Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch hadn’t been getting much attention prior to his decision to use the special election in New York’s 9th congressional district to make a point about the Obama administration’s policies toward Israel. Yet now that he’s gotten a great deal of the credit for that Republican upset, Koch is doing the only thing he can to maximize his time in the spotlight: he’ll be enthusiastically backing President Obama’s re-election next year.
Politico reports after spending the summer demanding Jewish voters punish the Democrats for Obama’s brutal treatment of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and attempts to pressure the Jewish state into dangerous concessions, Koch has decided all is forgiven. But it remains to be seen whether Jewish opinion, which polls have shown is tilting decisively against the president, will follow Koch’s lead.
Koch detailed his reasons for flipping back to join “the Obama Re-Election Express,” in an e-mail being circulated today. Citing the president’s speech to the United Nations opposing a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state, Washington’s efforts during the sack of the Israeli embassy in Cairo and its release of bunker buster bombs to the Israel Defense Force, Koch has decided it is now once again safe to vote for the Democrats.
The problem is the same arguments about Obama’s support for the U.S.-Israel defense alliance Koch now cites were being made by Democrats prior to the NY-9 election. The point then wasn’t that Obama was a declared enemy of Israel, but, as Koch wrote in an op-ed published in the New York Daily News just nine days ago, “he was not as friendly to Israel as we thought he would be” and had distanced himself from Israel while making no demands on the Palestinians.
While it is true Koch had said if Obama mended his ways he would support him next year, for the mayor to claim the president’s UN speech represents the fundamental change he had previously been demanding lacks credibility. After all, there was never any doubt even at the height of the controversy about Obama’s May speech in which he called for Israel to accept the 1967 lines as the basis of future negotiations (a point on which Koch was rightly angered by the administration) the United States would be forced to veto a Palestinian attempt to get the UN to recognize their independence.
Even more to the point, and perhaps missed by Koch in his enthusiasm to rejoin his party, was that in his address to the UN last week, Obama cited that May speech as an example of how he had put forward a “new basis” for the peace talks. In doing so, the president made it clear he intended to keep pressing Israel to accept the 1967 lines as a way of bribing the Palestinians to return to peace talks. So for anyone, especially Ed Koch, to now assert the last two and a half years of administration efforts to pick fights with Israel and to tilt the diplomatic playing field in the direction of the Palestinians is now over and done with is, at best, a trifle optimistic, and at worst, a serious misreading of the situation.
Koch undermined his argument about Obama’s alleged change of heart by citing in the same e-mail his delight at being invited to a gathering of UN delegates last week at which he had the opportunity to chat with the president. It was, he said, his first such invitation since the Reagan administration. While it might be unfair to say his good opinion was bought so cheaply, Koch has opened himself up to criticism by jumping back to the president’s camp so quickly and with such a weak rationale. All the arguments for supporting or opposing the president’s Israel policy three months or even just a few days ago are still there to be made today. The only difference is that Ed Koch has decided to change sides.
