I hadn’t known Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), the Tea Party favorite who is considering a presidential run, had spent a summer in Israel on Kibbutz Be’eri when she was a teenager until she mentioned it at her reception last week at the AIPAC conference.
It’s not news — the Minnesota Jewish media have had it covered a year or so ago. Here’s TCJewfolk, and here’s the American Jewish World.
Still, the spin Bachmann put on it at the AIPAC conference was novel: If your kids need straightening out, she said, "send them to a cotton field to pick fields in Israel all summer."
She was kidding. I think.
She also said she and her family make sure to do a "never forget" event at least once a year, attending a movie or a play about Jewish history.
Meantime, my former JTA colleague, Dan Sieradski, followed a Michele Bachmann banner ad on a pro-Israel website to this appeal — which leads into the Bachmann for Congress website — and is headed, "Tell Obama: You’ve betrayed Israel." It continues —
President Obama has announced his support of returning Israel and Palestine to the pre-war borders of 1967–borders that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called "indefensible."
Obama, of course, has called for nothing resembling this; he has explicitly said the border would be "different" and has called for negotiating on the basis of (not returning to) 1967 lines "with mutually agreed land swaps."
There’s much for Obama opponents to make of what the president actually said: The possible dangers of setting parameters, of U.S. over-involvement, of whether the implied 1:1 swaps are defensible.
I just heard that Dore Gold, the former U.N. envoy and a confidante of Israeli Prime Minister Benjaminn Netanyahu, made some of those cases in a conference call with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations just this morning.
That’s fine, and it’ll be interesting covering those debates.
This characterization of Obama’s proposal as the "pre-war borders of 1967" is a misrepresentation, however, and we’ll continue to call it.
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