I was sitting the back of the room not getting called for jury duty when yesterday's excellent Roger Cohen column dropped, so I'm a day late plugging it, which makes me five years late in blog time. But that's okay. The column, in case you missed it, broke some real news on the composition of Obama's Middle East team. The new circle of advisers includes Shibley Telhami, Vali Nasr, Fawaz Gerges, Fouad Moughrabi and James Zogby. The outcry greeting Obama's all-Arab negotiating team has been loud, much as you'd expect. Spokespeople for AIPAC have argued that this group, though not necessarily biased, is insufficiently sensitive to the Jewish perspective and unable to appear credible to the Israeli people. Action alerts have gone out. Senators are voicing skepticism. Sorry, did Cohen say Shibley Telhami, Vali Nasr, Fawaz Gerges, Fouad Moughrabi and James Zogby? He meant Dennis Ross, James Steinberg, Dan Kurtzer, Dan Shapiro, and Martin Indyk. American Jews all, as you'd imagine. But there's been no outcry be because there are no power Arab groups able to mount one. Cohen seems to see this as an error on the part of the Obama campaign. He 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.
