Michel Gurfinkiel at Pajamas Media has written that “The Obama administration’s decision to treat an ally like a rogue state seems to have backfired.”
Vice President Joe Biden landed in Israel on March 8 … Then, news broke, from an Israeli Interior Ministry source, that Israel was going to build 1600 housing units in Ramat Shlomo, a neighborhood in northern Jerusalem that the Obama administration sees as part of East Jerusalem, i.e., an “occupied Palestinian territory.” … It looked a bit like an Israeli blunder, or even a provocation, since Netanyahu had agreed to Obama’s request, some six months earlier, to freeze for some time any settlement building in the West Bank, if not in East Jerusalem. … However, it became clear very soon that there was no Israeli decision at all to expand Ramat Shlomo. … There was only a green light, at a very subordinate bureaucratic level at the Ministry, to review a housing project, without any kind of government commitment. … Clearly, there was an attempt, at some very high level in the Obama administration, to draw political benefit from the Ramat Shlomo announcement. And maybe to engineer such an announcement in the first place. … Either accidental or premeditated, the lynching of Netanyahu, Israel, and Oren probably had something to do with the AIPAC conference taking place from March 21 to March 23. Most American Jews – 77 percent of them – voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Many wonder today if this was the right move. Disappointment may lead to defection, a very bad prospect in a midterm election year. Hence the solution: to turn Netanyahu into a mere provocateur who insults the United States, and Obama into a true friend of Israel. However, the whole operation seems to have backfired. The more people thought about it, the more it was President Barack Obama who insulted Israel – and the American people. Not the other way around. Obama is now willing to meet Netanyahu in the wake of the AIPAC conference. Quite a change of tune from a fortnight ago.
This article, which I merely summarized (read the whole thing!) does a good job in exposing the Obama administration’s dishonesty and hypocrisy in their reaction to Israel’s insult; that hypocrisy is even more blatant if you consider the context (which Gurfinkiel did not get into) of the various other “insults” against America and/or Israel which all happened this month, which did not cause President Obama’s Administration or Hillary Clinton’s State Department to shriek up to DefCon One. These include Russia and Iran continuing to move forward on their nuclear ties, increased terrorist activity against Israel (much of which appears to have been caused by Obama’s gambit, to the point where many in and out of Israel are referring to the “Obama Intifada“), and so forth. One could also speculate that the good press Obama had hoped (in vain) to gain from his Israel-bashing might have helped to balance or distract from all of the negative attention that ObamaCare was getting at the time. In any event, the truth is out, and Israel knows who she can trust and who she can’t. Hopefully American Jews are also learning this lesson on the way to midterm elections in November.
Magic hate ball: Barack and Hillary’s foreign policy machine.
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