by Caroline Glick
Why
is US President Barack Obama coming to Israel today? In 2008, then
president George W. Bush came to celebrate Israel's 60th Independence
Day, and to reject Israeli requests for assistance in destroying Iran's
nuclear installations.
In 1996, then-president
Bill Clinton came to Israel to help then-prime minister Shimon Peres's
electoral campaign against Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu.
It
is possible that Obama is coming here in order to build up pro-Israel
bonafides. But why would he bother? Obama won his reelection bid with
the support of the overwhelming majority of American Jews. Their support
vindicated his hostility toward Israel in his first term. He has
nothing to prove.
It is worth comparing Obama's
visit to Israel at the start of his second term of office, with his
visit to Cairo at the outset of his first term in office.
Ahead
of that trip, the new administration promised that the visit, and
particularly Obama's "Address to the Muslim World," would serve as a
starting point for a new US policy in the Middle East. And Obama lived
up to expectations.
In speaking to the "Muslim
World," Obama signaled that the US now supported pan-Islamists at the
expense of US allies and Arab nationalist leaders, first and foremost
then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Moreover, in castigating Israel
for its so-called "settlements"; channeling Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad by intimating that Israel exists because of the Holocaust;
and failing to travel from Cairo to Jerusalem, preferring instead to
visit a Nazi death camp in Germany, Obama signaled that he was
downgrading US ties with the Jewish state.
In
sharp contrast to the high expectations the Obama White House cultivated
in pre-Cairo visit statements and leaks, Obama and his advisers have
downplayed the importance of his visit to Israel, signaling there will
be no significant changes in Obama's policies toward Israel or the wider
Middle East.
For instance, in his interview
with Israel television's Channel 2 last week, on issue after issue,
Obama made clear that there will be no departure from his first term's
policies. He will continue to speak firmly and do nothing to prevent
Iran from developing the means to produce nuclear weapons.
He
will not release convicted Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard from federal
prison despite the fact that Pollard's life sentence, and the 28 years
he has already served in prison are grossly disproportionate to all
sentences passed on and served by offenders who committed similar
crimes.
As for the Palestinians, Obama repeated
his fierce opposition to Jewish communities beyond the 1949 armistice
lines, and his insistence that Israel must get over its justified fears
regarding Palestinian intentions and withdraw from Judea and Samaria,
for its own good.
Given that all of these are
positions he has held throughout his presidency, the mystery surrounding
his decision to come to Israel only grows. He didn't need to come to
Israel to rehash policies we already know.
Much
of the coverage of Obama's trip has focused on symbolism. For instance,
the administration decided to boycott Ariel University by not inviting
its students to attend Obama's speech to students from all other
universities that is set to take place on Thursday in Jerusalem. In
boycotting Ariel, Obama's behavior is substantively the same as that of
Britain's Association of University Teachers. In 2005 that body voted to
boycott University of Haifa and Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. But
while the AUT's action was universally condemned, Obama's decision to
bar Israelis whose university is located in a city with 20,000 residents
just because their school is located beyond the 1949 armistice lines
has generated little attention.
Then again,
seeing as Obama's snub of Ariel University is in keeping with the White
House's general war with anyone who disputes its view that Judea and
Samaria are Arab lands, the lack of outrage at his outrageous behavior
makes sense. It doesn't represent a departure from his positions in his
first term.
The only revealing aspect of
Obama's itinerary is his decision to on the one hand bypass Israel's
elected representatives by spurning the invitation to speak before the
Knesset; and on the other hand to address a handpicked audience of
university students - an audience grossly overpopulated by unelectable,
radical leftists.
In the past, US presidents
have spoken before audiences of Israeli leftists in order to elevate and
empower the political Left against the Right. But this is the first
time that a US president has spurned not only the elected Right, but
elected leftist politicians as well, by failing to speak to the Knesset,
while actively courting the unelectable radical Left through his talk
to a university audience.
Clinton constantly
embraced the Israeli Left while spurning the Right - famously refusing
to meet with then prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 1997 while both
leaders' jets were parked on the same tarmac at Los Angeles
International Airport.
Clinton's assiduous
courtship of Israel's Left enabled him to portray himself as a true
friend of Israel, even as he openly sought to undermine and overthrow
the elected government of the country.
But
Clinton always favored leftist politicians - Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak
- over rightist politicians. He did not spurn leftist politicians in
favor of even more radical unelectable leftists.
So
what does Obama seek to achieve with this novel practice? Clearly he is
not attempting to use the opportunity of addressing this audience to
express contrition for his first term's policies. In his interview with
Channel 2, Obama spoke of the instability on Israel's borders - but
never mentioned the key role he played in overthrowing Mubarak and
empowering the Muslim Brotherhood, thus emptying of meaning Israel's
peace treaty with the most populous Arab state.
