Must read: The last word on the Biden-settlement fiasco and what Obama and company are really about
Missing him?
Having manufactured a crisis out of a diplomatic gaffe, the Obama administration, Krauthammer says, then attempted to shift the blame for the overall conflict onto Israel:
“Israel? Israelis have been looking for peace – literally dying for peace – since 1947, when they accepted the UN partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. (The Arabs refused and declared war. They lost.) Israel made peace offers in 1967, 1978 and in the 1993 Oslo peace accords that Yasser Arafat tore up seven years later to launch a terror war that killed a thousand Israelis. Why, Clinton’s own husband testifies to the remarkably courageous and visionary peace offer made in his presence by Ehud Barak (now Netanyahu’s defense minister) at the 2000 Camp David talks.
“Arafat rejected it. In 2008, prime minister Ehud Olmert offered equally generous terms to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Refused again.”
And what about Netanyahu?
“Under Obama,” the author says, “Netanyahu agreed to commit his center-right coalition to acceptance of a Palestinian state; took down dozens of anti-terror roadblocks and checkpoints to ease life for the Palestinians; assisted West Bank economic development to the point where its GDP is growing at an astounding 7 percent a year; and agreed to the West Bank construction moratorium, a concession that Clinton herself called “unprecedented.”
“What reciprocal gesture, let alone concession, has Abbas made during the Obama presidency? Not one.”
That pretty much sums things up, though you wouldn’t know it if you took your news from the BBC or CNN. And the tragedy here is, of course, that it is that UN/BBC/CNN world view that Obama has made his own. Why?
“Because,” Krauthammer asks, “Obama likes appeasing enemies while beating up on allies – therefore Israel shouldn’t take it personally (according to Robert Kagan)? Because Obama wants to bring down the current Israeli coalition government (according to Jeffrey Goldberg)?
“Or is it because Obama fancies himself the historic redeemer whose irresistible charisma will heal the breach between Christianity and Islam or, if you will, between the post-imperial West and the Muslim world – and has little patience for this pesky Jewish state that brazenly insists on its right to exist, and even more brazenly on permitting Jews to live in its own ancient, historical and now present capital? Who knows?”
Who knows indeed. But I think the sentiments expressed in that last thought really rather hit the nail on the head.
Tags: Israel
March 22nd, 2010 at 2:17 pm
President Obama’a hostility, historical short-sightedness and general ignorance is bad enough, but the Europeans’ anti-Jew(-state) animus is even worse. The 27 EU FMs have just issued a declaration that the continued “settlement-construction” is completely unaccaptable. So that’s it. I just hope that their impotence, irrelevance and well-deserved general decline will only grow from here. The period of 2000 years of diktats to the Jews by anti-Semites was put a point to in 1948.05.14. There’s absolutely no good reason for this to change now.
March 22nd, 2010 at 2:56 pm
4 short points:
1. Krauthammer is right and apt on facts.
2. The so-called EU is not in a poistion to “ask for” anything. (This is the phrase they used in their official document.)
3. Caroline Glick was basically right when she wrote that the “EU has no foreign policy. It only knows how to sound off authoritatively.”
4. Netanyahu was to be stopping for a brief visit in Brussels from Washington the way back. This was cancelled because he stays one more day in the American capital. I assume Brussels (and whom and what it represents) is a flyover territory now… (Only with respect to Israel or the global int’l arena as well?)
March 22nd, 2010 at 8:09 pm
I have found in life that most things are more or less what they appear to be. There is no subtle strategic quintuple reverse super secret handshake nonsense that Obama has going on here. He is bad for Israel because he wants them to fail. Period. If Israel was reduced to its 1948 status Obama would openly cheer. He would feel that his Nobel was finally earned.
March 24th, 2010 at 4:19 pm
So you all think Obama won’t do a thing should Israel suffer a nuclear attack? Don’t bet on it. He will take action. He’ll cheer it on! Same as he would were the USA attacked.
Despite any and all Obama attacks against Israel the Jew will pick himself up , dust himself off and continue on in the face of history. No nation, people or dictator have succeeded in destroying the Jew, though an awful lot have tried. Yes, the Jew has paid for his very existence with human sacrifice of kith and kin , a sacrifice not even Abraham, father of the Jews, was forced to endure. Jewish destiny is above the basic laws of nature. No other peoples have suffered as the Jew and survived.
Does Obama think he’ll succeed where others have failed? Probably. Will he succeed? He can Hope and Change. But, as they say: “Ain’t happenin’, ain’t never gonna happen”.
March 27th, 2010 at 8:57 pm
Krautheimer’s excellent piece appears to come from one side of a mirror, The other is one that sounds a clear warning bell and comes from behind the mirror, and is a complimentary article by Caroline Glick piece in the JP. It’s worth ( I think,and thanks to Joshua for recommending it on a previous post ) posting her view of what 5 possible motives (again not mutually exclusive) underlie Obama’s move, and in the case of Obama’s failure to deal with Iran effectively,outline’s Obama’s potentially deadly gaffe at the same time. She says:
“There are five explanations for Obama’s behavior. And they are not mutually exclusive.
First, Obama’s assault on Israel is likely related to the failure of his Iran policy. Over the past week, senior administration officials including Gen. David Petraeus have made viciously defamatory attacks on Israel, insinuating that the construction of homes for Jews in Jerusalem is a primary cause for bad behavior on the part of Iran and its proxies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria and Gaza. By this line of thinking, if Israel simply returned to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, Iran’s centrifuges would stop spinning, and Syria, al-Qaida, the Taliban, Hizbullah, Hamas and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards would all beat their swords into plowshares.
