Israelis have witnessed an intolerable amount of American meddling in the current election cycle, both from White House proxies and from self-important American Jews. As a Zionist, I support Jewish self-determination in the Jewish homeland. That means that I support the right of the Israeli electorate to choose its government for itself, regardless of whether I, as an American Jew who has never run to a bomb shelter or served in any military, think that Israelis are making the right decision. Israelis are the ones that have to live with the consequences of their choice. I do not. One thing I can’t support, however, is making such an important decision based on misinformation.
One piece of misinformation that I have seen in recent months, weeks, and especially the last few days, is that Prime Minister Netanyahu is responsible for the current deterioration in the US-Israel relationship. Well, far be it from me to criticize the former head of the Mossad. But before I was ever a blogger, I was pretty well-trained as a litigator, and if there was one thing that I learned in that training, it was how to look at evidence. Hard evidence shows that it is Obama, and not Netanyahu, who is the cause of the current mess.
On July 13, 2009, less than four months after Netanyahu had taken office, US President Barack Obama conducted a meeting with several prominent American Jewish leaders in which he explained to them that his intention, as it was described in a detailed 2012 report in the Washington Post, was to “talk tough to Israel, publicly and privately.” Obama is quoted in that meeting telling Malcolm Hoenlein, the Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, to
Look at the past eight years. . . . During those eight years, there was no space between us and Israel, and what did we get from that? When there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states.”
Even before that July meeting, according to the same article in the Post,
Obama made clear to close advisers that he, in the words of one of them, wanted “to demonstrate that he could change Israeli behavior on the ground” to strengthen U.S. credibility.
Obama came in to office in 2009 determined to put a wedge in the US-Israel relationship, and almost immediately set to work trying to achieve this goal. A 2011 Wall Street Journal article by Dan Senor catalogues some of the steps that President Obama took, including his September 2009 speech to the UN General Assembly in which he called Israeli building in the West Bank “illegitimate” but failed to unequivocally condemn terrorism directed at Israel by Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank or Gaza, as well as the March 2010 public condemnations, by senior members of Obama’s staff, of Israeli building in Israel’s capital.
That was all in his first term. In 2012, according to a CNN report quoting Obama advisor David Axelrod, Obama told a group of White House staffers that, after all of the problems in his first term, he still felt that he had not been tough enough on Israel, and that in his second term, “he wanted to be tougher on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.” Axelrod wrote:
From almost his first day in office, (President Obama) had pushed the Israelis and Palestinians for a two-state solution, but his efforts, like those of presidents before him, had been run aground by the intractable politics of the Middle East. He was frustrated with both sides, but felt he had pulled his punches with Netanyahu to avoid antagonizing elements of the American Jewish community.
What we see now is the outcome of Obama’s intentional plan, put into effect over the course of six years, to create a wedge between the US and Israel. There are many domestic and foreign policy issues that Israeli voters will need to consider on Tuesday. Whether Netanyahu is responsible for alienating a US President that has had it in for him and his country since the start should not be one of them. If the Herzog/Livni ticket does manage to win the election and form a government, it will be interesting to see whether anything changes.
