by David Horovitz
As Israel turns 67 in the vicious, unstable Middle East, the current US administration has proved a vital ally. But ties could and should have been closer
The United States has long been Israel’s most important ally. It is a partner whose support is central to the capacity of tiny Israel — insignificant demographically, and only nine miles wide at its narrowest point — to survive in the vicious Middle East.
Israel,
for its part, is the sole dependable democratic ally that the United
States has in this part of the world, its 8.3 million people on the
front line of the battle against tyrannical regimes and expansionist
Islamic extremism.
That’s why any daylight in the relationship
between the two countries is deeply disquieting for most Israelis and
many Americans, and a source of encouragement to Israel’s enemies.
The Obama administration has been deeply
supportive of Israel in innumerable ways. It has provided
firm diplomatic backing — even in areas where it disagrees with Israel,
such as over the settlement enterprise. Time and again, the US has voted
with Israel and/or to protect Israel at the United Nations and in the
UN’s various forums, some of them strategically and obsessively hostile
to Israel.
Under Obama, the US has ensured that Israel
preserves its crucial qualitative military edge over enemies and
potential enemies, maintaining military aid even in years of severe
financial crisis. The two countries have worked intimately to develop
cutting edge defensive weapons systems, and even at the height of
domestic US political tension and paralysis, the administration proved
willing and able to ensure further emergency funding for the Iron Dome
rocket defense shield.
US
President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
pose with military personnel next to an Iron Dome battery at Ben Gurion
Airport on March 20, 2013 (photo credit: Avi Ohayon /GPO/ Flash90)
The Obama years have been marked by scientific
and intelligence cooperation. They have seen unprecedented
journeying back and forth by senior politicians, military chiefs,
security experts from both sides, creating relationships of trust and
effective action.
But daylight between the allies — including
publicly aired differences over central issues and policies — has been a
near-constant feature too. Some of it stems from the lousy personal
relationship between Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. More
of it stems from their substantive differences over the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, especially, the appropriate strategy
for keeping Iran from the bomb. At times, ties have descended into
dismal nadirs that shame both sides, with unnamed US officials branding
Netanyahu “chickenshit,” for instance, or Israel’s Defense Minister
Moshe Ya’alon reportedly portraying Secretary of State John Kerry as an
“obsessive, messianic” meddler whose security proposals are not worth
the paper they’re printed on.
Plenty of blame attaches to Netanyahu, who
plainly would much rather have had a Republican (or just about anybody
but Obama, for that matter) in the White House; who clearly thinks the
president doesn’t begin to “get” Iran and the ruthless Middle East; who
refused to freeze settlements in the cause of Kerry’s 2013 peace effort;
and who resorted to some fairly despicable tactics — for which he later
apologized — to ensure his reelection last month.
Israel has no doubt of the Islamic Republic’s determination to cheat, charm and bully its way to a nuclear weapons arsenal
But that still leaves a great deal of blame at the door of Obama and his administration.
As Israel marks its 67th anniversary of
independence, it finds itself threatened by a rearming Hamas in the Gaza
Strip. In southern Lebanon, it faces Hezbollah — an Iranian-backed
terror army with 100,000 missiles. It watches the Syrian civil war
spiral endlessly onward, with President Bashar Assad unpunished for
unleashing chemical weapons against his own people, and with Iran and
Hezbollah now poised just across the border on the Syrian side of the
Golan Heights. It sees Islamic State, a terrorist group nobody had heard
of a couple of years ago, committing sickening acts of barbarism in
Syria and Iraq, and causing alarm in neighboring Jordan. It casts its
eyes south, to Egypt, where Abdel Fattah el-Sissi is battling to
marginalize Islamist terror groups. It monitors Iran’s relentless
military progress, and has no doubt of the Islamic Republic’s
determination to cheat, charm and bully its way to a nuclear weapons
arsenal.
A different American administration could not
have easily quashed all or even any of these threats. But a different
American administration would likely have been more effective in
addressing them, and in working shoulder-to-shoulder with its
only reliable partner in the region.
