Washington, D.C. (October 28, 2014) -- The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) responded to a spate of troubling expressions of hostility toward Israel coming from the Obama administration in recent days. RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks said:

"Last week, the Obama administration went out of its way to 'humiliate' a top Israeli official in retaliation for private remarks for which that official had publicly apologized. Yesterday, the State Department accused the Netanyahu government of lacking a commitment to peace because it had the temerity to authorize housing construction in the capital of Israel. And today, top aides to the president attacked Israel's Prime Minister in coarse, insulting language from behind the veil of anonymity.

"Americans expect their commander-in-chief to keep faith with critical allies in perilous times. This administration is dangerously off-course and its apparent determination to provoke a crisis in US-Israel relations is the latest disastrous evidence.

"We urge pro-Israel Americans to register their reservations about President Obama's naïve and petty foreign policy next week by supporting Republican candidates and electing a Congress that will stand up to him."

Sources:
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.622632

http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/US-says-Israeli-housing-action-incompatible-with-peace-379977

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/the-crisis-in-us-israel-relations-is-officially-here/382031/

Video released by the Prime Minister's office of Gov. Mitt Romney's visit with Israeli officials and remarks by Prime Minister Netanyahu and Gov. Romney.

See the RJC's response here.

Video released by the Prime Minister's office of Gov. Mitt Romney's visit with Israeli officials and remarks by Prime Minister Netanyahu and Gov. Romney.

See the RJC's response here.

Monday, July 09, 2012
By: Marc Goldman

[Note: This was written in response to an op-ed that has made the rounds in email as well, which makes the argument that Pres. Obama is a strong friend of Israel.]

Mark Vogel’s response regarding Obama’s support for Israel and where Obama’s true sympathies lie is misleading and dangerous. To equate help in fighting the Carmel Forest Fire or in rescuing Israelis trapped in the Egyptian embassy is disingenuous and ignores the following facts among many others:

• Obama’s first international phone call from the oval office after becoming president was to Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian authority, successor to Yasser Arafat. Of everyone on the world’s stage, that’s whom he chose to call first.


•  Obama’s first overseas trip was to Egypt, and to other Muslim nations, most of who are conspiring to destroy Israel.


•  After bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia, when there were demonstrations in Cairo Egypt, Obama could not wait to insist on our allay Mubarak leaving office, thus opening the door for the Muslim brotherhood to take over Egypt, which has now happened. He did that despite the fact that Mubarak, perhaps not the world’s greatest humanitarian, did however faithfully keep and honor the peace treaty with Israel. Obama’s behavior was completely opposite when the Iranian people were peacefully demonstrating to overthrow their government, a government that has threatened to annihilate Israel. Obama’s position was “it is an internal Iranian affair, it’s none of our business.” Similarly Obama was happy to lead from behind to over throw Gaddafi in Libya, which was not threatening Israel. Yet in Syria, the Iranian client state which is sworn to Israel’s destruction, Obama is eerily quiet as the Syrian government murders its citizens by the thousands.


•  The issue of the disrespect, which Obama overtly showed to Prime Minister Netanyahu, is not a matter of being invited for dinner or left standing in the doorway. In the Arab world, signs of respect and deference speak volumes and so the public dissing of Israel’s prime minister and the deep bow to the Saudi king send very loud and clear messages from the president of the United States to Israel and to its enemies, in a way that is too subtle for most Americans to recognize.


•  The sanctions, which have been placed on Iran as it continues to violate one after another of UN resolutions in its mad dash to develop a nuclear weapon, have been forced on the unwilling Obama administration by a Congress that is far more sympathetic to Israel.


•  And lest we forget; the Barack Obama who spoke at AIPAC, while he was a candidate for president, in words that every supporter of Israel responded to with enthusiasm; that he was committed to Jerusalem being the eternal undivided capital of Israel. Is the very same Barack Obama who the very next day issued a statement that he misspoke, and that what he meant was that Jerusalem should not be divided with barbed wire as it had been before 1967.

