President Barack Obama used Israeli television Tuesday night to accelerate his campaign to make Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu look like an illegitimate leader
The President established his credentials for a thorough knowledge and understanding of Israel. Afar all, he said, “When I’ve visited Israel, when I was in Sderot, talking to families who had seen missiles crash through their living rooms; when I was with young people in Jerusalem and talking to them about the possibilities of peace, the reception was incredibly warm.”
He then provided evidence that he knows and understands “the very moral imperatives that led to the founding of Israel — the belief that all of us share a basic humanity and dignity and rights that make it important for us to speak out against anti-Semitism.”
So much for Theodore Herzl and Zionism.
President Obama then went to the heart of his criticism of Netanyahu’s leadership in Israel, but he inadvertently exposed his administration as a wholesale failure without his questioner taking note.
Referring to the dangers of security to Israel, he noted “the incredible tumult and chaos that’s taking place in the Middle East, the hope of the Arab Spring that turned into the disasters of places like Syria, the rise of ISIL, the continuing expressions of anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli settlement [sentiment] in so much of the Arab world, the rockets coming in from Gaza, the buildup of arms by Hezbollah.
And which country and which president of the same country encouraged the Arab Spring without the ability to see beyond tomorrow, because of ignorance of the Middle East? The United States and President Barack Obama.
And which country and which president encouraged Israel to exercise “restraint” and not respond “disproportionately” when Hamas and Hezbollah tried to destroy the country? Same answer.
But the heart of Obama’s creed is “two states,” which he stills dreams is a “solution.” He blamed Prime Minister Netanyahu for “so many conditions” for “two states” “that it is not realistic to think that those conditions would be met any time in the near future.”
His clincher is that since the peace process is a dead duck, Israel is to be blamed and will be deemed illegitimate:
And so the danger here is that Israel as a whole loses credibility.
Already, the international community does not believe that Israel is serious about a two-state solution.
His statements represent a huge collapse of his former promises the United States would not impose conditions on Israel. President Obama always has promised that Israel should be guaranteed security and should remain Jewish, but now he is defining what those terms mean.
Netanyahu’s concerns for security are not Obama’s, and therefore the Prime Minister’s conditions are not “practical.”
The President did not utter one word about the Palestinian Authority, not about Mahmoud Abbas’ corrupt regime that he heads seven years after his term of office has expired, and not about Abbas’ refusal to talk with Israel except on his own condition of “all or nothing.”
President Obama used to criticize the Palestinian Authority for ditching the Oslo Accords and going to the United Nations for recognition, but he indicated in the interview last night that he might tacitly support the move.
Obama said:
But the practical consequence that I refer to — let’s be very specific — if there are additional resolutions introduced in the United Nations, up until this point, we have pushed away against European efforts, for example, or other efforts because we’ve said, the only way this gets resolved is if the two parties work together….
Iin fact, there’s no prospect of an actual peace process, if nobody believes there’s a peace process, then it becomes more difficult to argue with those who are concerned about settlement construction, those who are concerned about the current situation– it’s more difficult for me to say to them, be patient and wait because we have a process here — because all they need to do is to point to the statements that have been made saying there is no process.
But Obama says Israel has his back.