898 Son of Irgun!
Obama may not “pal around with terrorists,” but his first act as president elect (after giving a rousing speech) was to ask the son of one to be his chief of staff.
Ha’aretz reports that Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois congressman, the inspiration for the character Josh on “The West Wing,” and a former advisor to President Clinton, is also the son of an Irgun member.
The paper also calls Emanuel an Israeli. I would be surprised to learn that dual-nationals can serve as congressmen, but I’ve been surprised before. Or perhaps Ha’aretz just got carried away, and meant “son of an Israeli.” Perhaps they will change the headline.
I have no doubt Emanuel is an intelligent and competent man, however many passports he holds. I assume he has the respect of at least the Clinton people Obama will choose to staff the White House. And Emanuel’s father’s mistakes may not reflect his own beliefs.
Regardless, the appointment of the son of an Irgun militant to such an important office will confirm many Arabs’ worst suspicions about the United States before the ink has dried on the headlines announcing Obama’s historic victory.
(Incidentally, if what the BBC’s correspondent says is true, Emanuel’s appointment would also confirm Republicans’ suspicions that Obama’s talk of bipartisanship is hollow.)
Obama never said he would change U.S. policy with regard to Israel and Palestine, and he did say he would appoint Clinton advisors. And presumably the U.S. policy of condemning the deliberate killing of civilians for any reason, including “national liberation” struggles, is not one of the things the Obama administration hopes to change.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be necessary, given that Emanuel was never a member of Irgun, nor could he have been at his age. Perhaps it’s unfair, perhaps Emanuel has no love for the Irgun, Hamas, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or any other group that seeks an independent state by killing innocent people. In which case it should be easy for Emanuel to denounce Irgun’s tactics.
Alternatively, he could contribute to the future President Obama’s efforts to find a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by declining the job. I’m sure there are other qualified candidates.
[Update: Well, he took the job. Now he needs to tell his dad to shut up and stop talking to the press.]
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Well I do remember saying to all you Obama fans in Masr that you should vote on his domestic policy (esp healthcare and Social Security) because foreign policy can’t change much…
He’s going to stick with Washington Insiders for his staff, of course. He has to. Everyone does, even the self-styled Texas cowboy who dissed the beltway in his campaign speeches.
Perhaps that’s the trouble with someone who speaks too beautifully and is too inspirational…we think he’s speaking to us and since his sensibility is so much like ours he will have the same ideas about foreign policy. Not so.
Comment by SP — November 6, 2008 #
Judging somebody by his father’s faults is always wrong.
Comment by Simon Columbus — November 6, 2008 #
I think you’re both right.
Simon, I have two concerns here:
1) The dual nationality. I don’t think people with dual nationality should be allowed to occupy high government offices. I myself hold American and Canadian passports, but in the very unlikely event that anyone ever asks me to occupy a high office in either government, I would feel compelled to give up the other passport.
2) I would be less concerned by this had Emanuel not volunteered for the IDF during the first Gulf War, or had he not said this during the 2006 Lebanon war:
So support for Israel trumps support for democracy, and pro-Israel dictators are better than anti-Israel democracies.
You’re right, Simon: Emanuel may not agree with his apparently unrepentant Irgun militant father. But he has shown himself willing to throw democracy, supposedly a fundamental American value, under the bus for Israel’s sake. So the question becomes whether he would he also be willing to sacrifice the principle that innocent civilians should not be deliberately targeted for Israel’s sake, as his father did.
Comment by The Skeptic — November 6, 2008 #
Wow, had no idea this guy had volunteered for the IDF (and isn’t it funny that the slightest hint of holding onto a foreign passport would have been Obama’s death knell but his chief of staff can have served in another country’s military and that’s fine…but then again, it’s the 51st state).
Comment by SP — November 6, 2008 #
Right?
To clarify, I don’t think he actually served in the IDF, he just volunteered to help out on a base.
Comment by The Skeptic — November 6, 2008 #
check out al-dostor today. ibrahim eissa talks about emmanuel.
Comment by rob — November 7, 2008 #
thanks for the tip, rob! will you be translating over at the arab media shack?
Comment by The Skeptic — November 7, 2008 #
Hey Skeptic – great post as always. We’ve this into Arabic on the Meedan beta using the IBM transbrowser. Check it out and pass it around.
You can also here for the Meedan beta.
Good stuff.
Comment by AbuBaheejah — November 7, 2008 #
Emanuel most likely served in Sar-El (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Defense_Forces#Overseas_volunteers). It is doubtful that he is, in fact, an Israeli citizen, and I have seen nothing from any non-Israeli media sources that even suggests that to be true. I’m sure Haaretz was being a little overzealous.
That said, there are plenty of other reasons to find Emanuel’s appointment alarming.
