Rafael Medoff

Peres, in his remarks about the Iran problem, described how the Nazis “forced my grandfather, together with the remaining Jews [in his village], into the wooden synagoguge and set it on fire. No one survived. Not one.”

The next day, Netanyahu in his AIPAC speech said that some opponents of Israeli action against Tehran’s nuclear sites claim “that it would provoke an even more vindictive response by Iran.” He recalled that similar claims were advanced by Roosevelt administration officials in 1944, when they rejected requests to bomb Auschwitz.

Netanyahu read from a letter by Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, who claimed it was impossible for U.S. planes to reach Auschwitz and that attacking the mass-murder camp “might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.”

What, the prime minister asked, could possibly have been more “vindictive” than Auschwitz?

Obama evidently had those comments in mind at his news conference when he said, “I am deeply mindful of the historical precedents that weigh on any prime minister of Israel when they think about the potential threats to Israel and the Jewish homeland.”

Some of Netanyahu’s political rivals in Israel challenged his reference to the Holocaust.

“Not every enemy is Hitler, and not every problem is Auschwitz,” one asserted.

That’s true. But even if two people or situations are not absolutely identical, there may still be some points of comparison. That is why many previous Israeli leaders cited lessons from the Holocaust era in their remarks on policy matters.

Golda Meir when she was foreign minister, explaining to the United Nations in 1956 why Israel felt compelled to strike at Egypt, called Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser a “disciple” of Adolf Hitler. She said the fact that the international community ignored Nasser’s military buildup was comparable to the world’s meek response when Hitler “informed the world in advance of his bloodthirsty plans.”

Meir’s successor, Abba Eban, told the 1972 World Zionist Congress that Arab propaganda against Israel “would have done justice to the loathesome Goebbels and Streicher.” According to Eban, the Arab media’s depictions of the Jewish state “as a caricature, hook-nosed with tails, horns and monstrous attributes” demonstrated that “Nazism is deeply embedded in the style and content of the Arab war against Israel.”

When Knesset member Shevah Weiss of the Labor Party used the term “Gestapo 1985” to characterize the killers of Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly American tourist in a wheelchair, or when many Israelis made similar comparisons concerning the Arab terrorist who murdered 4-year-old Einat Harav on the Nahariya beach in 1979 by smashing her head against the rocks, they were not saying the terrorists were identical to the Nazis in every respect. They were pointing out, legitimately, that Nazis sometimes used similar methods against Jews.

For Netanyahu and many Israelis, the failure to bomb Auschwitz is particularly relevant because they fear that if they depended on the international community to aid Israel against Iran, they might find themselves abandoned as the Jews were in 1944.

Recall Eban’s description of the tense days preceding the 1967 war: “As we looked around us, we saw the world divided

between those who were seeking our destruction and those who would do nothing to prevent it.” Those words bring to mind Chaim Weizmann’s statement in 1937: “There are in [Europe] 6 million people for whom the world is divided into places where they cannot live and places where they cannot enter.”

Netanyahu, the son of a renowned Jewish historian, has a keen sense of history. So does Barack Obama. He invited 43 members of the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-black units of World War II pilots, to attend his presidential inauguration. The juxtaposition of 1940s segregation and the election of an African-American president in 2008 was striking.

Perhaps Netanyahu should have invited those pilots to his AIPAC speech because on Aug. 20, 1944, just days after that War Department letter claiming U.S. planes could not reach Auschwitz, a group of 127 U.S. bombers approached Auschwitz escorted by 100 Mustang fighter planes piloted by — Tuskegee Airmen. They dropped more than 1,000 bombs on German oil factories less than five miles from the gas chambers. Those targets were regarded by the Roose-

velt administration as worth hitting. The mass-murder machinery was not.

To what extent Israel should risk seeing history repeated is for Israelis to decide. But surely the historical record should be part of that conversation.

Dr. Rafael Medoff is the director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and co-author, with Sonja Schoepf Wentling, of the forthcoming book “Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the ‘Jewish Vote’ and Bipartisan Support for Israel.”

Michael Lerner

I also wanted to challenge the breakdown of human solidarity and the fear that competitive societies generate in their citizens, which destroys the natural instinct of individuals to care for “the other” and lead people to grab on to fascistic pseudo-solutions to their growing misery.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I found that my own Jewish people, which for 2,000 years had fostered a religion of compassion, non-violence, social justice, pursuing peace and generosity toward others, had responded to Auschwitz and the Holocaust by adopting a fear-based worldview. In this post-Holocaust period, power over others — rather than love, kindness and generosity (i.e., the teachings of our Torah) — would be our new way of identifying as Jews.

In so doing we began to give Hitler a victory he did not deserve and abandoned the God who, as was proclaimed in a Torah portion earlier this month, was revealed as a force in the universe for chesed, loving kindness, compassion and mercy. Instead, we worshiped at the altar of power and military might.

And the Jewish State of Israel became famous as the most powerful army in the Middle East.

I’m glad Israel is strong, and I’ve opposed those who seek to promote the campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel (though I support BDS against the settlements of the West Bank). I’m against those who sought to reduce U.S. military aid to Israel. I was proud to have brought my son to Israel, sent him to high school in Israel, and been there to wash his clothes and feed him every weekend during the time he served in one of the Israel Defense Forces’ scariest combat units, the paratroopers, praying that he would survive those perilous jumps.

