Obama on Israel

Last month, the Hill reports, Senators voted on a bill by Feinstein and Leahy that would limit the kind of cluster bombs that the U.S. can sell to other countries. We wouldn't be able to sell the older kinds that often fail to explode, leaving lots of little bomblets for kids to stumble on. It's hardly perfect, but it's a step in the right direction.

Since the big cluster controversy last year was about Israel's use of (U.S.-supplied) cluster bombs, Senators apparently worried that supporting the Feinstein-Leahy bill would be considered anti-Israel. All the republicans and 15 Democrats -- including Clinton, Biden and Dodd -- voted against the bill. But Obama voted for it.

The Hill notes that Ha'aretz ranked Obama 17th out of 17 presidential candidates on Israel-friendliness.

That's where the good Obama news ends. On Friday, he spoke to a regional AIPAC gathering in Chicago. The most thorough and useful press account is the one on the Ha'aretz website. Here's the full speech.

Richard Silverstein offers a thorough analysis of the speech, finding some good tidbits among the very bad. It's worth a look. Reading his analysis, it reminds me that Obama is still probably the second-least-bad of the Democratic candidates on this issue (behind Kucinich of course).

For the bigger-picture history of Obama and Israel, the must-read is Ali Abunimah's How Barack Obama learned to love Israel, published today. Abunimah says that Obama was once a supporter of Palestinian rights, but has been transformed in the last few years.