President Barack Obama meets with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the Oval Office in 2009. Photo: White House.
Earlier this month, it leaked that Israel’s Defense Minister, Moshe Ya’alon, had privately described Secretary of State John Kerry as “obsessive and messianic” in his quest to broker an Israeli/Palestinian peace settlement. The Obama Administration angrily rejected Ya’alon’s words as “offensive and inappropriate,” demanding and receiving an apology.
Yet, only weeks earlier, Yasser Abed Rabbo, a close adviser to Fatah/Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas, also excoriated John Kerry as possessed of “dangerous” proposals and seeking to “appease Israel by fulfilling its expansionist demands in the Jordan Valley under the pretext of security. He wants to buy Israeli silence over the Iran deal.” But for these grave, personal PA allegations against Kerry, the Obama Administration has said nothing.
Why this startling discrepancy in the Administration’s response? Why has it ignored blatant anti-peace statements from the PA, such as the call by the PA Minister of Religious Affairs, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, for Syrian jihadists to cease murdering each other and wage war against Israel? Or the PA’s Abbas Zaki reaffirming that the PA’s public demand for a state alongside Israel is merely a device aimed at eventually removing Israel from the map – a policy supposedly repudiated more than 20 years ago?
Because the Administration will not assimilate evidence that invalidates its public formula that the Palestinians are willing to conclude a genuine peace with Israel. So it ignores or finesses PA anti-peace words and deeds, while stridently criticizing Israel on disagreements and reluctance to make unilateral concessions.
Under Obama’s pressure, Israel’s Netanyahu government accepted in-principle a Palestinian state and unprecedentedly froze Jewish construction in the West Bank for 10 months in a bid to bring the PA to the negotiating table. The PA refused to come until the very end and broke off talks shortly after, but it was Israel whom Obama singled out in a January 2010 TIME interview for failing to make any “bold gestures” for peace.
When in March 2010, during a visit to the region by Vice-President Joseph Biden, the PA named a public square in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, the leader of the 1978 coastal road bus hijacking in which 37 Israelis, including 12 children, were slaughtered, the Obama Administration was silent for days. When Clinton belatedly criticized the Mughrabi event, it was only to whitewash the PA by falsely claiming “a Hamas-controlled municipality” had initiated it.
In contrast, a mere Israeli announcement of building program in a Jewish neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem that also occurred during the Biden visit led the Obama Administration to immediately condemn it and describe it as “destructive,” an “insult,” and an “affront.”
No other state, let alone ally, attracts the same ire, even when policy divergence is massive. When in April 2010 Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in the words of journalist Joel Brinkley, made “delusional criticism of the United States and its allies” and threatened to “join the Taliban”- this, in the midst of U.S. soldiers fighting and dying shoring up his regime – the Administration found it merely “troubling” and “frustrating,” and asserted that Karzai needed to be “treated with respect.”
When in June 2010, Turkey voted against a new U.S.-supported UN Security Council sanctions bill on Iran, there was no talk of destructiveness, insults, or affronts – the U.S. was merely “disappointed.” And when in October 2011, Abbas’ Fatah brazenly demanded U.S. taxpayer aid as “a political and moral right,” Obama took no notice, let alone curtailed or withheld aid to the ingrate PA.
When Iran’s top leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, addressing a mass rally, called the U.S. a “Great Satan” and an “enemy who smiles,” and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani boasted that “the U.S. and world powers surrendered to the Iranian nation’s will,” Obama said nothing. Only when the Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Zarif, laid a wreath at the tomb of a Hezbollah terrorist leader, who in 1983 murdered 242 U.S. marines in Lebanon, did the Administration permit a low-level National Security Council official to condemnit is a short statement.
Israel is expected to do things neither the U.S. nor its other allies would do. This month, the Obama Administration was critical of Afghanistan’s Karzai releasing of scores of Islamist “dangerous criminals against whom there is strong evidence linking them to terror-related crimes.” But last year, the Administration pressured Israel into releasing scores of convicted Palestinian killers of Israeli civilians – although it did express concern when one of those released, Al Haj Othman Amar Mustafa, turned out have also murdered an American. Actions unacceptable elsewhere were positively demanded of Israel.
