Obama Is Israel’s Captain America

Gal Beckerman September 28, 2011

Apparently, all it took was a speech.

After Barack Obama’s address to the United Nations last week, in which he spent approximately two minutes telling the Israeli narrative in a way that satisfied certain Jewish ears (and, of course, opposing Palestinian statehood), he is suddenly in the good graces of the Israeli population for really the first time since his election. The man who once had an abysmal 4% approval rating, is now, according to a new Jerusalem Post poll thought by 54 percent of Jewish Israelis to have policies that are favorable to Israel, while 19 percent said they are pro-Palestinian. In the sad, zero-sum logic of the conflict, this means they like him.

But you didn’t need the polls. The whole tone of the way the mainstream Israeli media has covered Obama seems to have changed. Nahum Barnea, the country’s most respected columnist, mockingly called the president “Israel’s ambassador to the UN.”

And then there was the cover of Maariv’s weekend magazine. Enough said.

Gal Beckerman was a staff writer and then the Forward’s opinion editor until 2014. He was previously an assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review where he wrote essays and media criticism. His book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review and Bookforum. His first book, “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry,” won the 2010 National Jewish Book Award and the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, as well as being named a best book of the year by The New Yorker and The Washington Post. Follow Gal on Twitter at @galbeckerman

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