"Obama's Republican opposition is in complete disarray on foreign policy and not in any position to push him to reveal his plans."...
3/20/13, "Obama's mysterious visit," Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post
"Why is US President Barack Obama coming to Israel today? In 2008, then president George W. Bush came to celebrate Israel's 60th Independence Day, and to reject Israeli requests for assistance in destroying Iran's nuclear installations.
In
1996, then-president Bill Clinton came to Israel to help then-prime
minister Shimon Peres's electoral campaign against Likud leader Binyamin
Netanyahu.
It is possible that Obama is coming
here in order to build up pro-Israel bonafides. But why would he
bother? Obama won his reelection bid with the support of the
overwhelming majority of American Jews. Their support vindicated his
hostility toward Israel in his first term. He has nothing to prove.
It
is worth comparing Obama's visit to Israel at the start of his second
term of office, with his visit to Cairo at the outset of his first term
in office.
Ahead of that trip, the new
administration promised that the visit, and particularly Obama's
"Address to the Muslim World," would serve as a starting point for a new
US policy in the Middle East. And Obama lived up to expectations.
In
speaking to the "Muslim World," Obama signaled that the US now
supported pan-Islamists at the expense of US allies and Arab nationalist
leaders, first and foremost then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
Moreover, in castigating Israel for its so-called "settlements";
channeling Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by intimating that
Israel exists because of the Holocaust; and failing to travel from Cairo
to Jerusalem, preferring instead to visit a Nazi death camp in Germany,
Obama signaled that he was downgrading US ties with the Jewish state.
In sharp contrast to the high expectations the Obama White House
cultivated in pre-Cairo visit statements and leaks, Obama and his
advisers have downplayed the importance of his visit to Israel,
signaling there will be no significant changes in Obama's policies
toward Israel or the wider Middle East.
As
for the Palestinians, Obama repeated his fierce opposition to Jewish
communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and his insistence that
Israel must get over its justified fears regarding Palestinian
intentions and withdraw from Judea and Samaria, for its own good.
Given
that all of these are positions he has held throughout his presidency,
the mystery surrounding his decision to come to Israel only grows. He
didn't need to come to Israel to rehash policies we already know.
.
.
Much of the coverage of Obama's trip has focused on symbolism. For
instance, the administration decided to boycott Ariel University by not
inviting its students to attend Obama's speech to students from all
other universities that is set to take place on Thursday in Jerusalem.
In boycotting Ariel, Obama's behavior is substantively the same as that
of Britain's Association of University Teachers. In 2005 that body voted
to boycott University of Haifa and Ben-Gurion University in the Negev.
But while the AUT's action was universally condemned, Obama's decision
to bar Israelis whose university is located in a city with 20,000
residents just because their school is located beyond the 1949 armistice
lines has generated litte attention.
Then
again, seeing as Obama's snub of Ariel University is in keeping with the
White House's general war with anyone who disputes its view that Judea
and Samaria are Arab lands, the lack of outrage at his outrageous
behavior makes sense. It doesn't represent a departure from his
positions in his first term.
The only revealing
aspect of Obama's itinerary is his decision to on the one hand bypass
Israel's elected representatives by spurning the invitation to speak
before the Knesset; and on the other hand to address a handpicked
audience of university students - an audience grossly overpopulated by
unelectable, radical leftists.
.
.
In the past, US presidents have spoken before audiences of Israeli
leftists in order to elevate and empower the political Left against the
Right. But this is the first time that a US president has spurned not
only the elected Right, but elected leftist politicians as well, by
failing to speak to the Knesset, while actively courting the unelectable
radical Left through his talk to a university audience.
Clinton
constantly embraced the Israeli Left while spurning the Right -
famously refusing to meet with then prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in
1997 while both leaders' jets were parked on the same tarmac at Los
Angeles International Airport.
Clinton's
assiduous courtship of Israel's Left enabled him to portray himself as a
true friend of Israel, even as he openly sought to undermine and
overthrow the elected government of the country.
