Americans living in Israel went to the polls this week, dropping sealed envelopes into improvised ballot boxes at community centers in this city and at other locations around the country.  Instead of a unifying experience, though, participating in the November presidential elections from afar seemed to accentuate the distance between the American Jewish voters here and those back in the United States.

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Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

An American Jewish Committee Survey conducted in early September showed nearly two-thirds of Jewish voters were supporting President Obama, in line with support in past elections. According to exit polls since 1992, about three-quarters of Jewish Americans have supported the Democratic presidential candidate.

Historically, the vote from Israel has hardly counted. The number of eligible American voters here is now estimated at about 160,000. In 2008, about 30,000 cast absentee ballots. Many here said the process of registering and voting was just too complicated.

But this time as many as 75,000 Americans in Israel have registered for a ballot, spurred on perhaps by the critical issues on the American-Israeli agenda but also by the efforts of iVoteIsrael, a get-out-the-vote group that says it is nonpartisan but that critics accuse of working quietly for the Republicans.

Whatever the reasons — whether the background of tension between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Obama administration, the looming threat of a nuclear Iran or simply the greater turnout because of efforts by iVoteIsrael — a number of people casting their ballots at an event sponsored by the group said they supported Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger.

“In the United States, like most people, I voted Democratic,” said Dr. Naftali Neal Fish, a clinical psychologist and hypnotherapist who came to Israel from Philadelphia in the 1980s. This was his first time voting abroad. Citing both the crisis with Iran and the economic situation in the United States, where American-Israelis still pay taxes, he said he voted for Mr. Romney.

Orit Straus, an interior decorator who came here with her family three years ago from St. Louis, said she had voted for Mr. Romney “because I feel he is better for Israel.”

Meir Simchah Panzer, from Virginia, said that there was probably little substantive difference between the candidates but that he was voting for Mr. Romney “by default; I see somebody who seems genuinely to care and to have principles.”

Daniel Laufer, 26, from North Miami Beach, Fla., said he voted for Mr. Romney because of his “economic record” and because he had become “disenchanted with Obama’s Middle East policies.”

iVoteIsrael has sponsored debates around the country and reached out to potential voters through social networks, community e-mail lists and local publications. Its activists have gone door to door, run phone banks, canvassed outside shopping malls and registered parents at Little League games. It has provided drop boxes for registration forms and ballots in locations like pizzerias and private homes, including in several West Bank settlements.

It has not endorsed any candidate, and the Web site of the United States Embassy lists it as a nonpartisan group offering voter assistance. Elie Pieprz, iVoteIsrael’s national campaign director, said the group had registered voters from 49 states, including “thousands” in critical swing states like Florida and Ohio.

“While the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential elections all came down to 537 absentee ballots cast in Florida, only 64 of those — out of the many thousands of Floridian-Israelis — were cast from Israel!” the group states on its Web site, adding, “We want to see a president in the White House who will support and stand by Israel in absolute commitment to its safety, security and right to defend itself.”

But critics from the Democratic camp have noted that some of iVoteIsrael’s messaging, particularly on its Facebook page, has a distinct anti-Obama flavor, including an appeal to vote from the hawkish former United Nations ambassador, John R. Bolton, who has endorsed Mr. Romney.

Adding to the uncertainty, iVoteIsrael has also been vague about the sources of its financing. Its parent organization, Americans for Jerusalem, is a registered 501(c)(4) organization that does not have to disclose its financial backers. But the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group said last week that Americans for Jerusalem appeared to have ties to Ronald S. Lauder, the conservative American businessman, philanthropist and supporter of Republican causes. Mr. Lauder’s office said it had no comment.

Mr. Pieprz, a former Republican activist who came to Israel in 2010, said only that iVoteIsrael was financed by supporters from the right and the left and that its day-to-day operations were run independently of Americans for Jerusalem.

The apparent growth in absentee voting has stirred a contentious debate over whether the numbers are great enough to make a difference.

“In raw numbers,” Mr. Pieprz said, “the votes from Israel can absolutely change an election.”

Republicans Abroad Israel, which represents the party here, has focused its efforts on the senatorial race in Ohio, where the Democrat, Sherrod Brown, has a healthy lead. Marc Zell, a chairman of Republicans Abroad Israel, said it had mobilized dozens of volunteers to submit opinion pieces, letters and responses to the Ohio news media in support of Josh Mandel, the Republican candidate, as well as Mr. Romney and Israel. Mr. Zell added that volunteers from Israel have also been calling potential voters in Florida.

But the idea that Americans in Israel could swing the November elections is largely dismissed by Obama supporters.

