for what looks to be brutal fight in the Senate. According to this scenario, appointing Hagel actually is a signal that Obama is serious about taking on Iran. Choosing an open opponent of not only the use of force against Iran but also sanctions would, we are told, give the president cover when he is ready to go to war on Iran and silence any criticism from the left while also showing the world that America is united behind the president’s policies.

While those attempting to put forward such an idea deserve credit for both chutzpah and creativity, this is utter nonsense. It flies against not only logic but also everything we know about how the president operates. Far from providing a warning to Iran that America is prepared to take action against them, it is a neon sign proclaiming that, at best, the cabinet will be divided on what to do after the next round of no-hope negotiations fail. At worst, it will make it obvious what many have already long suspected: that President Obama has no intention of keeping his promise to stop Iran and to not consider containment as a viable option.

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Hagel Means Iran Containment

Jonathan S. Tobin 01.06.2013 - 12:15 PM

The news that President Obama has finally decided to move ahead with the nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel to be the secretary of defense illustrates the difference between politics and policy. Last year while in the midst of a re-election year Jewish charm offensive, the president not only reiterated that he would never allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon but explicitly disavowed any intention of backing off that pledge and adopting a policy centering on “containing” the Islamist regime. But election years are for promises and second terms are about policy implementation. The appointment of Hagel, who, despite strong opposition from the pro-Israel community and gays, is a lock to be confirmed by his former Senate colleagues, illustrates the gap between what Obama’s supporters were told and what is likely to happen over the next four years.

The president’s defenders spent the last year trying to convince others and themselves that Obama is not only a good friend of Israel but that he should be trusted to take action against Iran if diplomacy fails. But placing someone at the head of the Pentagon who has been an opponent of a tough policy on Iran and a stern critic of Israel and its supporters sends a clear signal that Tehran has little to worry about from a second Obama administration.

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