Israel: Obama misses the point, deliberately

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
Orange County Register
31 March '10

Why is President Obama so obviously humiliating Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu? Why is Secretary of State Clinton negating everything she said when she represented New York state and piling on the Jewish state?

They want Benjamin Netanyahu out. Specifically, they want him to feel such pressure that he dumps his right-wing coalition partners and forms a new government with the center-left party Kadima headed by former Prime Minister Tzipi Livni. Livni, who thinks nothing of trading land for peace, no matter how flawed the peace might be, will then hold Netanyahu's government hostage and force it to bend to the will of Washington and sign a deal with the Palestinians that cedes them land in return for a handful of vague vapors and promises none of which will be kept.

On March 3, Livni said in a Knesset debate that since Netanyahu took control, "Israel has become a pariah country in the world." She is trying to use Obama's and Clinton's rejection of Netanyahu's course to force her way into the government. And Obama and Clinton are intent on helping her do so by publicly humiliating Netanyahu.
But Netanyahu insists that he'd be happy to negotiate a peace accord. But, as he told me last year, "I just don't have a peace partner with whom to negotiate."

The Palestinians are expert at playing "good cop/bad cop" with Israel. The good cop – the Palestinian Authority – wants to negotiate a peace deal and insists on signs of Israeli good faith to do so. Meanwhile, the bad cop – Hamas – fires missiles at Israel from Gaza, land Israel ceded to the Palestinians to promote the peace process earlier in the decade.

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