Key Jewish Donor Breaks With Obama

One of the most important Democratic donors in the past two decades, whose generous contributions helped pay for the DNC headquarters in Washington, D.C., has indicated that he will not contribute to President Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, because of the administration’s stance on Israel.

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Key Jewish Donor Breaks With Obama

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Kerry’s Delusions and Friendship

If one looks only at the main talking points, there was nothing new in yesterday’s speech by Secretary of State John Kerry about the Middle East peace process. Kerry’s lengthy remarks were in that respect a rerun of a similar speech given by President Bill Clinton at the end of his administration in 2000. Kerry believes that a two-state solution is the only way to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and the parameters he laid out for such a deal are no different that those of Clinton. What was different was the angry, self-righteous tone he adopted toward Israel in which he made clear that the lion’s share of the blame for the failure of peace negotiations belongs to the Netanyahu government and the mere lip service he gave to the notion that the Palestinians have any responsibility for what has happened.

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An Unseemly Transition

There have been ugly interregnums before; transitions from one presidential administration to the next defined not by cordiality and a transcendental sense of patriotic purpose but bitterness and spite. Few modern transitionary periods have looked as ugly, however, as this present transition has from the start. Save the occasional public niceties, the outgoing Obama administration and the incoming Trump administration are engaged not in a ceremonial passing of the baton but in conflict.

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The UN Vote Mocks the Law

There’s only one sensible way to relate to last week’s UN Security Council Resolution 2334–as a document, to quote its own language, which has “no legal validity” and “constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.” The resolution, which deemed every Israeli home in East Jerusalem and the West Bank in violation of international law and designated both areas in their entirety as “occupied Palestinian territory,” contradicts every previous binding international document on the Arab-Israeli conflict, including previous Security Council resolutions. So if those previous documents had legal validity, then this one is a flagrant violation of settled international law. And if they didn’t have legal validity, but merely expressed the international mood of the moment, then the same goes for this one, too.

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It’s Not the Settlements, Stupid

Immediately after the UN voted last week to vilify Israel, Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security advisor, held a conference call to argue that the Obama administration was motivated by its “grave concerns” about “the continued pace” of Israeli settlement activities. He asserted that the administration could not “in good conscience” veto the resolution. Here is how Rhodes quantified the administration’s “grave concerns”:

[S]ince 2009, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank has increased by more than 100,000 to nearly 400,000. … There are now nearly 900,000 — I’m sorry, 90,000 settlers living east of the separation barrier that was created by Israel itself. And the population of these distant settlements has grown by 20,000 since 2009.

The figure of 100,000 sounds significant until you realize that 80 percent of it has been in the settlement blocs “everyone knows” Israel will retain in any conceivable peace agreement. The 20,000 person increase east of the separation barrier, established to stop the wave of Palestinian mass murders against Israelis, translates into less than one percent of the population in the disputed territories, over a period of eight years.

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How Pro-Israel Dems Lost the Party

Several leading members of the Democratic Party have reacted furiously to the Obama administration’s betrayal of Israel at the United Nations last week. Incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer described the U.S. decision to allow the passage of a biased resolution effectively branding Israel as a rogue state as “extremely frustrating, disappointing and confounding.” Senators Richard Blumenthal, Chris Coons, Ron Wyden, and Mark Warner agreed. Blumenthal even called it “unconscionable.” But their protests were not bolstered by any groundswell from the party’s grass roots, which, along with the overwhelming majority of the Democrats’ liberal-media auxiliaries, rallied to the president’s defense and parroted the administration’s excoriation of Israel.

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