The Obama pattern is clear. The respect for sovereign decisions and deference to security concerns that apply to other U.S. allies are absent when it comes to Israel. Israel is expected to bow to the Administration’s policy without demur, run security risks the U.S. itself would not abide, and ignore the extremism, non-acceptance, and bad faith of its Palestinian partner, just as the Obama Administration does. This is just the unseemly underside of the disconnect between the Administration’s public words of support for Israel and the reality of its coolness and indifference to the realities it faces.
Morton A. Klein is National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Dr. Daniel Mandel is Director of the ZOA’ s Center for Middle East Policy.
One of his goals is to empower the Muslims in and out.
bernard ross Said:
As you know from previous debates,I love babies.
honeybee Said:
loved it, that child was smart and a good dancer.
bernard ross Said:
Your reward and thank you for your concern: http://youtu.be/1Nn9dd6FfE8
yamit82 Said:
I did! 😛
yamit82 Said:
From the beginning I have believed that the outcome these talks were pre agreed. whether a walk away or some kind of agreement. Most of what they are discussing I read from pal sources as already agreed last spring, including leaving the jordan valey settlements, giving them a choice for pal residency or Israel over a 5-10 year period. If they come out with an agreement, it was pre arranged and all this would be preparing the ground. I still believe everything is related to some broader regional understandings including a deal with the arab league. I also said a while back that they are preparing to demote hamas in gaza and give it to abbas. I do not beleive that BB considers himself of the right wing, he refers to Likud as a centrist party. He would likely reflect the polls and expect them to ok a referendum. I do not think they would require a referendum until they actually swap lands or dedicate something to the pals in Jerusalem for their capital which could be towards the end of the period; therefore postponing a referendum for years.
yamit82 Said:
And I thought my back ground was screwed up.
@ bernard ross:
Barack’s Jewish Brother …. Who knew?
https://www.google.com/search?q=Mark%20Obama%20photo&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls
Mark Obama, Barack’s Jewish Brother
Barak Obama’s autobiography seems to be as complex as the president himself. Tzach Yoked, writing in Maariv this week, exposed to Israelis, perhaps for the first time, that among the American president’s eight half-brothers is one, Mark Obama Ndesandjo, who is Jewish.
Obama’s father had four wives “ two Kenyan-born women and two white American women, the Christian mother of Barak Obama, Ann Duham, and the Jewish Mother of Mark Obama, Ruth Baker. Ruth was born to a Jewish family that immigrated to the United States from Lithuania. She married Obama Sr. in 1964 and moved to Kenya. Ruth divorced her husband after seven years of abusive marriage.
by no means religious, Mark Obama is proud of his Jewish identity. “My mother is a liberal person who did not keep the religious rituals he said. However, she always taught me to be proud of the fact that I am Jewish! As far as I am concerned, the main aspect of my Jewish identity does not stem from performing the religious rituals and prayers, but out of a strong sense that I am Jewish. It is something that you simply feel, a strong sense of secular Jewish identity that my mother gave me. She is the woman who taught me what’s important in life, who helped me to understand Torah, taught me music, helped me with my studies.
Mark Obama recounts that contrary to what President Obama has said, they first met in 1988, and not in 2007. Asked why the president hadn’t told the truth about their meeting, the Jewish sibling said his older brother was probably ill-advised by political advisers. Nevertheless, it would seem that Mark adores Barack, even though, as he claims, the president has failed to be in touch with his brother for several months now.
Mark Obama went on to marry Liu Xuehua and has been living in China for the last 12 years. He is an accomplished pianist and published the semi-autobiographical novel Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East.
Mark, who has adopted China as his home country, is a vivid testimony of the complexity of Jewish identity. Born to a black Muslim father and a white Jewish mother, raised in Kenya but educated in the United States, half-brother to a president whose own religious identity is far from clear, Mark Obama is no less Jewish than any other child born to a Jewish mother. If anything, he well represents the crisis of secular Judaism.