Second, even more important than its usefulness as a tool to divert the public’s attention away from the failure of his Iran policy, Obama’s assault against Israel may well be aimed at maintaining that failed policy. Specifically, he may be attacking Israel in a bid to coerce Netanyahu into agreeing to give Obama veto power over any Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear installations. That is, the anti-Israel campaign may be a means to force Israel to stand by as Obama allows Iran to build a nuclear arsenal.
For the past several months, an endless line of senior administration officials have descended on Jerusalem with the expressed aim of convincing Netanyahu to relinquish Israel’s right to independently strike Iran’s nuclear installations. All of these officials have returned to Washington empty-handed. Perhaps Obama has decided that since quiet pressure has failed to cow Netanyahu, it is time to launch a frontal attack against him.
This brings us to the third explanation for why Obama has decided to go to war with the democratically elected Israeli government. Obama’s advisers told friendly reporters that Obama wants to bring down Netanyahu’s government. By making demands Netanyahu and his coalition partners cannot accept, Obama hopes to either bring down the government and replace Netanyahu and Likud with the far-leftist Tzipi Livni and Kadima, or force Israel Beiteinu and Shas to bolt the coalition and compel Netanyahu to accept Livni as a co-prime minister. Livni, of course, won Obama’s heart when in 2008 she opted for an election rather than accept Shas’s demand that she protect the unity of Jerusalem.
The fourth explanation for Obama’s behavior is that he seeks to realign US foreign policy away from Israel. Obama’s constant attempts to cultivate relations with Iran’s unelected president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ahmadinejad’s Arab lackey Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and Turkey’s Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan make clear that he views developing US relations with these anti-American regimes as a primary foreign policy goal.
Given that all of these leaders have demanded that in exchange for better relations Obama abandon Israel as a US ally, and in light of the professed anti-Israel positions of several of his senior foreign policy advisers, it is possible that Obama is seeking to downgrade US relations with Israel. His consistent castigation of Israel as obstructionist and defiant has led some surveys to claim that over the past year US popular support for Israel has dropped from 77 to 58 percent.
The more Obama fills newspaper headlines with allegations that Israel is responsible for everything from US combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan to Iran’s nuclear program, the lower those numbers can be expected to fall. And the more popular American support for Israel falls, the easier it will be for Obama to engineer an open breach with the Jewish state.
The final explanation for Obama’s behavior is that he is using his manufactured crisis to justify adopting an overtly anti-Israel position vis-à-vis the Palestinians. On Thursday, The New York Times reported that administration officials are considering having Obama present his own “peace plan.” Given the administration’s denial of Israel’s right to Jerusalem, an “Obama plan,” would doubtless require Israel to withdraw to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and expel some 700,000 Jews from their homes.
Likewise, the crisis Obama has manufactured with Israel could pave the way for him to recognize a Palestinian state if the Palestinians follow through on their threat to unilaterally declare statehood next year regardless of the status of negotiations with Israel. Such a US move could in turn lead to the deployment of US forces in Judea and Samaria to “protect” the unilaterally declared Palestinian state from Israel.”
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=171364
March 29th, 2010 at 11:12 pm
another Joshua,
It now seems that Gen Petraeus made no such defamatory comments about Israel.
Mailman
March 31st, 2010 at 12:09 am
Thanks Mailman for making the point.
With Sarkozy’s recent support of Obama’s “initiative” for sanctions against Iran and at the same time also adding his criticism of Israel’s settlements, I am wondering whether we could speculate yet one more reason for a bit of Israel bashing by Obama , and now Sarkozy: to garner support from other middle eastern countries to support sanctions against Iran, who otherwise would not want to be seen on the same side as Israel and so to do this the US has deliberately created a pretext for a rift ? (Or may be what I say is a bit far fetched and that the cooling off of relations with Israel is genuine?)
April 6th, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Israelis have been looking for peace – literally dying for peace – since 1947, when they accepted the UN partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. (The Arabs refused and declared war. They lost.)
You don’t seem to be aware Mr Shepherd that resolution 181 held only recommendation status. It held absolutely no enforcement weight whatsoever. The arabs were perfectly entitled both legally and morally to refuse it. The laughable attempt by people such as yourself to paint the zionists acceptance of 181 (even though they were on record as seeing it merely as a stepping stone to Eretz Yisrael) as being ‘noble’ is beyond contempt. Tell me whats noble about accpetaing ebing given a large swathe of land which doesn’t belong to you, against the wishes of the indigenous people of that land? Also you declare that the Arabs attacked. Actually by unilaterally declaring statehood, the zionists declared war, because they had absolutley no right to do so. The surrounding arab nations came at the request and to the aid of the people within whom sovereignty resided in Palestine, namely the Palestinians. Thier well-being and sovereignty were under threat. Finally Mr Shepherd, a question. If you think it was okay for Israel to unilaterally declare statehood (even though they had no right - and I suggest you read the likes of Hans Kelsen, himself a famous jewish jurist of the period, on this point), will you accept the Palestinians uniltaterally declaring statehood encompassing all of the WB and Gaza? Bearing in mind that that is actually aprrox 24% less than what 181 envisaged giving them. A simple yes or no will suffice.
Robin Shepherd says: No.
April 17th, 2010 at 3:43 am
RepublicanStones, that is a pretty heroic reinterpretation of history. As a matter of curiosity, what do you think Jordan annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Egypt Gaza if they were simply coming to the aid of the poor innocent Palestinians - who by this point had killed about 1,500 Jews in the war, roughly equivalent to about 7,000 Palestinians or the number of them killed in the last 10 years. Why does Syria insist the land it conquered in 1948 belongs to them?
I look forward to seeing you stating any declaration by the Palestinians is an “act of war” but somehow i suspect that you only have an issue with Israel.