MEETING THE PRESIDENT ON 7/13/09

DID THEY DISSUADE THE PRESIDENT FROM HIS NEW ACTIONS AGAINST ISRAEL? DO AMERICAN JEWS EVEN CARE?

WHAT KIND OF JEWISH UNITY WAS DISPLAYED WHEN SOME JEWS ATTENDED KNOWING THAT OTHERS WERE DELIBERATELY EXCLUDED?

REMEMBER THESE NAMES FOR THEY ARE ADVANCING THE NEW AGENDA. IS THE NEW AGENDA YOURS? IF SO, WHERE WERE YOU ALL THESE YEARS? IF THE NEW AGENDA IS NOT YOURS WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO ABOUT IT?
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Participants:

Alan Solow, Chairman, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations,

Lee Rosenberg, President-elect, AIPAC,

David Victor, President, AIPAC Malcolm Honlein, Executive Vice Chairman, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations,

Abraham Foxman, National Director, Anti-Defamation League,

Jason Isaacson, Director of Government and International Affairs, American Jewish Committee,

Nancy Ratzan, President, National Council of Jewish Women,

Kathy Manning, Chair, Executive Committee, United Jewish Communities,

Andrea Weinstein, Chair, Jewish Council for Public Affairs,

Marla Gilson, Washington Director, Hadassah,

Stephen Savitsky, President, Orthodox Union Rabbi,

Steven Wernick, Executive Vice President and CEO, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism,

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President, Union for Reform Judaism,

Ira Forman, Chief Executive Officer, National Jewish Democratic Council,

Debra DeLee, President and CEO, Americans for Peace Now,

Jeremy Ben Ami, Executive Director, J STREET
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Instead of criticizing the substance of administration policies, the strongest critics at Monday’s meeting complained that the president is too willing to express disagreements with Israel in public, which they say gives the Palestinians and the other Arab states a free pass and undermines support for U.S. policy within Israel.

Obama vigorously defended that policy, saying that a public airing of differences between close friends can only bolster their friendship.

“What we heard from the administration is that the president believes he has an ability to open up to the world in a way that his predecessors didn’t,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “He argues that by reaching out and showing a different approach, we can bring peace and security — he used the word ‘normalization’ — to Israel and the Arabs.”

Foxman pressed Obama to keep policy disputes between the two governments private, arguing that perceived differences between the two allies can be exploited by Palestinian leaders not interested in making compromises.

The president did not back down an inch, he said.
“He spelled out that he has a strategy — and the strategy is to tell it like it is. Tell your friends the truth. The problem is, some of us feel he is not telling the truth in a fair way.”

The unintended result, he said, is that “Israel looks like it is the obstacle to peace when it doesn’t agree with U.S. demands. It takes the Palestinians off the hook and it means Israel will not feel secure enough to take risks.”
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Foxman said he and Malcolm Hoenlein, the Conference of Presidents’ executive vice president, pressed hard on that point — but that “the president disagreed. He said that for the past eight years there was no public difference between the U.S. and Israel — and nothing was accomplished. So it’s time for a change.”

Foxman said he and other critics came away with a sense that Obama administration policy in the region will continue without major change — but the way that that policy is packaged may be refined.
Still, there was little opposition to specific Obama administration policies, and several observers said this week’s Jewish outreach efforts gave the administration a tentative green light to proceed with aggressive peace efforts.

“He knows how to push while he’s hugging,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of the pro-peace process J Street, who attended the Jewish leadership gathering, another signal of the administration’s desire to hear from a broader segment of the Jewish and pro-Israel communities.

“He embraces the very basic concerns of the Jewish community on issues like security and the U.S.-Israel relationship, and at the same time he is taking them forward on a peace agenda that he believes is in Israel’s interests,” Ben-Ami said.

“It was brilliantly done,” said Kean University political scientist Gilbert Kahn. “The fact this meeting took place shows that the White House wanted to grab these issues before they bubbled up. They were proactive. They have 80 percent support from the Jewish community, and they don’t want it to go down to 55.”
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Obama: Pressure on Israel to Continue
Tammuz 22, 5769, 14 July 09 04:05
by by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz

(Israelnationalnews.com) U.S. President Barack Obama assured 15 leaders of Jewish American organizations of his commitment to Israel, but he also insisted he would continue to publicly press the Jewish State to conform to his vision of Middle East peace. Hosting the Jewish delegates in the White House on Monday, Obama said that Israel needs "to engage in serious self-reflection" if it is to succeed in reaching a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The American president repeatedly made it clear that in his view this can only mean the creation of an Arab state within Israel's current borders. He presented the "two-state solution" as a solution he wishes to promote to deal with Israel's purportedly precarious demographic situation.

