It doesn’t take a great deal of effort to observe that the White House and its occupants are having a great deal of problems with the upcoming speech to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In fact, a good number of commenters are observing that the White House is in a state of panic over it.
One such place, oddly enough, is the Washington Post of all places. Not exactly a bastion of right-wing thinking, that, and yet here it is. [1]
After days of whining that Netanyahu’s appearance was not cleared with the White House, U.S. officials have taken to the press [2] to anonymously screech and moan, accusing the Israeli ambassador — gasp! — of furthering the prime minister’s interests at the expense of his relations with the administration. (This is rich, considering the president’s hot-mike comment about Netanyahu and a senior official’s recent use of a barnyard epithet to criticize Netanyahu). In a separate New York Times article [3] (one was not enough to assist the White House propaganda machine!), the Netanyahu speech is portrayed as helping the White House round up opposition to the Menendez-Kirk sanctions. The kicker is a quote from the president of the notoriously anti-Israel J Street – which the Times originally falsely labeled as “a Democratic-aligned pro-Israel group” and later changed to “Israeli advocacy group” after a spate of mocking tweets on Wednesday night — piling on the anti-Netanyahu criticism. (This would be akin to identifying Vladimir Putin as a pro-peace voice on Ukraine or the Saudi king as a defender of human rights.) The latter is ludicrous. The Menendez-Kirk bill was introduced this week and is set to be marked up in the Senate Banking Committee soon. For the first time, 10 Democrats have promised to vote for the conditional sanctions at a specified time (after March 24).
The complaint from the White House is so disproportionate to the issue and so defensive (is the president so petrified that Congress might hear a compelling speech from the United States’ best ally in the Middle East?) that one wonders what it is up to.
Well, no, not really. All one really needs to do is look at the history of the thing. Consider the relationship between Netanyahu and democrat President Bill Clinton, for example. This is something that I wrote about in the very first post [4]on this blog.
From Oslo to Camp David, Clinton has pushed Israel to the bargaining table, and pressured her to give up vital strategic and cultural assets she has no business giving away, if survival is at all on her agenda. Ehud Barak, by his giving into Bill Clinton (who, along with his staff including Jim Carville, did much to put Barak into office), has done little more than demonstrate just how empty the Palestinians’ peace talk really is, and how desperate Clinton was to be seen as a good President, his crimes against his oaths not withstanding. Consider….
At Clinton’s insistence, Barak offered Arafat the keys to the kingdom; just about all of the West Bank and Gaza, plus East Jerusalem and even Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount. How do the peace loving Palestinians respond? Yasser Arafat turned it all down, and gave us another few nights of headlines, filled with kids in the street throwing stones, and being shot, occasionally. He also sent his armed forces, (You recall, they’re supposed to be policemen?) to fire at the Israelis, apparently hoping for an excuse to tell the rest of the world how Israel is a war-mongering nation.
Of course that should have been a signal to about anyone with a brain that he didn’t give a damn about peace. All he and his followers are interested in is the destruction of Israel. It should have also been a signal that Clinton’s attempt at a legacy backfired, big time, and more, that it didn’t have a chance to start with…. something that Clinton should have known, did he have any understanding of the
situation at all. You will recall, perhaps that back in 1992 , Clinton more or less bragged he had no understanding of matters of foreign policy. This was never quite so clear as during this monstrosity Mr. Clinton unleashed on the world.For Israel’s part, all of this has been laid at the feet of Ehud Barak, perhaps unfairly. No, I don’t think he was the man for the job, and clearly was only in the PM’s position because Clinton’s people worked so hard to get him there, apparently hoping to set up Clinton’s brokering a of peace deal. Easy to do when you have the PM of Israel owing you his election. But Barak apparently was under pressures he had no control of, having nothing to do with politics at home, or the Palestinians… both of which were quite out of his control to begin with, in any event.. He was concerned with Israel continuing to get support from the US. In this concern, he saw Israel as being on the controlled end of the puppet’s string… and knowing that if he did not capitulate to Clinton’s demands, that vital US support would wither as quickly as Benjamin Netenyau’s prime ministership did, when it became clear he wasn’t going to buckle to Clinton’s concession demands.
And Barak wasn’t alone, nor was the left in Israel, in this perception of US control versus Israel’s survival. Yitzhak Rabin, hardly a liberal even by American standards and certainly not under Bill Clinton’s extortion based control to the extent that Barak was, saw the same problems. His longtime friends, according reports I’ve seen,
tell us he was deeply troubled over the prospect of losing US support… and therefore bought into the ‘land for peace’ deals being brokered by the liberals in the US. This was something I predicted he wouldn’t have done.Israeli voters, seeing this happening, and clearly annoyed with the US control over Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians, trounced Barak in the polls. Unless one considers this anger, the election of Ariel Sharon, his replacement, is hard to fathom, since he has never been overly popular, as best I can tell. But perhaps the people of Israel are finally figuring out what the real story is.. that in truth, there is no dealing with the Palestinians, and Arifat.
One hopes that they’ve not been too late in coming to this conclusion. If they are, world war seems fairly certain to me… possibly nuclear in nature.”
Personally, I consider it no small point, that the post to which I refer and which I have quoted here, was written two days after the 9 11 attacks.
Sorry for the extended quote of my older article, but it’s critical that you understand that history is repeating itself here.
I suggest the pattern of Democrats having anti Israel and Pro Muslim sentiments, and working toward those goals, is nearly axiomatic. But that’s just for openers.
Even more pronounced is the Pro Muslim sentiments of Barack Hussein Obama, whose White House is once again meddling in the political affairs internal to Israel. As the Washington Post article notes….
Other Israel watchers speculate that this is really a ham-handed way of interfering with Israel’s elections by giving fuel to Netanyahu’s opponents, who argue that he cannot get along with the United States. This would be par for the course for an administration that has strained to topple the Israeli government. Its offense? It simply refuses to knuckle under to administration bullying or go quietly as the United States appeases Iran, an existential threat to the Jewish state.
Ironically, the scuffle comes just after Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed two Israeli soldiers, reminding us that Iran is on the march throughout the region and that the Iranian government with which Obama hopes to achieve a grand reconciliation is committed to Israel’s destruction.
A destruction which this administration is apparently as eager to help along, as was that of the Clintons.
Speaking of the Clintons, Hillary Clinton has endorsed very loudly the approach Barack Hussein Obama has taken with the situation, and I say unsurprising, since it’s so similar to the policies she and her husband pursued while they infested the White House.
I suspect that there is some crucial bit of intelligence as regards to the activities of Iran… activities of a nuclear weaponry nature, which Netanyahu is going to bring to the congressional speech. I suggest that the White House knows this, and is desperate to stop it, knowing the Congress will act on that information.
As will both the Israeli and American voters.
Really, it’s the only way to explain the hysterical responses we see from the White House.