The likelihood that the real Barak Obama is the one who was overheard telling Russian Prime Minister, Medvedev, to please tell Vladimir Putin not to pressure him at this time, that Obama will have much more flexibility after he is reelected, is too frightening and dangerous to take a chance on.

Monday, July 09, 2012
By: Marc Goldman

[Note: This was written in response to an op-ed that has made the rounds in email as well, which makes the argument that Pres. Obama is a strong friend of Israel.]

Mark Vogel’s response regarding Obama’s support for Israel and where Obama’s true sympathies lie is misleading and dangerous. To equate help in fighting the Carmel Forest Fire or in rescuing Israelis trapped in the Egyptian embassy is disingenuous and ignores the following facts among many others:

• Obama’s first international phone call from the oval office after becoming president was to Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian authority, successor to Yasser Arafat. Of everyone on the world’s stage, that’s whom he chose to call first.


•  Obama’s first overseas trip was to Egypt, and to other Muslim nations, most of who are conspiring to destroy Israel.


•  After bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia, when there were demonstrations in Cairo Egypt, Obama could not wait to insist on our allay Mubarak leaving office, thus opening the door for the Muslim brotherhood to take over Egypt, which has now happened. He did that despite the fact that Mubarak, perhaps not the world’s greatest humanitarian, did however faithfully keep and honor the peace treaty with Israel. Obama’s behavior was completely opposite when the Iranian people were peacefully demonstrating to overthrow their government, a government that has threatened to annihilate Israel. Obama’s position was “it is an internal Iranian affair, it’s none of our business.” Similarly Obama was happy to lead from behind to over throw Gaddafi in Libya, which was not threatening Israel. Yet in Syria, the Iranian client state which is sworn to Israel’s destruction, Obama is eerily quiet as the Syrian government murders its citizens by the thousands.


•  The issue of the disrespect, which Obama overtly showed to Prime Minister Netanyahu, is not a matter of being invited for dinner or left standing in the doorway. In the Arab world, signs of respect and deference speak volumes and so the public dissing of Israel’s prime minister and the deep bow to the Saudi king send very loud and clear messages from the president of the United States to Israel and to its enemies, in a way that is too subtle for most Americans to recognize.


•  The sanctions, which have been placed on Iran as it continues to violate one after another of UN resolutions in its mad dash to develop a nuclear weapon, have been forced on the unwilling Obama administration by a Congress that is far more sympathetic to Israel.


•  And lest we forget; the Barack Obama who spoke at AIPAC, while he was a candidate for president, in words that every supporter of Israel responded to with enthusiasm; that he was committed to Jerusalem being the eternal undivided capital of Israel. Is the very same Barack Obama who the very next day issued a statement that he misspoke, and that what he meant was that Jerusalem should not be divided with barbed wire as it had been before 1967.

The likelihood that the real Barak Obama is the one who was overheard telling Russian Prime Minister, Medvedev, to please tell Vladimir Putin not to pressure him at this time, that Obama will have much more flexibility after he is reelected, is too frightening and dangerous to take a chance on.

Thursday, May 03, 2012
By: Rafael Medoff

Benzion Netanyahu -- historian, one-time political activist and father of Israel's prime minister -- died Monday in Jerusalem at 102. An accomplished scholar and the patriarch of one of Israel's most important political families, he also played a surprising and little-known role in American political history.

Netanyahu was born in Poland in 1910 to a family deeply immersed in the world of religious Zionism. His father, Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, a popular Zionist preacher, brought the family to British-ruled Palestine in 1920. He Hebraicized the family name to Netanyahu.

In the wake of the Palestinian Arab riots of 1929, Netanyahu was attracted to the militant wing of the Zionist movement, Revisionist Zionism, headed by Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky. His literary talents were recognized early on, and he served as editor in chief of the Revisionist newspaper HaYarden in the 1930s.

In 1940, Jabotinsky sent several of his leading disciples, including Netanyahu and future Knesset member Hillel Kook (better known as Peter Bergson), to the United States to seek funds and public support for the rescue of Europe's Jews and creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

"It was a brand new world for us," Netanyahu told me in one of my interviews with him. "I had never been to America. But I had to learn quickly -- there was no time. The world of European Jewry was going up in flames."

