Barry’s Bullying Failed with Bibi
Our community organizer in chief tried his favorite
strategy — bullying — on the Israeli Prime Minister last week,
and discovered to his evident surprise that veterans of the special
operations community are not among those who can be
intimidated.
Those of us who wondered how Obama would misuse the
political capital gained by killing Osama bin Laden were answered
on Thursday when Obama took American Middle East policy in a
bizarre and dangerous direction. But before we get to that, we need
to set the context of Obama’s actions.
OBL assumed seabed temperature on May 1. One day later,
the leader of the terrorist group Hamas’ government in
the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniyeh, condemned what he called the
“assassination” of bin Laden and — with due deference to Hamas’
family quarrel with al Qaeda, which Haniya said were mere
differences in “opinions and agenda” — he prayed that bin Laden’s
soul would rest in peace.
After another two days, Hamas (whose charter requires the
destruction of Israel) signed a power-sharing agreement with the
Palestinian Authority in the cradle of the “Arab Spring,”
Cairo.
Two weeks after that, on the eve of Netanyahu’s arrival,
Obama gave a much-ballyhooed speech at the State Department. In it,
he rewarded the formation of the Hamas-PA alliance by demanding
that Israel make a peace with the Palestinians on which Israel’s
borders would be its 1967 borders before it was attacked by the
Arab nations, with agreed-upon land swaps. That would require
Israel to surrender its capital city — Jerusalem — to Palestinian
control and leave its borders indefensible.
Obama’s reasoning — both clearly stated and implicit in
his speech — is based on the core anti-Israel doctrine that the
Arab states have been propagating since the Jewish state was
created in 1948. No American president has so clearly abandoned the
Israelis.
First, Obama conceded the principal point of Arab
propaganda ever since Israel was founded: that there can be no
peace about anything in the Middle East until the Palestinians are
established in an independent contiguous state. Though George Bush
was the first American president to concede to the need for a
“contiguous” Palestinian state — which would require that Israel
be cut in two — Obama made it official U.S. policy.
The Arab states — as they have made clear by their
actions since 1948 — don’t give a damn how the Palestinians
suffer, or how many of them are killed in conflict with
Israel.
The Palestinians are merely cannon fodder in the
never-ending war the Arab nations wage against Israel. They are not
a “people” in the sense that the Russians, Chinese, Romanians or
French are, though Obama accepts this Arab premise as a basis for
his policy.
The Palestinians are fungible Arabs. About 3.7 million
live in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, some 2.5 million live in
Jordan, 1.5 million in Syria and Lebanon and about a half million
in Saudi Arabia. The Arab nations maintain the Palestinians in
perpetual “refugee” status, rejecting the idea that they could be
citizens of any Arab nation. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and others could
have absorbed these people quickly and relieved them of the burden
of what Obama called “permanent occupation.” But they don’t,
because they can — as they have for decades — indoctrinate, arm,
and fund the Palestinians’ terrorism against Israel which is of far
greater value to the Arab League than any peace would
be.
All of those historical facts were the backdrop to Obama’s
anti-Israeli speech and his meeting with Netanyahu. The president
may have believed that Netanyahu is the leader of a nation that is
no more than an American vassal state and would fall prey to his
bullying.
Obama likes to bully people while they’re sitting captive
in his audience and can’t respond. In the 2010 State of the Union
speech, Barry badgered the six Supreme Court justices sitting
before him, saying that the Citizens United decision would
open the floodgates to foreign corporations’ influencing American
elections. Five sat there in shock, though Justice Alito visibly
mouthed the words “not true” in response to Obama’s lie. In his
April 13 budget speech, with Republican Paul Ryan in the audience,
Obama spun a web worthy of Ted Kennedy, accusing Ryan of authoring
a budget that would deprive 50 million Americans of health
insurance, keep kids from being educated and basically turn our
nation into some dog-eat-dog scrapyard in which children and poor
people would die of neglect. Ryan, too much the gentleman, didn’t
even walk out.
Obama underestimated Netanyahu. The community organizer
wasn’t prepared, by education or experience, to properly measure
his latest adversary.
Netanyahu is, at his core, a special operations warrior.
He is a veteran of the elite Sayeret Matkal, an Israeli army unit
much like our Delta Force. Netanyahu has been in combat, including
his participation in a 1972 hostage rescue raid on a hijacked
Sabena Airlines jet.
The Sayeret Matkal are like our spec ops guys. They
aren’t, as is often said of spies, just like us. I know enough of
them to say that they can be picked out of a crowd pretty easily:
the way they walk, their wary, continuous measurement of whomever
and whatever is around them, their well-earned pride and potential
for individual action and bravery. Among the categories of
humankind, they are at the top of the “least likely to be bullied”
list.
Obama’s body language in the post-meeting session with
Netanyahu and reporters in the Oval Office said it all. Obama was
visibly angered when Netanyahu spoke: he sat, hand across his face,
glaring at Netanyahu. His bullying failed and he knew
it.
After reiterating the points made in his speech the day
before, Obama turned it over to the Israeli PM. Netanyahu treated
Obama better than Obama had treated him, the Supreme Court, and
Paul Ryan. Without rancor or visible anger, he said that Israel
won’t go back to the 1967 borders because they are indefensible:
not the boundaries of peace but the boundaries of repeated wars
because they left an attack on Israel so attractive to its enemies.
He said, flatly, that Israel must have a long-term military
presence along west bank of the Jordan River.
The Israeli PM went on to say that Israel cannot negotiate
with a Palestinian government that is backed by Hamas, echoing what
he said after the PA-Hamas agreement was announced. Hamas, he said,
is a terrorist organization committed to Israel’s destruction,
saying that Israel cannot negotiate with what he called the
Palestinian version of al Qaeda.
Netanyahu put the burden on Palestinian President Abbas:
either negotiate with Israel or keep his pact with Hamas, which
Obama had implicitly endorsed.
Addressing the Arab-Palestinian demand — which no
Palestinian leader has ever agreed to compromise — that
Palestinian “refugees” must be allowed the “right of return” to
Israel, Netanyahu said that the 1948 war resulted in two refugee
problems: Arab refugees and Jewish refugees in roughly equal
numbers. Israel absorbed the Jewish refugees while the Arab states
expelled them from their lands.
Netanyahu said, “Now, 63 years later, the Palestinians
come to us and they say to Israel ‘accept the grandchildren, the
great-grandchildren of these refugees thereby wiping out Israel’s
future as a Jewish state. It’s not going to happen. Everybody knows
it’s not going to happen. And I think it’s time to tell the
Palestinians it’s not going to happen.”
Obama pretended to look at Netanyahu, but couldn’t bear to
make eye contact. He knew he had failed.
Though Obama failed to bully Netanyahu, one fact is now
established: Israel is alone. Obama’s speech gives support to the
Europeans’ anti-Israeli policies. Israel cannot rely on American
support even in time of dire need as long as Obama is
president.
Tomorrow, Netanyahu will speak before a joint session of
Congress. His speech will likely repeat what he told Obama
face-to-face on Friday, and for that he will receive thunderous
applause and little else.
I recall some guy named Rumsfeld trying to teach us that
weakness is provocative. Obama’s betrayal of Israel and weakness in
dealing with the terror-sponsoring Arab nations will sustain those
Arab nations and their Palestinian proxies in their unrelenting
terror war on Israel. Thanks to Obama, peace between Israel and the
Arabs is far less likely now than it was before the Palestinian
Authority became a tool of Hamas.
