Date: March 31st 2008

The senator, his pastor and the Israel lobby

By Ali Abunimah

The Electronic Intifada
31 March 2008

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9427.shtml

US senator Barack Obama was widely hailed for his 18 March
speech calming the media furor about the sermons of his
pastor for twenty years Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright's
remarks, Obama said, "expressed a profoundly distorted
view of this country -- a view that sees white racism as
endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America
above all that we know is right with America; a view that
sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily
in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of
emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of
radical Islam."

It might seem odd for Obama to mention Israel and "radical
Islam" in a speech focused on US race relations,
especially since Wright's most widely reported comments
were about America's historic and ongoing oppression of
its black citizens.

But for months, even before most Americans had heard of
Wright, prominent pro-Israel activists were hounding Obama
over Wright's views on Israel and ties to Nation of Islam
leader Louis Farrakhan. In January, Abraham Foxman,
National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL),
demanded that Obama denounce Farrakhan as an anti-Semite.
The senator duly did so, but that was not enough. "[Obama
has] distanced himself from his pastor's decision to honor
Farrakhan," Foxman said, but "He has not distanced himself
from his pastor. I think that's the next step." Foxman
labeled Wright "a black racist," adding in the same
breath, "Certainly he has very strong anti-Israel views"
(Larry Cohler-Esses, "ADL Chief To Obama: 'Confront Your
Pastor' On Minister Farrakhan," The Jewish Week, 16
January 2008). Criticism of Israel, one suspects, is
Wright's truly unforgivable crime and Foxman's vitriol has
echoed through dozens of pro-Israel blogs.

Since his early political life in Chicago, Barack Obama
was well-informed about the Middle East and had expressed
nuanced views conveying an understanding that justice and
fairness, not blinkered support for Israel, are the keys
to peace and the right way to combat extremism. Yet for
months he has been fighting the charge that he is less
rabidly pro-Israel than other candidates -- which means
now adhering to the same simplistic formulas and
unconditional support for Israeli policies that have
helped to escalate conflict and worsen America's standing
in the Middle East. Hence Obama's assertion at his 26
February debate with Senator Hillary Clinton that he is "a
stalwart friend of Israel."

But Obama stressed that his appeal to Jewish voters also
stems from his desire "to rebuild what I consider to be a
historic relationship between the African American
community and the Jewish community."

Obama has not addressed to a national audience why that
relationship might have frayed. He was much more candid
when speaking to Jewish leaders in Cleveland just one day
before the debate. In a little-noticed comment, reported
on 25 February by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Obama
tried to contextualize Wright's critical views of Israel.
Wright, Obama explained, "was very active in the South
Africa divestment movement and you will recall that there
was a tension that arose between the African American and
the Jewish communities during that period when we were
dealing with apartheid in South Africa, because Israel and
South Africa had a relationship at that time. And that
cause -- that was a source of tension."

Obama implicitly admitted that Wright's views were rooted
in opposition to Israel's deep ties to apartheid South
Africa, and thus entirely reasonable even if Obama himself
did "not necessarily," as he put it, share them. Israel
supplied South Africa with hundreds of millions of dollars
of weaponry despite an international embargo. Even the
water cannons that South African forces used to attack
anti-apartheid demonstrators in the townships were
manufactured at Kibbutz Beit Alfa, a "socialist"
settlement in northern Israel. Until the late 1980s, South
Africa often relied on Israel to lobby Western governments
not to impose sanctions.

And the relationship was durable. As The Washington Post
reported in 1987, "When it comes to Israel and South
Africa, breaking up is hard to do." Israeli officials, the
newspaper said, "face conflicting imperatives: their
desire to get in line with the West, which has adopted a
policy of mild but symbolic sanctions, versus Israel's
longstanding friendship with the Pretoria government, a
relationship that has been important for strategic,
economic and, at times, sentimental reasons" ("An Israeli
Dilemma: S. African Ties; Moves to Cut Links Are Slowed by
Economic Pressures, Sentiment," The Washington Post, 20
September 1987).

In 1987, Jesse Jackson, then the world's most prominent
African American politician, angered some Jewish American
leaders for insisting that "Whoever is doing business with
South Africa is wrong, but Israel is ... subsidized by
America, which includes black Americans' tax money, and
then it subsidizes South Africa" ("Jackson Draws New
Criticism From Jewish Leaders Over Interview," Associated
Press, 16 October 1987). As a presidential candidate,
Jackson raised the same concerns in a high profile meeting
with the Israeli ambassador, as did a delegation of black
civil rights and religious leaders, including the nephew
of Martin Luther King Jr, on a visit to Israel. For many
African Americans, it was intolerable hypocrisy that so
many Jewish leaders who staunchly supported Civil Rights
and the anti-apartheid movement would be tolerant of
Israel's complicity.

Thus, Reverend Wright, who has sought a broader
understanding of the Middle East than one that blames
Islam and Arabs for all the region's problems or endorses
unconditional support for Israel, stood in the mainstream
of African American opinion, not on some extremist fringe.

That is not to say that Jewish concerns about anti-Semitic
sentiments among some African Americans should simply be
dismissed. Racism in any community should be confronted.
But as they have done with other communities, hard-line
pro-Israel activists like Foxman have too often tried to
tar any African American critic of Israel with the brush
of anti-Semitism. Why must every black candidate to a
major office go through the ritual of denouncing
Farrakhan, a marginal figure in national politics who
likely gets most of his notoriety from the ADL? Surely if
anti-Semitism were such an endemic problem among African
Americans, there would be someone other than Farrakhan for
the ADL to have focused its ire on all these decades.

By contrast, neither Senator Joe Lieberman (Al Gore's
running mate in 2000 and the first Jewish candidate on a
major party presidential ticket), nor Senator John McCain
have been required so publicly and so repeatedly to
repudiate extremist and racist comments by Israeli leaders
or some well-known radical Christian leaders supporting
the Republican party. Foxman, whose organization devotes
enormous resources to burnishing Israel's image, has
rarely spoken out about the escalating anti-Arab racism
and incitement to violence by prominent Israeli
politicians and rabbis.

That is no surprise. African Americans, Arab Americans and
Muslims all share some things in common: individuals are
held collectively responsible for the words and actions of
others in their community whether they had anything to do
with them or not. And the price of admission to the
political mainstream is to abandon any foreign policy
goals that diverge from those of the pro-Israel,
anti-Palestinian lobby.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is
author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the
Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).

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