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     New Republic owner Martin Peretz supports Gore and Clinton
     because of their strong pro-Israel views. (Peretz Commentary
     10/92)

<doctype>magazine article
<author>Peretz, Martin
<title>Bush, Clinton & the Jews: A Debate
<magazine>Commentary
<date>October 1992
<vol>94
<num>4
<pages>19-23

<quote>

     And about Israel? Here I write with some confidence and
     personal knowledge. Bill Clinton and Al Gore are more deeply
     and sensibly devoted to the Zionist dream and the Zionist
     reality than any President and Vice President have been
     since Harry Truman and Alben Barkley--both, by the way, also
     border-state Southerners. Maybe there is something about
     having read the Bible as children that makes them alert to
     the miracle of the ongoing Return, such worldly evidence as
     there is of the <it>mysterium tremendum</it> of the God of
     Israel. Moreover, as David Twersky wrote of Gore in the
     <it>Forward</it> (equally applicable to Clinton, I think),
     he is, unlike many other Democrats, "one who doesn't have to
     reconfigure his general foreign-policy framework to
     accommodate his love of Zion." I have talked about these
     matters with Clinton; and I have walked the streets of the
     faithful city with Gore and with Mrs. Gore, really from Dan
     to Beersheba, on ground where the patriarchs walked and
     Jesus, too, where history is immanent, where mankind's
     boldest and subtlest convictions were born.

     Clinton and Gore do not delude themselves about Israel's
     neighbors and about the vast sea-change which is required in
     their political culture before real peace is possible. This
     is how they knew, when George Bush lacked a clue, that the
     Gulf war did not end last spring in a victory satisfactory
     to the demands of justice and decency....

     With Clinton and Gore in office, the U.S.-Israel
     relationship may have its share of quarrels or spats, but no
     one will have reason to suspect malice, either toward Jews
     or toward the Jewish nation....

     Under the best of circumstances, Israel is doomed to live
     dangerously. Clinton-Gore would never worsen those
     circumstances. This is, alas, something which cannot be said
     for George Bush or for his true second, James Baker. The
     choice is clear.

<comment>

     Peretz's New Republic is probably the most influential
     journal of opinion and ideas in the big media, not because
     of its quality but because big media companies like CNN turn
     heavily to New Republic writers like Michael Kinsley, Fred
     Barnes and Morton Kondracke to serve as hosts of or guests
     on their shows.

     Note the religious mysticism and chauvinism which pervade
     Peretz's rhetoric, despite his pose as a modern
     sophisticated secularist.

     Peretz believes that Clinton and Gore share his views that
     more American blood should been shed in the Gulf War to
     fulfill Israeli war goals. Clinton, the draft dodger, as a
     military hardliner sending young Americans to war to satisfy
     the goals of people like Peretz is not a pretty prospect.

     In every possible way Peretz tries to suggest that George
     Bush and James Baker are anti-Semites without saying so
     directly.

     Israel is at the top of Martin Peretz's agenda: that is why
     he is supporting Clinton and Gore.

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