Obama’s Ongoing Obsession with Netanyahu

Obama’s Ongoing Obsession with Netanyahu

By Peter Wehner
June 4, 2015
Commentary Magazine

In an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 TV Network that aired on Tuesday, President Obama said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s position on Palestinian statehood undermines the credibility of his country.

As The Hill reports:

Netanyahu has recently expressed willingness to re-enter talks with Palestinians, but Obama said his stance contains “so many caveats, so many conditions, that it is not realistic to think that those conditions would be met any time in the near future.”

“The danger here is that Israel as a whole loses credibility,” Obama said….

The story went on to say, “the president suggested Palestinian officials and others might not see Netanyahu as a reliable negotiating partner.”

Now that is rich. Palestinian officials don’t see Israel as a reliable negotiating partner. If only our president was able to distinguish the fire brigade from the fire.

I’ve written before that Mr. Obama is quite simply anti-Israel. There’s no need here to recapitulate the case I’ve made to prove that proposition. For now, I simply want to comment on the president’s obsession with Prime Minister Netanyahu.

It is striking how much Mr. Netanyahu seems to occupy Obama’s thoughts, and how much the Israeli Prime Minister has become the target of the president’s petty rage. One gets the sense that a psychological drama is playing itself out on the world stage; that Mr. Obama sees in Mr. Netanyahu qualities that Obama himself lacks — leadership, moral clarity, toughness and fortitude, and a passion to publicly defend the nation he leads. This may have left the president smoldering with resentment. In addition, Obama isn’t used to being stood up to and pushed back on, which Netanyahu is willing to do.

But beyond all that, it tells us a very great deal about the president that he is so eager to criticize Netanyahu while he is so solicitous and delicate when it comes to the Iranian leadership. Mr. Obama is bending over backwards to get a nuclear arms deal — a truly awful nuclear arms deal — with one of the most malevolent regimes on earth, even as he routinely castigates America’s greatest ally and one of the most magnificent nations in history. When it comes to Obama’s approach to Israel versus the enemies of Israel, we are seeing a stunning moral inversion.

There is something deeply wrong and troubling going on here.

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