The Memorial Day ceremony at the Western Wall on April 21, 2015 (Photo credit: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Israel has made it through to its 67th
birthday, but it’s been a relentless struggle — and that struggle shows
few signs of getting easier. The best possible working relationship with
the US administration is central to Israel’s capacity to keep marking
anniversaries as a thriving Jewish state. Daylight in those ties, to put
it brutally, can cost lives; it’s anything but coincidence that Israel
remembers the thousands upon thousands who have fallen in its defense on
the day before it celebrates each anniversary of independence.
Netanyahu keeps telling Obama there’s a better
deal to be done on Iran. I tend to agree. There’s certainly a better
way to conduct US-Israel relations, especially if you believe that Obama
considers himself a friend of Israel.
Here then, in the heartfelt but likely forlorn
hope of a change for the better in this unnecessarily fraught
relationship over the coming year, are an anniversary-appropriate 67
ways in which the president and his mighty administration,
unfortunately, have put daylight between the US and Israel. Sixty-seven
ways they’ve distanced themselves, or haven’t been as much help as they
could and should have been. Some for which Israel also bears some
responsibility. Some relatively minor. Some profoundly troubling.
Sixty-seven disquieting degrees of separation.
1. Obama visited Turkey and Iraq in April 2009, early in his presidency, but not Israel.
2. Visited Saudi Arabia
and Egypt, but not Israel, in June 2009; same trip did include a visit
to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.
3. Failed to highlight the Jewish people’s historic connection to the Land of Israel in landmark outreach speech to Islam at Cairo University, on June 4, 2009.
US President Barack Obama speaks in Cairo on June 4, 2009. (photo credit: screen capture, YouTube)
4. Did come to Israel in March 2013… Has since been twice more to Saudi Arabia.
5. Chose to speak to Israeli
students at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem on that
trip, rather than to the Knesset — in contrast to his 2009 visit to
Turkey, when he addressed parliament and hailed Turkey’s “vibrant secular democracy.”
6. Seems willfully blind to
the perceived religious imperative behind Islamic extremism, notably
including Iran-championed Islamic extremism, and insistently deaf to the
entreaties of those — notably including Israeli leaders — who try to
open his eyes.
7. Horrified Israel by giving initial backing in 2010 for
Egypt’s relentless efforts to win global support for a Middle East free
of weapons of mass destruction, by which Cairo has long sought to
impose international scrutiny upon, and ultimately the elimination of,
Israel’s reported nuclear capabilities.
8. Candidate Obama told AIPAC in June 2008 that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” Then he backtracked, citing “poor phrasing.”
Vice
President Joseph Biden gestures upon his arrival at Ben Gurion airport,
March 8, 2010. (photo credit: POOL/Yariv Katz Flash90
9. Tasked then-secretary of
state Hillary Clinton with telephoning Netanyahu to berate him for a
planning committee’s approval of new housing in Jerusalem’s Ramat Shlomo
neighborhood, which lies over the pre-1967 Green Line, during Vice
President Joe Biden’s 2010 visit to Israel. Netanyahu had apologized for
the timing of the decision, Biden had accepted the apology, but Clinton
was then dispatched to reopen the dispute. The content of their phone
conversation, including the secretary’s devastating accusation that the
dispute raised questions about Israel’s commitment to its relationship
with the United States, was promptly leaked to the US media.
10. Castigated Netanyahu in a March 2014 interview with Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg
timed for publication precisely as the prime minister was flying in to
meet with him. Warned, in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
that there’ll come a point “where you can’t manage this anymore, and
then you start having to make very difficult choices: Do you resign
yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the West Bank?… Do
you perpetuate, over the course of a decade or two decades, more and
more restrictive policies in terms of Palestinian movement? Do you place
restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s
traditions?” Reasonable questions, indeed, but aired publicly, in a
slap-in-the-face interview when the prime minister is on his way to the
White House?
11. As so often in the Obama
presidency, such criticism of Israel was not matched by a similar public
critique of Palestinian policies — no parallel interview taking Mahmoud
Abbas to task — when the Palestinian Authority president visited the White House two weeks later.
12. The Obama Administration
declared in June 2014 that it would “work with” the new Fatah- and
Hamas-backed Palestinian unity government, even though Hamas made plain
that it had not reformed and remained committed to the destruction of
Israel. The “unity” government has, unsurprisingly, barely functioned.
