Obama Stresses Support for Israel
WASHINGTON — President Obama sought to reassure American Jews that he is a fierce supporter of Israel as he visited an influential synagogue here on Friday to defend his quest for a nuclear agreement with Iran. The visit was also an attempt to mend a strained relationship with parts of the American Jewish community that dates to the start of Mr. Obama’s presidency and has worsened in recent months.
“When I hear some people say that disagreements over policy belie a general lack of support of Israel, I must object — and I object forcefully,” Mr. Obama said. But he said he was unwilling to “paper over differences.”
Calling himself an “honorary member of the tribe,” Mr. Obama, wearing a yarmulke and standing at the bimah where rabbis chant from the Torah, told about 1,000 people in the packed sanctuary at Adas Israel, a large Conservative congregation about three miles from the White House, that the United States had an “enduring friendship with the people of Israel” and “unbreakable bonds with the state of Israel” that could never be weakened.
“Our commitment to Israel’s security, and my commitment to Israel’s security is, and always will be, unshakable,” Mr. Obama said.
And, he said, “it is precisely because I care so deeply about the state of Israel that I feel a responsibility to speak out honestly about what I think would lead to long-term security and to the preservation of a true democracy in the Jewish homeland.” He added, “I believe that’s two states for two peoples, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.”
The president used the roughly 30-minute speech to vow that he would reject a “bad deal” or one that failed to meet his objective of cutting off Tehran’s pathways to developing a bomb, and argued that an agreement was in Israel’s best security interests.
Above all, Mr. Obama said, “the people of Israel must always know: America has its back.”
It was unclear how much a single visit to a synagogue would assuage Jewish concerns, but White House officials indicated that it was part of what they described as a sustained effort to reach out to American Jews before the June 30 deadline for completing the Iran accord.
In his remarks, the president worked to put his support for Israel in a personal context and to knock down a perception among some Jewish leaders and activists that he lacks a deep emotional connection to Israel and its people. As a young man inspired by the civil rights struggle in the United States, Mr. Obama said, he came to know Israel “through these incredible images of kibbutzim,” the collective communities that formed the backbone of the Jewish state.
“Those values in many ways came to be my own values,” Mr. Obama said.
The president’s views on Israel were forged during his time in Chicago, when he became friendly with a group of prominent Jewish Democrats that included Lester Crown, a Chicago-based industrialist, the federal judge Abner J. Mikva, and Newton N. Minow, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. He came to share their approach to Israel, which involved staunch support for the Jewish state coupled with a willingness to criticize its policies.
Years later as he campaigned for president, Mr. Obama would tell a group of Jewish leaders in Cleveland that a person did not have to be pro-Likud — a conservative and hawkish party in Israel — to be pro-Israel. At a White House meeting during his first year in office, he questioned whether a stance that put “no daylight” between the United States and Israel was productive, telling a group of Jewish leaders that it had yielded no progress during the previous administration.
At the same time, Mr. Obama has sought close ties with Jewish communities during his time in office, has provided substantial military assistance to Israel and has selected Jews to serve in prominent posts in his administration, including his former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, now the mayor of Chicago, and Jacob J. Lew, now Treasury secretary. He was the first president to host a Passover Seder at the White House, now an annual custom. In his re-election in 2012, Mr. Obama received 70 percent of the Jewish vote.
But Mr. Obama’s decision to go to Cairo early on in his tenure — before he made a presidential visit to Jerusalem, where he had traveled as a candidate — and speak in stark terms about the pain and daily humiliations Palestinians had suffered was an indication to his critics that he would be biased against Israel in his attempts to promote a two-state solution. That sense has deepened as Mr. Obama has clashed bitterly and openly with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel over the Iran accord and other issues, and as conservative Jews have increasingly lavished campaign contributions on Republicans.
Supporters of Mr. Obama say his critics have long misunderstood his views on Israel.
“There’s been a lamentable partisanship that has come to surround Israel policy, and some confuse the occasional challenges in the relationship between Obama and Bibi with the president’s overall level of support for Israel,” said Norman L. Eisen, a former ambassador to the Czech Republic and longtime friend of Mr. Obama’s who is active in pro-Israel circles, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. “None of those critiques are accurate, or reflective of how Obama feels about Israel.”
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“Anybody who knows him personally knows that he is a very strong supporter of Israel and of the Jewish people,” Mr. Eisen said, calling it “part of his identity.”
Mr. Obama’s speech on Friday offered no shifts in position, angering some pro-Israel leaders who said he had missed an opportunity to make concrete promises that would have allayed their concerns, such as by vowing to veto any anti-Israel resolution at the United Nations, including one calling for the creation of a Palestinian state.
“He was really attempting the pull the wool over pro-Israel eyes,” said Morton A. Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America. “This speech showed no respect for the intelligence of the pro-Israel community, which is horrified by the catastrophe of the Iran deal.”Mr. Klein said he had predicted early on that Mr. Obama would be “the most hostile president to Israel, ever,” based on the Cairo speech and his membership in what he called an “anti-Semitic church” led by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., the African-American pastor whom the president called his spiritual mentor. Mr. Obama has since broken with Mr. Wright.
Still, Mr. Obama, who received an exceedingly warm reception from his audience — composed of prominent Jewish leaders, lawmakers and opinion leaders, many of them from the more liberal wing of American Jews — went out of his way to acknowledge that many Jews in Israel and the United States regard the Palestinians as bad actors.
“The Palestinians are not the easiest of partners,” Mr. Obama said. “The neighborhood is dangerous, and we cannot expect Israel to take existential risks with their security.”
Some Jewish leaders heard in that statement an attempt by Mr. Obama to reach out to Jewish Americans uncertain of his motives.
“For the president of the United States to say that publicly, even in that gentle a way, is notable,” said Nathan J. Diament, executive director for public policy at the Orthodox Union, an umbrella organization for Orthodox Jewry.
Mr. Obama’s visit to Adas Israel was the first time in more than 30 years and only the fourth time that a sitting American president had spoken in a synagogue. William Howard Taft was the first in 1909, when he addressed a congregation in Pittsburgh, followed by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. NYTimes