• English Site
• > World
• > Middle East

Obama in Israel

Hunting for Votes in the Holy Land

By Ulrike Putz in Tel Aviv

Barack Obama's visit to Israel on Wednesday will be filled with Kodak moments at the Weaping Wall and hundreds of reporters will meticulously detail his every gesture. Most of all, though, it will be a show for US voters. Some have doubts about Obama's loyalty to Israel. Still, the Middle East has bigger problems to deal with at the moment.

Jerusalem will be dark when Barack Obama arrives in the city that has already brought him so much trouble. He will touch down in a helicopter at around 11 p.m. on Tuesday night and reside in the King David Hotel. He won't have time for a dip in the famously beautiful swimming pool of Israel's most luxurious hotel.

Obama will spend just 36 hours in Israel, the last stop on his Middle East tour before he heads to Europe. On Wednesday he will have a series of meetings with top Israeli politicians and visit the essential sites of any Jerusalem itinerary -- the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem and the Wailing Wall.

He has set aside just two hours for an excursion to Ramallah where he is scheduled to meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. On Thursday morning he will fly on to Germany for the European part of his tour.

Maybe Obama would have been better advised to pencil in a little more time for the Holy Land. His visit could be of huge importance for the US election in November. Jewish voters in America will be scrutinizing his every move to judge how pro-Israel he is.

Even though only four percent of Americans eligible to vote are of the Jewish faith, their vote has disproportionately large weight because Jewish Americans spend above-average amounts on campaign donations and pro-Israeli lobbies wield strong influence in Washington.

Deep Mistrust

A majority of Jewish voters in America traditionally vote for the Democratic Party. But Obama has suffered from a credibility problem with them ever since his "Jerusalem faux pas". At the start of June he held a speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a well-known Jewish lobby group, his first big foreign policy speech after he became the presumptive Democratic nominee.

"Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided," the Illinois senator said to rapturous applause from the 7,000-strong audience, for whom the statement amounted to strong support for their political stance.

But Palestinian leaders reacted with anger and dismay to that sentence. Israel calls the city its undivided and eternal capital, but this status has never been recognized internationally. Palestinians want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, for a future capital.

The issue of what compromise can be found on Jerusalem is one of the toughest in the entire Middle East process. No politician who has even a little expertise on Middle East affairs would ever commit themselves on the Jerusalem issue.

And so Obama had no choice but to correct his statement publicly. "You know, the truth is that this was an example where we had some poor phrasing in the speech," he said in a CNN interview on July 13.

He said his point had been "that we don't want barbed wire running through Jerusalem, similar to the way it was prior to the '67 war, that it is possible for us to create a Jerusalem that is cohesive and coherent."

The episode led to deep mistrust of Obama among the people who had celebrated his initial bold statement. How could this man, whose middle name is "Hussein" after his Muslim father, be trusted to stand by his words and by Israel in the future?

A Gallup opinion poll in May showed that 61 percent of American Jews planned to vote for Obama. Only 31 percent said they would vote for his Republican opponent John McCain. That wasn't a good result for Obama compared with previous elections.

The Democratic candidate in 2004, John Kerry, anemic by comparison with Obama, got 74 percent of the Jewish vote, while only 25 percent of Jewish voters opted for George W. Bush.

The controversy surrounding Obama's Jerusalem statement played into the hands of the Republicans. The Republican Jewish Coalition started sniping at an ally of Obama's -- Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who has been frequently seen at Obama's side of late and is even being seen as a potential running mate.

Hagel isn't a true friend of Israel, his and Obama's enemies are whispering. Hagel had frequently voted against Israel's interests, they say, citing a 2006 vote in which he was among 12 Senators who voted against a motion to call on the European Union to classify Shiite militia Hezbollah as a terrorist group.

Fears About Iran

But it's not just voters in America who will be closely watching Obama's position on the Middle East conflict this week. The Israeli government also wants to find out more about the man who may soon be in charge of Israeli's most important strategic ally. Olmert's talk with Obama will focus on just one issue, according to sources in Jerusalem -- Iran.

The Iranian nuclear program, the growing influence of the Shiite state in the region -- there is nothing that currently worries Israel more than the threats from Tehran. Jerusalem is all the more concerned given that Washington has recently been striking a more conciliatory chord in its dealings with Iran.

Last Saturday a historic meeting between the two countries took place in Geneva when William Burns, US under secretary of state for political affairs, met Iran's chief negotiator Saeed Jailili.

Burns is the State Department's third ranking official after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her deputy John Negroponte. Since the break-off of diplomatic relations in April 1980 no American diplomat of such high rank has met an Iranian government representative.

Jerusalem fears that America might be starting to waver in its ironclad support for Israel regarding Iran. Obama had said in June he would do everything in his power to prevent Iran from getting hold of nuclear weapons. Israel's Foreign minister Zippi Livni, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and Olmert -- all the Israeli politicians Obama will be meeting during his trip -- will try to reinforce that stance.

In Jerusalem, Obama may well be asked if he really stands by his words. After all, he made his comment on Iran in the same speech in which he vowed Jerusalem must not be divided -- a remark he later corrected.