A former aide to US Secretary of State, John Kerry, used unusual – some might say, offensive – language, to describe Jewish influence in Washington.
Laura Blumenfeld, one of three Jewish former aides involved in Kerry’s failed peace negotiations, spoke on a panel at the Jewish Federation of North America’s General Assembly, which began Sunday.
According to Haaretz, Blumenfeld – who served as Senior Policy Advisor on Kerry's Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations team from October 2013 to February 2015 – was asked about tension between the White House and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in recent years.
“There were a lot of days we spent bickering with the Israelis over what they were saying about us and what they were doing to them. I think it is part of a larger phenomenon and ties into the Jewish community,” Blumenfeld reportedly explained. “As Jews acquire more and more political power, it became almost like a housing bubble or a real estate bubble. There’s almost been a Jewish bubble and I think we saw it pop over the summer. “
During Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, she said “the administration really felt like they were really humiliated and undercut by the Israelis during the war... And you heard people say out loud, fight loudly in the stairwell in the State Department, saying 'We are the United States of America – we will not be ruled whether it’s by domestic constituencies or Israelis!'
“And Obama was saying things to his advisers like ‘well, maybe I ought to accept this but I don’t want to be a ‘freier’” – a Hebrew slang word meaning "sucker."
“When you have Obama going all Middle East like that – worried that he’s going to be a sucker with Netanyahu, you know you’ve reached a certain point,” she said, according to Haaretz's Allison Kaplan-Sommer.