Editorial: The pro-Israel checklist

President Barack Obama wants the Jewish vote. Really, he needs it. After his party’s embarrassing defeat in the Ninth Congressional district to Republican citizen-candidate Bob Turner last week, the president has made some “painful concessions.”

When the staff of the Israeli embassy in Cairo was besieged by a rampaging mob, the administration reached out to Egypt’s military rulers, who receive $1.3 billion in annual military aid from Washington. Following the phone call, Egyptian police rescued the trapped Israeli diplomats.

At this week’s UN General Assembly, the president vowed to veto any possible vote for full Palestinian membership if it does not involve negotiations with Israel.

The same president who reached out to the Arab masses at Cairo’s Al Azhar University in July 2009, now risks losing the pro-American goodwill that came with the Arab Spring, in order to stand by Israel.

Obama deserves credit where it is due, but these actions are par for the course for an American president, and they will not stop the gradual Jewish departure from the Democratic Party. The president must make a gesture that would secure him forever in the annals of Jewish history, something far more memorable than this week’s New York Magazine cover lauding him as “The first Jewish president.”

Among the presidents, George Washington stands out for his 1790 letter of tolerance addressed to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, outlining the newborn country’s vision of religious freedom. Abraham Lincoln is honored for rescinding General Ulysses Grant’s order forbidding Jewish merchants from trading in the South during the Civil War. Theodore Roosevelt is remembered for his forceful rebuke to the Russian czar after the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev. Above all, Harry Truman rebuffed his State Department advisers and signed off on the recognition of newborn Israel.

Obama certainly has his options laid out. He can pardon Jonathan Pollard, gaining the gratitude of the community for a man who expressed his remorse numerous times during his 26 years in federal prison.

He can move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people. He can recognize Menachem Zivotofsky’s request to stamp “Jerusalem, Israel” as the birthplace on his passport.

We are not asking Obama to plant trees on a Samarian hilltop, nor to suspend funding for the Palestinian Authority, nor to stop routinely ignoring Saudi human rights violations. He does not even have to visit Israel. Sure, these gestures would be admirable, but we can’t ask Obama to be more Zionist than most American Jews.

Recognizing the injustice of Pollard’s sentence, moving an embassy to a capital city, and acknowledging that city as the capital, these are gestures that would make American policy towards Israel as fair as towards any other nation. These simple acts can give Obama credibility as a friend to Israel and strengthen the partnership in peace, security, trade, and values that it we have always had.