Obama on 'the kishke question'

Jeffrey Goldberg, who made an appearance here last week, spent part of his weekend asking Barack Obama about being endorsed by Hamas (he didn't care for it), Jimmy Carter's portrait of Israel as an apartheid state ("I strongly reject that characterization"), whether Israel hurts the U.S. image abroad ("no, no, no") and the lingering feeling among many Jews that he can't be trusted.

Here is Obama's response to "the kishke question":

I think the idea of Israel and the reality of Israel is one that I find important to me personally. Because it speaks to my history of being uprooted, it speaks to the African-American story of exodus, it describes the history of overcoming great odds and a courage and a commitment to carving out a democracy and prosperity in the midst of hardscrabble land. One of the things I loved about Israel when I went there is that the land itself is a metaphor for rebirth, for what’s been accomplished. What I also love about Israel is the fact that people argue about these issues, and that they’re asking themselves moral questions.

Sometimes I’m attacked in the press for maybe being too deliberative. My staff teases me sometimes about anguishing over moral questions. I think I learned that partly from Jewish thought, that your actions have consequences and that they matter and that we have moral imperatives. The point is, if you look at my writings and my history, my commitment to Israel and the Jewish people is more than skin-deep and it’s more than political expediency. When it comes to the gut issue, I have such ardent defenders among my Jewish friends in Chicago. I don’t think people have noticed how fiercely they defend me, and how central they are to my success, because they’ve interacted with me long enough to know that I've got it in my gut. During the Wright episode, they didn’t flinch for a minute, because they know me and trust me, and they’ve seen me operate in difficult political situations.

The other irony in this whole process is that in my early political life in Chicago, one of the raps against me in the black community is that I was too close to the Jews. When I ran against Bobby Rush [for Congress], the perception was that I was Hyde Park, I’m University of Chicago, I’ve got all these Jewish friends. When I started organizing, the two fellow organizers in Chicago were Jews, and I was attacked for associating with them. So I’ve been in the foxhole with my Jewish friends, so when I find on the national level my commitment being questioned, it’s curious.

In other Obama news (analysis), the Crunchy Con discusses the passages he found most interesting from the New York Times' lengthy profile of Obama's rise and on the op-ed page, Edward N. Luttwak argues that Obama is not going to be the miraculous American emissary to the Muslim world that some hope.

Carter: Hamas open to peace with Israel

This just in from Reuters:

Hamas would accept a deal creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip if it was approved by Palestinians in a vote, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said on Monday after talks with Hamas leaders.

Carter said he had "no doubt that both the Arab world and the Palestinians, including Hamas, will accept Israel's right to live in peace" within pre-1967 war borders.

But some of Hamas's commitments to Carter, in talks he held with the Islamist group's top leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus, were short on details and remarks by a Gaza-based Hamas official suggested the movement was not abandoning long-held positions.

In a speech, Carter said he heard from Hamas leaders they would "accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders if approved by Palestinians." He was referring to the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and a referendum on a deal Washington hopes to clinch this year.

"It means that Hamas will not undermine (Palestinian President Mahmoud) Abbas's efforts to negotiate an agreement and Hamas will accept an agreement if the Palestinians support it in a free vote," he said.

Right ... Hamas has really shown its willingness to live in peace. Carter, who may very well be the United States' most gullible self-appointed diplomat, was widely criticized for his decision to meet with Hamas leaders. For a review of why he is generally loathed by Jews, read this.

(Image: AP)

'The Gaza Bombshell'

Americans are, by now, well aware of the foreign-policy failings of President George W. Bush. But now he's getting ready to leave office and finally he seems awake to Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He wants to leave a legacy, we've been told about his impetus for the Annapolis conference and his interest in seeing peace achieved in the next 10 months. (There hasn't been peace regarding Jerusalem in 2,000 years and he's going to fix it in a year?)

Well, Vanity Fair's David Rose reports that there is a more layered context to Bush's interest in the conflict and, believe it or not, his previous diddling only made the situation worse.

In recent months, President Bush has repeatedly stated that the last great ambition of his presidency is to broker a deal that would create a viable Palestinian state and bring peace to the Holy Land. “People say, ‘Do you think it’s possible, during your presidency?’ ” he told an audience in Jerusalem on January 9. “And the answer is: I’m very hopeful.”

