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Obama Defends AIPAC Against Soros' Criticism

NY Sun | 05.01.2008 00:33 | Palestine | World

Obama's AIPAC speech. Text as prepared for delivery.
Prepared text of Barack Obama's speech for the AIPAC foreign policy forum.
 http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/03/obamas_aipac_speech_text_as_pr.html

Obama Rebuffs Soros
Billionaire's Comments on Aipac Are Scored

By ELI LAKE
Staff Reporter of the Sun
March 21, 2007

A D V E R T I S E M E N T


A D V E R T I S E M E N T

WASHINGTON — Leading Democrats, including Senator Obama of Illinois, are distancing themselves from an essay published this week by one of their party's leading financiers that called for the Democratic Party to "liberate" itself from the influence of the pro-Israel lobby.

The article, by George Soros, published in the New York Review of Books, asserts that America should pressure Israel to negotiate with the Hamas-led unity government in the Palestinian territories regardless of whether Hamas recognizes the right of the Jewish state to exist. Mr. Soros goes on to say that one reason America has not embraced this policy is because of the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Yesterday, Mr. Obama's presidential campaign issued a dissent from the Hungarian-born billionaire's assessment. "Mr. Soros is entitled to his opinions," a campaign spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said. "But on this issue he and Senator Obama disagree. The U.S. and our allies are right to insist that Hamas — a terrorist organization dedicated to Israel's destruction — meet very basic conditions before being treated as a legitimate actor. AIPAC is one of many voices that share this view."

The Soros article puts Democrats in the awkward position of choosing between Mr. Soros, a major funder of their causes, and the pro-Israel lobby, whose members are also active in campaign fund-raising. Pressed by The New York Sun, some Democrats aired their differences with Mr. Soros.

Rep. Robert Wexler, a Democrat of Florida who sent out an e-mail to Jewish supporters in his home state last week vouching for Mr. Obama's pro-Israel bona fides, said he too rejected Mr. Soros's comments. "Senator Obama says until the Palestinian government fulfills all three of the quartet requirements, the United States should not and would not recognize the Palestinian government. Senator Obama is clear, Mr. Soros appears to have a different position," Mr. Wexler said. "I agree with Senator Obama and have felt that way for a long time."

Mr. Wexler also took issue with Mr. Soros's view that Aipac was a major reason why the Bush administration would not recognize the new Palestinian unity government. "I have never met him, he's a very substantial figure in the country," Mr. Wexler said of Mr. Soros. "I think his views are obviously the views of a prominent man. I respectfully disagree with him."

A Democratic congressman from New York who has endorsed Senator Clinton, a Democrat from New York, yesterday was tougher in his assessment of the new Soros article. "He is obviously very self absorbed. … I am trying to be kind, but he doesn't leave any room for kindness," Rep. Eliot Engel said in a phone interview Monday.

Regarding Mr. Soros's claim that Aipac drives American foreign policy, Mr. Engel said, "It's a myth and lie about Aipac's supposed stranglehold on the Congress, it's just nonsense. He went on to say, "I don't think Mr. Soros will sway the Democratic Party one iota."

Other prominent Democrats yesterday also differed with Mr. Soros. A vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Susan Turnbull, said in an phone interview, "My view is the problem here is George Bush, Mr. Soros has made that clear and at that point I agree with him. I am not going to say that the problem is Aipac. I don't necessarily agree with him on that." She added, "There are a lot of reasons why we are in the state we are in. I don't think that blaming it on one lobbying organization, which is one aspect of the Jewish community, is the be-all or end-all to the problem. The problem is not with Aipac, but with President Bush."

A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, Amaya Smith, declined to comment.

At one point in his essay, in a section discussing how the pro-Israel lobby "has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism," Mr. Soros recalls the fate of Howard Dean's campaign for the presidency. "When Howard Dean called for an evenhanded policy toward Israel in 2004, his chances of getting the nomination were badly damaged (although it was his attempt, after his defeat in Iowa, to shout above the crowd that sealed his fate)," Mr. Soros wrote. Dr. Dean is now chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

The chairman of the Dean campaign, Steve Grossman, yesterday respectfully disagreed. "While Howard's public statements about Israel certainly cost him support in the pro-Israel community, I believe his anti-war positions continued to attract a broad cross section of support from the Jewish community. No one that I know ascribes Howard's defeat in 2004 to his public statements about Israel, even though I'll acknowledge that he lost support among some pro-Israel activists as a result."

Mr. Grossman, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and past president of Aipac, said he recognized and respected Mr. Soros' commitment to "progressive American values," and his "investment in political change in America." But Mr. Grossman also said, "I reject out of hand Soros's charges directed toward Aipac."

 http://www.nysun.com/article/50846

NY Sun

Comments

Hide the following 2 comments

Refuting Obama's Excuses

05.01.2008 03:04

Says the past president of AIPAC ... kind of making Soros' point for him ...