Hillel Schenker, vice chairman of Democrats Abroad Israel, said that in 2000: “Florida was stolen. I don’t think it was the absentee ballots but the manipulations.” Moreover, the skeptics note, most American-Israelis are likely to vote in states like New York, California and Illinois, where they will have zero impact.

David A. Harris, president and chief executive of the National Jewish Democratic Council, said, “I’d argue that unfortunately for the Romney-Ryan ticket, Americans living in Israel are unlikely to be the difference makers.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/world/middleeast/americans-in-israel-seem-to-back-romney.html?ref=middleeast&_r=0

Obama & Romney on Foreign Affairs

 President Barack Obama repeatedly ridiculed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s foreign policy views as dated and haphazard in his third and final debate with his Republican challenger, who in turn accused the president of diminishing American leadership during his first term.

 Obama took advantage of incumbency to remind voters throughout the 90-minute debate of his experience as commander-in-chief, and Romney’s lack thereof. The former Massachusetts governor, meanwhile, sought to project a deep familiarity with vexing global issues. The debate, held just 15 days before the election in the battleground state of Florida, veered at times from its stated emphasis on foreign policy and into issues of the economy and the budget – topics on which Romney holds an advantage over the president in most polls. 

But Obama sought to do to Romney with foreign policy – disqualify him in the eyes of voters – what his re-election campaign had tried to do on Romney’s economic proposals. The president openly mocked Romney’s suggestion, for instance, that Russia is the top geopolitical foe of the United States. 

"You seem to want to import the foreign policy of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s," he said. 

"Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed," Obama said. "We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship." 

Obama also derided Romney’s vow to grow the size of the Navy as indicative of the GOP nominee’s dated views toward national security. 

Romney used his time at the debate to more broadly accuse Obama of presiding over a period of diminishing American leadership abroad.

“In nowhere in the world is America's influence greater than it was four years ago,” he said. 

The former Massachusetts governor also voiced directly to the president an accusation – that Obama had apologized for American values – he has made throughout the campaign. 

The president says a strong economy at home will strengthen the U.S. overseas during the third and final presidential debate of 2012.

“You said that on occasion America had dictated to other nations,” Romney said. “Mr. President, America has not dictated to other nations. We have freed other nations from dictators.” 

That attack prompted Obama to respond with a blistering characterization of Romney’s own trip to the United Kingdom, Israel and Poland this past summer. 

“When I was a candidate for office, the first trip I took was to visit our troops. And when I went to Israel as a candidate, I didn't take donors. I didn't attend fundraisers,” Obama said in reference to a fundraiser Romney held while in Jerusalem this summer. “I went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum there, to remind myself the nature of evil and why our bond with Israel will be unbreakable.” 

 

Obama’s tough rhetoric, though, betrayed his campaign’s outward confidence amid a series of national and battleground state polls suggesting the election had tightened to a dead heat over the past month, since Romney’s strong performance in their first debate on Oct. 3. Republicans argued that the president’s posture was that of a candidate who has fallen behind Romney over the past few weeks. 

Romney used a number of opportunities to steer the debate back toward domestic issues, on which the former Massachusetts governor has mostly staked his campaign. Romney got an opportunity to recount his five-point economic plan, and his direct-to-camera closing statement emphasized the economy as much as foreign policy.

The Republican nominee also largely declined to make as sharp of a case about Obama’s handling of the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Romney has used the administration’s response to that incident to make up ground versus Obama, but scarcely dwelled on Libya – the opening topic of Monday evening’s debate. 

The debate’s tangents offered Obama other opportunities to go after Romney. The upcoming “sequester” – the automatic spending cuts, particularly to the defense budget, set to take effect at the beginning next year – prompted the two candidates to renew their squabbling over Romney’s tax plan. 

Romney also tried to dissociate himself with Republican hawkishness, refusing to engage a hypothetical question about Iran’s nuclear program, ruling out a military strike against Libya and stating the U.S. “can't kill our way out of this mess” as it relates to al Qaeda. 

And Obama – whose decision to extend federal aid to Detroit’s troubled automakers in 2009 has become a pillar of his pitch to voters in Midwestern battleground states – eagerly pounced on a tangent involving the auto industry to criticize Romney. 

The Republican nominee also largely shrugged off Obama’s attacks as obfuscatory. 

"Attacking me is not an agenda," Romney said early at the debate, at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla. 

Whether Monday’s debate would provoke a thinning sliver of undecided voters to make a decision was another question, to which the answer wasn’t immediately clear following the debate. 