Weeks after its formation, Israel’s Shin Bet exposed a Hamas plot to unseat Abbas and take over the West Bank.
A
screenshot from a cartoon published on the Facebook page of the Fatah
movement depicting three Jews fleeing as a car driven by a Palestinian
tries to run them over, November 2014.
13. The Obama administration
has failed to highlight and critique relentless incitement against
Israel by Abbas’s mainstream Fatah faction, notably including cartoons published by Fatah on its Facebook page last winter encouraging Palestinians to carry out murderous car attacks against Israelis for the sake of the Temple Mount, at a time when several Israelis were killed in a spate of such attacks.
14. The administration has
also chosen not to make a major issue of Abbas’s dismissal of Jewish
ties to the Temple Mount, including his warning last November
that the Palestinians will not allow Israeli extremists to
“contaminate” the Mount, and that allowing Jewish prayer at the site
would risk a global religious war.
15. In seeking to revive
peace talks in 2013, the administration pressed Israel into releasing
dozens of the most ruthless Palestinian terrorists, including the
orchestrators of murderous bombings. Such actions might be justified at
the culmination of a peace effort, when a full and final resolution of
conflict is agreed, but not as an interim measure in what proved,
unsurprisingly, to be another unsuccessful effort to push for a deal.
PA
President Mahmoud Abbas poses with prisoners released on October 30,
2013 as part of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations (photo credit:
Issam Rimawi/Flash90)
16. Also sought to have
Israel release some of its own citizens — Israeli Arabs involved in
terrorism, whose freedom was sought by Abbas — as part of the same
ill-fated diplomatic effort. The issue of those Israeli Arab security
prisoners was one of the factors behind the collapse of the
Kerry-mediated process in spring 2004.
17. Apparently seeking to
pressure Israel for more flexibility in peace talks, in a joint
interview with Israeli and Palestinian TV stations in November 2013, Kerry warned of a third intifada if his diplomacy failed: “I
mean does Israel want a third Intifada?” he asked. “Israel says, ‘Oh we
feel safe today, we have the wall. We’re not in a day-to-day
conflict’,” said Kerry. “I’ve got news for you. Today’s status quo will
not be tomorrow’s…” Israel’s neighbors, he warned, will “begin to push
in a different way.” Kerry did not balance his criticisms of Israel with
similarly potent criticisms of Palestinian incitement against Israel,
stubbornness in negotiations.
The Obama administration has made no significant effort to tackle terrorism at its roots — at the level where recruits are indoctrinated
18. Three months later, Kerry referred to boycott threats against Israel. “The risks are very high for Israel,” the secretary told a conference in Munich in February 2014. “People are talking about boycott. That will intensify in the case of failure.” The State Department later stressed Kerry himself has always opposed boycotts and was simply describing actions undertaken by others.
19. Then, in April, Kerry told a closed meeting of world leaders that Israel risked becoming “an apartheid state” if it did not make peace soon. He said the next day that he wished he could “rewind the tape.”
20. “Administration officials” — reportedly special envoy Martin Indyk — placed primary blame on Israel, in extensive conversations with Yedioth Ahronoth, for the failure of the 2013-2014 Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
View of the Jewish settlement of Efrat in the West Bank (Photo credit: Hadas Parush/Flash 90)
21. The administration warned in October 2014 that
Israel’s latest settlement plans would “draw condemnation from the
international community, distance Israel from even its closest allies
[and] poison the atmosphere.” At issue were building projects in the
Givat Hamatos neighborhood of Jerusalem, among others. The Obama
administration has consistently and very publicly opposed all building
over the pre-1967 lines, largely eschewing distinctions between
construction inside Jerusalem, inside major settlement blocs that Israel
seeks to retain under a permanent accord, and inside isolated
settlements.
‘It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation, it’s a hell of a pinpoint operation’ — John Kerry, on Israeli strikes in Gaza, unaware that his microphone was live
22. The Obama administration
has made no significant effort to tackle terrorism at its roots — at the
level where recruits are indoctrinated. Preventing new generations and
iterations of Islamist terrorism requires the reform of what young,
impressionable Muslims are taught in school, what they hear in the
mosques, what they watch and read in the media. The United States should
be galvanizing the international community and using every ounce of its
own diplomatic and economic leverage to marginalize extremist
educators, spiritual leaders and media channels, and to encourage those
who teach, preach and broadcast moderation.
