Obama’s Israel Obsession

Many supporters of Israel worldwide were shocked by America’s failure to veto U.N. Security Council ‎Resolution 2334, which “reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian ‎territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity” and “reiterates its ‎demand that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied ‎Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.” ‎

This openly one-sided resolution passed the U.N. Security Council by a vote of 14 to 0, with the U.S. ‎abstaining. Resolution 2334 goes on to castigate Israel and its settlement policy as the chief reason ‎there is not yet peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It casually underplays the obligation to ‎refrain from incitement and terrorism, without assigning blame to any particular party. This despite the ‎constant and continuous incitement from the leaders of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas on down ‎to propagandize their population to hate and kill the Israeli, and the Jew.

The resolution would like to see Israel cut itself down to indefensible borders, lacking in strategic ‎depth, and being only 9 miles wide in its narrowest waist. That, in a region where states are rapidly ‎imploding, and where Iran and Islamic State are both flexing their muscles is a prescription not for peace, but ‎for tremendous bloodshed.‎

The fact that east Jerusalem is where Judaism’s holiest sites, the Temple Mount and Western Wall, sit, was totally ‎overlooked by the resolution. So, too, was the continued unwillingness of the Palestinian Authority to ‎meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to conduct direct, bilateral negotiations with Israel to determine ‎the legal status of the land in question. Instead, they did not miss an opportunity to brainwash ‎their population to despise and murder Jews. ‎

And rather than work on building incremental trust with the Israelis, as the staged process of Oslo was ‎constructed to do, they chose to litigate their case against Israel in the court of international public ‎opinion, constantly maligning Israel with distortions, half-truths and outright lies, at every opportunity.‎

In fact, when U.S. President Barack Obama vetoed a similar resolution in 2011, before he ran for a second term and ‎needed Jewish support, he said: “Peace is hard work. Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the United ‎Nations. If it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now. Ultimately, it is the ‎Israelis and the Palestinians who must live side by side. Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the ‎Palestinians — not us — who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them: on borders ‎and on security, on refugees and Jerusalem.”

Israel’s supporters were even more shocked when it became clear that the Obama administration had ‎a hand in drafting and passing this resolution. This from a president who famously swore to “always ‎have Israel’s back.”‎

The resolution’s language goes against the convictions of every American president ‎since Lyndon Johnson — with the sole exception of Jimmy Carter — that it would be impossible to ‎expect the Israelis to return to the indefensible pre-1967 lines. ‎

In fact, contrary to popular opinion, U.N. Resolution 242 never demands that Israel return to the pre-‎‎1967 borders. There has been a great deal written about the fact that ‎the article “the” was not included in the resolution, connoting that Israel was not obliged to withdraw its armed forces from “[all of] the territories occupied in the recent conflict” but only from “territories occupied in the recent conflict.”

In fact, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov complained at the time that “there’s ‎certainly much leeway for different interpretations that retain for Israel the right to establish new ‎boundaries and to withdraw its troops only as far as the lines it judges convenient.”‎

In the wake of the Six-Day War, President Johnson declared that an ‎immediate return to the situation before the outbreak of hostilities was “not a prescription for peace, ‎but for renewed hostilities.” President Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger, “You and I both know that they [the ‎Israelis] can’t go back to the other [pre-1967] borders.” ‎

Resolution 2334 pays lip service to, but in essence ignores, the clear language of Resolution 242 that every state should have ‎‎”secure and recognized boundaries.” ‎

Although it can be debated whether or not Security Council resolutions are legally binding in international law, ‎we know that this resolution will be considered as such by the many enemies that the Jewish state has ‎within the international community. The implications of this act are horrific, including continued and ‎strengthened efforts to boycott, divest from and sanction the State of Israel, and attempts to take Israeli leaders and soldiers to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.‎

Unfortunately, abstaining on this resolution is only the latest example of Obama’s unparalleled animus ‎toward America’s one democratic ally in the Middle East.‎

In 2009, early in his presidency, Obama met with a small, select group of American Jewish ‎leaders and said to them, “When there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines and that ‎erodes our credibility with the Arabs.” As former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren wrote, ‎this “ignored Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and its two previous offers of Palestinian statehood in ‎Gaza, almost the entire West Bank and half of Jerusalem — both offers rejected by the Palestinians.”‎

In 2012, the Obama administration allegedly leaked information that Israel had financed and trained the Iranian ‎opposition group Mujahideen-e-Khalq, and that the Israelis were going to use an airfield in Azerbaijan ‎to enable a strike against the Iranian nuclear weapons program. ‎

In 2014, in Israel’s hour of need, during a war with the genocidal Islamist terrorists of Hamas in Gaza, ‎Obama blocked a delivery of previously ordered Hellfire missiles.‎

Of course, the most damaging thing that Obama did to harm Israel was ‎to agree to the Iranian nuclear deal, which lifted international sanctions on Iran, unfroze, first up to $33 ‎billion and then up to $150 billion, in frozen Iranian assets, bequeathed upon Iran $1.7 billion in exchange for releasing their American hostages, as well as an additional $1.4 billion in ‎cash and precious metals (which was only recently disclosed).‎

Most disturbingly, there is reason to believe that Obama is not finished yet. More surprises could come at the Paris peace conference on Jan. 15 or the U.N. Security Council meeting scheduled for Jan. 17.‎

We strongly fear that this next session of the Security Council may well result in concretizing the ‎map envisioned by Resolution 2334, carving out the border of a Palestinian state and pushing Israel back to the ‎indefensible pre-1967 armistice lines, which former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban once dubbed “the Auschwitz lines.”

Such is the length to which Obama’s peculiar obsession with Israel extends.‎

Originally published at Israel Hayom: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=18137