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XPost: alt.politics.democrats

The Jewish Democratic Council of America tries to rewrite history on
Wittes’s opposition to the historic Abraham Accords

President Joe Biden is headed to the Middle East this week for the first
time as president, in part to advance the historic peace agreements the
Trump administration helped secure between Israel and many of its
neighbors.

It’s bad timing for one of his nominees, Dr. Tamara Cofman Wittes, who
spent the Trump years as a Twitter warrior trashing the Abraham Accords
and —well, now it’s awkward.

We assume that’s why, according to our Alana Goodman, the Jewish
Democratic Council of America is rushing in to shore up Wittes’s street
cred with a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from "leaders
in foreign policy, national security, and the Jewish community" attesting
to her stellar support for the Abraham Accords: "As Dr. Wittes said during
her hearing," Jewish Democratic Council CEO Halie Soifer writes in the
letter, "the Abraham Accords ‘offer a foundation for regional cooperation between Arab states and Israel, on shared issues like energy, water, and health.’"

It would be hard to come up with a sleazier, more dishonest, more lawyerly
case for Wittes’s nomination.

Wittes may have regurgitated platitudes at her confirmation hearing
intended to assure lawmakers of her support for the Abraham Accords that
are now Biden administration policy, but one has to think she was more
honest when she wasn’t gunning for votes. That’s when she slammed the
peace agreements as a "new Naksa"—that is, a setback or catastrophe—for
the Palestinian people, called the normalization agreements between the
United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Israel a step "in the wrong direction,"
and took to her podcast to mock their significance: "For your average
Israeli, what is most exciting about this is that instead of having to fly
to Istanbul to get to Southeast Asia, they can fly through Abu Dhabi and
Dubai, it is much faster," she sneered.

Consider those remarks in light of the rest of the letter, which describes Wittes as an "open-minded and principled" woman who "always finds time to listen to alternative views and give them full consideration."

Mmmhmm.

Wittes’s post-hoc explanation for her tweets—that she "was skeptical that
other Arab states would join" the Abraham Accords—makes no sense and is
plainly refuted by the record. Bias and ignorance are the best case
explanation for her position then. At least as plausible is that Wittes
had in mind Qatari opposition to the Abraham Accords: The repressive Gulf monarchy was at the time funding her perch at the Brookings Institution,
and Wittes had no compunction about lavishing praise on her benefactors.

That a supposed Middle East expert was upstaged and discredited by the political novices in the Trump administration is embarrassing but not disqualifying. Her dishonesty during her Senate testimony should be.
Published under: Abraham Accords, Israel, Joe Biden, Middle East, UAE

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/the-weak-and-dishonest-case- for-tammy-wittes/

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