President Obama also said that he will continue to press his administration's demands on Israel urgently and publicly, regardless of opposition from the Netanyahu government. Keeping American disputes with Israel from the public eye, as he claimed was done in the past, has not served the interests of peace, Obama informed his guests. He likened this decision to the open and honest conversation needed among close friends.

At the same time, Obama stated, his administration would not adopt a foreign policy inimical to Israel's security needs. Some of those present suggested that a visit by President Obama to Israel would go a long way to assuring the Israeli people of that commitment. Obama expressed approval of the idea.

Regarding Iran, the U.S. leader said that he remains in favor of dialogue. If the Iranians reject that approach, he added, "we will have to see how we proceed. But it would be a mistake to talk now about what we're going to do and how we're going to do it."

The president excluded from the meeting the strongly pro-Land of Israel National Council of Young Israel, a synagogue federation, and the Zionist Organization of America.
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Jewish World Review July 20, 2009 / 28 Tamuz 5769

By Anne Bayefsky

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | President Barack Obama last Monday met for the first time with leaders of selected Jewish organizations and leaks from the meeting now make one thing very clear. The only free country in the Middle East no longer has a friend in the leader of the free world. Obama is the most hostile sitting American president in the history of the state of Israel.

This was the very first meeting with Jewish community's leaders. Earlier requests for an audience with major Jewish organizations had reportedly been ignored. Six months after taking office the president finally got around to issuing an invitation to stop the bleeding. Increasing numbers of Jews even among the overwhelming number who voted for Obama have been voicing serious concern about his real agenda.

The meeting, however, did not showcase the president's trademark engagement and dialogue routine. Instead, he decided to cherry pick his Jewish audience to include pro-Obama newcomers with little support in the mainstream Jewish world, such as J Street, while blackballing the Zionist Organization of America. The oldest pro-Israel group in the United States, with a Washington office second in size only to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), was not a voice Obama wanted to hear. This leaves the president willing to engage Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but not ZOA President Mort Klein.

The growing alarm in the Jewish community was also something the White House was bent on covering up. They refused to put the meeting on the President's public schedule until it was outed. The White House demanded strict confidentiality and issued a terse couple of lines that it occurred when it was all over.
WAKE UP!
But there is no papering over the distressing reality that emerged. The president told his listeners that he preferred putting daylight between the United States and Israel. His reported justification: "there was no light between the US and Israeli positions for the last eight years, and no progress was made."

Evidently, unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, 21 settlements and 9,000 residents counts for nothing. The Palestinian terrorist leadership and street have refused to accept a Jewish state for the past eight years (and the previous 53) because the United States did not add sufficiently to Israel's isolation.

The president apparently believes that the Palestinians are more likely to end terrorism, incitement to violence and rampant antisemitism if the United States applies more pressure on their victims. Even if Obama doesn't get it, Mahmoud Abbas does. He is now refusing to negotiate anything with the new Israeli government until Obama's settlement conditions are met.

During the meeting, the president repeatedly described his new policy in terms of one of Yasser Arafat's favorite mantras, "even-handedness." That's diplotalk for a moral equivalence between an Arab war against Jewish self-determination launched from the day of Israel's birth decades before any "occupation" and the conditions of third-generation Palestinian "refugees" kept in limbo pending Israel's destruction. But Obama's even-handedness was no slip of the tongue. In his Cairo speech, the president equated the Holocaust to Palestinian "dislocation."

The president promoted his strategy of putting hard public "pressure" on Israel as a means to build more credibility with Arab states. He must have meant the kind of credibility that comes from his policy of leaving an "open door" to Iran after its discredited election.

A DEM PRESIDENT BLAMING THE MEDIA?
Obama then claimed that the widespread perception of an anti-Israel agenda was all the media's fault because the media is only interested in a "man-bites-dog" story. When an administration sends a US ambassador back to Syria though it is still listed as a key state sponsor of terrorism, hosts terrorist kingpins pursuing Israel's annihilation, and was caught trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, the story is far-fetched alright, but true.

The president joked that Al-Jazeera often airs pictures of him wearing a yarmulke at the Western Wall. Except the photo-op during the election campaign had been intended to fool a Jewish audience that is no longer amused.

Reports also quote the president as claiming Israel has yet to "engage in serious self-reflection." Considering Israel is a democratic country forced to send its children into the armed forces for two to three years and its men into reserve duty for another twenty-five, that isn't the audacity of hope. It's just plain audacity.

There is no doubt that the pressure on Israel from the Obama administration is going to get a lot worse, as the President told the group "there is a narrow window of opportunity for advancing the peace process." Everyone understood the threat. The narrow window is Obama's self-defined political ambitions bearing no relationship to the realities of the Middle East or the welfare of either Israel or the United tates.

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