Obama granted a major interview to Jeffrey Goldberg to cover Iran, Israel/Palestine and ISIS. It was published in the Atlantic on Thursday and is well worth a read. I've highlighted sections I found interesting (all emphasis is mine).
On the Iran nuclear deal and how significant Obama believes it is to his legacy:
“Look, 20 years from now, I’m still going to be around, God willing. If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it’s my name on this,” he said, referring to the apparently almost-finished nuclear agreement between Iran and a group of world powers led by the United States. “I think it’s fair to say that in addition to our profound national-security interests, I have a personal interest in locking this down.”
Goldberg notes that Obama must have in the back of his mind the Carter/Reagan experience with Iran. By the way, if you want a little bit of insight into the Iranian regime, its relationship with the Iranian people and about the Islamic world in general, may I suggest Aatish Taseer's perceptive and personal book
Stranger to History: A Son's Journey through Islamic Lands.
On Israel/Palestine, why he believes it's important and involves his own core principles:
Obama told me that when Netanyahu asserted, late in his recent reelection campaign, that “a Palestinian state would not happen under his watch, or [when] there [was] discussion in which it appeared that Arab-Israeli citizens were somehow portrayed as an invading force that might vote, and that this should be guarded against—this is contrary to the very language of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which explicitly states that all people regardless of race or religion are full participants in the democracy. When something like that happens, that has foreign-policy consequences, and precisely because we’re so close to Israel, for us to simply stand there and say nothing would have meant that this office, the Oval Office, lost credibility when it came to speaking out on these issues.”
“My hope is that over time [the] debate gets back on a path where there’s some semblance of hope and not simply fear, because it feels to me as if ... all we are talking about is based from fear,” he said. “Over the short term that may seem wise—cynicism always seems a little wise—but it may lead Israel down a path in which it’s very hard to protect itself [as] a Jewish-majority democracy. And I care deeply about preserving that Jewish democracy, because when I think about how I came to know Israel, it was based on images of … kibbutzim, and Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir, and the sense that not only are we creating a safe Jewish homeland, but also we are remaking the world. We’re repairing it. We are going to do it the right way. We are going to make sure that the lessons we’ve learned from our hardships and our persecutions are applied to how we govern and how we treat others. And it goes back to the values questions that we talked about earlier—those are the values that helped to nurture me and my political beliefs.”
I sent these comments on Wednesday to Rabbi Steinlauf to see if he disagreed with my belief that Obama, when he talks about Israel, sounds like a rabbi in the progressive Zionist tradition. Steinlauf wrote back: “President Obama shares the same yearning for a secure peace in Israel that I and so many of my rabbinic colleagues have. While he doesn't speak as a Jew, his progressive values flow directly out of the core messages of Torah, and so he is deeply in touch with the heart and spirit of the Jewish people.”
“What is also true, by extension, is that I have to show that same kind of regard to other peoples. And I think it is true to Israel’s traditions and its values—its founding principles—that it has to care about … Palestinian kids. And when I was in Jerusalem and I spoke, the biggest applause that I got was when I spoke about those kids I had visited in Ramallah, and I said to a Israeli audience that it is profoundly Jewish, it is profoundly consistent with Israel’s traditions to care about them. And they agreed. So if that’s not translated into policy—if we’re not willing to take risks on behalf of those values—then those principles become empty words, and in fact, in my mind, it makes it more difficult for us to continue to promote those values when it comes to protecting Israel internationally.”
Coverage in the Israeli/Palestinian press is below the fold:
Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev had this to say:
The interview was presumably conducted before the ill-advised and since-revoked Israeli decision on segregated bus lines for Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank, but Obama’s own analogies between Jews and African Americans highlight what raw nerves would have been touched by the decision. “There’s a direct line between supporting the right of the Jewish people to have a homeland and to feel safe and free of discrimination and persecution, and the right of African Americans to vote and have equal protection under the law. These things are indivisible in my mind,” Obama said. He then added that he wants Israel to embody “the same values that led to the end of Jim Crow and slavery” - the same Jim Crow laws which underpinned the segregated bus lines that figured so prominently in the Civil Rights Movements, from Rosa Parks in Montgomery to the Freedom Riders, of which a sizeable proportion was Jewish.
The Palestinian News Network covered the interview primarily by quoting from it:
article in)
Obama remarked in the interview that despite the confrontations with Netanyahu over the past number of years, most of the American Jewish community still voted for him in the 2012 presidential election.
"What I also think is that there has been a very concerted effort on the part of some political forces to equate being pro-Israel, and hence being supportive of the Jewish people, with a rubber stamp on a particular set of policies coming out of the Israeli government," he said. "So if you are questioning settlement policy, that indicates you’re anti-Israeli, or that indicates you’re anti-Jewish. If you express compassion or empathy towards Palestinian youth, who are dealing with checkpoints or restrictions on their ability to travel, then you are suspect in terms of your support of Israel. If you are willing to get into public disagreements with the Israeli government, then the notion is that you are being anti-Israel, and by extension, anti-Jewish. I completely reject that."