The next day, in the West Bank capital of Ramallah, Bush acknowledged that there was a rather large obstacle standing in the way of this goal: Hamas’s complete control of Gaza, home to some 1.5 million Palestinians, where it seized power in a bloody coup d’état in June 2007. Almost every day, militants fire rockets from Gaza into neighboring Israeli towns, and President Abbas is powerless to stop them. His authority is limited to the West Bank.

It’s “a tough situation,” Bush admitted. “I don’t know whether you can solve it in a year or not.” What Bush neglected to mention was his own role in creating this mess.

According to [Fatah strongman Muhammad] Dahlan, it was Bush who had pushed legislative elections in the Palestinian territories in January 2006, despite warnings that Fatah was not ready. After Hamas—whose 1988 charter committed it to the goal of driving Israel into the sea—won control of the parliament, Bush made another, deadlier miscalculation.

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.

Within the Bush administration, the Palestinian policy set off a furious debate. One of its critics is David Wurmser, the avowed neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007, a month after the Gaza coup.

Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,” Wurmser says.

The botched plan has rendered the dream of Middle East peace more remote than ever, but what really galls neocons such as Wurmser is the hypocrisy it exposed. “There is a stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy,” he says. “It directly contradicts it.”

Gunmen bomb Gaza YMCA library

Stories like this reminds me that militant Islamist groups -- not to be confused with righteous Muslims -- don't just hate Jews and Israel, but all who disagree with their vision for world supremacy. (Remember what Hamas did to its Fatah brothers in June?)

A band of 14 masked gunmen forced its way into YMCA offices in the Gaza Strip and exploded a library there, Israel Radio reported Friday.

Thousands of books were reportedly burnt in the ensuing fire. The YMCA in Gaza also operates a gym and a wedding hall.

The gunmen laid a second explosive device near a computer in the library but it failed to detonate. Two security guards on the scene were not able to block the intruders; they were taken by them from the YMCA and later released in the northern Gaza Strip.

The latest incident is another link in an ongoing chain of attacks against Palestinian Christians which has worsened since Hamas took power of the Gaza Strip last June.

NY Times: Life still miserable in Sderot

The mainstream media has mainly only written about the plight of Israelis living around Sderot when someone actually is killed by a Qassam rocket falling out of the sky from Gaza. But tomorrow's New York Times has this story, pegged to President Bush's arrival:

SDEROT, Israel — Less than two months ago, Raziel Sasson emerged from his rocket-proof closet, willing now to sleep just outside it, with the rest of his family, on mattresses circled on the living room floor. But Razi, 13, still wakes his father up three times a night, afraid to walk alone to the bathroom.

Four years ago, Razi was climbing a tree when a Qassam rocket, fired from nearby Gaza, flew over his head and exploded nearby. He remembers the spinning contrail of the crude rocket and its fierce whistle. The blast blew him eight yards to the ground.

Sderot, a working-class town of mainly North African immigrants less than two miles from Gaza, has been hit over the past four years with some 2,000 rockets of improving range and explosive power — 22 in the last eight days. Eight Sderot civilians have been killed by the rockets; Razi has seen 15 therapists.

“He wouldn’t leave the house to go to school for a year,” said his mother, Shula. One of his older brothers, Rafi, 22, used his army exit pay to build Razi a bomb shelter in the living room, a concrete cocoon with a steel door.

Across the border in Gaza, life is wretched for Palestinians. But as President Bush prepares to arrive in Jerusalem on Wednesday for the first time since taking office, to spur peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian president, he will hear a lot about the Qassams.

For many Israelis, Sderot (pronounced stay-ROTE) embodies the fears of what happens when they pulled back from occupied land, as they did from all of Gaza more than two years ago — it turns into a staging ground for attacks by extremist Palestinians that a peace treaty will not stop.

“When Bush comes, he should come to Sderot,” said Razi’s father, Moshe, 49, who works as a prison warden in Beersheba.

The problems of Sderot — and of a Gaza run by Hamas, considered a terrorist group by Israel and the United States — are at the heart of Israel’s security concerns. But those concerns, like Hamas itself, are present only in the abstract in the American-led peace effort, which features negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, who has no control over Hamas or Gaza.