Comment by Jillian C. York — November 7, 2008 #
You guys are kidding, right? What’s so alarming? He’s going to be chief of staff, not national security advisor or secretary of state. So how does this choice have any bearing on the direction of Obama’s foreign policy?
Comment by mbk — November 8, 2008 #
Let’s hope it has none. You make it sound like the chief of staff is some sort of intern, though.
My impression is that chiefs of staff are supposed to act like whips, to carry out instructions and get things done. It sounds like Emanuel has a reputation as a heavy, and he’ll probably do this well.
But chiefs of staff hold some influence. They decide who can meet with the president. They attend Cabinet meetings, National Security Council meetings, and meetings with foreign leaders.
So yeah, I’m alarmed.
I don’t think there’s been any doubt as to the direction of Obama’s foreign policy on Israel-Palestine (which Al-Dustur today called “fikrat al-qadim”.) Emanuel’s appointment alarms me because of the degree.
It has been received as a signal by at least Haaretz and Al-Dustur (I’d be curious to know of others). Some Pollyanna left an interesting comment on that Haaretz article, something to the effect that Obama needed to establish his wacky Zionist credentials to push through a no-nonsense solution to the problem. I hope she’s right.
Comment by The Skeptic — November 8, 2008 #
id say chief of staff is one of the most important and powerful positions in washington.
noone meets with the president without going through the chief of staff- he basically sets the presidents agenda.
and it seems that obama is making clear that he considers emmanuel his “right hand man” which might make him stronger than even previous chiefs-of-staff
so for anyone who was expecting obama to adapt anything but hard-core support for israel, i think this is the nail or at least the beginning of the nail in the coffin of that idea
Comment by rob — November 8, 2008 #
From the domestic perspective, a thought on why Emanuel is a great appointee. He’s know as a ridiculously hard-charging politician (Rahm-bo), but he’s a centrist in the Democratic party. Obama probably knew that appointing him as chief of staff would make people on the right shut up with their accusations that he’s going to soft on (Islamic) terrorism, but Rahm will also help Obama whip the liberal wing of the Democratic party into line. This is important because it’s the liberal wing who would be asking for higher government spending, and that is not something America can afford now.
(Rahm was also a supporter of the Oslo process, and played a big role in organizing the Clinton administration’s involvement.)
In other words, while Emanuel may be making the Palestinians afraid, the people he’s REALLY making afraid are the left-wing Democrats.
Comment by sarah — November 8, 2008 #
I think you underestimate Obama’s independence of thought.
Perhaps you read about the meeting between General Petraeus and Obama last July, as reported by TIME’s Joe Klein. Petraeus made a strong demand for “maximum flexibility” going forward, and Obama firmly responded that while he understood Petraeus’s position, he was going to make decisions from a broader sense of national security concerns. Unlike President Bush he will not be a blissfully unconcerned delegator. Emanuel is not going to steam-roll him any more than Petraeus did.
Secondly, don’t confuse being the *son* of an Israeli (he relinquished citizenship at age 18) with being a neo-con or a hard-line Zionist. Neo-conservatives form a minority of American Jews although they seem to be unfortunately prominent in national discourse. But there are plenty of Jews who are emotionally invested in a secure and prosperous Israel but despise militaristic Likud-style tactics. If Obama had chosen Bill Kristol, THEN I would be concerned.
It remains to be seen, but from my sense of his character Obama will obliquely oppose the military-industrial complex that cleaves us so strongly to the Israeli right-wingers.
This is put forth with due humility, since I am not especially knowledgeable about these topics and you seem to be a pretty sharp guy.
Comment by mason — November 8, 2008 #
Humility-schmumility, you seem like a pretty sharp guy yourself. Thanks for clearing up the citizenship question.
Comment by The Skeptic — November 9, 2008 #
how exactly do you want him to denounce the irgun 60 years later and what happened to not being prejudicial.. i cant believe you expect him to resign..
by the way i dont think he denounced israeli citinzenship at 18 – he actually flew to israel to volunteer with the israeli army duringthe gulf war..
offspring of israelis are automatically israeli by birthright as is the case with many other citizenships.. there is a good chance that this guy is too..
Comment by lirun — November 9, 2008 #
Hi, no, I don’t expect him to resign now that he’s taken the job. And I never really expected him not to take the job.
It’s done now. And I’m taking some comfort from this:
Comment by The Skeptic — November 9, 2008 #
Three things:
First, a friend of mine who is Palestinian (refugee, now with US citizenship) has been talking this appointment over with her husband, who is Palestinian-Israeli. They’ve been swinging back and forth on whether to be nervous or not about Emanuel as Obama’s chief of staff. My friend’s husband looked up his voting record and was comforted to see that it corresponds to centrist, rather than far-right, positions in Israeli politics. Given how far right on the Israeli spectrum many US Jews fall (or at least the outspoken ones), they found this to be quite comforting.