There is an enormous difference between "recognizing Israel's existence" and "recognizing Israel's right to exist".

Almost two years after the most democratic elections ever held in the Arab world, as Palestinians struggle to survive in two disconnected and hostile fragments of historical Palestine, a besieged Gaza Strip and a coopted West Bank, with the enemies of the Palestinian people sending arms and funds to the side perceived as responsive to Israeli and Western wishes for use against the side perceived as representing Palestinian interests, the justification put forward by Israel, the United States and the European Union for their refusal to accept the result of the January 2006 elections, their determined efforts to overturn that result and their brutal collective punishment of the Palestinian people -- the refusal of Hamas to "recognize Israel" or to "recognize Israel's existence" or to "recognize Israel's right to exist" -- merits serious examination.

These three verbal formulations have been used by media, politicians and even diplomats interchangeably, as though they mean the same thing. They do not.

"Recognizing Israel" or any other state is a formal legal and diplomatic act by a state with respect to another state. It is inappropriate -- indeed, nonsensical -- to talk about a political party or movement extending diplomatic recognition to a state. To talk of Hamas "recognizing Israel" is simply to use sloppy, confusing and deceptive shorthand for the real demand being made.

"Recognizing Israel's existence" appears on first impression to involve a relatively straightforward acknowledgement of a fact of life. Yet there are serious practical problems with this formulation. What Israel, within what borders, is involved? Is it the 55% of historical Palestine recommended for a Jewish state by the UN General Assembly in 1947? The 78% of historical Palestine occupied by the Zionist movement in 1948 and now viewed by most of the world as "Israel" or "Israel proper"? The 100% of historical Palestine occupied by Israel since June 1967 and shown as "Israel" (without any "Green Line") on maps in Israeli schoolbooks? Israel has never defined its own borders, since doing so would necessarily place limits on them. Still, if this were all that was being demanded of Hamas, it might be possible for it to acknowledge, as a fact of life, that a State of Israel exists today within some specified borders.

"Recognizing Israel's right to exist", the actual demand, is in an entirely different league. This formulation does not address diplomatic formalities or a simple acceptance of present realities. It calls for a moral judgment.

There is an enormous difference between "recognizing Israel's existence" and "recognizing Israel's right to exist". From a Palestinian perspective, the difference is in the same league as the difference between asking a Jew to acknowledge that the Holocaust happened and asking him to concede that the Holocaust was morally justified. For Palestinians to acknowledge the occurrence of the Nakba -- the expulsion of the great majority of Palestinians from their homeland between 1947 and 1949 -- is one thing. For them to publicly concede that it was "right" for the Nakba to have happened is something else entirely. For the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, the Holocaust and the Nakba, respectively, represent catastrophes and injustices on an unimaginable scale that can neither be forgotten nor forgiven.

To demand that Palestinians recognize "Israel's right to exist" is to demand that a people who have for almost 60 years been treated, and continue to be treated, as subhumans unworthy of basic human rights publicly proclaim that they are subhumans -- and, at least implicitly, that they deserve what has been done, and continues to be done, to them. Even 19th century U.S. governments did not require the surviving Native Americans to publicly proclaim the "rightness" of their ethnic cleansing by the European colonists as a condition precedent to even discussing what sort of reservation might be set aside for them -- under economic blockade and threat of starvation until they shed whatever pride they had left and conceded the point.

Some believe that Yasser Arafat did concede the point in order to buy his ticket out of the wilderness of demonization and earn the right to be lectured directly by the Americans. In fact, in his famous statement in Stockholm in late 1988, he accepted "Israel's right to exist in peace and security". This formulation, significantly, addresses the conditions of existence of a state which, as a matter of fact, exists. It does not address the existential question of the "rightness" of the dispossession and dispersal of the Palestinian people from their homeland to make way for another people coming from abroad.

The original conception of the formulation "Israel's right to exist" and of its utility as an excuse for not talking with any Palestinian leadership which still stood up for the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people are attributed to Henry Kissinger, the grand master of diplomatic cynicism. There can be little doubt that those states which still employ this formulation do so in full consciousness of what it entails, morally and psychologically, for the Palestinian people and for the same cynical purpose -- as a roadblock against any progress toward peace and justice in Israel/Palestine and as a way of helping to buy more time for Israel to create more "facts on the ground" while blaming the Palestinians for their own suffering.