He
never mentioned that his feckless handling of Syria's civil war ensured
that the moderate opposition forces would be eclipsed by radical
Islamists affiliated with al-Qaida, as has happened, or expressed
concern that al-Qaida forces are now deployed along Syria's border with
Israel, and that there is a real and rising danger that Syria's arsenals
of chemical and biological weapons, as well as its ballistic missiles,
will fall into their hands. Indeed, Tuesday it was reported that the
al-Qaida infiltrated opposition attacked regime forces with chemical
weapons.
Obama will not use his speech before
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's most outspoken critics to express
remorse over the hostility with which he treated Israel's leader for the
past four years. He will not admit that his decision to coerce Israel
into suspending Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria in his first
term gave the PLO justification for refusing to meet with or negotiate
with the Israeli government.
So since he
doesn't think he's done anything wrong, and he intends to continue the
same policies in his second term, why did he decide to come to Israel?
And why is he addressing, and so seeking to empower the radical,
unelectable Left? Obama's speech in Cairo to the Muslim world was held
at the Islamist Al-Azhar Univerity. By speaking at Al-Azhar, Obama
weakened Mubarak in three different ways. First, Al-Azhar's faculty
members regularly issue religious rulings calling for the murder of
non-Muslims, prohibiting the practice of Judaism, and facilitating the
victimization of women. In stating these views, Al-Azhar's leadership
has demonstrated that their world view and values are far less amenable
to American strategic interests and moral values than Mubarak's world
view was. By speaking at Al-Azhar, Obama signaled that he would reward
the anti-American Islamists at the expense of the pro-American Arab
nationalists.
Second, in contempt of Mubarak's
explicit wishes, Obama insisted on inviting members of the Muslim
Brotherhood to attend his speech. In acting as he did, Obama signaled
that under his leadership, the US was abandoning its support for Mubarak
and transferring its sympathies to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Finally,
by addressing his remarks to the Muslim nation, Obama was perceived as
openly rejecting Egyptian nationalism, and indeed the concept of unique
national identities among the various Arab states. In so doing, Obama
undercut the legitimacy of the Egyptian regime while legitimizing the
pan- Islamic Muslim Brotherhood which rejects nationalism in favor of a
call for the establishment of a global caliphate.
As
subsequent events showed, the conditions for the Egyptian revolution
that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power were prepared during
Obama's speech at al-Azhar.
It is possible that
in addressing the unelected radical Left in Jerusalem, Obama seeks to
undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli government. But if that is the
plan, then it would bespeak an extraordinary contempt and
underestimation of Israeli democracy. Such a plan would not play out the
same way his Egyptian speech did.
There are
two possible policies Obama would want to empower Israel's radical,
unelectable Left in order to advance. First, he could be strengthening
these forces to help them pressure the government to make concessions to
the Palestinians in order to convince the Palestinian Authority to
renew negotiations and accept an Israeli peace offer.
While
Obama indicated in his interview with Channel 2 that this is his goal,
it is absurd to believe it. Obama knows there is no chance that the
Palestinians will accept a deal from Israel. PA chief Mahmoud Abbas and
his predecessor Yasser Arafat both rejected Israeli peace offers made by
far more radical Israeli governments than the new Netanyahu government.
Moreover, the Palestinians refused to meet with Israeli negotiators
while Mubarak was still in power. With the Muslim Brotherhood now in
charge in Cairo, there is absolutely no way they will agree to negotiate
- let alone accept a deal.
This leaves another
glaring possibility. Through the radical Left, Obama may intend to
foment a pressure campaign to force the government to withdraw
unilaterally from all or parts of Judea and Samaria, as Israel withdrew
from the Gaza Strip in 2005. If this is Obama's actual policy goal, it
would represent a complete Europeanization of US policy toward Israel.
It was the EU that funded radical leftist groups that pushed for
Israel's unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005.
And in the past week, a number of commentators have spoken and written in favor of such a plan.
The
is truth we don't know why Obama is coming to Israel. The Obama
administration has not indicated where its Israel policy is going. And
Obama's Republican opposition is in complete disarray on foreign policy
and not in any position to push him to reveal his plans.
What
we can say with certainty is that the administration that supports the
"democratically elected" Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and did so much to
clear all obstacles to its election, is snubbing the democratically
elected Israeli government, and indeed, Israel's elected officials in
general. Obama's transmission of this message in the lead-up to this
visit, through symbols and action alike does not bode well for Israel's
relations with the US in the coming four years.
Caroline Glick
Source: http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2013/03/obamas-mysterious-visit.php
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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