23. The administration was
ambivalent, at best, to the fall of a Muslim Brotherhood president in
Egypt, Mohammad Morsi — whose movement is deeply hostile to Israel and
gave birth to Hamas — and his replacement by Ahmad Fattah el-Sissi.
Egyptian
President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi takes his oath of office at the Supreme
Constitutional Court in Cairo, Egypt, June 8, 2014. (photo credit:
AP/MENA)
24. Lack of firm US support for el-Sissi — who has commendably spoken out several times about the imperative for a reform in Islamic thought, warning that Islam is becoming a source of “destruction” and is “making enemies of the whole word” — risks pushing the Egyptian regime into the embrace of Russia.
25. Having vowed that the use
of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria would cross a red line
and carry “enormous consequences,” and with Kerry in August 2013 delivering an impassioned address in
which he confirmed such use and termed it a “moral obscenity” for which
there must be accountability, Obama cancelled plans for a punitive
strike at the last minute. Instead, he accepted a Russian diplomatic
initiative for the dismantling of Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal — an
admirable, non-violent solution if it proves effective, and a troubling
one in terms of the message it sent to Iran regarding the credibility of
American red line and military options.
Syrian President Bashar Assad tours the neighborhoods of Daraya, August 1, 2013. (photo credit: Syrian Presidency/Instagram)
26. The administration has
repeatedly leaked details of alleged Israeli strikes on Syrian weapons
depots, shipments and military targets, prompting everything from
bafflement to fury in Jerusalem. Twice in the summer of 2013, CNN, the
New York Times and other outlets quoted administration officials saying
Israel was behind such strikes, when Israel was staying silent in hopes
of avoiding Syrian retaliation. Those leaks had Israeli officials reportedly scratching their heads.
27. By November — when an Obama administration official reportedly told CNN that
Israeli warplanes had attacked a Syrian base at Latakia, and that the
target was “missiles and related equipment” set for delivery to
Hezbollah in Lebanon — Israel was said to be conveying bitter protests to the White House and complaining that the US leaks endangered national security.
28. The State Department initially refused to co-sponsor a 2014 UNESCO exhibit detailing the Jewish people’s 3,000-year relationship to the land of Israel, citing
the “sensitive juncture in the ongoing Middle East peace process… after
thoughtful consideration with review at the highest levels.” Created by
the Simon Wiesenthal Center, co-organized with UNESCO, and co-sponsored
by Israel, Canada, and Montenegro, the exhibit was postponed at the
last minute due to Arab pressure, renamed (with “Israel” excised from
its title), and adjusted before finally opening six months later, now with US co-sponsorship.
UNESCO’s
Director General Irina Bokova poses with the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s
Rabbi Marvin Hier and the original poster for the exhibit on the Jewish
people’s 3,500-year connection to the land of Israel, in January, 2014.
(photo credit: Courtesy Simon Wiesenthal Center)
29. Obama failed to provide robust support for dissidents whose protests against the Iranian regime were
brutally suppressed during Iran’s 2009 presidential elections.
Initially silent, on June 15, 2009, he said it was “up to Iranians to
make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be,” adding that “we
respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being
the issue inside of Iran.” A week later, he condemned “the threats,
beatings and imprisonments of the last few days.”
30. More recently, Obama
chose not to condition his diplomatic outreach to Iran on the regime
halting its relentless incitement against Israel, including Ayatollah Khamenei’s tweeted 9-point plan for destroying Israel.
Iran’s
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers a speech in Tehran
(photo credit: AP/Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/File)
31. Obama chose not to condition his diplomatic outreach to Iran on the regime halting its Holocaust cartoon competitions.
32. Or its displays of “Death to Israel” banners at military parades.
33. Or its continued orchestration of acts of international terrorism.
34. Or its calls to arm
Palestinians in the West Bank to fight Israel, its support for terrorist
groups in Gaza, its funding and arming of Hezbollah in south Lebanon,
and its growing direct involvement in anti-Israeli violence in Lebanon and Syria.
35. Obama went ahead with the Lausanne talks even as Ayatollah Khamenei was calling “Death to America” and rebuffing his calls for a better future.
