Barack, Bulworth & Bibi

[Valin]

The Weekly Standard:

WILLIAM KRISTOL

Feb 23, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 23

 

David Axelrod is the man who, more than any other, could be called Barack Obama’s brain (though Axelrod would be publicly horrified by the honorific, and would hasten to assure Valerie Jarrett that he has never been in communication with the editors of this magazine). In his new book, Axelrod describes a moment late in Obama’s first term where Obama acknowledges having a “Bulworth” list of “issues on which he felt he had been insufficiently forthright,” but about which he would be more candid in his second term. (The reference is to the Warren Beatty movie in which a candidate finally decides to tell the truth.) About what issues was Obama now going to be honest? One of them was Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with regard to whom Obama “felt he had pulled his punches .  .  . to avoid antagonizing elements of the American Jewish community.”

 

 

One’s first reaction is that Obama needn’t have worried, since major elements of the American Jewish community seem more committed to staying on good terms with Obama than to forthrightly defending Israel. But Obama perhaps mistakenly assumed that behind much of the Jewish community’s bark there was some bite, and kept his true views under wraps until reelected.

 

No longer. The Obama White House’s amazing assault on Netanyahu in recent months has culminated in the attempt to make sure, as one Obama aide put it, that “there will be a price” for the prime minister’s accepting the invitation of the speaker of the House to address Congress. That price will not be limited to Netanyahu personally, though there has been no shortage of personal attacks on him. That price will also be exacted on the state of Israel. Why? Well .  .  . why not? The Israelis elected Netanyahu. Even the Israeli opposition parties say they won’t give back all the “territories”—which includes the Old City of Jerusalem—to allow for the establishment of a terrorist-friendly or terrorist-dominated Palestinian state. Even the opposition parties seem to take seriously what Obama has said but doesn’t himself mean, that an Islamic Republic of Iran with nuclear weapons is unacceptable.

 

Obama wants to claim that his problem is with Netanyahu. Obama’s political allies on the left and his credulous well-wishers in the nominally pro-Israel parts of the Jewish community want to believe his problem is with Netanyahu. But his problem is with Israel, a state founded by a bunch of folks who Obama believes were unjust to the Palestinian Arabs living there and that is now inhabited by a bunch of folks who keep getting in Obama’s way. Obama doesn’t have a Netanyahu problem. He has an Israel problem.

 

(Snip)