The Amateur

by Edward Klein

That courtship brought Obama the support of some of the wealthiest Jews in Chicago. They included Penny Pritzker of the Hyatt Hotel chain family; Betty Lu Saltzman, daughter of the late real-estate baron Philip Klutznick; former Congressman Abner Mikva; Lester Crown, a billionaire benefactor of Jewish charities; and Lee Rosenberg, a media and entertainment mogul, who accompanied Obama on his 2004 senatorial election campaign visit to Israel, where Obama placed a handwritten prayer for peace in the cracks of Jerusalem’s Western Wall.

  Few of these early Jewish sponsors have since publicly criticized the president for his tough line on Israel. But at least three of his Chicago backers—Penny Pritzker, Lester Crown, and Lee Rosenberg, the president of the powerful pro-Israel lobby AIPAC (America-Israel Public Affairs Committee)—expressed their distress in private conversations with Obama.

  Some people blamed Obama’s Jewish problem on his advisers, including his former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, whose Israeli father was a member of the Irgun underground during Israel’s struggle for independence, and Valerie Jarrett, who made no secret of her close ties to the Jordanian royal family. But veteran journalist Richard Z. Chesnoff, who has had more than forty years of experience reporting from the Middle East, and who’s done extensive research on Obama’s management style, didn’t agree with that assessment.

  “In my opinion,” said Chesnoff, “Obama’s problem in dealing with the Arab-Israeli conundrum doesn’t come from the advice he’s getting from his advisers, but rather from his one-man style and his inflated view of his own leadership talents. Obama believes that no matter what the odds against it, he can bring everyone together, kumbaya style, so that we can solve hitherto insoluble problems. Perhaps even more egregiously, he seems to have an exaggerated sense of his own depth of understanding of the Middle East, which is simply not borne out by his background or experience.”

  “The problem is naïveté in the Obama administration,” added Robert Lieber, professor of government at Georgetown University. “The president came into office with the assumption that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is by far the most central urgent problem in the region—which it is not—and that it is the key that unlocks everything else in the region. And he and his advisers believed the [Israeli-Palestinian] situation was ripe for progress, which it absolutely isn’t.”

  By the end of March 2010, most of the organized Jewish community was in full cry against the Obama administration’s treatment of Israel. However, the voice of New York’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, one of the most influential elected Jewish officials in Washington, was conspicuously silent. That gave Ed Koch, an incurable gadfly, the opportunity to taunt his frenemy Schumer in his blog, “Ed Koch Commentary.”

  “Chuck Schumer resented my blog,” Koch told me. “He called me and said, ‘How can you say this? I’m a protector of Israel.’ And I said, ‘Chuck, you’re not speaking out!’ And he said, ‘I’m doing it behind the scenes.’ He was upset because there was a piece quoting me as saying, ‘It’s obvious Chuck wants to be the majority leader in the Senate if Harry Reid leaves, and Chuck doesn’t want to criticize the president and diminish his chances.’”

  Throughout April 2010, the pressure on Schumer continued to mount. Finally, when P. J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, announced at a press conference that the relationship of Israel and the United States depended on the pace of peace negotiations, Schumer could no longer hold his tongue.

  “This is terrible,” Schumer said. “That is a dagger, because the relationship is much deeper than the disagreements on negotiations, and most Americans—Democrat, Republican, Jew, non-Jew—would feel that. So I called up Rahm Emanuel and I called up the White House and I said, ‘If you don’t retract that statement, you are going to hear me publicly blast you on this.’

  “You have to show Israel that it’s not going to be forced to do things it doesn’t want to do and can’t do,” Schumer continued. “At the same time, you have to show the Palestinians that they are not going to get their way by just sitting back and not giving in, and not recognizing that there is a state of Israel. And right now, there is a battle going on inside the administration. One side agrees with us, one side doesn’t, and we’re pushing hard to make sure the right side wins and, if not, we’ll have to take it to the next step.”

  After Schumer’s J’accuse, it became clear that the inexperienced Obama had once again overplayed his hand. In part, the president had allowed himself to be influenced by the growing volume of anti-Israel anger coming from the left wing of the Democratic Party, especially from radical students on campuses, where calls for the “delegitimization” of the Jewish State were almost de rigueur. In part, too, the president probably placed too much weight on recent sociological studies that indicated a shift in American Jewish attitudes on Israel.

  In May 2010, under mounting pressure, the president agreed to meet with Jewish members of the Democratic caucuses in the House and Senate. Thirty-seven of the forty-three Jews in Congress met with Obama, the largest such gathering of Jewish lawmakers ever held in the White House. One of the attendees, who took notes during the meeting, made them available to the author of this book. Here is a transcript of what Obama said to the Jewish congressmen and women:[Palestinian Prime Minister Salam] Fayyad and Abu Mazen [Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Mahmoud Abbas] are as moderate as we are going to get.

  My policy on settlements is no different than George Bush’s, but I won’t wink or nod.

  You want me to be explicit on Iran, but as the guy with his finger on the button, I am not going to say anything. When I say [an Iranian nuclear weapon is] unacceptable, it’s unacceptable.