Second, just imagine for a moment the uproar in the United States if Obama’s first appointment had been a Palestinian who’s father was a terrorist? It’s all very well to say that a man shouldn’t be judged by his father’s actions, but that admirable sentiment doesn’t at all reflect the reality of the bias in America on the Israel/Palestine question.
And finally, I’m for giving Obama the benefit of the doubt at this early stage. His term hasn’t even begun yet, and we know that he will make some popular, some unpopular choices. I’m not ready to cut him to pieces so soon after the election, and without seeing how his choices play out. I’d rather wait and see than assume this one appointment sounds a death knell for a decent US Middle East policy.
Comment by petroushka — November 9, 2008 #
Hey, how are you doing? Your post bugs me for a number of reasons:
(1) Why not research Emmanuel before throwing out charges of dual loyalty?
(2) We have problems in this country and we need an effective administration to help solve them. By all accounts Emmanual is a very effective guy. He also knows Congress, being a Congressman himself, unlike more obtuse Chiefs of Staff from prior administrations. Plus he’s from Chicago and has a good working relationship with Obama. In short, he seems like the perfect choice.
(3) You’re looking at it narrowly from the perspective of the Arab world. I disagree with that approach (see above), but even if you take that approach, you’re discounting the “Nixon goes to China” potential of such an appointment. If the Obama administration gets serious about an Israel-Palestine peace effort, Emmanuel would be ideal for getting Israel to make concessions. It would also insulate the administration from charges from the American right — which it suffered during the campaign — that it’s “anti-Israel” or worse.
I hope all’s well,
James S. from NY.
Comment by James S. — November 10, 2008 #
James! Good to hear from you!
1) Haaretz called him an Israeli. Emanuel was the one who went to IDF summer camp, or whatever it was he did on the base during Gulf War I.
2) All well and good. See my own post and comments above.
3) Yes, that was the point of the post: I feared Emanuel’s appointment might squander whatever goodwill the election might have earned the United States ’round these parts. There’s some evidence that this is already happening (at least among the pundits… ordinary people are still telling me “we’re all celebrating”).
I hope that you and some commentators I’ve seen on Haaretz (including here) are right in hoping that the appointment of a pro-Israel hawk would help Obama get a peace deal past other Israeli hawks. But I fear we will be disappointed in that hope.
Finally, a question: Would you feel the same if Rahm were Abd al-Rahman and his father had been in Hamas?
Comment by The Skeptic — November 10, 2008 #
“Would you feel the same if Rahm were Abd al-Rahman and his father had been in Hamas?”
Well, if his father had been in Hamas, he’d be pretty young wouldn’t he? But yeah if Hamas existed decades earlier and he’d independently established himself as an American political figure — and was described by Bob Woodward in The Agenda as some kind of economic boy genius — sure I’d feel the same way.
I never saw the logic in McCain’s answer — to his supporter’s charge that Obama was a Muslim — of “no he’s not, he’s a decent family man”. As Colin Powerll said, there’s no reason a Muslim American should think that he can’t be President, so I think the same should apply to Chief of Staff.
“But I fear we will be disappointed in that hope.”
Obama has the chance to be a transformational historical figure in so many ways. The flipside to that is that there’s a lot of room for disappointment — in all of these ways. But I would let things play out a little while rather than reading anything in to one appointment, albeit an extremely important one, months in advance of his inauguration. For me at this point competence matters much more than ideology, and Obama strikes as an extremely competent, intelligent and effective person. Emmanuel fits the same mold.
Comment by James S. — November 10, 2008 #
Here’s another piece on Emanuel and his approach to the Middle East: http://mideast.blogs.time.com/2008/11/09/obama-mideast-watch-rahm-emanuel/
I have to say, Obama’s idealistic talk of change never did seem to extend to the Middle East – he was willing to play the populist in ranting about “foreign oil” and the Iraqi “surplus” that meant they were milking the US, and obligingly talked about Israel as an ally vs “murderous Islamic ideologies” in the Middle East and now this Emanuel’s nationalistic nonsense on the Dubai Ports World matter is not reassuring either. I guess Obama had to pick *some* insiders to get the job done, but really hope this appointment isn’t a sign of things to come, would hate it if he used his message of change just to become another Clinton (but with a better marriage).
Comment by SP — November 10, 2008 #
P.S. The ADC picked up on Emanuel’s father’s remark about Arabs, and Emanuel has apologised after they made a stink: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/us_elections_2008/7729046.stm
Comment by SP — November 14, 2008 #
Yep, saw that. And was very happy to see it.
Comment by The Skeptic — November 15, 2008 #