New York

It was probably inevitable that a major Presidential candidate with an Arabic name would, sooner or later, be confronted with questions about the relationship between the United States and its closest Middle Eastern ally. Equally inevitably, after five years of war in an Arab country and seven after a terrorist attack carried out on this country by an Islamist terror network, that discussion will touch on America's fractured relationship with the Islamic world in general and our posture towards the Jewish state in particular.

A look back is in order. In 1820, New York State's Grand Island was proposed as the location of a new Jewish homeland, understood as a gathering place for Jews before aliyah to Zion became possible. Emma Lazarus, author of The New Colossus, was an agitator for proto-Zionist and proto-feminist ideas in New York's 19th Century Gilded Age. The connection between New York and the idea of Zionism is long and deep.

The United States was one of the first countries to recognize Israel itself, somewhat to the chagrin of the British Empire; and before Washington endorsed the fact of Israel's independence, there had been a bipartisan consensus of sympathy to the Zionist experiment.

President Wilson expressed his support for the Balfour Declaration when he stated on March 3, 1919:

The allied nations with the fullest concurrence of our government and people are agreed that in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth.

After Wilson left office, his successors expressed similar support for the Zionist enterprise. "It is impossible for one who has studied at all the services of the Hebrew people to avoid the faith that they will one day be restored to their historic national home and there enter on a new and yet greater phase of their contribution to the advance of humanity," said President Warren Harding.

Calvin Coolidge expressed his "sympathy with the deep and intense longing which finds such fine expression in the Jewish National Homeland in Palestine."

"Palestine which, desolate for centuries, is now renewing its youth and vitality through enthusiasm, hard work, and self-sacrifice of the Jewish pioneers who toil there in a spirit of peace and social justice," observed Herbert Hoover.

Of course, Hoover's observation rested on one glaring error: that the Cis-Jordanian Imperial mandate of Palestine was terra nullius, an empty land awaiting settlement. The land was not empty, and the question of how to reconcile the legitimate claims of competing (and, one could argue, complementary) nationalisms has been contentious and unresolved ever since.

Following independence, the relationship between the United States and the new nation of Israel quickly cooled, responding to the patterns of alignment set in the developing Cold War. A major portion of the weaponry that secured the new state's independence came from Czechoslovakia prior to that country's complete absorption into the Soviet orbit. In 1956, President Eisenhower forced an Anglo-French-Israeli expedition force to retreat from the Suez Canal, recently seized by Egypt's Arab nationalist President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Further frost was added to the bilateral relationship by the conservative Eisenhower administration's distrust of Israel's nascent structure as a socialist economy characterized by strong labor unions, led by the labor coalition Histadrut, and a parallel internal economy of collectivist enterprises in the Kibbutzim. A rapprochement of sorts between the Labour government of Levi Eshkol and the Kennedy/Johnson administration was capped in the 1967 Six Day War, another Cold War proxy battle, when American arms shipments to Israel obviated comparable shipments to Arab combatant states by the Soviet Union and resulted in a stunning Israeli victory.

As a result of that victory, Israel became an occupying power over territories previously belonging, de facto or de iure, to Egypt, Syria and Jordan. It is the fate of these territories that ultimately will decide a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In 2004, the Democratic Party platform embraced the concept of a two-state solution for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, following in the footsteps of the Clinton administration's developing Middle Eastern policy. The current republican administration embraced the idea of two states for two peoples some time into its first term as well. Despite the overall fraying of the post-war foreign policy consensus along partisan lines, therefore, it can be considered settled American policy that the legitimate national aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians, to live in peace, security, within recognized borders as fully sovereign members of the international community, are an objective of the American national interest. Firmly embedded within that consensus is the assumption that America, due to the kinship between our domestic institutions and Weltanschauung with those of Israel as a Western democracy, will continue to support Israel's security and aid that country's defense.

Barack Obama stands equally firmly within this consensus. So why the controversy?

I will be appearing as a panelist in the "HOT TOPIC" panel at Fair Media Council's Connection Day (PDF).

Hot Topic!
Convergence: How Technology Has Changed News
Today, you get your news delivered straight to your cell phone, you listen to podcasts and watch streaming video on your local news radio web site. Find out how all the technological advances that enabled these new news delivery methods impact the types of stories you get in the news, as well as how the inner workings of newsrooms are changing to accommodate your unquenchable thirst for information.
With:

Carl Corry, Executive Producer, News12.com
Ethan Dreilinger, Product Manager, CBS Mobile News
Luke Funk, Sr. Web Producer, myfoxny.com
Liza Sabater, Blogdiva & Publisher, CultureKitchen.com

Fair Media Council is a New York metro area not-for-profit media watch organization that educates and advocates for quality local news coverage.

"Hillary Clinton can't win a national general election". This is conventional wisdom among people who know about these things. As is so often the case with the conventional wisdom, this assessment is based on a very rich and consistent amount of data, collected and analyzed over years.

It stands to reason, however, that she also has loyalists; even Lyndon LaRouche does, after all, and who knows how he would fare if he'd had the good sense to sleep with a President. These loyalists rather recently were giddy over polling results showing her able to just break over the 50% hurdle in a national election. I said at the time that this was an announcement bounce, in a very customary and well-known pattern.

And so it was. Polling data released earlier this week and month shows Hillary losing New Jersey, and barely holding New York and Connecticut. Read on.

Liza blogged about it this morning, but I thought I'd weigh in on the race that's presently consuming all of us.

As Liza lays out, there are several reasons to be interested in what at first glance appears to be simply a by-election of little relevance beyond the borders of one district. However, the circumstances surrounding this election are far-reaching.

New York State has a bicameral legislature, the lower House of which is held by Democrats, the upper, the state Senate, by republicans. They have held this body largely without challenge or interruption (there were two, in the last century, in 1932 and 1964 respectively) for one hundred and fifty years. In the 2006 election, for the first time in memory, Democrats won the popular vote for the Senate; it is ripe for a takeover.

This special election is for a seat in the state Senate. A few weeks ago, Governor Sptzer tapped a republican Senator, Michael Balboni, for a seat in his cabinet. To replace him, the other side nominated one Maureen O'Connell, presently the Nassau County Clerk and formerly a member of the State Assembly.

It's her record that puts choice on this ballot.