  Bibi’s speech at AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] on Jerusalem was belligerent.

  I’m pro-Israel not pro-Shas [an ultra-orthodox religious political party in Israel that opposes any freeze on Israeli settlements in the West Bank].

  My job is to protect the national security of the United States.

  I fundamentally believe the key to the Middle East is being an evenhanded broker.

  I’m pained that people don’t think I support Israel. I take responsibility for stubbing my toe on messaging. My views are distorted.

  I feel close to the Jewish community. I wouldn’t be here without many of you.

  There are legitimate differences between the United States and Israel and [between] me and Prime Minister [Netanyahu]. I’ve spent more time with him than any other foreign leader.

  Everyone knows two states is the only solution.

  I can’t impose a settlement but I may outline a solution for the parties.

  Our public disagreement with Israel gives us credibility with the Arab states and compels them to act.

  What most disturbed the Jewish members of Congress was that last comment by Obama—namely, that by haranguing Israel in public and portraying it as a villain in the peace process, Washington gained credibility and influence with the Arabs. No one in the room believed that to be true. Quite the opposite, they believed that the bad blood between the Obama administration and Israel encouraged the Arabs to be more, not less, intransigent.

  Indeed, after the meeting, Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, one of Obama’s most loyal backers, shook her head and admitted: “He doesn’t understand that ally-to-ally differences should not be aired in public. He’s isolating Israel and putting Israel in a weakened position.”

  When word of Obama’s views inevitably spread beyond the Capital Beltway, it sent shockwaves through the Jewish community. Said one prominent Jewish leader: “You can draw a straight line between that meeting and Obama’s fundraising problems with Jews today.”

  “The majority of today’s American Jews don’t see themselves as outsiders or victims anymore,” said Binyamin Jolkovsky, the publisher and editor of the widely read Internet magazine JewishWorldReview.com. “That’s positive. But that feeling of equality has also produced a communal negative. The fear that came with being an outsider also gav
e most Jews, even nonreligious ones, a cohesive sense of responsibility regarding their Jewish identity in general and Israel in particular.

  “That’s changed,” Jolkovsky continued. “I’m no senior citizen, but today’s generation didn’t witness the Holocaust, they don’t understand what was entailed in the birth of Israel, they don’t even remember the real threats of the 1967 Six Day War, they probably never read the novel Exodus. The majority of young American Jews think that somehow Israel will always be there. They don’t understand that when your enemies say they want to destroy you, they mean it.”

  Most of all, what Obama didn’t count on was that, for all the changes taking place among younger “progressive” Jews, Jerusalem remained a third rail in American politics. The person who seemed to understand that better than anyone else was Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor, who took out full-page ads in April 2010 in major American newspapers to express his views on the city of Jerusalem.

  “For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics,” Weisel wrote.

  It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture—and not a single time in the Koran. Its presence in Jewish history is overwhelming. There is no more moving prayer in Jewish history than the one expressing our yearning to return to Jerusalem. To many theologians, it IS Jewish history, to many poets, a source of inspiration. It belongs to the Jewish people and is much more than a city; it is what binds one Jew to another in a way that remains hard to explain. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it is not the first time; it is a homecoming.

  I interviewed Weisel following a private lunch that he had in early May with President Obama at the White House. “The invitation came before my public statements on Jerusalem,” Weisel said. “It was a very good lunch. No small talk. Everything was substance. I understood his position. We didn’t agree on everything. The president wanted to know why Bibi [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] didn’t fire the minister who made that Jerusalem announcement [about expanding Jewish housing during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit]. I said he would have had to go to his party and say, ‘Give me anyone else.’ But he didn’t and then there was a chain reaction.

  “Most of the problems [between America and Israel] remain, but the intensity on both sides and the recriminations are gone,” Weisel added. “During our lunch, it was clear that the President does at least know that Jerusalem is the center of Jewish history, and he knows you can’t ignore 3,000 to 4,000 years of history. I believe the only way to attain peace is to put Jerusalem at the end of the negotiations, not at the beginning.”

  Since the shellacking it suffered in the 2010 midterm elections, the Obama administration has softened some of its more controversial Mideast policy initiatives. For instance, on Jerusalem, the White House conceded that the question of the city’s status should come at the end of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, as Elie Weisel desired, rather than at the beginning, as the president originally wanted.

  Along with this apparent U-turn in substance, the White House launched a charm offensive to win back the allegiance of the Jewish community. The president set the tone. He sent a personal letter to Alan Solow, the former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, in which he reasserted his support for Israel’s security. And he followed that up with a warm message of greeting on the occasion of Israel’s sixty-second independence day.

  Meanwhile, pro-Obama rabbis from local communities all over America were invited to the White House for schmooze fests with Rahm Emanuel, Daniel Shapiro, the deputy national security adviser who dealt with the Middle East, and Dennis Ross, the White House’s top Iran policy official.