But as a researcher at Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University, I discovered that Israelis were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. They were seeing current events primarily through the framework of Auschwitz, the Holocaust and the sufferings of our life in exile.

I already had discovered in my work as a psychotherapist — before I became a rabbi or editor of Tikkun magazine — that a significant section of American Jews suffered from similar PTSD.

PTSD is the psychological category that does not attribute the distortions in perception to one’s inner life. It acknowledges that there really was a trauma, but that the source of the trauma is no longer there.

American Jews are one of the most politically and economically powerful groups in society, and Israel is one of the strongest military powers on Earth both in conventional and nuclear military power. Yet speak to many American Jews or Israelis and they feel totally insecure. They see Amalek, Haman or Hitler lurking in every enemy.

So the Palestinian people, without an army, has been seen consistently as Nazis. First Yasser Arafat, then Hezbollah and Hamas, and now Iran are seen as the embodiment of the Nazi threat.

As a result, Israel and many American Jews have been unable to respond to reasonable plans for a peace accord that have come from the Israeli peace movement and even from the Saudi peace proposal in 2002 — re-offered in 2007 — for peace and reconciliation between Israel and the entire Arab world.

Not everyone has been completely unable to see that an attack on Iran by Israel — and the likely embroilment of the United States in a war with Iran — would be a disaster for Israel and the United States. Such an attack also likely would intensify anti-Semitism around the world based not on previous irrational beliefs that the Jews killed Jesus, but on the legitimate outrage of people around the world against any country that engages in a “preemptive first strike” against another.

In fact, in the first week of March, a poll showed that a majority of Israelis disagree with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and oppose a unilateral Israeli first strike.

The United States did not take a preemptive strike against North Korea or any of the other Communist states with ideological fanatics at their helm — including the Soviet Union and China when they developed nuclear war capacities — instead relying on its own nuclear capacity to wipe out any country that would attempt to strike at us. Many Israelis recognize that the strategy of mutually assured destruction, which has kept the world safe even with some countries having nuclear weapons, will keep Israel safe even if Iran has nuclear weapons.

It is only PTSD that makes it difficult for many American Jews and some Israeli hawks to recognize that as ideologically crazy as the Iranian government is today, there is zero reason to believe that it would be willing to have Iran bombed into oblivion by U.S. and Israeli nuclear retaliation from a first strike by Iran. PTSD so obscures our vision that many Jews have sided with U.S. militarists who always like a good excuse to amp up the military-industrial complex.

It’s time to heal from the distorted perceptions of seeing the world through the framework of Auschwitz. There are other paths to take, some of which I outlined in the recent full-page advertisement in The New York Times that we at Tikkun took calling for No First Strike and No War with Iran.

We are now seeking to put that ad in Israeli newspapers; it can be seen at tikkun. org/iran.

Read our full explanation of our strategy to provide protection for Israel at tikkun.org.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is the editor of Tikkun magazine and author most recently of “Embracing Israel/Palestine: A Strategy to Heal and Transform the Middle East.”

Last week, Rabbis for Human Rights-North America called on the Jewish National Fund and its partner organizations to issue a public statement that they will no longer evict Palestinians from their homes in eastern Jerusalem.

In November, RHR-NA mobilized American Jews to write nearly 1,500 letters to Russell Robinson, CEO of the Jewish National Fund of America, asking him to stop a JNF subsidiary from evicting the Sumarin family from their home in Silwan, a neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem. The eviction would have allowed the home to be transferred to Elad, a settler organization that aims to Judaize eastern Jerusalem.

The Absentee Property Law, which was the legal basis for this eviction, allows the State of Israel to take possession of eastern Jerusalem properties whose owners were not physically present when Israel first took control of the area in 1967.

In the case of the Sumarin family, the children of the original owner were declared absentees even though other members of the family were living in the home at the time.

Though JNF responded to the uproar among American Jews and halted the eviction of the Sumarins, the organization and its subsidiaries are currently pursuing other evictions.

It’s time for JNF once and for all to end its policy of evicting families.

This is not ultimately a story about whether a few families can stay in their homes. What happens in Silwan may determine whether a peaceful solution remains possible. What happens in Silwan speaks to the the moral and democratic soul of Israel. And the crisis in Silwan opens our eyes to the role that American money plays in perpetuating the conflict.

By moving into Silwan and other eastern Jerusalem neighborhoods, ideological settlers are putting facts on the ground that make peace more difficult. Visiting Silwan last November, I saw the homes of recent Jewish settlers standing next to the homes of longtime Palestinian residents.

These Jewish homes sported Israeli flags, guard booths, barbed wire and sky-high fences. The settlers walk through the streets carrying rifles. The juxtaposition between these fortified houses and the more modest ones of their neighbors serves as an answer to those who ask why Jews can’t live anywhere in Jerusalem. This is not an attempt at peaceful coexistence; it is an armed takeover that threatens the very possibility of peace.

