US Elections

Good for the Jews?

By James Morrow in Sydney

4 May 2010

America’s Jews overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama’s run at the presidency. Having helped elect the man, however, many of them are having second thoughts.

And no wonder.

While the whole Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process’ has become something more akin to a religion than a reality (as Aaron David Miller lucidly explains in Foreign Policy), under the Obama administration, supporters of the Jewish state have seen its status, like that of so many other traditional allies, downgraded. This has led to some pretty outrageous moral equivalencies: Obama has even gone so far as to compare the plight of the Palestinians to that of African-Americans in the Jim Crow-era South. Of course, American blacks fought a peaceful campaign that never sought to deny their white counterparts’ existence. The Palestinians? Not so much.

The latest – though surely not final – nail in this coffin is the widely-reported news that the Obama administration is considering support for a “nuclear-free Middle East”. Again, sounds great in theory. But in this construction, a modern, pluralistic democracy – Israel – which has been under attack by its neighbours literally since its modern Day One, is being treated as morally equivalent to neighbouring dictatorships where it is capital crime to sell property to a Jew.

Of course, it is not just Israel. If one over-arching theme can be teased out of the Obama Presidency it is this: a strong America at home, a weak one abroad. Thus, domestically, the White House and their Democratic allies see no area of life or commerce that cannot be improved by their intervention. Whether it is bailing out the auto companies, writing student loans, restricting recreational fishing, or sneaking a crackdown on vitamins (!) into Wall Street “reform” legislation (and perhaps one of my co-bloggers can explain just what is going on with the increasingly mercurial Henry Waxman thinks he's up to these days), Barack Obama is working hard to make good on his promise to “fundamentally transform” the way the US works.

Abroad, however, it is a different story. When it comes to foreign affairs, Barack Obama sounds like nothing so much as that miserable American archetype, the second-year university student who’s come home for Thanksgiving full of the news that the US “democracy” is a sham, that Hugo Chavez is a really exciting character, and that everything grandpa fought for was a lie. Iran is free to pursue its nuclear ambitions, historic allies like Britain are not so special, and the US drops the alpha pose and shows the scruff of its neck, not realising – or caring – that the other dogs in the yard don’t necessarily want to play nice.

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