Former Newsweek reporter Michael Hirsh is now with Politico, but one consistent thread of his writing has been a fondness for the foreign policy “doves.” His latest Politico piece on the Iran deal is headlined “Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama and the Jews: Why does America’s Jewish community always condemn the presidents who save Israel?”
One can imagine Israelis doing a spit take on that headline. This is the same Jimmy Carter who wrote a book trashing Israel for having a racist “apartheid” system that oppresses the Palestinians. They'd also worry this only inflates Carter's massive ego.
Hirsh allows the reality on the ground: when Carter passes away, “he will receive the usual glowing eulogies afforded ex-American presidents, yet many Jewish-Americans will listen through gritted teeth, recalling their strong suspicion that Carter was an anti-Semite. After all, during his long post-presidency Carter stood up for Palestinian rights with unseemly zeal, especially in his heretical 2006 book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid.”
“Heretical”? Is that really a word secular journalists should apply to secular policies?
Carter “saved” Israel with the Camp David Accords in 1978, and Obama is doing the same thing right now:
Barack Obama, whom some American Jews also suspect is anti-Semitic, may have just saved Israel’s existence again—and as profoundly as Carter did. However flawed, compromised and uncertain in its application, the Iran deal is the only thing in the past decade that has come close to stopping Tehran’s relentless march from a few hundred centrifuges to 20,000 and counting....
Obama is thus only sharing the fate of most modern U.S. presidents who have dared to cross official Israeli policy—and the American Jewish community. Somehow it seems that the ones who have worked hardest to preserve Israel have managed only to earn Israeli and Jewish mistrust and contempt.
After Carter there was George H.W. Bush, who with the 1991 Madrid conference set in motion what became the Oslo peace process—which during Bill Clinton’s subsequent presidency came within a hair’s breadth of achieving a necessary, internationally legal separation from the Palestinians. Most Israelis yearned passionately for this historic outcome. And yet for their troubles the elder Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, also earned the enmity of American Jewry, again for the heresy of defiance.
Back in 2007, Michael Ledeen at National Review noted Hirsh “approvingly quotes General Abizaid’s contention that we ‘could live with’ a nuclear Iran. Hirsh likes ‘realists’ like Abizaid, but he doesn’t like what he thinks he sees in the White House: …Bush is taking the Israeli line.”