This form of Judaism, as can be found also in Israel, wants to maintain Jewish identity apart from the Jewish faith. In America, where society is overwhelmingly non-Jewish, secular Judaism is on the decline due to a high rate of intermarriage. If anything can be learned from it is, as Israeli President Shimon Peres said just recently, that as far as Jews are concerned, state and religion cannot be separated
PHOTO: President’s Brother Malik Obama Wears Kaffiyeh Declaring that Muslims Will Destroy Israel
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/01/28/photo-presidents-brother-malik-obama-wears-kaffiyeh-declaring-that-muslims-will-destroy-israel/
Ted Belman Said:
According to reports everything contained in the Kerry document is what BB has already agreed to. Therefore there is no American pressure.
All of BB’s moves of late point, as Friedman says to “preparing the ground”.
@ yamit82:I don’t think Netanyahu will bite. Nor will Abbas.
Ted Belman:
Why Kerry Is Scary by Thomas L. Friedman
TEL AVIV — It is pretty clear now that Secretary of State John Kerry will either be Israel’s diplomatic salvation or the most dangerous diplomatic fanatic Israel has ever encountered. But there isn’t much room anymore for anything in between. This is one of those rare pay-per-view foreign policy moments. Pull up a chair. You don’t see this every day.
In essence what Kerry is daring to test is a question everyone has wanted to avoid: Is the situation between Israelis and Palestinians at five minutes to midnight or five minutes after midnight, or even 1 a.m. (beyond diplomacy)?
That is, has Israel become so much more powerful than its neighbors that a symmetrical negotiation is impossible, especially when the Palestinians do not seem willing or able to mount another intifada that might force Israel to withdraw? Has the neighborhood around Israel become so much more unstable that any Israeli withdrawal from anywhere is unthinkable? Has the number of Israeli Jews now living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank become so much larger — more than 540,000 — that they are immovable? And has the Palestinian rhetoric on the right of return become so deeply embedded in Palestinian politics? So when you add them all up, it becomes a fantasy to expect any Israeli or Palestinian leader to have the strength to make the huge concessions needed for a two-state solution?
President Obama is letting Kerry test all this. Kerry has done so in a fanatically relentless — I’ve lost count of his visits here — but highly sophisticated way. After letting the two sides fruitlessly butt heads for six months, he’s now planning to present a U.S. framework that will lay out what Washington considers the core concessions Israelis and Palestinians need to make for a fair, lasting deal.
The “Kerry Plan,” likely to be unveiled soon, is expected to call for an end to the conflict and all claims, following a phased Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank (based on the 1967 lines), with unprecedented security arrangements in the strategic Jordan Valley. The Israeli withdrawal will not include certain settlement blocs, but Israel will compensate the Palestinians for them with Israeli territory. It will call for the Palestinians to have a capital in Arab East Jerusalem and for Palestinians to recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. It will not include any right of return for Palestinian refugees into Israel proper.
Kerry expects and hopes that both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will declare that despite their reservations about one or another element in the U.S. framework, they will use it as the basis of further negotiations.
This is where things will get interesting. U.S. and Israeli officials in close contact with Netanyahu describe him as torn, clearly understanding that some kind of two-state solution is necessary for Israel’s integrity as a Jewish democratic state, with the healthy ties to Europe and the West that are vital for Israel’s economy. But he remains deeply skeptical about Palestinian intentions — or as Netanyahu said here Tuesday: “I do not want a binational state. But we also don’t want another state that will start attacking us.” His political base, though, which he nurtured, does not want Netanyahu making a U-turn.
“Nothing in politics is as risky as a U-turn or as challenging as a successful one,” says Gidi Grinstein, the president of the Reut Institute, a leading Israeli strategy group. “It requires a gradual disengagement from one’s greatest supporters, who slowly turn into staunchest enemies, while forming a new coalition of backers, made up of former opponents. In a cautious dance of two-steps-forward, one-step-back, U-turning leaders must shift their political center of gravity from the former base to their future platform.”
Obama apologizes to Muslims without being requested to do so.
Obama requires an apology from Ya’alon
Natanyahu requires an apology from Bennett
It would appear that public apologies delineate the pecking order among humans.
Are these guys just figuring this out now?
The joke about Obama’s views toward other nations is as follows:
If you are an enemy of the USA, we’re sorry.
If you are an ally of the USA, YOU’RE sorry.