Netanyahu became executive director of the U.S. wing of the Revisionist Zionist movement and editor of its magazine, Zionews. His essays were notable for their passion, political insights and high level of fluency in a language he only recently had mastered. One 1944 editorial criticized mainstream Jewish leaders as "too cautious, too appeasing, and too ready to swallow the meaningless statements of sympathy that [are] issued from high places."

Bergson and Netanyahu employed tactics that were not commonly used by the American Jewish community at the time, including placing full-page advertisements in The New York Times and other newspapers. Some of the ads challenged the Roosevelt administration's stance on refugees. Others took aim at the British government's White Paper policy of closing Palestine to Jewish immigration. One that Netanyahu authored was headlined "The White Paper Must Be Smashed, if Millions of Jews are to be Saved!"

Netanyahu divided his time between Revisionist headquarters in New York City and Capitol Hill, where he sought to mobilize congressional backing for the Zionist cause. At the time, mainstream Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Stephen S. Wise were strong supporters of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and stayed away from the Republicans. Netanyahu, by contrast, actively cultivated ties to prominent Republicans such as former President Herbert Hoover, as well as dissident Democrats such as Sen. Elbert Thomas of Utah, a Mormon.

In 1944, Netanyahu sought to have the Republican Party endorse Jewish rescue and statehood.

In the months leading up to that year's Republican national convention, the Revisionists undertook what they called “a systematic campaign of enlightenment” about Palestine among GOP leaders such as Hoover, Sen. Robert Taft, who chaired the convention's resolutions committee, and Rep. Clare Booth Luce, wife of the publisher of Time and Life magazines.

The GOP adopted an unprecedented plank demanding "refuge for millions of distressed Jewish men, women, and children driven from their homes by tyranny" and the establishment of a "free and democratic" Jewish state. The Republicans' move compelled the Democrats to compete for Jewish support and treat the Jewish vote as if it were up for grabs. The Democratic National Convention, which was held the following month in Chicago, for the first time endorsed “unrestricted Jewish immigration and colonization” of Palestine and the establishment of “a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth.”

These events helped ensure that support for Zionism and later Israel would become a permanent part of American political culture. Every subsequent Republican and Democratic convention has adopted a similar plank. To do less became politically inconceivable.

In recent years, pundits have speculated on the extent to which Benzion Netanyahu may have influenced his son's actions as prime minister. While it is difficult to draw a direct connection between father and son on specific policy matters, there is a parallel in their efforts to cultivate support for Israel on both sides of the political aisle.

While working as a political activist in the 1940s, Benzion Netanyahu also managed to complete a doctorate in medieval Jewish history at Dropsie College in Philadelphia. He later taught Jewish history at Dropsie, and then at the University of Denver and Cornell University. Netanyahu's magisterial study, “The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain,” widely considered a groundbreaking work in his field, was published in 1995. He spent time in both Israel and the United States over the years, returning to Israel permanently in 1976, the same year his son Yoni was killed while leading the Entebbe rescue operation.

Notoriously reluctant to grant interviews, Netanyahu generally succeeded in eluding the spotlight. He only recently agreed to cooperate in the first documentary on his life and legacy, by Israeli filmmaker Moshe Levinson, which coincidentally is scheduled to premiere this week in Jerusalem.

Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington. His latest book, co-authored with Sonja Schoepf Wentling, is “Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the 'Jewish Vote' and Bipartisan Support for Israel.”

This article was published by the JTA. (Link) Used with permission of the author.

 

Thursday, May 03, 2012
By: Rafael Medoff

Benzion Netanyahu -- historian, one-time political activist and father of Israel's prime minister -- died Monday in Jerusalem at 102. An accomplished scholar and the patriarch of one of Israel's most important political families, he also played a surprising and little-known role in American political history.

Netanyahu was born in Poland in 1910 to a family deeply immersed in the world of religious Zionism. His father, Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, a popular Zionist preacher, brought the family to British-ruled Palestine in 1920. He Hebraicized the family name to Netanyahu.

