Obama in Jerusalem
All eyes will be on Senator Obama today when he visits the capital of Israel, where he will have an opportunity to signal whether the change he has in mind is the kind we, or anyone else, can believe in. These columns have never bought into the idea that his world view has been irrevocably poisoned by the kind of bigotry he listened to from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. On the contrary, our view has been that the most important thing about Mr. Obama is that even after he listened to all that bigotry from the Rev. Wright, he entered our national public life sketching support for the Jewish state.
This came to a head with his remarks to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, where he made his now famous statement that Jerusalem “will remain the capital of Israel, and must remain undivided.” No sooner were those remarks published than the senator’s advisers, and then the senator, started backtracking. This was reviewed last week in these pages by the editor of jewishcurrentissues.com, Rick Richman, who concluded that Mr. Obama had not merely been guilty of “some poor phrasing,” as the senator had put it to Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek, but had changed his position and stands for dividing Jerusalem again.
One way to put that would be that Mr. Obama is spurning American law, enacted with the Jerusalem Embassy Act, signed into law in 1995 by President Clinton after being passed by overwhelming bi-partisan margins in both the House and the Senate. It enacted a “Statement of the Policy of the United States” holding that “Jerusalem should remain an undivided city in which the rights of every ethnic and religious group are protected” and that “Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel.” What, after all, does Mr. Obama think of that law and what does he think it means when it says that Jerusalem should remain “an undivided city”?
Mr. Obama tried to explain it again yesterday in an interview with Katie Couric, telling her, “there was no shift in policy or backtracking in policy.[…]