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| He respects this Rasha more than he does the PM of Israel |
But it is now quite apparent that instead of being the statesman a President of the United States should be, he turns out to be a vindictive man whose hatred for the current Prime Minister of Israel has all but consumed him. He is behaving like a vindictive child - out for revenge. It isn't even subtle anymore. He no longer hides his hatred of the man. It is visceral.
I used to give him the benefit of the doubt when he spoke about the differences not being personal. Just differences of opinion about policy with respect to achieving the same goals. But now I see him and his administration as a bunch of babies ganging up on someone they don't like. And that is dangerous for the people of Israel. Here is what the Wall Street Journal has to say about this. And I agree with them completely.
You’ll have to forgive President Obama. The leader
of the free world is still having difficulty accepting that the Israeli people
get to choose their own prime minister, never mind his preferences.
The latest White House tantrum in the wake of Benjamin
Netanyahu’s re-election last week took the form of a speech delivered Monday by
Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, in which he declared that “an
occupation that has lasted for almost 50 years must end.”
When a chief of staff speaks in public, especially as the
keynote speaker at a scheduled event, the President has signed off. In this
case the audience was also carefully chosen: the annual conference of J Street,
a left-leaning Jewish lobbying group that has never met an Israeli concession
it didn’t like. Which makes it all the more distressing that Mr. McDonough
would talk about Israel in language usually associated with Palestinian terror
groups.
Mr. McDonough’s remarks come amid other expressions of
presidential pique—including last week’s unprecedented threat that Mr.
Netanyahu’s re-election may mean an end to U.S. backing for Israel at the
United Nations, and this week’s report in the Journal that the Israelis have
been spying on the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks. (Israel denies it, and we don’t
condone such spying, but the U.S. also shouldn’t be keeping its allies and
Congress in the dark.) Not to mention the more or less constant snubs and
insults directed at the Israeli prime minister by unnamed Obama officials, with
one calling him a “coward.”
Mr. Obama was counting on Mr. Netanyahu to be defeated in
last week’s election, and the President did what he could to help that defeat
along. But Mr. Obama’s overt hostility backfired. In the normal course of
things, this would be the time for the White House to soften the rhetoric and
seek to restore relationships.
Instead, the President and his team seem out for revenge. So
while Mr. Netanyahu has clarified his comment about his opposition to a
Palestinian state (he says he supports a two-state solution but now is not the
time) and apologized to Arab Israelis for his remarks about their votes during
the waning hours of the election, the President and his team have been
escalating.
Perhaps this is a sign that the nuclear negotiations with
Iran aren’t going as well as the President had planned, notwithstanding his
willingness to let Iran preserve much of its nuclear infrastructure. So
desperate is the U.S. for an Iran deal, the French look like hard-liners,
hardly a consoling thought.
But these latest anti-Israel conniptions from the White
House could well mean something else. Namely, that President Obama believes
what he and his team are saying: that the Israelis are unjust occupiers, an
obstacle to peace in the region and no longer worthy of the full support they
have historically counted on from Uncle Sam.
Yet even if you believe the main challenge in the region is
getting Israel to cede more territory to the Palestinians, that day won’t
happen until Israelis feel secure. But Israelis can be forgiven for feeling the
opposite with a raging civil war in Syria, Islamic State and an offshoot of al
Qaeda operating near the Golan Heights, Iranian General Qasem Soleimani leading
Shiite militias in Iraq, and a U.S. Administration sounding and acting as if
Iran can be a more constructive partner for peace than Israel.
The main threat to Middle Eastern peace today—even beyond
Islamic State—is the rise of an imperial Iran using its own troops or proxies
effectively to colonize Arab capitals. The prospect of an imperial Iran on the
cusp of becoming a nuclear power has all of America’s traditional Arab friends
in the region now closer to Mr. Netanyahu’s position on the Middle East than to
Mr. Obama’s.
“We cannot simply pretend that those comments were never
made.” These were the words Mr. McDonough used in his speech about Mr.
Netanyahu’s election comments.
But Mr. McDonough’s words might be easily turned around. In
a day when the President’s chief of staff invokes the lexicon of Palestinian
terrorists to describe Israel’s democracy, Americans and the world are left to
wonder whose side the leader of the free world is on.