In the wake of the Palestinian Arab riots of 1929, Netanyahu was attracted to the militant wing of the Zionist movement, Revisionist Zionism, headed by Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky. His literary talents were recognized early on, and he served as editor in chief of the Revisionist newspaper HaYarden in the 1930s.

In 1940, Jabotinsky sent several of his leading disciples, including Netanyahu and future Knesset member Hillel Kook (better known as Peter Bergson), to the United States to seek funds and public support for the rescue of Europe's Jews and creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

"It was a brand new world for us," Netanyahu told me in one of my interviews with him. "I had never been to America. But I had to learn quickly -- there was no time. The world of European Jewry was going up in flames."

Netanyahu became executive director of the U.S. wing of the Revisionist Zionist movement and editor of its magazine, Zionews. His essays were notable for their passion, political insights and high level of fluency in a language he only recently had mastered. One 1944 editorial criticized mainstream Jewish leaders as "too cautious, too appeasing, and too ready to swallow the meaningless statements of sympathy that [are] issued from high places."

Bergson and Netanyahu employed tactics that were not commonly used by the American Jewish community at the time, including placing full-page advertisements in The New York Times and other newspapers. Some of the ads challenged the Roosevelt administration's stance on refugees. Others took aim at the British government's White Paper policy of closing Palestine to Jewish immigration. One that Netanyahu authored was headlined "The White Paper Must Be Smashed, if Millions of Jews are to be Saved!"

Netanyahu divided his time between Revisionist headquarters in New York City and Capitol Hill, where he sought to mobilize congressional backing for the Zionist cause. At the time, mainstream Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Stephen S. Wise were strong supporters of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and stayed away from the Republicans. Netanyahu, by contrast, actively cultivated ties to prominent Republicans such as former President Herbert Hoover, as well as dissident Democrats such as Sen. Elbert Thomas of Utah, a Mormon.

In 1944, Netanyahu sought to have the Republican Party endorse Jewish rescue and statehood.

In the months leading up to that year's Republican national convention, the Revisionists undertook what they called “a systematic campaign of enlightenment” about Palestine among GOP leaders such as Hoover, Sen. Robert Taft, who chaired the convention's resolutions committee, and Rep. Clare Booth Luce, wife of the publisher of Time and Life magazines.

The GOP adopted an unprecedented plank demanding "refuge for millions of distressed Jewish men, women, and children driven from their homes by tyranny" and the establishment of a "free and democratic" Jewish state. The Republicans' move compelled the Democrats to compete for Jewish support and treat the Jewish vote as if it were up for grabs. The Democratic National Convention, which was held the following month in Chicago, for the first time endorsed “unrestricted Jewish immigration and colonization” of Palestine and the establishment of “a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth.”

These events helped ensure that support for Zionism and later Israel would become a permanent part of American political culture. Every subsequent Republican and Democratic convention has adopted a similar plank. To do less became politically inconceivable.

In recent years, pundits have speculated on the extent to which Benzion Netanyahu may have influenced his son's actions as prime minister. While it is difficult to draw a direct connection between father and son on specific policy matters, there is a parallel in their efforts to cultivate support for Israel on both sides of the political aisle.

While working as a political activist in the 1940s, Benzion Netanyahu also managed to complete a doctorate in medieval Jewish history at Dropsie College in Philadelphia. He later taught Jewish history at Dropsie, and then at the University of Denver and Cornell University. Netanyahu's magisterial study, “The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain,” widely considered a groundbreaking work in his field, was published in 1995. He spent time in both Israel and the United States over the years, returning to Israel permanently in 1976, the same year his son Yoni was killed while leading the Entebbe rescue operation.

Notoriously reluctant to grant interviews, Netanyahu generally succeeded in eluding the spotlight. He only recently agreed to cooperate in the first documentary on his life and legacy, by Israeli filmmaker Moshe Levinson, which coincidentally is scheduled to premiere this week in Jerusalem.

Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington. His latest book, co-authored with Sonja Schoepf Wentling, is “Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the 'Jewish Vote' and Bipartisan Support for Israel.”

This article was published by the JTA. (Link) Used with permission of the author.