Mitt Versus Barack on Israel
Obama is nostalgic for the Jewish state's socialist past. Romney admires its capitalist future.
By BRET STEPHENS, WSJ, July 30, 2012
Mitt Romney infuriated Palestinians during his visit to Israel on the weekend
by calling Jerusalem "the capital of Israel." He then added insult to injury by
noting—in the context of a discussion of "culture"—the "dramatically stark
difference in economic vitality" between Israelis and Palestinians. A
Palestinian official called the remark "racist."
I'm beginning to warm to Mitt.
We live in a time when being pro-Israel has become a key test of a
candidate's presidential fitness, and rightly so. George W. Bush passed that
test on a helicopter ride over Israel with Ariel Sharon in 1999. Barack Obama
tried to do the same when he paid homage to the besieged Israeli town of Sderot
in 2008.
By contrast, Jimmy Carter thinks Israel is a virtual apartheid state, which
is just the sort of thought that makes Carter Carter. To be anti-Israel doesn't
absolutely, positively, make you an anti-Semite. But it does mark you out as
something between a moron and a crank.
President Obama has yet to do anything toward Israel that would put him in
the Carter league—quite. But give him a second term. Perhaps his performance so
far has been only an overture.
This performance includes unprecedented personal chilliness toward the
Israeli prime minister; unprecedented warmth toward Turkey's anti-Israel prime
minister; an unprecedented effort to put diplomatic distance between the U.S.
and Israel; and, more recently, an unprecedented campaign of intelligence and
military leaks designed to stay Israel's hand against Iran. The president only
seems to get right with Israel when he senses he's in political trouble, or when
his fundraising efforts lag, or when there's a big Aipac speech to deliver. Last
week, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, couldn't bring himself to name
Israel's capital when asked at a briefing. Why?
You hear a lot of theories trying to explain this, often centered on Mr.
Obama's past friendships with the likes of Prof. Rashid Khalidi, Rev. Jeremiah
Wright or Rabbi Arnold Wolf, the late firebrand of the Jewish far left. I have a
simpler theory: The president's views are of a piece with the broader left-right
debate on the nature of success.
When detractors think about Israel, they tend to think its successes are
largely ill-gotten: Somebody else's land, somebody else's money, somebody else's
rights. It's the view that Israel gets an unfair share of foreign aid from the
U.S., and that it takes an unfair share of territory from the Palestinians. It's
also the view that, as the presumptive stronger party in its dealings with the
Palestinians, Israel bears the onus of making concessions and taking the
proverbial risks for peace. As the supposed underdogs, Palestinians are not
burdened by any reciprocal moral obligations.
By contrast, when admirers of Israel visit the country, they typically marvel
at everything it has planted, built, invented, re-imagined, restored, saved.
Israel's friends think that the country has earned its success the hard way, and
that it deserves to reap the rewards. Hence Mitt Romney on Sunday: "You export
technology, not tyranny or terrorism. . . . What you have built here, with your
own hands, is a tribute to your people."
Animating one side of this divide is a sense of admiration. Animating the
other is a sense of envy. Could Mr. Obama have uttered lines like Mitt Romney's?
Maybe. But you get the feeling that scrolling in the back of his mind would be
the words, "You didn't build that."
Does this mean that Mr. Obama is "anti-Israel" in the most invidious sense?
Mr. Obama seems sincere when he speaks of his admiration for Israeli kibbutzim,
or his outrage at Holocaust denial, or his solidarity with Israeli victims of
terrorism. And he seems more than sincere in his desire to return Israel to
something approximating its 1967 borders.
But all this amounts to a form of nostalgia for the Israel that once was—the
plucky underdog, the proud member of the Socialist International. And Israel
isn't going back there any more.
Mr. Romney's attitude toward Israel seems to come from a different place. He
admires the country as much for where it's going as for where it has come from.
And he's not prepared to give Palestinians an automatic pass for their failure
to do something with the political and economic opportunities they've been
given. Israeli success, in his mind, is earned—and so is Palestinian failure.
Mr. Romney has a history as an eminently malleable politician, and the views
he has offered on Israel have, so far, been politically risk-free. How would he
act as president? Who knows, although it would be unthinkable for any Republican
president today to seek to strong-arm or publicly humiliate Jerusalem the way
Jim Baker did during the George H.W. Bush presidency.
Yet beyond that, one sensed in Mr. Romney's speech in Jerusalem qualities of
conviction and sincerity—two of his lesser known traits. Keep that up, governor,
and you may yet win this election.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
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