The Attack on Netanyahu

Leo Rennert
American Thinker
15 March '10

In orchestrating fierce attacks by Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton against Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama allowed his long-held anti-Likud animosity to blind him to basic political and diplomatic realities about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As if Mideast diplomacy doesn't face enough hurdles, Obama has made things worse.

Even before he became president, Obama, when asked whether he was a friend of Israel, responded with a qualified affirmative, emphasizing that one didn't have to be in lockstep with Likud orthodoxy to qualify as a supporter of the Jewish state. To Obama, Netanyahu's political party basically doesn't fit his idea of who should run Israel's government.

And judging by his directives to Clinton and Biden to go all-out in condemning Netanyahu over an announcement of a preliminary planning OK for 1,600 housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood of Jerusalem, Obama showed that he has carried his animus against Likud into the White House.

But in giving full vent to his anti-Likud sentiments, the president forgot to do his homework about past and current U.S. criteria for a two-state solution. Ramat Shlomo was simply the wrong target for creating a crisis with Netanyahu and Israel.

In getting all exercised about more housing in Ramat Shlomo, Obama forgot that his own Secretary of State praised Netanyahu not too long ago when he agreed under administration pressure to impose a ten-month moratorium on housing construction in West Bank settlements. Netanyahu's unilateral concession to entice the Palestinians to come to the negotiating table did not encompass East Jerusalem. Clinton nevertheless praised it as an "unprecedented" confidence-building measure.

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