However, many private citizens of good will and decent values may well be taken in by the surface simplicity of the words "Israel's right to exist" (and even more easily by the other two shorthand formulations) into believing that they constitute a self-evidently reasonable demand and that refusing such a reasonable demand must represent perversity (or a "terrorist ideology") rather than a need to cling to their self-respect and dignity as full-fledged human beings which is deeply felt and thoroughly understandable in the hearts and minds of a long-abused people who have been stripped of almost everything else that makes life worth living.

That this is so is evidenced by polls showing that the percentage of the Palestinian population which approves of Hamas' steadfastness in refusing to bow to this humiliating demand by the enemies of the Palestinian people, notwithstanding the intensity of the economic pain and suffering inflicted on them, substantially exceeds the percentage of the population which voted for Hamas in January 2006.

Those who recognize the critical importance of Israeli-Palestinian peace and truly seek a decent future for both peoples must recognize that the demand that Hamas recognize "Israel's right to exist" is unreasonable, immoral and impossible to meet. Then they must insist that this roadblock to peace be removed, that the siege of the Gaza Strip be lifted and that justice -- not simply "peace", which can be a euphemism for the successful repression of resistance to injustice -- be pursued, with the urgency it deserves, with all legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people.


* John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer, is author of "The World According to Whitbeck".
John Whitbeck
Homepage: palestinechronicle.com/story-12220742026.htm


A "Jewish State": I Can't Define It, But You Have To Recognize It.


At one time, everyone knew that peace would break out all over the Middle East if the Palestinians would just recognize Israel. But then the PLO went and spoiled things by recognizing Israel, so there had to be a new excuse for not ending the Occupation. The new demand was that the Palestinians had to recognize Israel's "right to exist". And now, to ward off any danger that peace might raise its ugly head at Annapolis, here's a timely new one: the Palestinians have to recognize that Israel exists; that it has a right to exist; and that it has the right to exist as a "Jewish state".

The implications of Israel's demanding recognition as a state of the Jewish people rather than a state of all its citizens are complex, and I'm going to work on a separate post about that. But one really basic issue came to mind today when I read (via Desertpeace) this Ha'aretz editorial on the subject. To sum up the article: Ha'aretz thinks it's absurd for the Israeli government to demand that the PLO recognize Israel as a "Jewish state", when it is the settlement policies of successive Israeli governments in the Occupied Palestinian Territories that have been, and continue to be, the greatest danger to Israel's Jewishness. But what struck me most when I read the article wasn't the strength or otherwise of Ha'aretz's argument: it was the realisation that Israelis don't seem to have a common understanding of what they mean by a "Jewish state"; yet they insist the Palestinians must recognize nonetheless that Israel is one.

When Olmert and Livni talk about Israel as a "Jewish state", they mean essentially that it is a state that is for Jewish people, even if they don't reside or have citizenship there. It would be very handy for them if they could force the Palestinians to accept this definition, because then they could go into final status talks with some of the more intractable issues - like how to resolve the Right of Return - pre-emptively swept off the table. After all, how can Palestinians have a right to return to their homes in a "Jewish state" when they're not even Jewish, and non-Jews shouldn't expect to be allowed to live in a "Jewish state" in the first place...

Various Israeli commentators have been up in arms this week because the PLO has made it clear it will never give Israel this kind of recognition. The PLO says that Palestinians, like everyone else, give diplomatic recognition to countries, not to demographic balances, religious leanings or political affiliations. In recognizing Iran, for example, they give formal acceptance to Iran's sovereignty, its people and its borders, but not to its religious orientation. If Iran wants to call itself "The Islamic Republic of...", that is purely an internal Iranian affair. It's "Iran" that international diplomacy recognizes, not the Islamic-ness or Republic-ness of its political system. Similarly, if Israel wishes to call itself "The Jewish State of...", that is an internal Israeli affair, which does not need and cannot demand recognition from the PLO or anyone else in the world community.

So what does the PLO recognize in regard to Israel? The PLO recognizes the state of Israel in its 1967 borders - an area which happens to have an overwhelmingly Jewish population - and is offering through its acceptance of the Saudi peace initiative a Right of Return that is implemented in agreement with Israel, i.e. a nominal one that won't change the demographic balance there. So they offer recognition to a state that is de facto Jewish, and recognize the right of that state to peace and security within its recognized borders.

The one thing they won't say is that Israel is formally a "Jewish state", i.e. a state for Jews. Just as a Jewish American might recognize that the USA is a Christian country in terms of its dominant population and cultural traditions, but would never accept that it should be formally designated a "Christian state", because that immediately defines Jews and other non-Christians as lesser citizens. For some outrageous no-doubt Islamofascist Jew-hating reason, the Palestinians similarly refuse to declare that Israel is constitutionally a state where Israelis of Palestinian descent are inferior citizens.