36. Obama went ahead with the
Lausanne talks even as an Iranian militia leader, Basij commander
Mohammad Reza Naqdi, was declaring that the destruction of Israel is “nonnegotiable.”
37. In the words of Israel’s
strategic affairs minister, Yuval Steinitz, the US-led world powers
shifted unaccountably from seeking to “dismantle and neutralize” Iran’s
nuclear capabilities, to freezing and inspecting them. Worse still, the
“non-deal” in Lausanne, Steinitz added acidly in a Times of Israel interview earlier this month, neither fully freezes nor fully inspects the Iranian program.
38. A major landmark in that shift was Obama’s declaration, at the December 2013 Saban Forum in Washington,
that the Iranian regime could be allowed to have a peaceful nuclear
program with “modest enrichment capability” under a permanent deal.
Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint meeting of the United
States Congress in the House chamber at the US Capitol in Washington, DC
on Tuesday, March 3, 2015, in a speech warning against the then-looming
US-backed deal with Iran (Win McNamee/Getty Images/AFP)
39. Mocked Netanyahu for
seeking a meeting with him in March, two weeks before the Israeli
elections, when the prime minister spoke to Congress about the emerging
terms of the deal with Iran. Hosting the German chancellor, Obama joked that Angela Merkel “would not have asked” for such a meeting so close to her elections.
40. Brusquely dismissed Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on March 3 as “nothing new.” (Israelis
were deeply divided over the merits of the prime minister’s trip to
Congress, where he essentially lobbied against the US president, and
risked rendering Israel a more partisan issue in American politics. By
contrast, they seem to widely share Netanyahu’s concerns over the
emerging deal, and his fear that the Obama approach as it stands will
not thwart Iran’s nuclear drive. A Times of Israel poll two months ago found three in four Israelis don’t trust Obama to keep Iran from the bomb; at the very least, most Israelis would presumably like the president to give Netanyahu a further serious hearing.)
US
President Barack Obama makes a statement to the press after a meeting
in the Oval Office of the White House, March 3, 2015, in Washington, DC,
soon after Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress (photo credit: AFP
PHOTO/BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI)
41. Ignoring Netanyahu’s repeated suggestions for a better deal, Obama consistently claimed that Netanyahu has not offered any alternative to the emerging Iran accord.
42. Hailed an agreement reached with Iran in Lausanne that is not signed, features no agreed text, and key elements of which are disputed by Iran.
43. Failed to ensure that the P5+1 powers are in full accord on what was agreed at Lausanne.
44. Despite the US’s
immediate post-Lausanne insistence that sanctions on Iran would only be
lifted in phases, in accordance with Iranian compliance, two weeks later
Obama opened the possibility of negotiating on Iran’s demand for immediate lifting of sanctions.
45. Under the terms of the Lausanne framework, as set out by the US, the deal keeps over 5,000 centrifuges spinning at the Natanz facility.
46. It “converts” but does not dismantle the Fordo facility.
47. It “converts” but does not dismantle the heavy water reactor at Arak.
48. It allows ongoing research on more advanced centrifuges.
49. It does not address Iran’s missile development programs.
50. It does not require a
full accounting by Iran to the International Atomic Energy Agency on the
possible military dimensions of its nuclear activities to date.
51. By Obama’s own account,
it does not provide for anywhere, anytime inspections at suspect
Iranian military facilities, but rather for a complex “international
mechanism” in which Iran could seek to bar such access.
52. It seems likely to spark a regional nuclear arms race.
53. Obama summarily rejected Israel’s plea that Iran be required to recognize it as part of the permanent nuclear deal.
54. Had his spokespeople backtrack implausibly on his candid acknowledgement earlier
this month that Iran would be able to break out to the bomb almost
immediately when key limitations in the emerging nuclear deal lapse.
Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sets out his ‘red line’ for Iran on a
cartoon bomb drawing during a September 27, 2012 speech to the General
Assembly (photo credit: Avi Ohayun, GPO)
55. Pushing the deal with
Iran, and apparently seeking to undermine its most prominent critic
Netanyahu, the White House in early April mimicked the cartoon bomb
drawing which the prime minister presented to the UN General Assembly in
2012 with a revamped version of its own, complete
with red line. Where Netanyahu’s bomb drawing featured fuse wire
leading to an explosion, the White House version featured a severed
detonator wire and the captioned assertion that the framework deal will
“shut down” Iran’s uranium-enrichment path to the bomb.