I’m deeply concerned as well about the moral and democratic soul of Israel. I believe strongly that Israel has the potential to live up to the very best of Jewish values, and to be the “light unto the nations” to which its founders aspired. Jewish history teaches us the pain of being expelled from one’s home. And Jewish law sets up strong protections against seizing property without cause and without incontrovertible evidence. I am proud that Israel’s Declaration of Independence commits to “ensur[ing] complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” I pray that we will realize this vision soon.

Settler organizations argue that the Absentee Property Law simply allows for the return to Jewish hands of property owned by Jews before 1948, but the argument fails the test of fairness and democracy. First, the properties are not being returned to the families who left after the partition of Jerusalem but rather into the hands of settlers with an ideological desire to Judaize the area and transfer Palestinians out.

Second, there is, of course, no parallel law allowing Palestinians to reclaim ownership of homes that their families owned before 1948. Such a law would mean the end of many western Jerusalem neighborhoods that are now Jewish, and even of Israel as we know it.

Finally, the situation in Silwan has opened many of our eyes to the role of American Jewish money. It makes the news when mega-donors like Sheldon Adelson, Irving Moskowitz or Ira Rennert invest millions of dollars into building new settlements or financing Jewish enclaves in Palestinian neighborhoods.

But those of us who give money to “neutral” organizations, such as JNF, may believe that we are only helping to plant trees, contribute to economic development or even support Jewish-Arab cooperation projects. Our donations to JNF do support such praiseworthy activities. At the same time, these contributions support the uprooting of Palestinian families, the development of settlements, the forced displacement of Bedouin Israeli citizens and other activities that violate human rights.

In the world of Israel politics, very little is neutral. Adelson and other right-wing billionaires invest in projects that reflect their vision of Israel. Those of us who believe in building a country that reflects the best of Jewish and democratic values must similarly invest in work that reflects our vision of what Israel should be.

I hope that JNF will retain the trust of American Jews who support peace and justice. I therefore call on JNF to end policies that set up roadblocks to peace.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America.

As a child growing up in a small town in Texas, I dropped my coins in the Blue Box in Hebrew school. My parents and grandparents raised me on the importance and the power of the Blue Box. My grandfather would say to me, “If only we had been stronger and more unified, we could have bought more land and had a place for 6 million Jews to go home to.”

Never did I think that rabbis and organizations would use this iconic symbol of our unity and success for the promotion of propaganda using politically motivated, destructive language.

JNF began doing lifesaving work 110 years ago by buying land for our people to have a place to call home. Those who use the term “judaizing” insult the men and women who perished fighting for our democratic Jewish State of Israel. There is nowhere else on earth that Jews have been able to call home.

The British voted in 1939 to limit Jewish migration to Palestine under pressure from Arabs, even though they knew many of these Jews would go to their deaths. The United States sent back the USS St. Louis to the ovens of the Holocaust because it could not absorb one ship of Jews. These acts show that the safety of the Jewish people lies in our land of Israel and depends on our unity.

Destructive language and personal attacks hurt all of the Jewish people.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs and her flock at Rabbis for Human Rights-North America sadly do not know the facts or respect the rule of law.

This week, after 16 years on Israel’s Supreme Court — the last six as president — Dorit Beinisch is stepping down. Her main contributions to the court have been strong protection of human rights and promotion of Israel’s values as a liberal society. This is the same court whose rulings Rabbi Jacobs dismisses — unless, of course, she agrees with them. They are only wrong if she doesnít like the outcome.

More than 10,000 court cases have ruled in favor of Palestinians for property ownership — are those good rulings? The ones that Rabbi Jacobs disagrees with are the bad ones? I don’t hear Rabbis for Human Rights protesting evictions of Jews carried out by rule of law in the Migron outpost or eastern Jerusalem.

JNF respects the legal processes of the democratic State of Israel. Asking us to make a declaration against any evictions — of Arabs or Jews — is beyond our mission. The money we raise is used only for the purpose of making Israel a better place. Everything about us is “neutral,” as Rabbi Jacobs states. Like helping children reach their potential at a therapeutic riding center, or supporting a Bedouin in starting a new tourist business at Project Wadi Attir, or allowing a Reform movement kibbutz to grow and prosper, or turning historical sites into world-class destinations.

Rabbi Jacobs loosely uses terms like “moral and ethical soul of the Jewish people.” Is that the same ethical soul that publicized a picture of a JNF tractor and said it was knocking down homes when in fact the picture was of a tractor miles away doing no such thing? When Rabbis for Human Rights flaunts its version of the “facts,” unchecked and unfounded, it is are only adding to the disunity of the Jewish people.

We at JNF care about all of the people of Israel, and I will match the moral and ethical standard of our 600,000 contributors against anyone. They are directly donating their dollars to enhance the quality of life of all of Israel’s residents, to improve the environment for the next generation of pioneers and, yes, to plant millions of trees a year. We are proud that Israel makes the world a better place and that JNF makes Israel a little better every day.

There are great opportunities for the 1,500 e-mail protesters to be part of building and creating.

That’s the human rights cause in which JNF is involved.

Russell F. Robinson is the chief executive officer of the Jewish National Fund of America.

