The Boston Globe reports that a group of leading Jewish supporters of John Kerry will campaign in Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, “where Jewish voters could well tip the balance and decide the presidential election.”
[Alan Solomont] said John Kerry’s record on Israel is ”perfect” and that the senator has traveled a number of times to the region and familiarized himself with the issues and its leaders.
”John Kerry has been as good a friend of Israel as anyone,” Solomont said. ”He didn’t need to be a candidate for president to become interested in these issues. He already has the deep knowledge and experience in foreign relations.”
Sheesh. Where to begin?
1. A “perfect” record on Israel? As good a friend “as anyone”? Uh, no. On important votes, he was basically a 60-40 guy.
2. “[F]amiliarized himself” with the region’s leaders? Kerry has never spoken with Ariel Sharon. But during his January 2002 trip to the region, he went to Ramallah for a private meeting with Arafat.
3. “[D]eep knowledge” of the issues? Hmmm. See how many errors you can spot in Kerry’s April 23, 2004 statement about Taba to the Newspaper Association of America/American Society of Newpaper Editors Joint Conference:
If you go back to Taba, President Clinton in fact arrived at an agreement on right of return as well as the annexation of a number of settlements.
The correct answer is . . . three.
A. Clinton was neither at, nor involved in, Taba. Taba occurred after Clinton left office — and nearly a month after Arafat had definitively rejected the Clinton parameters for peace — a rejection described in day-by-day detail in Dennis Ross’s new book.
David Makovsky has noted that the Palestinians specifically wanted Taba to begin after Clinton left office, because they thought they “were about to reap a political windfall” — Clinton’s replacement by the son of a Republican president who had been memorably unsympathetic to Israel. The Palestinians’ thinking was that:
American Jews were known to be political supporters of the Democrats, and thus losers in a [new] Bush Administration, especially given the Texan’s oil industry connections.
At Taba, during the first week of the Bush Administration, the Palestinians actually withdrew from positions they had taken at Camp David, and “widened the gaps” on several fundamental issues.
B. The parties at Taba did not arrive at an agreement on the right of return — quite the contrary. The detailed EU summary of the outcome of the Taba negotiations shows that the Palestinians demanded a formal recognition by Israel of the “right” before any “limitations” could be discussed.
C. The parties at Taba did not arrive at an agreement on the annexation of a number of settlements. The EU summary described the standoff as follows:
The Israeli side stated that the Clinton proposals provide for annexation of settlement blocs. The Palestinian side did not agree that the parameters included blocs, and did not accept proposals to annex blocs.
Taba was an intense, week-long negotiation, conducted by Israel under fire, a last-gasp attempt by Shlomo Ben Ami and Yossi Beilin to reach an agreement before the election of Ariel Sharon — with desperate concessions that, even had they been accepted by the Palestinians, would never (according to Makovsky) have been approved by the Knesset.
Dennis Ross’s new book is an 800-page account of the Middle East negotiations, beginning with Madrid in 1991 and ending with the Quartet’s Road Map in 2003. Guess how much space Ross devotes to Taba?
Two sentences.
In his presentation to the Council on Foreign Relations last December, Kerry said “it’s astonishing to me that we are not picking up somewhere near where we left off at Taba, where most of the difficult issues were resolved, in many ways.”
Deep knowledge? Familiar with all the leaders? As good a friend as anyone? Please.
And we haven’t even discussed Jimmy Carter, or Kerry’s conflicting statements on the fence, or the coded reference on “Meet the Press” to a limited right of return, or the disingenuous representations to the New York Jewish community just before the primary — nor the fact that the person whose record on Israel is in fact second to none (although not perfect) is currently in the White House.