OBAMA MAY HAVE DONE ISRAEL
AND NETANYAHU A FAVOR
- By Caroline B. Glick
. Apr 2/10
There is an element of
irony in the current crisis of relations between the Obama administration
and Israel. On the one hand, although US President Barack Obama and his
advisors deny there is anything wrong with US-Israel relations today, it is
easy to understand why no one believes them.
On the other hand on most
issues, there is substantive continuity between Obama's Middle East policies
and those his immediate predecessor George W. Bush adopted during his second
term in office. Yet, whereas Israelis viewed Bush as Israel's greatest
friend in the White House, they view Obama as the most anti-Israel US
president ever. This contradiction requires us to consider two issues.
First, why are relations with the US now steeped in crisis? And second,
taking a page out of Obama's White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel's
playbook, how can Israel make sure not to let this crisis go to waste?
The reason relations are so
bad of course is because Obama has opted to attack Israel and its
supporters. In the space of the past ten days alone, Israel has been subject
to three malicious blows courtesy of Obama and his advisors. First, during
his visit to the White House last Tuesday, Obama treated Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu like a two-bit potentate. Rather than respectfully
disagree with the elected leader of a key US ally, Obama walked out in the
middle of their meeting to dine with his family and left the unfed Netanyahu
to meditate on his grave offense of not agreeing to give up Israel's capital
city as a precondition for indirect, US-orchestrated negotiations with an
unelected, unpopular Palestinian leadership that supports terrorism and
denies Israel's right to exist.
