In several posts last week, I presented information about Barack Obama that, in my view, should raise concerns for Jews, especially Jews who care about the security of Israel. Now, Obama has held a telephone conference with "the Jewish news media" in an attempt to address some of these concerns.

I'm not sure what constitutes the Jewish news media, but there is reason to believe that invitations to the call were tilted in favor of Obama-friendly journalists. For example, I understand that Jonathan Tobin, the conservative-leaning editor of the Jewish Exponent, was not informed of the call.

As to the call itself, Eric Trager provides this account:

He. . .declared his support for Israel “as a Jewish state”; expressed concern for continued rocket attacks from Gaza; stated that the Palestinian right of return could not be interpreted “in any literal way”; and opposed negotiations with Hamas so long as it denies Israel’s right to exist. He further denied that he had ever practiced Islam, and said that his church leader had made a “mistake of judgment” in honoring Louis Farrakhan. “My church has never issued anti-Semitic statements, nor have I heard my pastor utter anything anti-Semitic,” he said. “If I have, I would have left the church.”

That sounds good. However, as a correspondent who has heard a podcast of the call tells me, Obama's statement that he never "heard" his "pastor" express any anti-Semitism, "neatly elid[es] the whole issue of Wrights repeated anti-Israel comments over the years, Wright's trip to Libya, etc." Apparently, no one tried to pin Obama down on this, nor (I'm told) did anyone bring up the issue of Obama's anti-Israel advisers.

Moreover, as Trager points out (along with some on the left), Obama's recent pro-Israel positions almost surely amount to pandering of the most cyncial kind:

After all, Obama is on record as having called for an “even-handed approach” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2000, just as the Palestinians commenced the Second Intifada following Camp David. According to Electronic Intifada founder Ali Abunimah, Obama’s pro-Israel epiphany occurred shortly before his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign—an about-face for which Obama apologized to Abunimah. “Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front,” Obama said at the time.

As Trager concludes, the mixture of Obama's advisers (at least two of whom -- Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samatha Power -- subscribe to the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis that that the U.S.-Israel relationship is the product of Jewish power politics, rather than strategic interest) and the candidate's own past statements "are hardly reassuring" when it comes to thinking about what an Obama presidency would mean for Israel.

UPDATE: Samatha Power has said this:

Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the “national interest” as a whole is defined and pursued . . . America’s important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.

So greater regard for international institutions along with less automatic deference to special interests–especially when it comes to matters of life and death and war and peace–seem to be two take-aways from the war in Iraq.

This view -- that we went into Iraq out of deference to Israel's interests, which "dictated" our view of the national interest -- channels Walt and Mearsheimer. As Martin Kramer has pointed out, they have claimed that "pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical."

This position cannot be defended. As Kramer has shown, Israel dissented from U.S. preoccupation with Iraq, fearing that Iran, its focus of concern, would benefit from the Iraq distraction. In the face of Kramer's evidence, Walt and Mearsheimer ended up retreating to the view that neo-conservatives within the Lobby, as opposed to Israel or the Lobby as a whole, played a "central" (but, it seems, not "critical") role in the invasion.

If anything, then, Walt and Mearsheimer seem like voices of moderation on this issue compared to the Obama-advising Samantha Power.

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