MELANIE PHILLIPS; OBAMA PICKS A GREAT TIME TO THROW ISRAEL UNDER THE BUS
Obama picks a great time to throw Israel under the bus
Sunday, 14th March 2010
In the US, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is shocked – shocked! – by the way the Obama administration has picked a fight with Israel over its plans to build more houses in east Jerusalem.
‘We are shocked and stunned at the administration’s tone and public dressing-down of Israel on the issue of future building in Jerusalem,’ ADL’s National Director Abe Foxman said in a statement… ‘US Vice President Joe Biden accepted the prime minister’s apology,’ Foxman said. “Therefore, to raise the issue again in this way is a gross overreaction to a point of policy difference among friends.
‘We cannot remember an instance when such harsh language was directed at a friend and ally of the United States,’ the statement continued. ‘One can only wonder how far the US is prepared to go in distancing itself from Israel in order to placate the Palestinians in the hope they see it is in their interest to return to the negotiating table.’
All the way, Abe, all the way. And just when Iran is in the verge of getting the nuclear bomb with which it is threatening to destroy Israel and America, too. Great time to throw Israel under the bus, huh?
And maybe that’s the real point. Maybe this is even worse yet than the shocked Abe Foxman thinks. Because it’s not just that Israel apologised for a diplomatic blunder. The key point is that there was actually nothing to apologise for, since it was explicitly agreed between America and Israel that, as a concession to kick-start peace negotiations, Israel would stop building in the West Bank although it would continue to build in east Jerusalem. Indeed, Hillary Clinton herself, no less, praised Israel for this agreement.
America has thus effectively unilaterally repudiated that agreement. In other words, this whole uproar has been artificially manufactured by America to produce a crisis with Israel – while refusing, astonishingly, to condemn the Palestinians at all for their refusal to enter peace talks, their honouring of one of their worst terrorists by naming a square after her, their violent attacks on the Temple Mount in recent days, and so on. As Noah Pollak speculates at Commentary, the most troubling conclusion is that America has provoked this crisis in order to stop Israel from attacking Iran because America itself will not stop Iran from getting the bomb:
I think it’s clear by now that Obama does not wish to make a confrontation with Iran part of his presidency. As I’ve written before, this means that Israeli security fears become a major problem for the administration: surely Obama realizes that one of his most important jobs is therefore preventing the Israelis from attacking.
How does one do that? Typically, the way the United States has alleviated Israeli security concerns is by affirming the closeness of the strategic relationship. But doing this on the Iran issue doesn’t work, for two reasons: 1) it would undermine Obama’s mission to the Arab world, which requires pushing the Israelis away; 2) and in the context of a nuclear Iran, it doesn’t really matter how close the U.S. and Israel are. The Israeli fear of the Iranian bomb is that one nuke would destroy the Jewish state, and that even in the absence of such a strike, Israel would be confronted with an emboldened Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas axis, more wars, constant (and credible) threats of annihilation, and over time would experience the psychological, demographic, and economic attrition of the country.
When we follow this logic chain to its conclusion, we find that Obama’s only option for restraining an Israeli attack is the one that we’re seeing unfold before our eyes: a U.S. effort to methodically weaken the relationship; provoke crises; consume the Netanyahu government with managing this deterioration; and most important, create an ambiance of unpredictability by making the Israelis fear that an attack on Iran would not just be met with American disapproval but also a veto and perhaps active resistance.
Well, folks, you read this all here a long time ago.
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