Obama and Israel: Making the Same Mistake Again and Again

Jeffrey Dunetz
American Thinker
20 March '10

The Bible says that the Jews are descended from twelve brothers, and they have always acted that way. Throughout recorded history, Jews have spent almost as much time fighting each other as they have fighting their enemies. Yet each time they are attacked from the outside, they coalesce and support their brothers like a close-knit family. And that pattern goes double for the multi-party world of Israeli politics.

Last time I checked, there were twelve different political parties that received enough votes to be part of the Knesset, and many of those parties are part of the governing coalition. The different parties, though they may be serving in the same government, remain very partisan. When you add to that the fact that cabinet ministers have a lot more independent authority than what you would see in an American president's cabinet, you can see how the results become very wild at times. But when their nation is under attack, either militarily or simply via international political pressure, the various parties in an Israeli cabinet coalesce to fight off the threat.

If Barack Obama bothered to take the time to understand the "soul" of the Israelis, he might be much closer to restarting talks between Israel and the Palestinians than he is today. His own arrogance, however, and his refusal to believe that anybody would not see the world as he does, prevents him from achieving progress in the region. Obama's arrogance is so strong that last week, he made the exact same mistake on the settlement issue as he made just four months ago.

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