"The End of Liberal Zionism"

[Quacker Jack™]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/opini ... pe=article

[stilltrucking]

Beinart argued Obama understands Israel through the lens of liberalism while Netanyahu understands it through the prism of security and strength. “Obama got his view on Israel from liberal Jews back in Chicago,” wrote Thomas Mitchell in “Likud Leaders,” and that effect on his thinking has been apparent for years. One of those Jews, Beinart noted, was David Axelrod, who, “like many of Obama’s early Jewish supporters, put the ‘progressive social justice tradition’ at the core of his Jewish identity, and in his view, ‘Obama was very much a part of that and was very much a product of it.’ ”

While Obama was running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, for example, he criticized Israel’s West Bank security barrier, which the Republican Jewish Coalition later seized upon, according to JTA. Writing in “The Crisis of Zionism,” Beinart called Obama’s criticism “remarkable,” given that 361 members of the House that same year had passed a resolution in support of the barrier.

Even Obama’s reading habits were suspect to some Israel supporters. In an interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in May of 2008, Obama spoke of the book “The Yellow Wind,” which he read when it first came out in 1988. Written by novelist David Grossman, one of Israel’s most prominent doves, the work offers a searing indictment of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Its impact on Obama had been such that, even decades later, he still recalled it.

“It is difficult to read ‘The Yellow Wind’ without being profoundly disturbed by its portrait of Palestinian life under Israeli rule,” Beinart remarked. “That Obama read it, along with the novels of another famed Israeli dove, Amos Oz, lends further credence to Arnold Wolf’s claim that his pre-presidential years, Obama ‘was on the line of Peace Now.’ ”

Obama’s opinions on Israel have long contrasted with the militant view adopted by Netanyahu’s Likud, a point he made clear during the 2008 campaign, which made some pro-Israel hawks nervous. “I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re opposed to Israel, that you’re anti-Israel, and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel,” Obama said.

These statements weren’t lost on the Israeli public. . .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morn ... tional_pop

[url=http://allsonatural.com/cqi/it/pdf-The- ... 330169320/]The Yellow Wind{/url]

http://allsonatural.com/cqi/it/pdf-The- ... 330169320/