Will Samantha Power keep her promise on Israel?

The U.S. envoy to the United Nations may have sworn to tirelessly defend America’s ally, but that’s not a commitment that a UN ambassador is always in a position to keep.

Ha’aretz

Samantha Power, the American envoy to the United Nations, has been put on the spot by a full-page ad in the New York Times over the weekend. The ad, placed by Birthright founder Michael Steinhardt, recounted the assurances Power made to Jewish leaders — and the Senate — two years before U.S. President Barack Obama named her the country’s envoy to the United Nations. The ad ran under the headline, “Ambassador Power: Will you defend Israel at the UN as you promised?”

The ad reminds me of a quarrel between one of Power’s predecessors, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the Wall Street Journal. It erupted after Kirkpatrick voted to censure Israel for attacking Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor in 1981. Kirkpatrick, who died nine years ago, was a heroic figure. She nonetheless faced the kind of situation that Power could be facing at a world body that is corrupt, cynical, and hostile to the Jews.

Steinhardt’s ad comes amid the drama over a resolution France plans to seek in the Security Council in order to force upon Israel a timetable for an agreement with the Palestinians. The ad describes a meeting in Steinhardt’s office four years ago. I wasn’t there, though Steinhardt is a friend and a former partner of mine in the New York Sun. The meeting, in any event, was no passing matter.

Power, who rose to fame after writing a book on genocide called “A Problem From Hell,” had come to see Steinhardt and other Jewish leaders to apologize for remarks at the expense of Israel and the Jews. At one event, at the University of California at Berkeley in 2002, Power had seemed to suggest, as the ad recounts, that “America may need to force a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the expense of ‘a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import’.”

It would have been a blunder to say such a thing at any juncture, but on a campus seething with anti-Semitism it was shocking. It was the kind of talk that could well have become a problem should Power come under consideration for a post, such as envoy to the UN, requiring Senate confirmation. At the behest of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, then a defender of Power but now a critic, Steinhardt had agreed to host a meeting with about 40 Jewish leaders.

So intense was the questioning by the Jewish leaders, Rabbi Boteach tells me, that Power at one point broke into tears. He remembers her saying that it pained her to be thought of as anti-Israel and that her husband, Cass Sunstein, is a descendent of the Vilna Gaon. Boteach recalls the parley getting so uncomfortable that Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League came over to Boteach and said the meeting shouldn’t have been called.

Yet Power was persuasive enough that the Jewish leaders did not oppose her elevation to the United Nations, and at her Senate confirmation hearings she promised that she would work tirelessly to defend Israel. That, though, is not the kind of commitment any would-be ambassador to the United Nations is always in a position to keep, as she may soon find out and as was learned by Kirkpatrick, who had been U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s envoy at Turtle Bay.

A tougher, nobler, wiser ambassador than Kirkpatrick would be hard to imagine, nor one more inclined to defend Israel. Yet after Prime Minister Menachem Begin sent American-built warplanes to bomb Iraq’s atomic reactor, Kirkpatrick went into a room with Saddam Hussein’s envoy at the UN and co-authorized a resolution, the first America ever let through, condemning Israel.

The Wall Street Journal wheeled on Kirkpatrick with an editorial headlined “Andy Kirkpatrick,” comparing her to U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s envoy at the UN, Andrew Young, who’d met, in violation of U.S. policy at the time, with an envoy of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Kirkpatrick was so angered by the editorial that she sent an aide to tell the Journal’s editor, Robert Bartley, that she’d never speak to the paper again.

I was then working at the Journal, and Bartley called me into his office to ask what message I thought we should send back to the ambassador. I clipped a copy of the editorial out of the paper and gave it to Kirkpatrick’s aide, suggesting he give it to Kirkpatrick to keep in her purse. “The next time she has to go into a room with the ambassador of Iraq,” I suggested, “she can pull out the editorial, wave it at him, and say, ‘Look what I’m up against.’”

Eventually things calmed down for Kirkpatrick. Whether Ambassador Power can weather the coming crisis so well is hard to predict. In this age of Twitter and the Internet, the United Nations ambassadorship isn’t as powerful a post as it was in Kirkpatrick’s time, and President Obama is no Ronald Reagan. But the dangers facing Israel at the UN are as great as ever, or worse. So Ambassador Power might want to keep Steinhardt’s ad handy.