But
Clinton always favored leftist politicians - Shimon Peres and Ehud
Barak - over rightist politicians. He did not spurn leftist politicians
in favor of even more radical unelectable leftists.
So
what does Obama seek to achieve with this novel practice? Clearly he is
not attempting to use the opportunity of addressing this audience to
express contrition for his first term's policies. In his interview with
Channel 2, Obama spoke of the instability on Israel's borders - but
never mentioned the key role he played in overthrowing Mubarak and
empowering the Muslim Brotherhood, thus emptying of meaning Israel's
peace treaty with the most populous Arab state.
He never mentioned that his feckless handling of Syria's civil war ensured that the moderate opposition forces would be eclipsed by radical Islamists affiliated with al-Qaida, as has happened, or expressed concern that al-Qaida forces are now deployed along Syria's border with Israel, and that there is a real and rising danger that Syria's arsenals of chemical and biological weapons, as well as its ballistic missiles, will fall into their hands. Indeed, Tuesday it was reported that the al-Qaida infiltrated opposition attacked regime forces with chemical weapons.
Obama will not use his speech before
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's most outspoken critics to express
remorse over the hostility with which he treated Israel's leader for the
past four years. He will not admit that his decision to coerce Israel
into suspending Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria in his first
term gave the PLO justification for refusing to meet with or negotiate
with the Israeli government.
So since he
doesn't think he's done anything wrong, and he intends to continue the
same policies in his second term, why did he decide to come to Israel?
And why is he addressing, and so seeking to empower the radical,
unelectable Left? Obama's speech in Cairo to the Muslim world was held
at the Islamist Al-Azhar Univerity. By speaking at Al-Azhar, Obama
weakened Mubarak in three different ways. First, Al-Azhar's faculty
members regularly issue religious rulings calling for the murder of
non-Muslims, prohibiting the practice of Judaism, and facilitating the
victimization of women. In stating these views, Al-Azhar's leadership
has demonstrated that their world view and values are far less amenable
to American strategic interests and moral values than Mubarak's world
view was. By speaking at Al-Azhar, Obama signaled that he would reward
the anti-American Islamists at the expense of the pro-American Arab
nationalists....
Finally, by addressing his remarks to the Muslim nation, Obama was perceived as openly rejecting Egyptian nationalism, and indeed the concept of unique national identities among the various Arab states. In so doing, Obama undercut the legitimacy of the Egyptian regime while legitimizing the pan- Islamic Muslim Brotherhood which rejects nationalism in favor of a call for the establishment of a global caliphate.
As subsequent events showed, the
conditions for the Egyptian revolution that brought the Muslim
Brotherhood to power were prepared during Obama's speech at al-Azhar.
It
is possible that in addressing the unelected radical Left in Jerusalem,
Obama seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli government. But
if that is the plan, then it would bespeak an extraordinary contempt and
underestimation of Israeli democracy. Such a plan would not play out
the same way his Egyptian speech did....
.
.
This leaves another glaring possibility. Through the radical Left,
Obama may intend to foment a pressure campaign to force the government
to withdraw unilaterally from all or parts of Judea and Samaria, as
Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. If this is Obama's actual
policy goal, it would represent a complete Europeanization of US policy
toward Israel. It was the EU that funded radical leftist groups that
pushed for Israel's unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza
in 2005.
And in the past week, a number of commentators have spoken and written in favor of such a plan.
The truth is we don't know why Obama is coming to Israel. The Obama
administration has not indicated where its Israel policy is going. And Obama's Republican opposition is in complete disarray on foreign policy
and not in any position to push him to reveal his plans.
What
we can say with certainty is that the administration that supports the
"democratically elected" Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and did so much to
clear all obstacles to its election, is snubbing the democratically
elected Israeli government, and indeed, Israel's elected officials in
general. Obama's transmission of this message in the lead-up to this
visit, through symbols and action alike does not bode well for Israel's
relations with the US in the coming four years."
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