WASHINGTON – How the United States treats the Palestinians’ new status as a non-member state at the United Nations depends on how Palestinians plan to use it — as cudgel or outstretched hand.
Beneath the outcries of disappointment at the lopsided U.N. vote, both the United States and Israel showed signs of acquiescence to its inevitability. There were the grim warnings of financial consequence for both the Palestinians and the United Nations, but there also was a willingness to take at face value Palestinian claims that the vote is an avenue to return to talks — something Israel and the United States have been demanding for two years.
WASHINGTON – Think immigration through — again. Forget about gay marriage. And for heaven’s sake, when it comes to rape, shut up!
The Republican Party as a whole is having the morning-afters, reconsidering how it might have done better in an election that saw the party fail to win the White House and suffer modest losses in Congress, and Jewish Republicans and conservatives are coming forward with their own insights.
“There will be a lot of very frank conversations between our organization and its leadership and the leadership within the party,” Matt Brooks, the director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said last week in a conference call that otherwise addressed gains that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney appeared to have made among Jewish voters.
WASHINGTON – President Obama’s Jewish numbers are down, but by how much and why?
Expect four more years of tussling between Jewish Republicans and Democrats about the meaning of Obama’s dip from 78 percent Jewish support cited in 2008 exit polls to 69 percent this year in the national exit polls run by a media consortium.
Is it a result of Obama’s fractious relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Or is it a natural fall-off in an election that was closer across the board than it was four years ago? Does it reflect a significant shift in Jewish voting patterns toward the Republicans?
A separate national exit poll released Wednesday by Jim Gerstein, a pollster affiliated with the dovish Israel policy group J Street, had similar numbers: 70 percent of respondents said they voted for Obama, while 30 percent — the same figure as in the media consortium’s Jewish sample — said they voted for Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
WASHINGTON — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made headlines last month with this question: What are the U.S. red lines when it comes to Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program?
The two presidential campaigns are offering two different answers.
“Recently, President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have talked about weaponization and Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan talk about nuclear weapons capability,” said Michael Makovsky, a Bush administration Pentagon official who now directs the National Security Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
WASHINGTON -- President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not meet, but they ended up sounding not so far apart.
Netanyahu’s address to the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday in many ways echoed Obama’s speech there on Tuesday, with both ratcheting up the heat on Iran over its nuclear program. The themes that echoed in each speech suggest that despite the bickering between the two leaders, they may be converging on policy.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Jerusalem holds many mysteries, but none may be as perplexing as why it disappeared from a pre-convention draft of the Democratic Party platform. In dramatic fashion, it returned to the platform document on Wednesday, at the request of the party’s standard-bearer, President Barack Obama.
Several people involved in the platform’s writing who spoke to JTA said they did not know how it happened.
Republicans launched a full-force offensive on Tuesday, just hours after the Democrats released their platform Monday night, when they discovered that boilerplate references to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital that have appeared in Democratic platforms since 1968 were missing.
“It is unfortunate that the entire Democratic Party has embraced President Obama’s shameful refusal to acknowledge that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital,” Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, said in a statement. Romney called Jerusalem Israel’s capital during his visit to the city in July.
TAMPA, Fla. – Republicans spent three evenings at their convention hammering home their message: After four years of leadership failures, Mitt Romney will restore America to a position of strength, confidence and unity, both at home and abroad.
In his Thursday night speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Romney suggested that President Obama had shattered Americans’ sense of security.
He said that the “Obama economy has crushed the middle class.”
On foreign affairs, Romney warned that the president’s approach to the Iranian nuclear issue had left Americans “less secure.” He accused Obama of having “thrown allies like Israel under the bus.”
WASHINGTON – Get set for a political double feature with much of the same plot, but with different outcomes for the issues that tend to preoccupy Jewish voters.
The same key words and themes will bounce around Jewish events at next week’s Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., and at the Democratic convention in Charlotte, N.C., the week after that: “pro-Israel,” “marriage,” “Jewish vote,” and “abortion.”
With the exception of “pro-Israel,” however, the content of the sessions will be as different as, well, Tampa (famed for its beaches and strip joints) and Charlotte (known for its seminaries and colonial history).
WASHINGTON – Get set for a political double feature with much of the same plot, but with different outcomes for the issues that tend to preoccupy Jewish voters.
The same key words and themes will bounce around Jewish events at next week’s Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., and at the Democratic convention in Charlotte, N.C., the week after that: “pro-Israel,” “marriage,” “Jewish vote,” and “abortion.”
With the exception of “pro-Israel,” however, the content of the sessions will be as different as, well, Tampa (famed for its beaches and strip joints) and Charlotte (known for its seminaries and colonial history).
WASHINGTON – Anointing Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney attached a name and face to his fiscal policy.
Jewish Republicans, including the House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, say they are thrilled with Wisconsin’s Ryan emerging as the ticket’s fresh face, hailing the lawmaker as a thoughtful and creative budget guru bent on taming out-of-control federal spending.
Ryan’s name is well known to Jewish community leaders who have been grappling with the Republicans’ chief budget shaper since the party retook the majority in the House in 2010.
