Jonathan’s post on the very few organizations willing to defend President Obama’s goalpost-moving borders position reserved a special place for the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL has not exactly distinguished itself as a voice willing to criticize this administration, and its supportive press release was particularly quick this time.
It will be interesting to see how the ADL reconciles its paint-by-colors defense of the President with the blistering press release just issued by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Entitled “Israel Should Reject a Return to 1967 ‘Auschwitz’ Borders” and subheaded “ ‘Auschwitz’ Borders: A term coined by Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban who warned that a return to pre-1967 Six Day War borders would be Auschwitz borders for Israel,” the release prominently, explicitly, repeatedly linked the President’s position with the specter of mass genocide conducted by forces intransigently hostile to a Jewish presence anywhere in the Middle East. Brutal:
The Simon Wiesenthal Center commended President Obama’s call for further democratization in the Arab world but expressed deep disappointment that he called for Israel’s return to the pre-June 1967 borders. “We welcome the President’s recognition of Israel’s security needs and that Hamas cannot be a partner in the peace process, but a call to a return to 1967 borders as the basis for negotiations, even with ‘land swaps’ is a non-starter, when at least half of the Palestinian rulers are committed to Israel’s destruction,” said Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, founder and dean, and associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
In the last 48 hours White House excuses have run the gamut from “there was no change in policy so people are overreacting” to “there was a change in policy meant to reinvigorate negotiations with a ‘borders first’ approach.” One particularly bold claim is that friends of Israel are not merely overreacting, they’re in fact misunderstanding President Obama’s basic position. “The President didn’t say that Israel would have to return to its pre-1967 borders,” these pedantic and condescending lectures proceed, “He said they should have to start with those parameters and then engage in land swaps.”
The Wiesenthal Center’s statement makes it clear that it’s not a case of people just not getting what Obama is suggesting. The widely recognized problem with Obama’s speech is that he adopted the final Palestinian negotiating position as the starting position for talks. That would leave Israel—now deprived of bargaining chips—in the position of trying to negotiate out of that position with nothing to trade. In the process the president abrogated any number of previous security guarantees to Israel, while asking them to have faith in future security guarantees. No wonder friends of Israel from across the political spectrum are labeling the President’s gambit a non-starter.
For completion’s sake, the Washington Times also just published a disbelieving editorial about Obama’s almost willfully created rift with Israel. Of the various permutations (was it a new policy? was it an existing stance? is it a coherent policy?) they settle basically on the combination suggested earlier on Contentions: it’s a break with previous administrations, but a culmination of this administration’s failed approaches. The question is why the White House would continue pushing failed initiatives based on flawed assumptions, and the editorial takes a detour through how the President has mishandled the issue of Jerusalem.
If its goal was to turn U.S. media outlets against Netanyahu and Israel, the administration’s lack of judgment went far beyond the speech itself.
