Crimes Against Liberty (53 page)

Obama’s hostility toward Israel continued as his administration reportedly blocked the sale of six AH064D helicopters to Israel while approving twelve for Egypt. This was revealed in a January 2010 Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs report concluding that the Obama administration had refused for the past year to approve any major Israeli weapons requests while approving more than $10 billion in arms sales to Arab League states.
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Caroline Glick had confirmed the administration’s limitations on arms sales to Israel in a June 2009 interview with
National Review Online.
Should the Palestinian army attack Judea and Samaria, said Glick, and the U.S. side with the Arabs against Israel, “Israel will have to move quickly to find other suppliers.”
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“I CONDEMN THE DECISION BY THE GOVERNMENT OF ISRAEL”

As the months ticked by, Obama’s pressure on Israel was unrelenting. Showing its enthusiasm for dictating the most minute aspects of Israeli domestic policy—even in Israel’s own capital city—the State Department in July warned Israel not to permit construction of a 20-apartment building on a piece of privately owned land in Eastern Jerusalem. Netanyahu flatly rejected the demand, saying Israeli sovereignty meant that any Jerusalem resident, whether Jewish or Arab, could choose to live in any part of the city. “Jerusalem,” he said, “is not a settlement.” Another Israeli official called the Obama demand “odd,” saying he’d never heard of a similar demand against an Arab citizen building in Jerusalem.
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Relations between the United States and Israel reached a low—maybe an all-time low—in March 2010, when Israel announced its plan to build 1,600 homes in an Israeli settlement in Eastern Jerusalem—the announcement occurring when Vice President Joe Biden was in Jerusalem for meetings with Prime Minister Netanyahu. After he heard of the announcement, a petulant Biden kept Netanyahu waiting ninety minutes before dinner as the administration contemplated how to respond. They decided to use the harsh word “condemn,” which is rarely used by countries when discussing their own allies. “I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem,” Biden said. “The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel.”
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The relationship continued to deteriorate from there. Biden delivered a speech a few days later in Tel Aviv looking as though he were seeking an approving pat on the head from Obama. After paying lip service to our “unbreakable bond” with Israel, he again scolded Israel over the housing project. By marked contrast, he lauded Palestinian president Abbas and prime minister Fayyad as willing partners for peace and again accused Israel of having “undermined the trust required for productive negotiations.” As Leo Rennert wrote in
American Thinker
, Biden’s slamming Israel while not mentioning “anything about Abbas’s multiple impediments to advancing the peace process makes a mockery of Obama-Biden pledges to hold all sides equally accountable when they get out of line.” If they had, said Rennert, Biden would have condemned “Abbas’s incitement campaign against Israel in Palestinian Authority media, schools and mosques; and Abbas’s retention of clauses in the PLO/Fatah charter that call for the total elimination of the Jewish state. He also might have ‘condemned’ Fayyad for joining Abbas in legitimizing terrorist murderers. Doesn’t such conduct also ‘undermine trust required for productive negotiations?’”
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UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES

Many astute observers, including Rennert, have noted that Obama’s bias toward the Palestinians and against the Israelis has been counterproductive to his stated goal of peace. By highlighting and magnifying any and all alleged Israeli infractions and wholly ignoring those of the Palestinians, Obama left the Palestinians with no incentive for cooperating toward peace, effectively encouraging them to remain intransigent and allow Obama to do their negotiating for them. Although Obama’s strategy has proven counterproductive, we can’t expect anything else from him, for that’s Obama’s typical MO: he must have his way, and he will bully anyone that gets in his way, including our longest and most loyal Middle East ally.

Even the reliably pro-Palestinian
New York Times
chided the “rare and decidedly undiplomatic language” with which Obama and Biden condemned Israel’s housing policies, though it said the administration was “understandably furious.” The
Times
acknowledged “Obama seriously miscalculated last year” in demanding the complete halt of all new settlements, and faulted Obama and Mitchell for failing to extract any concessions from Arab leaders in exchange for Obama’s demanded Israeli settlement freeze.
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For all Obama’s posturing about bringing a new era of diplomatic relations, he has single-handedly made a royal mess of our relationship with Israel—and for nothing. The peace process was, if anything, set back by his antics. Israel’s ambassador to the United States Michael Orin said ties between Israel and the United States were the worst they’d been since 1975. But Obama was unrepentant, demanding a monopoly on the claim to being offended. His aide David Axelrod reiterated that Israel’s housing announcement was an “affront” and an “insult” to the United States.
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ISRAEL: A BIPARTISAN CAUSE NO MORE

Caroline Glick argued that “bipartisan support for Israel has been one of the greatest casualties of U.S. President Barack Obama’s assault on the Jewish state.” Today, said Glick, Republican support for Israel is at an all-time high, but it is a minority position among Democrats. She cited evidence demonstrating a remarkable change in the Democratic attitude pre- and post-Obama. Eleven days before Obama’s inauguration, the House passed Resolution 34, which sided with Israel against Hamas during Operation Cast Lead—the Israeli offensive to stop Hamas from firing rockets into Israel. Of the 390 yea votes, five nays, and thirty-seven abstentions, Democrats cast four nays and twenty-nine abstentions. In November 2009, Congress passed a resolution urging Obama to disregard a report that falsely accused Israel of committing war crimes during Cast Lead. There were 344 yea votes. Of the thirty-six nay votes, thirty-three were Democrats, and forty-four of the fifty-two abstentions were from Democrats.

