Chuck Schumer’s Humiliation

[geek tragedy]

Phuckem.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/chuck-schumers-humiliation

You know, my name comes from the word shomer: guardian, watcher,” Senator Chuck Schumer told the host of a Jewish radio program in 2010. “My ancestors were guardians of the ghetto wall in Chortkov. And I believe Hashem actually gave me that name. One of my roles, very important in the United States Senate, is to be a shomer, to be the shomer Yisrael”—the guardian of Israel—“and I will continue to be that with every bone in my body.” Schumer and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s efforts to rally Democratic opposition to President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal have now failed. On Tuesday, the support of Senators Richard Blumenthal, Ron Wyden, and Gary Peters assured Obama that any Republican resolution of disapproval would not even come up for a vote. But the extraordinary identity Schumer was claiming—to be a “guardian of Israel,” without apparent fear of being at odds with American foreign policy or the Democratic Party—may be the greater loss. It’s hard to see how AIPAC, and Schumer, come out of the Iran fight with the authority they had going in.

...


Israel, in AIPAC’s playbook, is the best judge of its defense needs, a sister democracy, and, besides, a strategic asset in a volatile region. (It proved this for the first time in September, 1970, when Israeli jets helped protect the Jordanian monarch from a Palestinian insurgency and Syrian invasion.) Schumer’s opposition to the Iran deal was supposed to signal that AIPAC remained influential among Democratic principals and fund-raisers, and that the man who chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee from 2005 to 2009, and is now the favorite to lead Senate Democrats when Harry Reid retires, could still fend off challenges to Israeli policy—if, for example, the U.N. Security Council were to vote on another resolution condemning West Bank settlements. The signal, meant to be cautionary, seems rather weak.

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Netanyahu wants us to believe that the fifteen-year duration of the Iran deal is a historical “blink of an eye,” as he told Congress in March. His implicit message is that he does not expect the regional status quo to significantly change: he assumes that the settlement project will continue growing, that Palestinians will remain in despair and disarray, and that ayatollahs will remain fixated on Israel. Democrats have rejected that message, but Netanyahu retains some influence over the deal’s eventual implementation. “The provisions are complex,” Steven Simon, the former senior director for Middle East and North Africa affairs in the Obama White House, told me. “Iran will exploit this, and Israeli analysts will claim cheating.” If Iran can be presented as not in compliance, it does “raise the spectre of military action,” Simon added. Still, the presumption that any Israeli government deserves the benefit of the doubt seems obsolete. In 2010, after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complained about Netanyahu’s settlement policy, Schumer told a conservative radio host that he had persuaded three-quarters of the Senate to sign a letter “rebuking the Administration for these confrontational stances toward Israel.” Would he even attempt this today?