Mervyn Danker

To establish its independence, Israel had to win a war against the combined might of the Arab nations in 1948. The Arab failure to destroy the nascent Jewish state became known, in Orwellian Arab vernacular, as “Nakba,” a catastrophe. For the next 20 years, neither Jordan nor any of the other Arab states even spoke of giving Palestinian Arabs their independence, concentrating instead on boycotting and delegitimizing Israel.

Only some years after the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel, beating back the annilihation attempt by Egypt, Jordan and Syria, found itself in possession of the West Bank and Gaza Strip did the Arabs suddenly develop a passion for Palestinian statehood.

Even though Arab national aspirations in Palestine are little more than a century old and developed in response to Zionism, Israel, whose Jewish roots in the land go back thousands of years, repeatedly has sought a negotiated settlement so that Israel and a Palestinian state could live side by side in peace. Generous Israeli offers were made at Camp David and Taba under President Clinton’s aegis in 2000-01, but Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat walked out on the talks. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pulled all Israelis out of Gaza, but instead of developing into an embryonic Palestinian state, the region became a Hamas-ridden launching pad for anti-Israel terror.

Subsequent Israeli attempts to restart negotiations have met a wall of Palestinian refusal to recognize it as a Jewish state and insistence on a refugee “right of return” to Israel proper — both positions clearly intended to keep up the conflict, not solve it.

Rebuffing the very idea of a Jewish state means the Palestinians are not ready to concede that Israel was the place of origin of the Jewish people, the focus of its prayers and dreams for centuries and the center of a renewed Jewish people today in the wake of the Holocaust. Indeed, Palestinian negotiators seem to deny that Jews constitute a people at all.

Combining this with the demand that anyone claiming to be a descendant of a Palestinian who left what is now Israel should be allowed to return confirms that the Palestinian strategy is indeed to snuff out the Jewish state demographically, turning Israel into a second Palestinian state alongside the one to be created in Gaza and the West Bank.

Hamas, classified by the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization, condemned the killing of Osama bin Laden and has categorically rejected any acceptance of Israel. Coming at a time when the Palestinian Authority is allied with Hamas, passage of a U.N. resolution backing the creation of a Palestinian state could put an abrupt end to any hope for the resumption of peace talks with Israel. It also could reverse Palestinian economic progress by triggering a cutoff of the annual $400 million that the Palestinian Authority gets in

American aid and possibly lead to violence in the West Bank when the Palestinians realize that an empty U.N. declaration makes not an iota of difference to the situation on the ground.

In their quest for unilateral statehood, the Palestinians themselves are deeply divided in the vision of their future state. The Fatah faction sees itself as part of a secular Arab world, whereas Hamas envisions an Islamic Palestinian state. The U.N. vote could well create a Palestinian crisis resulting in a destructive civil conflict — a conflict that could spread into Israel, Jordan and other neighboring Middle East states.

While it is tempting to imagine that the United Nations can magically create a Palestinian state, only a return to the peace table and negotiations with Israel can do that. While it may take a little longer, a settlement reached that way is the only kind that can last, preparing the groundwork for an agreement whereby a new Palestinian state and the existing Jewish state agree to an end of the conflict. Once such a deal is reached, Israel should be the first to propose U.N. membership for the democratic and peace-loving Republic of Palestine.

Mervyn Danker is the regional director of the American Jewish Committee’s Northern California office.

Michael J. Weil

Israelis and Jews around the world are awaiting the Palestinians’ push at the United Nations for statehood with trepidation.

The official response of the government of Israel and American Jewish groups has been to do everything possible to prevent any action at the U.N. and to line up votes against it. Only America and a few other nations have joined Israel’s side. Most European countries are likely to either support the Palestinians or abstain. The current Israeli strategy seems certain to fail.

While the Palestinians are unlikely to get the Security Council’s approval because of the U.S. veto, they will get the support of the General Assembly. Legally a General Assembly vote means little, but it doesn’t matter. As far as the world goes, Palestine will have achieved statehood. The new State of Palestine will be recognized by many countries. And it won’t stop there.

Israel will be accused of establishing settlements in a foreign country, and each time Israel acts in response to a rocket from Gaza or an attack from the West Bank, it will be attacked verbally for threatening the sovereignty of a neighboring country. Israel will find itself embroiled in lawsuits at the International Court at The Hague and in other European countries, accused of violating the rights of a sovereign nation. The new “frontline” in the Israel-Palestinian conflict will be about water, airspace, territorial waters, imports and exports, taxation and more.

Israel cannot win in this battle.

There is, however, an alternative to Israel’s current approach and our community’s wall-to-wall condemnation of the Palestinian plan: Israel should support Palestinian statehood in the strongest manner. This is the right approach on both moral and pragmatic grounds.

As an Israeli and a Zionist, I have a moral duty to support any people that desires national self-determination. This was our dream for 2,000 years, and we began the journey toward realizing that aspiration in Basel 120 years ago. We achieved statehood in 1948, and yet we still struggle to have our right to self-determination accepted.

Today, especially as the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement works to challenge Israel’s national legitimacy, we need not only to defend our Jewish state but also to support others seeking self-determination.

Is there any moral reason to deny that right to the Palestinians? True, they have only become a people in recent times, but what right do we have to say that they are not a nation entitled to their own state? Our doomed attempt to prevent recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations will only serve to bolster the cause of those who are trying to delegitimize Israel’s national rights.

