Is it bad to be pro-Likud?

The other day the Jerusalem Post reported on some comments Sen. Obama made (via memeorandum):

“I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, then you’re anti-Israel, and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel,” leading Democratic presidential contender Illinois Senator Barack Obama said Sunday.”If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make progress,” he said.

He also criticized the notion that anyone who asks tough questions about advancing the peace process or tries to secure Israel by anyway other than “just crushing the opposition” is being “soft or anti-Israel.”

(A complete transcript is here.)

Matthew Yglesias is encouraged by the comments:

This is music to my ears and, frankly, very much the attitude that’s Israel’s long-term future requires. Still, in some quarters the man may as well have just festooned himself with swastikas.

Elder of Ziyon disposes of this nonsense efficiently

It is curious that Obama is adopting an apparently anti-Likud stance. Likud, after all, was responsible for Camp David and the surrender of the Sinai to Egypt; and Likud was in power when Gaza was abandoned.Obama’s statement seems even more naive when the latest polls in Israel show Likud handily beating Kadima and Labor. As Shmuel Rosner asks, does this mean that a President Obama would not support a Likud prime minister?

Also, as The American Thinker observes, the word “Likud” has turned into a generalized anti-Israel term by the far left, pretty much their equivalent to “Taliban.” It is hard to read Obama’s comment as anything but influenced by the strong anti-Likud stance of people who clearly are anti-Israel.

As far as Rosner’s question goes, if a hypothetical President Obama is anything like former President Clinton, the answer is “yes.” As this article reminds us:

In the last two months, Mr. Arafat has traveled Europe and the Arab world extensively, from Finland to Bahrain. At his meeting on Tuesday with President Clinton, the second in recent months, it is highly unlikely that the President will promise to recognize a Palestinian state in the future. The Clinton Administration has long insisted that both Israelis and Palestinians refrain from taking any unilateral action on the issues — like statehood — that are supposed to be hammered out in the final status negotiations between them.But Mr. Clinton gives Mr. Arafat a kind of international recognition just by meeting with him — especially given what the Israelis have dubbed the American ”snub diplomacy” toward their Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

(Actually “snub diplomacy” was an American term mentioned in a Washington Post article a year earlier.)

This is how President Clinton acted and it undermined Netanyahu and brought Ehud Barak and the Labor Party to power. Prime Minister Barak was a lot more cooperative with President Clinton and withdrew Israeli troops from Lebanon and continued negotiating with Yasser Arafat, including an attempt to give Arafat nearly everything he wanted at Camp David in July 2000.

We now know that the withdrawal from Lebanon strengthened Hezbollah and led to the eventual war with that terrorist organization. Clinton’s failure to side with Netanyahu and challenge Arafat to comply with signed agreements led to the so-called Aqsa intidfadah.

I know, as Elder of Ziyon observes, that “Likud” is an insult meant to dismiss a political opponent as ideological and impervious to reason. President Clinton worked against the Likud Prime Minister during his presidency and Israel paid a very high price.

If that’s what Sen. Obama advocates by his pro-Likud statement, then I think it’s safe to say that he doesn’t have Israel’s (or frankly, America’s) best interests in mind.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.