In a New York Times op-ed yesterday, Israeli journalist Aluf Benn asked President Obama to soften his tough anti-settlement talk with a conciliatory speech to the Israeli public, which is increasingly skeptical of the American president. Regardless of what you think of this idea, it's pretty clear that there is a pernicious narrative emerging, suggesting that Obama owes it to Israelis to woo them more than he already has in his Cairo address -- as if he were the president of Israel and not the United States.
Benn's piece is quite strange. He recognizes that some of Obama's unpopularity is driven by the reactionary Israeli right, which sows mistrust (and bias) by casually throwing around the president's middle name, "Hussein." And ridiculously, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyhu supposedly refers to Obama's top advisers, Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod, as "self-hating Jews." But then Benn engages in some anti-Obama scare-mongering himself, suggesting that the American president's view of 20th-century Jewish history is akin to that of Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadienjad:
...Mr. Obama seems to have confused American Jews with Israelis. We are close emotionally and politically, but we are different. We speak Hebrew and not English, we live in the Middle East and have separate historical narratives. Mr. Obama's stop at Buchenwald and his strong rejection of Holocaust denial, immediately after his Cairo speech, appealed to American Jews but fell flat in Israel. Here we are taught that Zionist determination and struggle — not guilt over the Holocaust — brought Jews a homeland. Mr. Obama's speech, which linked Israel's existence to the Jewish tragedy, infuriated many Israelis who sensed its closeness to the narrative of enemies like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
I take Benn's point that American and Israeli Jews have different historiographies. But it is patently absurd to claim that Obama somehow sounded like an anti-Semitic "enemy" when he acknowledged that the Zionist project is a direct outgrowth of the oppression of European Jews over centuries and centuries. Zionism predated the Holocaust, but was obviously strengthened by it. Obama pointed that out as a way to signal his support for the Jewish state as morally and historically just.
Benn's misreading of Obama only further cements the mistrust between Israelis and Americans that he claims to combat. His piece leaves American Jews with the sense that it is impossible to support both their president and the State of Israel. The truth is that 79 percent of American Jews broadly support Obama's agenda, and 60 percent specifically support the president's call to freeze settlement activity. American and Israeli Jews don't have to agree about everything. We're even allowed to have our own opinions on Middle East policy -- as is our president.
And by the way: I'd like to second these sentiments.
--Dana Goldstein