Israel would do better by endorsing the Palestinian effort to gain recognition, and it should be the first nation to vote in favor of Palestinian statehood. This should be followed by demands that the Palestinians prove they can fulfill the responsibilities of statehood.

The new Palestinian government must develop an economy that can provide for the well-being of its citizens. It must teach its children to respect all peoples and remove anti-Israel rhetoric from its textbooks and media. The Palestinian government’s police force needs not only to protect its own citizens but also to ensure that terrorism is rooted out.

The new state must embrace democracy and protect civil rights. These have been the demands of the citizens of Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya and Syria during the Arab Spring, and the Palestinian people deserve the same. They are entitled to a free press, free speech and freedom of religion. The status of Palestinian women must be advanced and their rights protected.

The new Palestinian government faces an especially difficult challenge in dealing with Jewish settlements. Yet a modern state must learn to live with citizens of other countries and peoples of other faiths in its midst. It will behoove the new Palestinian government to protect the Jewish settlers and guarantee their rights.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should call upon Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to fulfill the responsibilities of enlightened government. Netanyahu should offer to meet with the head of the new Palestinian state to negotiate borders and resolve all outstanding issues between the two countries.

I doubt that Abbas will respond favorably. Nor do I expect that the Palestinians will be eager to return to peace negotiations. But their refusal will put the Palestinians on the defensive and expose their current statehood push as just an empty public relations tactic. Meanwhile, by supporting Palestinian statehood, Israel would underscore its willingness to move forward and achieve the ultimate goal of peace.

This approach is a lot better than the one now being pursued by Israel. It is also the morally correct, Zionist and Jewish thing to do.

Michael J. Weil is the executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans. He lived in Israel for 30 years and served in the Israeli army. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not represent the policy of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans.

Marc Stanely

I was amused by Adam Serwer’s recent blog post titled “Is Bibi anti-Israel?” in which he pointed out that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conditionally offered this month to negotiate with the Palestinians using the pre-1967 borders as a framework.

Amazingly, there was no outcry by American Jews that Netanyahu was abandoning Israel by suggesting a return to supposedly “indefensible” borders.

As Serwer noted, this was in stark contrast to the negative accusations hurled at President Obama after his May 19 State Department address during which he restated — against a backdrop of supportive statements about Israel’s security — longstanding U.S. (and, frankly, Israeli) policy that Israel’s negotiations with the Palestinians should take place along “1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”

Obama’s statement was unremarkable for many reasons: President George W. Bush said as much in 2005 while standing next to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the Rose Garden; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reiterated the same formula in 2009; and Netanyahu even issued a joint statement with Clinton using that exact phrase last November. In fact, this common understanding has been the basis of bipartisan negotiations for at least 12 years, if not more.

So why was Obama vilified over this statement, but his critics remained silent as Netanyahu took the exact same position? And why do Obama’s critics insinuate that the Israeli government — Netanyahu in particular — has concerns with the president and his commitment to a safe and secure Jewish state? Why haven’t Netanyahu’s quite favorable remarks about the current status of the U.S.-Israel relationship been covered in the media?

In a recent speech in Tel Aviv, the Israeli leader extolled the current U.S.-Israel relationship, noting that the United States has “provided invaluable diplomatic, moral and military support.

Diplomatic support, in our quest for a negotiated peace … grounded in security but grounded also in mutual compromise that can only be achieved in face to face negations. America is very, very clear on this point. And I think President Obama has spoken eloquently about this.”

Netanyahu then talked about the great military support that Israel receives from the U.S.

“We just had a successful deployment of the Iron Dome system. And we’ve intercepted seven missiles that were fired over the skies of Beersheva and Ashkelon,” the prime minister said, “and this was made possible by generous American military support; funding that was approved by the Obama administration.”

After we have all received scurrilous e-mails to the contrary, I imagine many American Jews will be surprised to learn that Netanyahu is pleased with and deeply grateful for the “diplomatic, moral and military support” his government has received from Obama. The president’s critics surely are not going to bring this up.

On an unprecedented level, and truly on the width and breadth of issues they face together, Obama and Netanyahu agree. You can see it in the words they speak, but you can see it even clearer in the everyday actions taken by the Obama administration to help secure Israel.

High-level security cooperation, including funding the critical Iron Dome? Check.

Heavily sanctioning Iran to block its pursuit of nuclear weapons? Definitely.

Committing to stop a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations in September, as well as blocking other efforts to undermine Israel’s legitimacy in world bodies?

Absolutely.

From the Gaza flotilla to missile defense cooperation, the list goes on and on.

So are critics being fair to President Obama when they intentionally misquote him and spread lies about his positions? Are they being fair when they portray a rift between the U.S. administration and the Israeli government in the face of clear evidence to the contrary? And are they helping Israel by trying to use Israel as a wedge issue for partisan gain?

While some work to tear down the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus that we’ve built over decades, Obama and Netanyahu continue to work as partners in every sense to secure Israel and ensure lasting peace for the Israeli people. On top of the extensive list of agreements regarding policy and security cooperation, add the fact that Netanyahu has reiterated his support for this longtime basis for negotiations.

