Parallels

I didn't watch any of the Presidential webcast Friday where he interacted with the leadership of the American Jewish community in an effort to simultaneously ostensibly allay their fears and sell the JCPOA as the best method of preventing Iran's attaining a nuclear weapon.

It has been posited in some circles that the President's unfathomable attitude toward Jews in general and the Zionist project in particular notwothstanding, it still is heartening that he has shown that he feels compelled to respond to the Jewish community's concern rather than ignoring them outright.  [Although one might also assume this was a more subtle attempt to both lecture and divide the Jewish community rather than actually mollify it.]

I'm not sure from what historical parallels these more optimistic assessments are drawn--and in the circles where I've heard them, they haven't been based at all on more "progressive" sociopolitical notions, which would almost mandate an almost lock-step support of the President.  No: they've actually emanated from communities where opposition to the JCPOA is usually vocal and almost unceasing.

Hearing this assessment recently, I was searching for historical analogs, and today two occurred to me.  While both may be strained to a point, there's enough commonality between the events surrounding the JCPOA and German President Paul von Hindenburg's appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in 1933, and between the JCPOA and Palestine High Commissioner Herbert Samuel's appointment of Haj Amin al-Hussieni as Mufti of Jerusalem in 1920.

Hindenburg's case may be instructive, because as late at 1932, as detailed in a JTA dispatch at the time of his death two years later, "von Hindenburg sent to the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith a message in which he expressed disapproval of the limitation of Jewish rights and also of all anti-Jewish attacks. His message was in reply to a white book submitted to him by the Central Union setting out the facts regarding Nazi terroristic methods practiced against the Jews.  The Hitlerites, as well as General von Ludendorf protested von Hindenburg’s statement and later Nazi deputies in the Reichstag unleashed a vicious attack on “Der Alte,” denouncing him and describing him as “the Jewish candidate.”"  [Did he "have their back"?...]

Yet, when he needed to save his precious German Fatherland, and, having convinced himself he could control Hitler only by handing over the high office he had worked so hard to deny the future Fuhrer, von Hindenburg rewarded Hitler's gangsterism with the Chancellorship after the Nazis had suffered a downturn in the polls in the most recent election.  Once can compare this to trying to rehabilitate a certain Islamic Republic by rewarding them in advance for unverified compliance with a legally dubious agreement that subverts a sanctions regime that had been effective and has now been short-circuited.

In Samuel's case, in trying to please all factions that were engaging in a tug-of-war over the newly conquered Palestine, Samuel reverted to the previous Caliphate policy that had been the Ottoman modus operandi in appointed al-Husseini to the position of Mufti, where he proved to not only be a thorn in the side of the British colonial authorities [at least, those who weren't already sympathetic or actively furthering his murderous tendencies] but a paradigm of religiously motivated genocidal Judeophobia, particularly when he ended up in Berlin during World War II.  [Not for nothing came the remark about the High Commissioner [alternatively attributed to Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George]:  "When they circumcised Herbert Samuel, they threw away the wrong bit."]

In both of these cases, ostensibly well-meaning statesmen had concerns other than the well-being of the Jews, which, while one can always maintain may not have to be the primary concern or interest of a state, somehow always prove to be a litmus test of how a power can act against it's own interests in cases where the authorities assume that their interests and the Jews' are automatically at odds, whereas in fact the Jews' interest prove to be aligned with those of the States in question all along.  That is why--as this writer opined recently--the protests against the JCPOA must continue regardless of the result of the upcoming Congressional battle.