A
diagram issued by the White House, similar to the one used by Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2012 to illustrate the dangers of a
nuclear Iran, points out the advantages of a nuclear deal with Tehran,
April 8, 2015 (Photo credit: Courtesy White House website)
56. Despite Israeli fears
that Russian S-300s, if supplied to Iran, would complicate any resort to
force against Iran’s nuclear facilities, and that the missile defense
systems could impact Israel’s air supremacy over Lebanon and Syria if
they found their way to Hezbollah and the Assad regime, Obama sounded
forgiving when discussing Vladimir Putin’s declared decision to deliver
the weaponry to Tehran. Obama noted on April 17 that Putin had
previously suspended the sale “at our request. I am frankly surprised
that it held this long, given that they were not prohibited by sanctions
from selling these defensive weapons.” In the studio of Israel’s
Channel 10, one commentator reported, “Jaws dropped.”
57. Defending the Lausanne framework agreement, Obama inaccurately claimed that Netanyahu does not seek a “peaceful resolution to the Iranian issue.”
58. During the 2014 war with Hamas, the US delayed the shipment to Israel of Hellfire precision air-to-surface missiles.
59. And tank shells.
60. It also instituted “additional steps” in the process of sending weapons to Israel.
61. After Netanyahu stressed
Israel’s efforts to achieve pinpoint accuracy in hitting Gaza terror
targets during war of summer 2014, Kerry, unaware that his microphone was live, derided the Israeli claim: “It’s
a hell of a pinpoint operation, it’s a hell of a pinpoint operation,”
he repeated sarcastically to an adviser. (In November 2011, in another inadvertently overheard exchange, at a G-20 summit in Cannes,
France’s then-president Nicolas Sarkozy told Obama he couldn’t bear
Netanyahu, who he called a “liar.” Responded Obama: “You are fed up with
him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you.”)
John
Kerry stands with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, left, and
Qatari Foreign Minister Khalid al-Attiyah in Paris, France, on July 26,
2014. (photo credit: US State Department)
62. Last July, although an Egyptian ceasefire proposal acceptable to Israel was on the table, Kerry embarked on a mission
to engineer a ceasefire to the Israel-Gaza war in circumstances that
continue to be much disputed between Israel and the United States. This
included outreach to Hamas-backing Qatar and Turkey, and the
transmission of a text to the Israeli cabinet that, while the secretary
denied that it was anything of the kind, was understood in Jerusalem to
be a ceasefire proposal, was seen as a capitulation to Hamas, and was
furiously rejected as such by unanimous cabinet vote.
63. Following Netanyahu’s March 17, 2015 election victory, Obama waited two days to call to congratulate him.
Phone call was reportedly difficult in content, with the
president said to make clear he didn’t believe Netanyahu was genuinely
supportive of a two-state solution, and to indicate that the US would no
longer automatically support Israel at the United Nations. Obama
then declared that the US was evaluating its options on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
64. Chose to accept that
Netanyahu meant what he said, the day before the elections, in ruling
out Palestinian statehood, but not that Netanyahu meant what he said,
two days after the elections, in support of “a sustainable, peaceful
two-state solution.”
Benjamin Netanyahu in an Election Day message, March 17, 2015 (screen capture: YouTube)
65. Warned publicly about the threat of Israel’s democracy eroding, after
Netanyahu complained that Arabs were streaming in droves to the polling
stations on election day. Did not similarly highlight Netanyahu’s
apology for his remarks.
66. As of this month, the Obama administration no longer rules out advancing UN resolutions regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
67. Obama refusing to meet with Netanyahu prior to the June 30 deadline for a deal with Iran,
because he fears a face-to-face meeting would likely end with Netanyahu
“publicly venting his complaints about the president’s policies,”
according to a New York Times report published on Israel’s 67th
Independence Day.
Hat tip: Sefton Bergson
David Horovitz
Source: http://www.timesofisrael.com/obamas-birthday-gift-to-israel-67-degrees-of-separation/
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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