Obama vs. Israel

Liat Collins noted that as Obama hosted a Passover meal in the White House in April, he coolly compared the uprising in the Arab world to the story of the Exodus from Egypt. It's a perfect message for the Twitter generation. With the perspective of barely three months … Obama takes the most epic event in more than four millennia of Jewish history and reduces it to its lowest possible common denominator, and then distorts it some more. (Lessons from the Shoah," L. Collins, JP Features, 1 May 2011)

What followed was worse. Obama stunned Netanyahu hours before their meeting in the White House, by radically changing US foreign policy, sandbagging Israel and aligning himself with Palestinian Authority [PA] chairman Abbas' preconditions for talks as he called for a complete phased withdraw of Israeli forces from occupied Palestinian lands to the 1967 borders.

His goal: two states for two peoples with borders based on the 1967 lines, which are really, lines agreed upon in the 1949 armistice, following which Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria for 19 years. The armistice lines, considered indefensible by defense experts, are often called 'Auschwitz borders' in Israel.

Obama wants Israel as a Jewish state for the Jewish people; Palestine as a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people. But the PA refuses to see Israel as a Jewish state. Yet he presses Israel to make concessions, and dreams about final negotiations on permanent borders before deciding on security, the future of Jerusalem, or Palestinian 'refugees,' the real make-or-break issues for both sides. ("Obama: 'A Full and Phased Withdrawal' by Israel to '1967 Lines'," Arutz 7, 20 May 2011)

Obama backed all of the PA's demands, and ignored most of Israel's conditions for peace. Caroline Glick summed up:

He said Israel must concede its right to defensible borders as a precondition for negotiations; he didn't say he opposes the Palestinian demand for open immigration of millions of foreign Arabs into Israel; he again ignored Bush's '04 letter to Sharon opposing a return to the 1949 armistice lines, supporting large settlements, defensible borders and opposing mass Arab immigration into Israel; he said he was leaving Jerusalem out but actually brought it in by calling for an Israeli retreat to the 1949 lines; he called for Israel to be cut in two when he called for the Palestinian state to be contiguous; he called for Israel to withdraw from the Jordan Valley, without which it is powerless against invasion, by saying the Palestinian State will have an international border with Jordan. Obama conceptually and substantively abandoned the US alliance with Israel.

("Obama's abandonment of America," C. Glick, www.carolineglick.com, 20 May 2011)

Gama Helal, former adviser to US presidents on the Middle East, noted Obama's shift towards the Arabs, for whom the 1967 borders have always been the starting point for any peace process, since they don't believe they should lose any territory as a result of their past efforts to destroy Israel. ("Obama's AIPAC speech gets mixed reviews in Israel," Israel Today, 23 May 2011)