In February 2010, fifty-four congressmen—all Democrats—sent Obama a letter encouraging him to pressure Israel to open the borders of Hamas-ruled Gaza and also accusing Israel of engaging in collective punishment. Moreover, when Obama was berating Israel over the Jerusalem construction issue, 327 congressmen signed a letter to Secretary of State Clinton demanding the administration quit publicly attacking Israel. Of the 102 refusing to sign the appeal, ninety-four were Democrats. Glick concluded that the numbers point to a 13-point decline in the number of congressmen supporting Israel, with the entire decrease coming from the Democratic side. Meanwhile, the number of Democratic congressmen willing to attack Israel has tripled. Even the pro-Israel initiatives the other Democrats do support are “less meaningful than those they supported before Obama entered office.”
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BACKLASH

Eventually, Obama’s mistreatment of Israel began to backfire, as there is just so much good will a fallen messiah can squander. Conservative and even some liberal commentators criticized Obama’s dogmatic position against Israeli settlements. The left-leaning
Washington Post
, while also critical of Netanyahu, said that by insisting on “a total construction ban” in the settlements, the administration risked “bogging itself down in a major dispute with its ally, while giving Arab governments and Palestinians a ready excuse not to make their own concessions.”
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Reminding Obama that he has always insisted the United States not “dictate” to other countries (as he alleged his predecessor did), columnist Charles Krauthammer noted he was doing just that with Israel, especially in demanding it stop the settlements. No “natural growth,” wrote Krauthammer, meant “strangling to death the thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line ... no babies. Or if you have babies, no housing for them—not even
within
the existing town boundaries. Which means for every child born, someone has to move out. No community can survive like that.” All that would be required for both Jews and Arabs to stay in their existing homes, noted Krauthammer, is for the 1949 armistice line to be “shifted slightly into the Palestinian side to capture the major close-in Jewish settlements” and “then shifted into Israeli territory to capture Israeli land to give to the Palestinians.”

This was agreed to by both Democratic and Republican administrations for the past decade, said Krauthammer, and agreed to in writing by Israel and the United States in 2004 and endorsed by a congressional resolution. Yet Obama wouldn’t even promise to honor the agreement when he is constantly berating politicians for not living up to their commitments. Krauthammer also criticized Obama’s Cairo speech for stating that the Palestinian people’s “situation” is “intolerable.” Yes, but it is not intolerable because of Israel, implied Krauthammer, but because of “60 years of Palestinian leadership that gave its people corruption, tyranny, religious intolerance and forced militarization; leadership that for three generations rejected every offer of independence and dignity, choosing destitution and despair rather than accept any settlement not accompanied by the extinction of Israel.”
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The American Jewish Committee also spoke up, urging the administration to halt its public denunciations of the Israeli government and return to using language befitting close allies. It wasn’t just Obama’s demands that were distasteful, the AJC noted, but that he was making such a public spectacle of the issue and attempting to humiliate Israel.

The AJC said, “Ideally, differences with allies, which do occur even between the closest of friends, should be discussed and resolved in private. We urge the White House to reconsider its latest, repeated verbal assaults on the Israeli government. It is not beneficial to pummel Israel with language that has rarely been used in U.S. foreign policy. And it may, however unintentionally, send the wrong signal to Israel’s adversaries in the region, further complicating an already complex landscape.”
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Obama’s betrayal of Israel also earned a stunning denunciation from Democratic former New York City mayor Ed Koch, who wrote,

I weep as I witness outrageous verbal attacks on Israel. What makes these verbal assaults and distortions all the more painful is that they are being orchestrated by President Obama. ... I weep today because my president, Barack Obama, in a few weeks has changed the relationship between the U.S. and Israel from that of closest of allies to one in which there is an absence of trust on both sides. The contrast between how the president and his administration deals with Israel and how it has decided to deal with the Karzai administration in Afghanistan is striking.

According to Koch, Obama treats the “corrupt and opiate producing state” with complete respect but, “on the other hand, our closest ally—the one with the special relationship with the U.S., has been demeaned and slandered, held responsible by the administration for our problems in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.” Koch said he supposed Obama’s plan was to “weaken the resolve” of Israel to make it easier to impose on it a peace plan that will ultimately leave “Israel’s needs for security and defensible borders in the lurch.” Koch concluded by expressing his “shock” at “the lack of outrage on the part of Israel’s most ardent supporters,” including “members of Congress in both the House and Senate” who “have made pitifully weak statements against Obama’s mistreatment of Israel, if they made any at all.”
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In another op-ed, Koch called out by name New York Democratic senator Chuck Schumer, a pro-Israel stalwart who had kept noticeably quiet about Obama’s Israel policies. Koch wrote, “President Obama’s abysmal attitude toward the State of Israel and his humiliating treatment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is shocking.... I have not heard or read statements criticizing the president by New York Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand or many other supporters of Israel for his blatantly hostile attitude toward Israel and his discourtesy displayed at the White House” as well as his berating and “degrading” attitude toward Netanyahu. “It is one thing to disagree with certain policies of the Israeli government,” wrote Koch. “It is quite another to treat Israel and its prime minister as pariahs, which only emboldens Israel’s enemies and makes the prospect of peace even more remote.”
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Schumer may have been keeping silent out of loyalty to Obama, but he eventually reached his breaking point. He joined with a majority of members of the House and Senate in urging Obama to keep his disagreements with Israel private.
Politico
, however, reported that his tone was “dramatically” sharper on a radio talk show where he called the White House stance “counter-productive,” and said he had threatened to “blast” the administration if the State Department did not refrain from further “terrible” tough talk toward Netanyahu. Schumer rightly noted that “Palestinians don’t really believe in a state of Israel.”
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