Obama's 'analytical' Israel policies

[Pirate Smile]

Obama's 'analytical' Israel policies



Aaron David Miller, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, has an op-ed in the LA Times that looks at the difficult relationship between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Miller's take is that the president is fundamentally pro-Israel, but that his policies towards the Jewish state are more analytical than emotional — and this is the real origin of the tension between the president and Netanyahu:

The main source of Obama's view of Israel lies in his broader assessment of conflict and how problems are resolved. Obama didn't get his vision of Israel from the movie "Exodus," in which the Israelis are cowboys and the Arabs are Indians. Nor does he have Clinton's Southern Baptist Bible sensibilities or Bush's evangelical ones relating to Israel as the Holy Land.

Obama's views came from another place: his own logic, the university environment in which he developed intellectually and his own moral sensibilities. And according to this view, the Arab-Israeli dispute isn't some kind of morality play that pits the forces of good against the forces of darkness. Instead, it's a more complex tale, not of heroes and villains but of a conflict between two rights and two just causes. It's also a conflict that is vital to American interests. And those interests are being threatened by the divide between those who want a solution and are serious about moving toward one, and those who aren't serious about finding a solution and throw up obstacles. After three years, the president has clearly placed the Israelis in the latter category and the Palestinians in the former.

The tendency to look at Israel analytically instead of emotionally, and to view the conflict through a national-interest prism rather than some sort of moral filter, dovetails with Obama's poisonous relationship with Netanyahu. Obama doesn't like him, doesn't trust him and views him as a con man. The Israeli prime minister has frustrated and embarrassed Obama and gotten in the way of the president's wildly exaggerated hopes for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he's been pursuing with more enthusiasm than viable strategy since his inauguration.

http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/01/obamas-analytical-israel-policies-109312.html#comments

[shira]

1. The President believes the PA is serious about finding a solution?

Come on.

That's spin.

My take is that Obama wants a solution very much, and in order to make it so he is willing to arm Israel to the teeth (which he has been doing all along) so that Israel can then risk giving the Palestinians virtually all that they want. In case things go bad, and of course they will, Israel would still have a decided military advantage that the US will help maintain for years to come. Therefore, Obama is frustrated that Netanyahu isn't willing to cave to nearly all PA/Hamas demands. Israel wouldn't be under any threat of extinction, so why not take the leap?

The problem is no Israeli PM, not even from Meretz, can make the PA/Hamas happy enough to avoid catastrophe. The POTUS may think a war where tens of thousands dead is okay - so long as Israel remains intact - but the Israeli populace won't go for that.