Latest Editions

Israeli view of Obama team

By The World ⋅ July 28, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment
Play
Download

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3
Correspondent Linda Gradstein reports on Israeli reaction to the Obama administration’s big push for regional peace talks in the Middle East.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS:  I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World – a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston. Today the parade of American officials visiting Israel continued with the arrival of chief Middle East negotiator George Mitchell. Mitchell followed defense secretary Robert Gates, and still to come national security adviser James Jones and the Whitehouse Counsel Dennis Ross. And Linda Bradstein reports, the Obama Administration’s big push is leaving the Israeli public unimpressed.

LINDA BRADSTEIN: Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, came out of his meeting with George Mitchell today, talking about progress towards understandings, apparently referring to a deal to freeze most Jewish settlement building in the West Bank. Senator Mitchell too, seemed pleased.

GEORGE MITCHELL: The meeting was very productive, conducted in a cordial atmosphere as is the case when friends and allies are discussing important issues.

LINDA: Neither man provided any details. But at the Aroma Coffee shop on Jerusalem’s trendy Emek Refaim Street, most patrons seemed skeptical that any real progress can be made. Ilana Zimran, says she supports a peace deal with the Palestinians but sees little hope for a deal in the near future. Zimran says she supports a settlement freeze. But she also says any final peace deal will mean dismantling most of the Jewish settlements, and moving close to 300,000 Jewish settlers from their homes is impractical.

ILANA ZIMRAN: I am against the settlements. But now it’s a problem. You cannot move so many people out, that’s the problem.

LINDA: Her friend Mazal Ben Zikri, says that Israeli’s pay the price of continued conflict with the Palestinians. Her son she says, has to interrupt his architectural studies frequently to do reserve duty in the Israeli Army. She too says she has little faith that a peace deal is imminent.

MAZAL BEN ZIKRI: [SPEAKING HEBREW/TRANSLATED] It’s not real. It’s all political. The Americans always want progress, but it’s not real, they have missed too many opportunities.

LINDA: At a nearby table, Gavriel Porten, a tour guide and educator, says politely that President Obama and his chief of staff should mind their own business.

GAVRIEL PORTEN: I believe that it is being a little, I don’t know if condescending is the right word, perhaps patronizing, when you hear somebody like Rahm Emmanuel saying the two state solution will happen in four years, whether it’s Netanyahu or somebody else, that to Israeli’s can feel a little patronizing, you know. We need America’s help perhaps in solving the problem but we’re the ones who will solve it.

LINDA: President Bush was enormously popular here. He was seen as a true friend of Israel who understood Israel’s need for security. President Obama on the other hand, is seen as much less sympathetic to Israel. A recent Jerusalem Post poll found that only 6% of Israeli’s see President Obama as pro-Israel, while half believe he is pro-Palestinian. Israeli’s also frequently mention the fact that President Obama has not visited Israel since he was elected, although he has gone to Cairo where he made a speech reaching out to the Arab world. Professor Steve Kaplan, the academic director of the Truman Institute at the Hebrew University, says Israeli’s feel like they’ve already seen this movie.

STEVE KAPLAN: Every new American administration thinks it’s going to solve the problems of the Middle East, and there’s a tendency to almost laugh at the naiveté of people in that.

LINDA: Prime Minister Netanyahu has so far focused on what he calls “economic peace”. Some large check points in the West Bank have been removed, making it easier for Palestinians to travel. More Palestinians have received permits to enter Israel. Today Netanyahu announced the Allenby Bridge Crossing between Israel and Jordan will be open until midnight to facilitate travel. Palestinians say these moves are too little too late, and only a complete settlement freeze can restart negotiations. Israeli’s say they’re skeptical about President Obama, and that pressure on Israel, including on the issue of the settlements, is doomed to fail.


Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Discussion

3 comments for “Israeli view of Obama team”

  • Joan Hazbun

    After listening to your report on Israel I happened to read an article by Uri Avnery. Here is an excerpt tpwards the end. The last paragraph seems to echo your report.

    “I BEG to contradict yet another myth that is being propagated relentlessly by our media: that a national consensus against President Obama is forming.

    As we say in classical Hebrew: No bears and no forest. Or more colloquially: No birds and no shoes.