Both Obama and Romney had arranged major rallies with their running mates on Tuesday so as to project momentum in the closing two weeks of the campaign. Both campaigns left Boca Raton with a self-professed sense of confidence, validation or dismissal of which will come on Nov. 6. 

http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/22/14625343-obama-casts-romney-as-unseasoned-on-foreign-affairs?lite

U.S. Military Is Sent to Jordan to Help With Crisis in Syria

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/world/middleeast/us-military-sent-to-jordan-on-syria-crisis.html?ref=middleeast&_r=0

 The United States military has secretly sent a task force of more than 150 planners and other specialists to Jordan to help the armed forces there handle a flood of Syrian refugees, prepare for the possibility that Syria will lose control of its chemical weapons and be positioned should the turmoil in Syria expand into a wider conflict

The task force, which has been led by a senior American officer, is based at a Jordanian military training center built into an old rock quarry north of Amman. It is now largely focused on helping Jordanians handle the estimated 180,000 Syrian refugees who have crossed the border and are severely straining the country’s resources.

American officials familiar with the operation said the mission also includes drawing up plans to try to insulate Jordan, an important American ally in the region, from the upheaval in Syria and to avoid the kind of clashes now occurring along the border of Syria and Turkey.

The officials said the idea of establishing a buffer zone between Syria and Jordan — which would be enforced by Jordanian forces on the Syrian side of the border and supported politically and perhaps logistically by the United States — had been discussed. But at this point the buffer is only a contingency.

The Obama administration has declined to intervene in the Syrian conflict beyond providing communications equipment and other nonlethal assistance to the rebels opposing the government of President Bashar al-Assad. But the outpost near Amman could play a broader role should American policy change. It is less than 35 miles from the Syrian border and is the closest American military presence to the conflict.

Officials from the Pentagon and Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, declined to comment on the task force or its mission. A spokesman for the Jordanian Embassy in Washington would also not comment on Tuesday.

As the crisis in Syria has deepened, there has been mounting concern in Washington that the violence could spread through the region. Over the past week, Syria and Turkey have exchanged artillery and mortar fire across Syria’s northern border, which has been a crossing point for rebel fighters. In western Syria, intense fighting recently broke out in villages near the border crossing that leads to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. To the east, the Syrian government has lost control of some border crossings, including the one near Al Qaim in Iraq.

Jordan has also been touched by the fighting. Recent skirmishes have broken out between the Syrian military and Jordanians guarding the country’s northern border, where many families have ties to Syria. In August, a 4-year-old girl in a Jordanian border town was injured when a Syrian shell struck her house, and there are concerns in Jordan that a sharp upsurge in the fighting in Syria might lead to an even greater influx of refugees.

Jordan, which was one of the first Arab countries to call for Mr. Assad’s resignation, has become increasingly concerned that Islamic militants coming to join the fight in Syria could cross the porous border between the two countries.

The American mission in Jordan quietly began this summer. In May, the United States organized a major training exercise, which was dubbed Eager Lion. About 12,000 troops from 19 countries, including Special Forces troops, participated in the exercise.

After it ended, the small American contingent stayed on and the task force was established at a Jordanian training center north of Amman. It includes communications specialists, logistics experts, planners, trainers and headquarters staff members, American officials said. An official from the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugee Affairs and Migration is also assigned to the task force.

“We have been working closely with our Jordanian partners on a variety of issues related to Syria for some time now,” said George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, who added that a specific concern was the security of Syria’s stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. “As we’ve said before, we have been planning for various contingencies, both unilaterally and with our regional partners.”

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta met in Amman in August with King Abdullah II of Jordan and at that time pledged continuing American help with the flow of Syrian refugees. Mr. Panetta was followed in September by Gen. James N. Mattis, the head of Central Command, who met with senior Jordanian officials in Amman.

Members of the American task force are spending the bulk of their time working with the Jordanian military on logistics — figuring out how to deploy tons of food, water and latrines to the border, for example, and training the Jordanian military to handle the refugees. A month ago, as many as 3,000 a day were coming over the border. But as the Syrian army has consolidated its position in southern Syria, the number of refugees has declined to several hundred a day.

According to the United Nations, Jordan is currently hosting around 100,000 Syrians who have either registered or are awaiting registration.   American officials say the total number may be almost twice that.

The American military is also sending medical kits to the border and has provided gravel to help keep down the dust at the Zaatari refugee camp, which the task force helped set up and is now home to 35,000 Syrians. It has also provided four large prefabricated buildings to be used at Zaatari as schools. One official estimated the cost so far at less than $1 million.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Ranya Kadri from Amman, Jordan.