The Jerusalem Post reported on oneresponse to the interview:
Likud MK says Obama's criticism of Netanyahu has 'a bit of hypocrisy'
In an interview with Israel Radio on Friday, Likud MK Tzachi Hanegbi was asked to comment on Obama’s comments to The Atlantic published Thursday.
“It’s astonishing that President Obama didn’t see fit to criticize countries like Iran, which regularly executes people, or Turkey, where journalists who write things critical of their government are sent to jail,” Hanegbi said.
The Likud lawmaker and coalition chairman said that Obama’s statements “causes discomfort and unease and bears an iota of hypocrisy.”
Hanegbi said that Obama was seeking to regain favor in the eyes of the American Jewish community as the US prepares to gear up for elections and as a deadline nears for consummation of an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program.
Israel Hayom (Sheldon Adelson's pro-Netanyahu paper) has the following:
Obama warns of 'foreign policy consequences' over Netanyahu's remarks on Arabs
Striking back at Obama's criticism, Public Security Minister Yariv Levin (Likud) accused the U.S. president of meddling in Israeli affairs.
"We appreciate and respect the president of the United States, but there is no room for remarks that constitute interference in domestic Israeli issues. It is time for the leaders of the Western world to open their eyes and deal with the real problems that threaten world peace, namely radical Islam, and stop their obsessive preoccupation with the State of Israel. Israel is the only democracy in the region and it is fighting, almost by itself, for the future of the free world," Levin said.
and
In Obama's Middle East there's only one problem -- Netanyahu:
Khamenei's latest rhetorical gems, however, did not give Obama any pause. As usual, Khamenei's comments always escape scrutiny in Obama's world. In other words, Iran may continue being a rogue state that sponsors terrorism and propagates anti-Semitism. It can continue to destabilize Sunni Arab states and show its contempt toward American values and at the same time be completely trustworthy, because it is obviously a rational actor. The world can strike a deal with Iran with its eyes wide shut. But Netanyahu? That is something else. As far as Obama is concerned, he has been blacklisted. He will not be invited back to the White House, at least not anytime soon.
Finally! The root cause behind the Middle East's many problems has been identified. It is not Iran, which is about to ink a deal with the West; it is not the Islamic State group, which is supposedly on the run, No! The real problem is Israel's elected premier. Go democracy!
To give you a taste of the range of opinions on Obama's views towards Israel, here's Chemi Shalev reporting on a two-day conference he attended in Long Island:
Segregated buses make conference on Israel’s isolation seem urgent and naive
The basic premises of most of the participants were not in dispute: Relations between Israel and the United States, at the leadership level, have never been worse, at least since Dwight Eisenhower was president; anti-Semitism and support for BDS are on the rise; Jerusalem is facing an imminent avalanche of diplomatic challenges, including the [mostly bad] Iran nuclear deal, a Security Council resolution on Palestine, a UN report on the last Gaza war and aggressive Palestinian moves at various international forums; and while the American Jewish community is still likely to support Israel in times of crisis, it is increasingly divided over, and distant from, Israel and its policies.
Most of the participants, including those presumably in the know, seemed to believe that there was no realistic option for advancing negotiations with the Palestinians in the foreseeable future, with or without a parallel effort to incorporate Israel’s new “regional buddies”, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Jordan, into the process. The range of predictions about the near-term course of events in the Middle East ranged from grim to cataclysmic, with many pointing fingers in President Obama’s direction. The solitary but nonetheless harsh accusation that Obama was a born and bred anti-Semite, though later rejected by many, went shamefully unchallenged in the plenum in which it was uttered.
Though not directly related to the interview, Don Futterman has a very perceptive article about the dilemma facing liberal Jewish students who support Israel, but question some of the curent government's policies:
How to destroy American Jewish support for Israel
Many Jewish students feel cornered. They don’t know how to answer the criticism of the Gaza war or the ongoing occupation, criticism they may share or know nothing about, and they are being told that they don’t qualify as a minority by Israel’s non-Jewish minority adversaries on campus. If they question Israeli policies, the organized Jewish community views their loyalty as suspect.
Jewish students don’t expect to be attacked as intolerant or racist or to be accused of supporting murderous colonialism, especially not by their black, Hispanic or gay peers. Jewish claims to be the ultimate victims of persecution, with earned empathy for victims of all forms of discrimination, are dismissed as irrelevant in 2015 because many of the Jewish students and faculty on campus are white, rich and privileged.
Case in point: New York’s upcoming Celebrate Israel parade. The parade was once the peak moment of Jewish solidarity, in which 100,000 Jews of every political and religious persuasion (with the exception of the anti-Israel Satmar), took over Fifth Avenue, marching out of step but side by side. Today, celebrating the settlements seems to be at the top of the agenda of the right-wing and Orthodox groups that have come to dominate the parade and surrounding events. Passionate supporters of Israel who don’t toe the right-wing line or who believe that a healthy democracy is dependent upon self-criticism, like J Street and the New Israel Fund, endure relentless charges of betrayal as they fight for their right to march.
Changed the title of this diary, was originally: "Obama interview on Israel, Iran and ISIS in The Atlantic"