Testimony on Obama and Israel

...Obama took office with a distinctly progressive vision of Jewish identity and the Jewish state, one shaped by the Chicago Jewish community that helped launch his political career. Three years later—after a bitter struggle with the Israeli government and the American Jewish establishment--that vision is all but gone.

Obama entered the White House after an adulthood spent—more than any predecessor—in the company of Jews. Most of his key legal mentors were Jews (Abner Mikva, for example); many of his biggest donors were Jews; his chief political consultant, David Axelrod, was a Jew; he lived across the street from a synagogue. And for the most part, the Jews Obama knew best were progressives, shaped by the civil-rights movement and alienated from mainstream American Jewish organizations over Israel.

Obama’s initial statements about Israel often mirrored the liberal Zionism of his Jewish friends. Like them, he embraced the progressive aspects of Israeli society and Jewish tradition while critiquing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. During his 2004 Senate run, Obama criticized the barrier built to separate Israel and its major settlements from the rest of the West Bank. In an interview with the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, he praised David Grossman’s book Yellow Wind, a searing portrait of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. Before a Cleveland crowd in 2008, he challenged the view that “unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, you’re anti-Israel.” In the words of Rabbi Arnold Wolf [of Breirah], an earlier supporter who ran the synagogue across the street from Obama’s house, Obama “was on the line of [the dovish Israeli group] Peace Now.”

...Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had a record of opposing settlement growth too. In 2003, he had been one of only four Jewish members of Congress to sign a letter endorsing the Road Map. Privately, he told associates that the Bush administration had coddled Israel, and that it was time for Israel’s American friends to speak more frankly to the leaders of the Jewish state...

From Peter Beinart's forthcoming book, The Crisis of Zionism, excerpted in Newsweek.

You'd trust your Zionism and Israel's security to that approach?

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