Don’t listen to the noise; look at the record. Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama are truly on the same page.

Marc Stanley is the chair of the National Jewish Democratic Council.

Morton A. Klein

It’s high time to face an unpleasant fact: President Obama and Israel are not on the same page.

This has been true ever since Obama took office in January 2009, but it was most recently apparent this May when the president ambushed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with an adversarial speech the day before Netanyahu’s U.S. visit by advocating that Israel return to the pre-1967 armistice lines (with mutually agreed swaps).

Obama’s speech meant that Israel cannot keep the Jewish neighborhoods of eastern Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, the Western Wall or the major settlement blocs without Palestinian Authority approval. No previous U.S. president ever took this position.

Neither has any previous president ever suggested, as Obama has, that the issues of “territory and security” should be agreed upon first, and only then should the issues of Arab refugees and Jerusalem’s status be decided. Thus in Obama’s view, Israel should establish a Palestinian state and give away virtually all the disputed territory, thereby eliminating its negotiating leverage, before negotiating over Jerusalem and refugees from a weakened position.

An anonymous Israeli official interviewed in early August by Reuters denied recent reports that Netanyahu now accepts the pre-1967 lines as a basis for negotiations, and two senior Israeli officials recently told me the same.

It’s also shocking that Obama made these demands of Israel only two weeks after Fatah, the faction that leads the Palestinian Authority, signed a unity agreement with Hamas, the terrorist organization that calls in its charter for the murder of Jews.

Netanyahu has been clear: He won’t negotiate with a Hamas-linked Palestinian Authority. Yet Obama has refused to make diplomatic or financial support for the Palestinian Authority conditional on its abrogating its unity agreement with Hamas.

Obama’s first major Middle East speech, in Cairo in June 2009, made clear his tenuous commitment to Israel. He ignored the legal, historical and religious basis of the Jewish claim to Israel, instead writing it off as a reward for enduring the Holocaust.

Obama also claimed that the Palestinians have been suffering in trying to establish their state for 60 years, but he ignored the fact that they turned down offers of statehood in 1937, 1947, 2000 and 2008. He spoke about the Arabs being “displaced” by Israel’s founding, ignoring the fact that if there had been no Arab war against Israel, there would have been no refugees.

Most egregiously, the president strongly implied that Palestinian suffering was equivalent to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. And by framing his call for Palestinians to practice only nonviolent resistance by pointing to the experience of U.S. blacks during slavery and black Africans during South African apartheid, Obama effectively lumped in Israeli Jews with history’s oppressors.

In a January 2010 TV interview, Obama’s Middle East envoy George Mitchell — who has since left his post — told PBS’s Charlie Rose that “full implementation of the Arab Peace Initiative is the objective set forth by the president.” The so-called Arab Peace Initiative demands that Israel retreat to the pre-1967 lines, set up a Palestinian state and accept the right of millions of Arab refugees to move into Israel. That would end Israel as a Jewish state.

And let’s not forget Obama’s September 2009 U.N. speech, in which he spoke of the need to couple “unwavering commitment to Israel” with calls for Israel to “respect the legitimate claims and rights of the Palestinians.” Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton called this “the most radical anti-Israel speech I can recall any president making.”

Even former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat who campaigned for Obama, recently wrote in the Huffington Post, “I weep as I witness outrageous verbal attacks on Israel” that “are being orchestrated by President Obama.” Koch suggested that Obama is “throwing Israel under the bus.”

Perhaps Israel’s deepest concern is the existential threat posed by the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. Obama needlessly delayed congressional sanctions against Iran for a year while he tried to get multilateral, U.N.-backed sanctions enacted first. Now that sanctions have become U.S. law, Obama has not implemented them in a serious way.

Obama also sent Vice President Joe Biden to Israel to warn Netanyahu not to launch any military strikes against Iran without U.S. approval.

One of my most revealing experiences was a meeting I attended, along with 40 other Jewish leaders, with President Obama at the White House in March. The president told us, according to my notes: “You must speak to your Israeli friends and relatives and search your souls to determine how badly do you really want peace. Israelis think this peace business is overrated; their life is good, their economy is good, and things are quiet.”

Several times he emphasized that “the PA is sincere in wanting a peaceful settlement” and that “Israel has not sufficiently tried to make an acceptable offer.” He asked, “Is the Netanyahu government serious about territorial concessions?”

Things may get better or worse — more likely the latter — but one thing is clear: Obama and Israel are not of one mind, or anywhere close to being so.

Morton A. Klein is the national president of the Zionist Organization of America.

Newt Gingrich, a Republican candidate for president, speaks at the republican Jewish Coalition's California summer bash in Beverly Hills, June 12, 2011. (Zach Abrams)

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (JTA) – Israel and America are at a dangerous crossroads in which the survival of Israel and the safety of the United States both hang in the balance.

Year after year, the forces of terrorism become stronger, and the claims of terrorists become more acceptable to our European allies and more powerful in the United Nations. Year after year the Iranian dictatorship, with its openly stated desire to annihilate Israel and defeat the United States, moves closer to having nuclear means to do so. Year after year, Hamas grows stronger in Gaza and Hezbollah grows stronger in Lebanon.

