Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Why Obama’s Jewish support is slipping

Dunque, una delegazione di leader ebreo ortodossi va da Obama a trattare 
le condizioni del loro appoggio alla sua rielezione.  Fin qui tutto 
normale: sono cittadini americani, rappresentanti di una comunità di 
cittadini americani che hanno i loro interessi e le loro necessità, come 
tutti, e che subordinano il loro appoggio elettorale alle promesse del 
candidato riguardo al loro soddisfacimento.
 
Tutto bene, dunque?  Niente affatto, perché non sono andati a 
rappresentare i loro interessi di cittadini americani bensì quelli di 
Israele: uno stato estero con il quale essi si identificano.  Ed è 
all'appoggio che il candidato presidente è disposto a dare a quello 
stato estero che essi hanno subordinato il loro appoggio elettorale, a 
prescindere da quali siano gli interessi strategici americani.  Sono 
andati a trattare col candidato presidente in quanto essendo formalmente 
cittadini statunitensi hanno il diritto di votarlo, ma sostanzialmente 
si sono posti come rappresentanti di Israele.
 
Qui siamo ben oltre la doppia fedeltà: siamo alla conclamata fedeltà 
esclusiva. Verso Israele ovviamente.
 
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Why Obama’s Jewish support is slipping
By RAFAEL MEDOFF
06/17/2012 21:50
Look no further than the president’s meeting last week with a delegation 
of Jewish leaders.
President Peres, US President Obama toast Photo: Amos Ben Gershom/ GPO
Anyone wondering why President Barack Obama’s 30-point lead over Mitt 
Romney among Jews in New York has shrunk to just eight points need look 
no further than the president’s meeting last week with a delegation of 
Jewish leaders.
 
According to the latest survey by the Siena College Research Institute, 
one of the top polling agencies covering New York State, Obama’s 
previous 62-32 edge over Romney among the state’s Jewish voters has 
dwindled to 51-43. That’s the lowest Jewish support for a Democratic 
presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1980.
 
A few days before the poll came out, a delegation of Orthodox Jewish 
leaders met with the president at the White House. In a memo to his 
congregants this week, Rabbi Dr. Haskel Lookstein of Manhattan’s 
Kehilath Jeshurun synagogue described the meeting.
 
“When asked about the perception that Israel is being pressed on the 
peace process more than are the Palestinians,” Rabbi Lookstein wrote, 
“the President indicated his belief that both sides need to compromise 
and that he has pressured both sides. However, in truth, he only cited 
pressure on the Israelis with respect to stopping settlement activity. 
He indicated that all of the United States assistance to Israel on 
security issues is problematic for the Palestinians, but, of course, 
that doesn’t constitute pressure on them to do anything. The one thing 
the Palestinians have to be pressured to do is to sit down at the table 
and negotiate without preconditions. The President has not done this and 
he avoided giving a clear response to the question of how he is 
specifically pressuring the Palestinians.”
 
Although the president and his advisers had plenty of time to prepare 
for the meeting, and even though the meeting was, as Rabbi Lookstein put 
it, “carefully scripted,” President Obama “avoided giving a clear 
response” regarding pressuring the Palestinians. One would think he 
would have come up with at least one example, even if it was more 
rhetorical than substantive, to soothe the concerns of the Jewish 
delegation. No such luck.
 
Rabbi Lookstein, the author of Were We Our Brothers’ Keepers?, an 
important book on American Jewry’s response to the Holocaust, has a keen 
sense of history. He recalled, in his memo, how some prominent Jews with 
access to President Franklin Roosevelt hesitated “to ask the hard 
questions or raise the tough issues.”
 
In December 1942, after the US had verified that mass murder of Europe’s 
Jews was underway, Jewish leaders were granted half an hour with the 
president. He spent the first 23 minutes telling jokes and commenting on 
other subjects. Then FDR spoke in generalities about the Nazi genocide 
for a few moments. And then – one participant later wrote – he “pushed 
some secret button, and his adjutant appeared in the room” to usher the 
Jewish leaders out.
 
In his diary, Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, wrote about an 
incident in March 1944, in which FDR met with Jewish leaders and “caused 
[them] to believe that he was in complete accord with them...” The very 
next day, Roosevelt boasted to his cabinet that he had told the Jewish 
leaders “where to get off” and had warned them that their agitation for 
Zionism was “going to be responsible for the killing of a hundred 
thousand people.” “Enraged Arabs” would retaliate by attacking Americans 
in the Middle East, FDR claimed.
 
“The President certainly is a waterman,” Wallace wrote. “He looks one 
direction and rows the other with the utmost skill.”
 
American Jews in the 1940s had no way to know President Roosevelt’s true 
feelings on these issues, and Jewish leaders were reluctant to speak up. 
“Thank God, we live in a very different world today,” Rabbi Lookstein 
wrote this week. Today’s Jewish leaders are much more willing than their 
predecessors to ask the president the difficult questions that need to 
be asked.
 
At the end of the meeting with President Obama, Rabbi Lookstein gave the 
president’s Jewish chief of staff, Jack Lew, a copy of his book, which 
he inscribed, “May you, unlike American Jewish leaders during the 
Holocaust, speak truth to power when the opportunity presents itself.”
 
“My only question,” Rabbi Lookstein concluded, is “will the President 
listen? I hope the answer to that is yes.”
 
I hope so, too. But unfortunately, so far President Obama evidently 
prefers to “avoid giving a clear response” regarding pressuring the 
Palestinians. If that continues to be his policy, then the president may 
well find his Jewish support decreasing even further.
 
The writer is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust 
Studies, and coauthor, with Prof. Sonja Schoepf Wentling, of the 
forthcoming book Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish 
Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel.
 
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?ID=274182&R=R1
 
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