    Many Israelis, very many, hope that Barack Obama will do for them what seems impossible without him: bring them peace. They have despaired of our political system, of both the coalition and the opposition, of both Right and Left. They are convinced that only an outside force can realize this hope.

    If indeed Obama does clash with Netanyahu over his refusal to freeze the settlements in the West Bank and his insistence on continuing to build in East Jerusalem, it is for Obama’s victory that many Israelis will be praying. They know that in this battle, it is not Netanyahu but Obama who represents the true interests of Israel.

    The question is whether Obama has the power to follow through, as no preceding president since Dwight Eisenhower has done.

    Netanyahu does not believe so. His American partners – the defeated Republicans, the Neocons who are now in hiding, the almost-silent Evangelical preachers – this defeated camp is hoping to recover its fortunes by encouraging the Jewish lobby and the Israeli government to provoke Obama. Netanyahu, who has mobilized Congress against the White House in the past, believes that he can do it once again.

    Our newspapers are gleefully reporting, with charts and graphs to bear them out, that Obama’s standing in America is sinking. It is not hard to divine that most of this information emanates from Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign Office, the same source that is feeding the American media with reports of the growing opposition of the Israeli public against Obama. Soon the American media will show Israeli protesters waving posters with Obama in SS uniform, as happened with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin before him.

  • mirra barelli

    leave it to Linda Gradstein to go around the corner from her house in Baka (aka Jerusalem’s Upper West Side) to bring to “the world” the “word from Zion and Jerusalem” from a coffeeshop the equivalent of Starbucks on Broadway by English-speakers who probably left the UWS not so long ago. They, too, are living, what settler Tamar has the chutzpah to call “the American dream” while 300,000 – the number of “poor” settlers who will need to leave – is the same number as the projected unemployment figure for the end of this year, while one in three Israeli children goes to bed hungry each night, while there are homeless in the “homeland of the Jews.” Some of these settlers are indigenous Israelis, lured over the Green Line by ridiculous mortgages and other benefits, all the while holding onto their apartments on THIS side of the Green Line and renting them out for good old American greenbacks to students, tourists, new immigrants who still think they can afford to “deal in dollars,” before the reality of the Israeli economy and too much month for the money sinks in.

    Let your reporter continue down Emek Refaim (the Street of the Ghosts) to where it leads to the old, peeling, working-class (when there’s work to be had) Katamonim neighborhoods, some of the poorest in Jerusalem and interview the blue-collar, heavily Sephardic communities for their opinions. Or to the other side of Jerusalem, just behind Israel Television,(who also do not cover the story) where in a warehouse a non-profit food bank that just last year was distributing 12,000 cartons of staples a month has, as a result of the Madoff-macerated contributions been reduced to 2,000 – just to stay afloat and mainitain their non-profit status – to find out where those 10,000 familes are getting their food from now and what kind of coffee they’re drinking every morning.

    And as for the mother of the archi-parchi architecture student whose studies get “interrupettd” by reserve duty in the army, why wasn’t she building a society where her son and others would not have the burdens of military service, a reality of Israel’s existence since it’s founding, but rather would see national service as a privilage and would embrace serving the country in a host of ways. National service would be just that: national, across-the-board and include the ultra-Orthodox, whose garbage gets picked up (except recently thanks to Mayor Barkat) and whose streets are well-lit and cleaned even though they contribute virtually nothing to the tax base, while the children of the non-Orthodox “hold the line” so that they are “free” to hurl insults and throw garbage at Israeli police. Had she built an moe eq

    If the U.S. wants to be an honest broker, just as we crack down on Muslim charities that funnel money to Hamas, Hezbolllah and the rest, we must open the tax records of the last sixty years and see where tax-exempt contributions by American Jews to Israeli organizations have wound up furnishing the infrastructure such as roads that carry only Jewish cars, endowing educational institutions that inculcate an exclusivist, elitist ideology as radical as that taught in the madrasas, and supporting “social service” agencies and institutions that also find cheap land over the Green Line and send wave after wave of emissaries to the U.S. to pump U.S. tax-exempt dollars from the pockets of their patrons.

  • mirra barelli

    Had the mother of that student built a more just and equitable society, that referred to in the Declaration of Independence, drawn from the words of the prophets,Israel would look very different today.