Today the greatest obstacle toward achieving a real and lasting peace is not the strength of the enemy or the unwillingness of Israel to make great sacrifices for the sake of peace. It is the inability on the part of the Obama administration and certain other world leaders to tell the truth about terrorism, be honest about the publicly stated goals of our common enemies and devise policies appropriate to an honest accounting of reality.

Moral confusion that cannot see for what they are attacks that fit into a carefully defined ideology of radical Islamist terrorism is sadly typical of this administration’s elevation of political correctness above common sense. The Obama administration’s policy towards Israel has been a victim of this dangerous confusion.

In his May 19 State Department speech, President Obama rightly stated that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with a terrorist organization that denies its right to exist. But he then went on in the same speech to pressure Israel to do exactly that.

President Obama wants Israel to enter into negotiations with a Palestinian Authority that is now in league with the terrorist organization Hamas. The president said that applying this pressure on Israel was not the politically savvy thing for him to do, and that the safe thing to do in an election year is nothing.

He is essentially telling us that he is doing the brave thing by pressuring Israel to negotiate with terrorists who want to destroy it. President Obama and his State Department should recall some basic facts.

Hamas was founded as a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Its charter openly calls for Israel’s destruction and instructs its followers to kill Jews wherever they find them. Hamas goes well beyond words in its effort to destroy Israel. In 2010, more than 200 missiles were fired into Israel from Gaza.

No country can be expected to conduct peace negotiations with a terrorist organization dedicated to its destruction, or with a Palestinian governmental authority that joins forces with such a terrorist organization.

Twenty years of hopes for the modern peace process cannot change this fundamental reality.

It also means that entering into peace negotiations with any organization that includes Hamas is a fool’s errand.  It is something that no friend of Israel should ever ask Israel to do. I certainly hope this administration doesn’t resort to the meaningless exercise of trying to artificially distinguish between the military and political wings of Hamas as a way of justifying pressure on Israel to negotiate with the latter.

In his recent speeches, President Obama also called for Israel to accept the 1967 lines as the beginning of peace negotiations. He went to great lengths to have us all believe that what he said at the State Department and later at AIPAC was no different than what other American presidents have declared as official policy.

Unfortunately, that’s just not true. President Obama has in fact called for a remarkable shift in U.S. policy regarding the peace process. He wants Israel to accept the indefensible lines of 1967 as the starting point of negotiations.

Accepting such a proposal would be a suicidal step for Israel. Fortunately for Israel, that proposal is a non-starter with the American people.

Like Israel, we are committed to seeing a peace agreement that protects Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the Jewish state. After all, it has only been under Jewish authority that religious freedom, including access to holy sites, for people of all faiths — Christian, Jewish and Muslim — has been protected.

Meanwhile, we must readily see the president’s policies for what they are: the dangerous accommodation of Middle East dictators, and worse, the accommodation of terrorist groups like Hamas.

President Obama’s policies represent a sharp break from the post-World War II American political consensus of providing unwavering support to the State of Israel.

The decision to adopt a policy of accommodation, using the political objectives and code words of those who wish to drive Israel into the sea, affirms the administration’s radicalism in its headlong flight from the legacy of U.S. presidents — from Truman to Bush — and is leading Israel and the Western democracies toward ever increasing danger.

President Obama’s focus on Israel as the obstacle to peace is particularly disturbing considering the existence of a true threat to the peace of the world: the threat from Iran. Today Iran is watching whether the United States keeps its promises with its ally Israel and how we deal with Iran’s proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. The Iranian regime will also be watching how America and our allies treat Israel at the U.N. General Assembly this September.

We need to acknowledge that 20 years of trying to negotiate peace with evil regimes and organizations dedicated to the destruction of Israel — and in many cases our own destruction — has been a failure, and the time has come to clearly and decisively take the offensive against them.

This begins with a firm and consistent commitment by the United States — in the Reagan tradition — to speak plainly and truthfully about the nature of our enemies.

Next, our policies must reflect the fact that there is no moral equivalency between terrorist regimes and a legitimate self-governing country that abides by the rule of law.

We must reverse the Obama administration’s dangerous policies of incoherence and accommodation and implement instead a foreign policy that is clear about the evil that we face and committed to the actions necessary to overcome it.

(This Op-Ed was adapted from a speech Newt Gingrich, a Republican candidate for president, delivered to the Republican Jewish Coalition on June 12, 2011.) counterpoint

Stuart Eizenstat (JPPPI)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — A strong secure Jewish state of Israel, supported by the United States as a close ally, has been a central feature of my public and private careers.

As a senior government official in several administrations, an American and a Jew, I see Israel from multiple perspectives. Israel plays a strategic role in advancing American interests in the Middle East and beyond; Israel and the United States share a common set of democratic values and have developed a partnership unique in the annals of history. Israel is the Third Jewish Commonwealth, returning the Jewish people to their homeland after 2,000 years of exile, and it is the home of relatives and close friends, and the final resting place of my great-grandfather and grandfather, both of whom made aliyah.

I fervently believe President Obama’s course is essential to achieve the hopes I have for Israel’s future in the 21st century and beyond — notwithstanding the recent controversy over the president’s remarks about Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and differences over Israeli settlement expansion.