Now, in this Ha'aretz editorial, Ha'aretz also talks about the "Jewish state", and says that the Israeli government is preventing it coming about because of the settlements, which make it impossible to separate the two peoples. So Ha'aretz is talking about a "Jewish State" in terms of an Israel that emerges from a final peace settlement as a country with a large Jewish majority.

But what Ha'aretz calls a Jewish state, i.e. a Jewish-majority state, is not what Olmert and Livni mean by the term, i.e a state that constitutionally favors people of one religion over another. Ha'aretz is saying that Israel will be a Jewish state because it will be a country that is made up overwhelmingly OF Jews - which the PLO could accept. Olmert and Livni say it is a Jewish state because it is a country not OF Jews, but FOR Jews - which Palestinians do not accept.

It seems absurd that Israelis will have hysterical fits when the PLO says it doesn't recognize Israel as a "Jewish state", when Israelis themselves don't agree in first place what exactly they mean by a "Jewish state".

Israelis need to decide what it is they mean by a "Jewish state", before they accuse the Palestinians of being unreasonable in rejecting it. Right now, I suspect that some of them are happy to conflate the two different understandings of what a "Jewish state" is; perhaps so that when the PLO rejects Olmert's demand for a "state for Jews", they can pretend the PLO is rejecting too the idea of Israel as a "state of Jews". I suppose if you understand that the price of a universally-recognized Jewish-majority state in the 1967 borders is finally getting out of the Occupied Territories, and you really don't want to do that, it's a lot easier to derail peace talks by whipping up fears of being driven into the sea than to simply acknowledge you're not willing to pay the price. It's a bit like having the President of Iran say that the Occupation regime over Jerusalem will disappear from the pages of time, and then pretending that he really said he would "wipe Israel off the map"; because it's always easier to invoke the Hitler bogeyman than to answer Ahmadinejad's questions about why exactly Muslim-majority Palestine should be dismantled to make way for a sectarian Zionist state....

Maybe Israelis could take a short break from insisting on what the Palestinians must give them, and make up their minds what exactly it is they want. Then perhaps if they could actually listen to what they're being offered, they might even be pleasantly surprised to find it's something they could live with after all.



Fallacy Used to Avoid Negotiation & Compromise


What a big bag of bulls

05.01.2008 23:31

Soros, the financial predator, parasite and vampire self appoints itself intellectual leader of an anti-AIPAC crusade.

Seems to me like an attempt at cinfusing issues and damage control - recuperation by the zionist lobby itself.

Why doesn't mister Soros lobby Israel directly by attacking it's currency for example ?

He made his multibillion fortune out of that vampirical activity on many otger nations and even endangered the pound just on his own some time ago if I am not mistaken.

If he can endanger the pound I guess he can easily put Israel on its knees as it's economy is waaaay smaller than the british one, isnt'it ?

So what does he say in his "anti-AIPAC" paper ?

I feel he shifts the focus from AIPAC's role as one of the major lobbying force behind the war against Iraq, with which he could easily attack and screw both Clinton and Obama if he wanted to IMO.

AFAIK AIPAC is not much concerned with affairs internal to Israel, AIPAC is mostly concerned with the alignment of the United States foreign policy agenda on Israel's one.

This is very visible when reading major speeches given before AIPAC.

Between 2000 and 2003, all you heard about at AIPAC was Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq... ad nauseum.

Despite the fact that Soros opposed the Iraq war, opposed Bush and that AIPAC was pro war (and certainly one the main ideological and vocal driving force behinf it) he does not go as far as reminding AIPAC of that but agrees with it that Iran is the major threat.

That's all you hear about at AIPAC since 2004, Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran... ad nauseum.

Soros says he is not a zionist but simply has Israel at heart and thinks it should enjoy military supremacy, lol.

As for HAMAS, this great democrat thinks that a political party that has won general elections should enjoy a few minority seats in a coalition government, relol.

IMO he portrays AIPAC as a place where the United States government is lobbied, so that it can lobby Israel on its internal policies which is absolutely not how it works.

As said above, it is the alignment of US foreign policies on Israel ones that matters to AIPAC (IMO).

Soros' pamphlet is here btw :

 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20030

A bit off topic but for those, who like me and unlike Soros (who is part of it IMO), believe in a zionist conspiracy, the sudden emergence of Mike Huckabee who was virtually unknown weeks ago as the leading GOP candidate might have to see with it's very "innovative" views on the palestinian question.

He thinks the best would be to deport all the Palestinians outside of Israel and establish a state for them on land grabbed from either Egypt, Jordan or Syria.

There is a video on one of his website where he exposes those ideas to members of the extremely powerful and influential extremist zionist suprematist sect Chabad-Lubavich.

 http://mikehuckabeecampaign.magnify.net/item/99TG0XDRF16PX4Q3?msg=Please+confirm+your+problem+report

styx


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