Marty Peretz is undoubtedly among of the most serious, argumentatively adept pro-Israel American leftists. That's not exactly high praise in a community stacked with people like Bob Wexler and NJDC tool Aaron Keyak. But it's still not nothing. During the election he did yoeman's work for Obama in the American Jewish community, publishing reams of copy so Jewish Democrats could guiltlessly vote the way they were going to vote anyway.

The only problem is that his arguments were kind of bad and that reality - as it does to bad arguments - keeps pointing that out. He had to defend President Obama's reinstatement of Samantha Power by suggesting that Power's desire to invade Israel was motivated out of love (presumably her nudge-wink smear about "a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import" was also misplaced affection). He subsequently wrote an article entitled "Samantha Power Is a Friend of Israel" that was interesting for two reasons. The first is that at the beginning he defended Susan Rice by saying he didn't know anything about her, which seems like a strained rhetorical move. The second is that it had this passage:

There will be a test for Susan Rice and for Barack Obama very soon. Whether she opposes the United States participating in the United Nations' gang rape of Israel at Durban II. I doubt that she will. And here we can follow the government of Canada which has already declined the gracious invitation from intellectual and political hoodlums. Here we can test the limits of engagements. And now I come to the ZOA's other victim of the day, Samantha Power. The New Republic carried many of her most searing articles from Bosnia.

I think that the first part is an editing hiccup. The original draft was probably something like "whether she acquiesces... I doubt that she will" or "whether she opposes... I think that she will." At least that's how I think it happened since the implication is clear: the test for Obama will be whether he follows Canada's lead and refuses to engage the Durban II organizers. Now keep in mind that passage about actively opposing Durban II is from an article specifically written to defend Rice and Power.

Hmm:

While the US has said it would decide at a later date whether to participate in the conference, the State Department on Saturday said that it would send diplomats to participate in preparatory meetings being held next week for the 2009 World Conference Against Racism, which is set to be held in Geneva on April 20-24 and which Israel and Canada have already decided to boycott... Nonetheless, the apparent departure from the Bush administration's outright rejection of the conference has fueled speculation that Obama administration officials are at odds with one another over how to proceed. One official who is reportedly pressuring Secretary of State Clinton to take part in Durban II is the new American Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, who was Obama's close campaign adviser and has pushed for the US to join the UN Human Rights Council, which was boycotted by the Bush administration, partly because of its one-sided criticism of Israel. The other official reportedly pushing for American involvement in "Durban II" is Samantha Power, an Obama adviser at the National Security Council who participated in the initial Durban conference as the representative of an NGO and has a history of making controversial statements about Israel.

This is outreach to Jew-hating fanatics. Even if the White House bails on the conference, the anti-Semitic organizers will have succeeded in moving the "engagement" goalposts.

And none of that matters for whether Peretz should be publicly retracting his defenses of Rice and Power. They're not pushing for involvement in the planning stages. They're pushing for involvement in Durban II as such. They apparently have Obama's ear since they've thus far achieved involvement in the planning. If the President bails out later that might be a limited defense of his actions. Maybe. But it wouldn't be a defense of Rice and Power.

It turns out that people who make their career out of criticizing the US-Israel alliance will, given the opportunity, try to erode the US-Israel alliance. Who knew?

References and previously after the jump...