First, the Obama administration has generated unprecedented international pressure to confront Iran, Israel’s most dangerous security threat. President Obama is determined in word and deed to “prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

The president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have orchestrated increasingly biting multilateral sanctions through the U.N. Security Council, winning support even from Russia and China; strengthened them with comprehensive U.S. sanctions aimed at Iran’s financial sector; and obtained European Union support for similar sanctions.

As a result, Iran is virtually cut off from large parts of the international financial system, its economy is hobbled, and most large American and European companies have left Iran.

The administration also has taken on Islamic terrorism more generally, from gravely weakening al-Qaida with relentless drone attacks and the courageous killing of Osama bin Laden to providing vast financial and military support to help governments throughout the Middle East and North Africa combat radicalism.

Second, with bipartisan cooperation from Congress, the president has placed the military relationship with Israel at an all-time high. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recognized this in his recent speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, saying that “Our security cooperation is unprecedented” and noting that the president “has backed those words up with deeds.”

President Obama has expanded U.S.-Israeli security cooperation from counterterrorism to preventing arms smuggling to Gaza to missile defense.

Despite the most difficult federal budget challenge in our lifetime, Israel’s military assistance has increased to the historic high of $3 billion. The Obama administration has assured that Israel will maintain a qualitative advantage in a region where the sophistication of arms is increasing by providing additional support of $205 million to help produce an Israeli-developed short-range rocket defense system, Iron Dome, which already has intercepted rockets from Gaza and saved Israeli lives.

Third, the Obama administration has taken head-on the insidious campaign to delegitimize Israel as a Jewish state. Obama is the first president to repeatedly refer to Israel as the “Jewish state of Israel.” He told the U.N. General Assembly that “Israel’s existence must not be a subject for debate” and said, “Efforts to chip away at Israel’s legitimacy will only be met by the unshakeable opposition of the United States.”

The president withdrew U.S. participation in the Durban Review Conference in Geneva in 2009 because of its anti-Israel agenda. And the administration strongly opposed the Goldstone report following the Gaza War.

The controversy over the president’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has colored the view of some supporters of Israel, who failed to listen to what the president said. His May 19 speech on the Arab Spring and his May 22 AIPAC speech are bookends that should be reassuring to Israeli supporters and are distinctly in Israel’s best interests.

It is critical to understand that the president was not only trying to reignite the stalled peace process, but also to head off a serious looming danger to Israel: a unilateral declaration by the U.N. General Assembly in September recognizing Palestinian statehood within pre-1967 borders, with Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state and the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees.

By giving the Europeans and the G-8 members an alternative, the president’s approach gives him leverage to urge them to join him in voting against the U.N. resolution.

Without this initiative, and in the absence of a concrete Israeli proposal, the chances of heading off the U.N. vote or diminishing its support would have been nil.

Israel is politically isolated because of its government’s policies on Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The Obama initiative provides the opportunity for key nations to support the U.S. government’s determined effort to support Israel at the United Nations.

We must focus on what President Obama said and what he did not say. He emphasized that peace could not be imposed on Israel and that Israel should not be expected to negotiate with Hamas so long as it is committed to Israel’s destruction. He stated point blank that “No vote at the United Nations will ever create an independent Palestinian state,” and that any final agreement must assure that Israel can “defend itself — by itself — against any threat.” He said that the withdrawal of Israel’s military forces from the West Bank should occur only when the Palestinians can demonstrate their capacity to keep the peace, and that a Palestinian state should be “non-militarized.”

Importantly, he stressed that the status of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees should be left to later — after negotiations on principles that satisfy each side that their respective core needs on borders and security will be met.

Finally, he said that the Palestinians must accept “Israel as a Jewish state and homeland for the Jewish people.” No American president has provided these assurances.

What he did not say was that Israel should be required to withdraw to pre-1967 borders; quite the contrary. President Obama stated clearly that negotiations should be based on “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”

This is essentially the position that both former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000 and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert took in 2008 in negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

As the president stressed at AIPAC, this means “by definition” that the “parties themselves — Israelis and Palestinians — will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed” before the Six-Day War in June 1967. That will allow the “parties themselves to account for the changes that have taken place for the last 44 years,” he said, referring to Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Lost in the fog of an unnecessary controversy is the fact that continued expansion of settlements does not strengthen Israel’s security; it isolates Israel and makes a two-state solution more difficult.

Two states for two peoples, with as much separation as possible, is essential for Israel’s well-being. When the president said that only a viable two-state solution with Israel within internationally recognized secure borders will enable Israel to remain a majority Jewish, democratic state, the president spoke for me. I believe he spoke for millions of Israelis, too; a recent poll by Israel’s daily Maariv showed that 57 percent of Israelis accept Obama’s principles.

It’s time for the American Jewish community, and supporters of Israel in the United States and around the world, to recognize that President Obama’s broad principles — apparently just accepted by the chief Palesinitan negotiator, Saab Erekat, in a speech in a recent speech in Washington — provide the key to a safe and secure Jewish state.

(Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat, now a partner at the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, served in senior positions in several presidential administrations. Under President Clinton, Eizenstat was responsible for the economic dimensions of the Middle East peace process, and he served as the administration’s special representative on Holocaust-era issues.)