My colleague Ezra Klein writes:
[Roger Cohen] sees America's goal as acting as a credible broker and this team as an impediment to that. But I interpret the team another way: America's point is not to act as a credible broker. It understands Israel from the perspective of American Jewry, means to engage the conflict from the perspective of American Jewry, and has picked a bunch of American Jews to do it. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But we shouldn't pretend that the Palestinians will take our mediation seriously. We are on a side, and it is not theirs.
Perspective is a metaphysical matter, and neither Barack Obama nor George W. Bush know what it's like to be an American Jew any more than Norman Podhoretz knows what it's like to be black. To argue that there are organizations like AIPAC that claim to represent the perspective of American Jews and have skewed America's foreign policy in a direction that doesn't serve our interests is another point entirely, but the perspective of American Jews is something only American Jews can possess.
And that perspective is quite varied. In fact, many of the most heated and personal exchanges on political blogs over the Gaza conflict have been between American Jews, between Glenn Greenwald and David Bernstein, or between Marty Peretz and Spencer Ackerman, Matthew Yglesias, and Ezra himself. The problem is rather like that of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson being called upon to speak for black people everywhere every time a "race issue" comes up: Both in the United States government, and in the press, the perspective of American Jews is represented to policymakers almost exclusively by Jewish figures who share a rather simplistic and hawkish view of American policy in the Middle East. To the extent that American policy is influenced by American "Jewish interests," it is through the actions of a select group who do not represent the complexity of Jewish thought on the subject. This is not The Jewish Perspective; this is the perspective of some Jews, and our non-Jewish heads of state must share some responsibility for giving them such weight. Moreover, right-wing gentiles who give unconditional support to Israel's military behavior hardly share the same ultimate interests as American Jews, and their approach on domestic matters displays an acute divergence from the politics of most Jewish Americans.
I am in agreement with Ezra that our Middle East policy, and even our reputation, would benefit from greater Arab representation among Obama's advisers and that America can't hope to be seen as an honest broker as long as the president's views are shaped entirely by people who hold a particular ideological position in Israel. Obama's group of advisers sends a message, not merely through the religious background of its members but more significantly through their foreign-policy views. The idea of a single, monolithic "Jewish perspective" influencing American policy is really quite noxious. American Jews have a variety of opinions on Israel's behavior and how the United States should behave, and they often disagree.
-- A. Serwer
