Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Would a Kerry administration protect Israel at the UN?

Martin Peretz:

Like many American Jews, I was brought up to believe that if I pulled the Republican lever on the election machine my right hand would wither and, as the Psalmist says, my tongue would cleave to the roof of my mouth.

According to the Bible, of course, these are the feared consequences of forgetting Jerusalem. Now although there are many reasons one might want to vote for John F. Kerry, remembering Jerusalem — remembering to stand up for the state of Israel — is not among them.

It is true that Kerry's campaign pronouncements have been unexceptionable from the pro-Zionist point of view. Yes, he flip-flopped on the miles of trenches and fences Israel is building to defend itself from the plague of terrorism, first attacking the structure as "another barrier to peace," then accepting it as "a legitimate act of self-defense."

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So why am I still exercised about John Kerry?

It's the ramifications of his foreign policy in general, especially his fixation on the United Nations as the arbiter of international legitimacy, proctor of that "global test."

Save for the U.S. veto in the Security Council, Israel loses every struggle at the U.N. against lopsided majorities. In the General Assembly and the Human Rights Commission, Muslim states trade their votes to protect aggressors and tyrannies from censure in exchange for libels against the Jewish state. The body's bloated and dishonest bureaucracies are no better, as evidenced most recently by the head of the U.N. Palestine refugee organization, who defended having Hamas militants on his staff.

I've searched to find one time when Kerry — even candidate Kerry — criticized a U.N. action or statement against Israel. I've come up empty. Nor has he defended Israel against the European Union's continuous hectoring. Another thing that bothers me about Kerry is the deus ex machina he has up his sleeve: the appointment of a presidential envoy. It's hard to count how many special emissaries have been dispatched from Washington to the Middle East to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. What's easy to see is that none of them has gotten to "yes."

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For his part, Kerry grabs at any showy idea to demonstrate his sense of urgency. As a response to militant Islam and to encourage moderate Muslims, the presidential aspirant proposed that "the great religious figures of the planet" — he mentioned the pope, the archbishop of Canterbury and the Dalai Lama — hold a summit.

To do exactly … what?

"To begin to help the world to see the ways in which Islam is not, in fact, a threat," Kerry said, "and to isolate those who are, and to give people the strength to be able to come together in a global effort to take away their financing, their freedom to move, their sanctuary and so forth."

This muddled foolishness reflects Kerry's sense of politics as desperate theater. Another simply showy idea he proposed (to Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press") was to insert U.S. troops between Israel and the territories, as part "of some kind of very neutral international effort that began to allow Israel itself to disengage and withdraw."

Now, if anything would put U.S. soldiers in harm's way it is such a move, exposing our men and women to fiercely competing gangs of suicide bombers and other killers.

Kerry asserted on "Meet the Press" that it is "Israel's presence [in the territories that] puts Israel in difficult circumstances and obviously creates an enormous handle for Osama bin Laden for all the radicals and extremists to hang on to." But this stands history on its head. It is not the occupation that caused the conflict. It is the very existence of Israel — even within the unbearably narrow 1949 cease-fire lines.

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Kerry, meanwhile, appears ready to formulaically follow the failed precepts of the past, complete with photo ops and multiple interlocutors. This is a road map to nowhere.