Some Jewish conservatives had praise for the foreign policy team.
“They leave a strong paper trail,” said Jim Colbert, policy director at the hawkish Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
It was a team, Colbert said, that would mitigate what he saw as the damage done by the Obama administration’s policy of making Israeli-Arab peace a centerpiece of its Middle East strategy and its practice of criticizing Israel for actions it deemed counterproductive to that effort.
Sarah Stern, the president of EMET, the Endowment for Middle East Truth, said Obama’s policy of engagement with autocracies in the region was a failure. Both Gingrich and Romney seemed to understand this, she said, as evidenced by the people they chose for their teams.
“The understanding is that there are bad actors in the world and we can’t sit down and have detente with every one,” she said. “Some of us interpret all this openness as weakness.”
(JTA)