I thought this started five years ago. But I didn’t anticipate the actual level of open hostility of
this administration to Israel and whether it would manifest itself during a war.
It may not have come to the forefront during Cast Lead—which
was stopped cold for the first Obama inauguration—or Pillar of Defense, which,
aside from the usual only-Israel-has-to-actually-follow-“rules”-of-war type
restraint, was further hamstrung by considerations relating to the 2012
election.
This time it started almost immediately, with John Kerry’s
probably deliberate hot mic comments, and the series of blackmail attempts with
varying levels of nakedness, from the aborted FAA flight ban, to the $11B
defense deal signed with the biggest financial and logistical backer of Hamas,
to the “leaked non-conversation” between Obama and Netanyahu that was denied by
the PM’s office and the NSC…but not the
White House.
I think Netanyahu knows exactly where he stands with this
President, given Obama’s general anticolonialist and Everybody-But-America-First
ideology playing out in other arenas, especially pronounced in his dealings in
the Middle East aside from the
conflict between Israel and her neighbors. He essentially kicked off his
Administration when he performed the Grovel In Cairo in early 2009, and continues straight through his recent eid-al-fatr declarations [“Muslims built this country”--but I
thought “you didn’t build that”?]
Further evidence: his unwillingness to even
give a modicum of aid and comfort to the Greens in Iran as Madman-dinejad’s
minions mowed them down; his banking on the ascendancy of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt which blew up in his face when the Egyptians got buyers’
remorse, turned the MB out of office and started shooting them in the streets; his
backtrack in Syria [even if not sending troops is salient, you still lose a ton
of credibility drawing “red lines” you have no intention of backing up]; his
failure to even deign to address the ISIS massacres and borderline enslavement
of Christians in Mosul; and his attempts to allow Iran to get the bomb while he
gives himself political cover for what he likely considers an inevitability [if
he doesn’t believe that it’s Iran’s sovereign right to have one. It’s also possible that he believes the
Israelis will somehow take out the reactors or attempt to, and then he gets to condemn
the Israelis while they ironically do his dirty work for him.]
[Something like the non-response to Mosul actually has
precedent in American political history: when the Vietnamese invaded
autogenocidal Cambodia and overthrew Pol Pot in 1979, the US, still smarting
from the Vietnam War, condemned Vietnam.
Here the administration is hamstrung
between its reluctance to condemn anything Muslim, its belief that its real
genesis is the reaction to Gulf War II and the illegitimacy of having committed
to that theater, and the concomitant possibility that they’d have to admit that
the precipitous withdrawal might be a proximate cause. Even if Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck now think
the right got it wrong, the days that blaming Bush would carry any weight are
long over, which is why some on the right can now safely beat their breasts
publicly.]
I think—aside from the counter-blackmail the Israelis pulled
with the FAA ban [“You want ‘restraint’ in Gaza—we get the airport
back”]—Netanyahu might sit and take diplomatic opprobrium as long as he gets to
operate as Israel sees fit in Gaza, since his public is more than solidly
behind him, because he’s going to force Obama to publicly reveal his endgame
and finally dispense with the illusion that he’s anything but hostile to
Israeli interests. He’s slowly bringing
the President to that point— where his Jewish approval is at the
levels that Jimmy Carter’s was.
As I've mentioned before, absent all other reasons for Israel’s
safety and security being a particular American interest, there is one almost
transcendental reason: the spectre of dead Jews resulting from Administration
inaction during the Holocaust. Netanyahu is basically daring Obama to make into
policy what Kissinger and Nixon could only discuss on the tapes: that another
Holocaust might be a humanitarian issue but not a policy matter.
I actually don't think Obama is an anti-Semite. [It's documented that Nixon and even Truman were. And, according to Andrew and Leslie Cockburn--no friends of Israel--Jimmy Carter said he'd "f*** the Jews" in 1980, more than a decade before James Baker said something similar.] But--like the pundit who said when Eric Cantor lost his most recent primary "it's not that they don't like Jews, they just love Jesus more"--it's not that Obama doesn't like Jews, he just likes their sworn mortal enemies more. And Netanyahu is going to make him publicly choose sides and say so, which might put Obama in a political bind the likes of which haven't been seen in a long time.
