Love of the Land: Mr. President, Your Animus Is Showing

Mr. President, Your Animus Is Showing

John Podhoretz
Commentary
16 April "10

The declaration this morning on the front page of the New York Times that the Obama administration has made an explicit shift in the U.S.-Israel relationship brings to mind words I published in COMMENTARY 10 months ago about the relationship between the United States and Israel in the Age of Obama: “There is no question that we have entered a new era, one that I expect will be characterized by tensions and unpleasantnesses of a kind unseen since the days when George H. W. Bush was president, James A. Baker III was secretary of state, and the hostility toward Israel oozed from both men like sweat from an intrepid colonial traveler’s brow as he journeyed across the Rub-al-Khali.”

Prophetic? Perhaps, but if you wish to credit me with visionary foresight, I have to confess that the reports of President Obama’s conduct toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during their deliberately unphotographed White House meeting in March still came as a cold shock to me. We still don’t know quite what happened, but it appears that the president came into the room with a list of unilateral demands, that he grew impatient with Netanyahu’s answers, and that he left unceremoniously by claiming he was going to have dinner with his wife and kids but that he would “be around” in case the prime minister “changed” his tune.

Even if the meeting was only half as confrontational and chilly as the reports indicated, it would still represent a display of rudeness and high-handedness unprecedented in the annals of American diplomacy. But since the target of Obama’s startling behavior was Israel, something especially complicated was at work. The president’s conduct was so extreme that it would be unthinkable for him to act in such a fashion toward the leader of any other nation, friend or foe. Obama knows that Israel needs the United States so much it is in no position to complain—particularly since the president was supposedly still in a snit over the ham-handed revelation in Israel, in the midst of Vice President Biden’s March visit, of the construction of 1,600 new housing units in Jerusalem.

Maybe Obama was operating, even unconsciously, in the unique spirit of informal aggression that can only be expressed between familial intimates. For who else would feel free to express such open rudeness at a special occasion? More likely, he was behaving in the manner of a liege lord demanding compensation from someone he considers his vassal. This attitude might explain as well the president’s otherwise perplexing treatment of other friendly leaders—Gordon Brown of Great Britain, Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Silvio Berlusconi of Italy—who may not seem to Obama to possess sufficient rank for him to treat them as allies of comparable stature.

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Love of the Land: Mr. President, Your Animus Is Showing

Love of the Land: No Denying White House Animus Toward Israel

No Denying White House Animus Toward Israel

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
25 March '10

This White House likes symbolism. After Barack Obama moved in, one of the first things his staff did was to unceremoniously remove the bronze bust of Winston Churchill that had been in the Oval Office and return it to Great Britain, thus signaling that this president no longer valued the special relationship with the UK, which had been a cornerstone of American diplomacy from the days of FDR to those of George W. Bush. And when Obama finally met with the Dalai Lama last month, the visit was kept low key, with no official welcome and no media allowed to witness the event for fear of offending China. The one picture that was released of the meeting appeared to show the president lecturing the exiled Tibetan so no one might think that a former editor of the Harvard Law Review had anything to learn from a legendary spiritual leader.

But the cold reception of the Dalai Lama now seems like a wild party compared to the way Obama received Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House this week. Oh, I know, Bibi is in the doghouse because we’re all supposed to think that Israel gravely insulted Vice President Joe Biden by allowing the announcement of a housing-project start in an existing Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem to coincide with his recent visit there. But the reason this is such a “big f@!%ing deal,” as the vice president might put it, is not because it was a real insult but because it was an excuse for the administration to renew its war on Netanyahu.

This is not the first president to dislike an Israeli prime minister or even Israel itself. The elder George Bush and his secretary of state, James “f@!% the Jews” Baker despised Yitzhak Shamir. But never has the leader of America’s ally Israel been treated with such open contempt as shown by Obama to Netanyahu. The Israeli’s visit to the White House was closed to the press — with not even one photo released of their encounter. The fact is that Obama didn’t even want his picture taken with Netanyahu. That’s particularly strange since the president has never any qualms about getting snapped next to a wide variety of international leaders on his travels.

In yesterday’s press briefing, spokesman Robert Gibbs was quizzed on this startling behavior by Jake Tapper. In response to repeated questions as to why the White House chose to treat a democratically elected head of the government of a close U.S. ally in this manner, Gibbs did not try very hard to pretend that it was anything but an indication of Obama’s dislike for the Israeli and the country he represents. Coming from a president that has spent his time in office making non-stop efforts to reach out to and engage America’s enemies around the world, this open hostility to Israel is breathtaking in its brazenness.

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Love of the Land: No Denying White House Animus Toward Israel

Love of the Land: The Shadow Viceroy

The Shadow Viceroy

Lee Smith
Tabletmag.com
24 March '10

If no one was sure what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was going to tell the 7,500 delegates who descended on Washington for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference early this week, everyone knew what Elliott Abrams was going to say. For more than a year, the former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush has been the most vocal critic of the Obama Administration’s handling of the U.S.-Israel relationship. With the recent Washington-Jerusalem confrontation over 1,600 apartment units still simmering, Abrams drew a standing-room-only crowd to his two AIPAC panels.

“If we distance ourselves from Israel,” Abrams told the audience, “the Jordanians, Egyptians and the rest of our allies in the Middle East will think, ‘if they can do it to the Israelis, why not us?’ ”

Abrams, while well under 6 feet tall, is a commanding physical presence, with broad shoulders and a prominent chin and nose, a profile worthy of a Roman coin. And like a provincial governor, he wielded power on behalf of a hegemon in a way that earned him more enemies at home than abroad. His rivals mock the policies he advocates, describe him as arrogant, and fear winding up on the wrong end of his sharp wit. While in the United States he is best known for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, in the Middle East, he is simply “Elliott”—the man tapped by Bush to administer the daily conduct of U.S. policy in large parts of the region, with particular attention to democracy promotion and the Bush Administration’s “Freedom Agenda” in Egypt and throughout North Africa, as well as in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and the Palestinian territories.

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Love of the Land: The Shadow Viceroy