Barack Obama the candidate, at the 2008 AIPAC conference said this:
We know that the establishment of Israel was just and necessary, rooted in centuries of struggle and decades of patient work, but 60 years later we know that we cannot relent, we cannot yield, and as President I will never compromise when it comes to Israel’s security.
Not when there’s still voices that deny the Holocaust; not when there are terrorist groups and political leaders committed to Israel’s destruction; not when there are maps across the Middle East that don’t even acknowledge Israel’s existence and government funded textbooks filled with hatred towards Jews; not when there are rockets raining down on Sderot and Israeli children have to take a deep breath and summon uncommon courage every time they board a bus or walk to school.
And this:
And then there are those who would lay all the problems of the Middle East at the doorstep of Israel and its supporters as if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root of all trouble in the region. These voices blame the Middle East’s only democracy for the region’s extremism. They offer the false promise that abandoning a stalwart ally is somehow the path to strength. It is not; it has never been and it never will be.
Yesterday, President Barack Obama met with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. There were no pictures of the two shaking hands. There was no official protocol. There was no press conference, all the trappings of the usual state visit. And it was all deliberate snubs.
But the meetings were shrouded in unusual secrecy, in part because U.S. officials, who just ten days earlier called the surprise announcement of new housing in East Jerusalem an “insult†and an “affront,†made sure to reward Netanyahu with a series of small snubs: There were no photographs released from the meeting, and no briefing for the press.
And as of late Tuesday evening, neither side had released the usual “readout†of the meetings’ content – a likely indicator of the distance between the sides.
That’s a far cry from Candidate Obama’s attestation of his love for Israel—the “unbreakable bond” he quoted so often throughout his speech:
… my strong commitment to make sure that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, unbreakable tomorrow–unbreakable forever. … And as President I will work with you to insure that it is this bond that is strengthened.
As Jim Geraghty said, every campaign promise Obama made comes with an expiration date. Israel’s expiration date was, well, the day after the AIPAC speech, I presume. Here, however, is the most interesting quote of the entire affair:
Netanyahu “is too smart not to understand that Washington has changed,†veteran Middle East peace negotiator Aaron David Miller told POLITICO on Tuesday. “And that a potentially transformative president who is now king of the world for a day is facing off against Benjamin Netanyahu, king of Israel. And the fight between the two is not today. What we see now is positioning.”
That’s a very unconsciously telling analogy. As a person of faith (and particularly as a person of the Jewish faith), if I were to choose the more powerful of the two kings—the king of the world or the king of Israel—I would absolutely go with the man who has G-d behind him.
Barack Obama’s hypocrisy on Israel is actually meaningless in the long run. Presidents come and go. Kings come and go. Israel remains. When we say “Am Yisrael chai,” we’re kinda not exaggerating.
When Mr. Obama is unemployed in January 2013 and looking to travel, here’s hoping that his entry visa for visiting Israel is rejected.
-ls
Barak Obama is treating Israel like the 51st state. That is he regards the Israelis with the same “respect” that he has for the citizens of this country and is acting towards Israel in the same way that he has acted towards the United States (for example with health care).
Obama and Clinton should have cleaned out the State Department but neither had the kishkies to do it. So we have presidents advised by State Department career folk who “went native” and we have presidents who don’t understand how vacillation is viewed by most folks in the world.
However, blindsiding Biden was not a good idea. If you know anything about diplomacy you know that you do not make someone look like a fool—and they made Biden look like a fool.
Consider this, however. What if the announcement of apartment building and the later pullback by Israel had been a contrivance intended to force the Pals to sit at the negotiating table? Far-fetched because politicians are notorious about not keeping their mouths shut and others have an addiction to leaking stories even if they endanger lives and security.
velville:
Bidon doesn’t need help to make him look like a fool.He does a great job all by himself.
Back at my blog I quoted from a WaPo article by Glenn Kessler:
President Obama and his aides have cast the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not just the relationship with Israel, as a core U.S. national security interest. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of the military’s Central Command, put it starkly in recent testimony on Capitol Hill: “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment due to a perception of U.S. favoritism toward Israel.” His comments raised eyebrows in official Washington — and overseas — because they suggested that U.S. military officials were embracing the idea that failure to resolve the conflict had begun to imperil American lives.
Never mind, as you noted elsewhere, that Petraeus says that his words were taken out of context. It really doesn’t matter. Perry did the administration’s dirty work. No, Israel doesn’t endanger American soldiers, but it does work against American interests. The exaggerated claim may be inoperative, but the lesser (but false) claim now stands as a “reasonable” alternative and is reported as fact by a leading newspaper.
So the administration (no great surprise to me) has accepted (and promotes) the “false promise” that candidate Obama eschewed.