  “The three men told the Democratic rabbis that the administration has three priorities in the Middle East,” Caroline Glick reported in The Jerusalem Post. “First Obama seeks to isolate Iran. Second, he seeks to significantly reduce the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq. And third, he seeks to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel.”

  As part of its PR campaign, the White House had David Axelrod do a limited mea culpa. “With some of the leadership of the Jewish community there’s been some bumps in the road over the past fifteen months,” Axelrod admitted in a phone conversation with the author of this book. “Some of those bumps resulted purely from a lack of communication on our part. I don’t think we’ve done as good a job as we could have in our communications with the Jewish community during the first year or so of the administration. We’ve had a sustained and vigorous round of communications in the last few months, and I think that’s been helpful.”

  The crowning moment in Washington’s charm offensive came in July 2010, when Prime Minister Netanyahu returned to Washington and this time was given the red-carpet treatment. He was honored with a working lunch in the Cabinet Room and a photo op with Obama in the Oval Office. But things didn’t work out as the White House had planned. As the TV cameras recorded the scene, Netanyahu wagged his finger under Obama’s nose and lectured the president on the Middle East. Obama sat there, saying nothing and looking like a weak, immature schoolboy.

  But neither the White House’s charm offensive nor the minor adjustments it has made in its policies can obscure an irrefutable fact: the changes are tactical and tonal, not substantive. The goal is still the same—to conclude successful peace talks by applying pressure on Israel.

  “In my view, the Obama administration has not pulled back from its desire to ingratiate itself with the Arab world,” 5 said Kenneth J. Bialkin, chairman of the American-Israel Friendship League. “Yes, they’ve pulled back from saying that Israel’s conduct endangers the lives of American soldiers in the Middle East. But most of its charm offensive was aimed at damage control.”

  Domestic politics surely played a role in the president’s calculations vis-à-vis the American Jewish community. But Obama was also influenced by his major foreign policy conundrum: how to contain a resurgent Iran. In pursuit of that goal, Obama expected Israel to strike a peace accord with the Palestinians and their Arab allies—no matter how real or unreal that expectation might be.

  “Obama and his people believe the Palestinian leadership is genuinely ready for historic compromise,” says David Horovitz, the London-born former editor of The Jerusalem Post. “The unfortunate consensus in Israel—and not just the hawks—is that while we wish [the Arabs] were [ready], they aren’t.... [To] our great sorrow—and to our great cost—we are not convinced that even the relative moderates like Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad have internalized the idea that Jews have historic rights here too.”

  Indeed, in the days just before a new round of peace talks began, Palestinian leaders went out of their way to declare that while they might be prepared to negotiate with Israel, they would never recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the Middle East. In other words, nothing fundamental has changed in the Arab approach to Israel’s right to exist since the creation of the State of Israel sixty-two years ago.

  In March 2012, with the threat of a nuclear war with Iran hanging over both Israel and the United States, Netanyahu was invited back to the White House for yet another face-to-face with Obama. It was, said Jonathan S. Tobin on the “Contentions” website of Commentary magazine in February 2012,impossible to ignore the political implications of this summit. With evidence mounting that Obama and the Democrats have been bleeding Jewish support in the last year, the visit [took] the president’s charm offensive aimed at convincing the Jewish community he is Israel’s best friend to a new level. Netanyahu [had] good reason to play along with Obama’s pretense, as he may have to go on dealing with him until January 2017. But the question remained whether the two men [could] sufficiently paper over their personal hostility and policy differences in order for the visit to have the effect the president’s political handlers are aiming for.

  CHAPTER 16

  ALL IN THE FAMILY

  This president runs from race like a black man runs from
a cop.

  —Michael Eric Dyson, an African-American professor of sociology at Georgetown University

  During the months I spent researching and writing this book, I was frequently asked the same question: What surprised you the most about Barack Obama? My answer was always the same. I said that I was surprised by how badly America’s first black president had bungled his relations with black America.

  “Early on in his presidency,” wrote Randall Kennedy in The Persistence of the Color Line, “Obama was pressed by some activists and politicians to offer race-specific policies to address the disproportionately high rates of unemployment that have long plagued black and other racial-minority communities. He steadfastly refused to do so.... ‘I can’t pass laws that say I’m just helping black folks,’ he responded when asked about Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) criticism of his employment policy. ‘I’m the president of the United States. What I can do is make sure that I am passing laws that help all people, particularly those that are most vulnerable and most in need. That in turn is going to help lift up the African American community.’

  “Here Obama was engaging in the old trick of creating a straw man to knock down,” Kennedy continued. “The CBC was not requesting policy aimed at ‘just helping black folks.’ It was requesting policy that would be intended to assist Americans as a whole but ‘particularly those who are most vulnerable’ in economic downturns.... ”

  Despite Obama’s failed economic policies, grievances between black leaders and the black president were kept under wraps for quite some time. White Americans were hardly aware of the family squabble. But those grievances finally surfaced in a dramatic way in the summer of 2010, when Shirley Sherrod, the black Georgia state director of rural development for the United States Department of Agriculture, was forced to resign under orders from the Obama White House.