BUYER'S REMORSE

From day-one of his presidency, Barack Obama, confident that Jewish voters would never desert him, set out to make Israel pay for all the conflicts in the Middle East. "Today, a sizable number of American Jews are having a serious case of buyer’s remorse when it comes to Obama." IT’S ABOUT TIME, HIGH TIME!
　
Part of a long article in the October 15 issue of The Jerusalem Post, THE JEWISH PROBLEM WITH OBAMA by Edward Klein with Richard Z. Chesnoff, follows. The article noted that "the Obama administration was not only outwardly hostile to Israel but perhaps, without even knowing it, hostile to Jews as well."
　
From the article by Klein and Chesnoff:
　
THE CURRENT Jewish problem with Obama can be traced back to his first full day on the job. On January 21, 2009, he summoned his national security team to the Oval Office and laid out a tough new policy toward Israel. According to my sources, Obama said that to make good on his campaign promise to extricate 200,000 American troops from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US had to create a grand coalition of "moderate" Muslim states and Israel to isolate Iran, which has made no secret of its ambition to become the nuclear hegemon in the Middle East.

The only way to accomplish that goal, he stated, was to eliminate the poisonous effect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which provides Iran with an excuse to stir up trouble. Thus it was "a vital national interest of the United States" to stop Israel from building settlements in the occupied West Bank and housing in east Jerusalem, and force the Jewish state to resolve the Palestinian problem.

Previous White Houses had made similar noises about bringing peace to the Middle East, and at first Jewish leaders didn’t pay much attention to leaks emanating from the new administration about a fundamental change in American policy. However, a clue to the president’s true intentions came in March 2009, when Abe Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, met with the president’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. "This is Israel’s moment of truth," Emanuel told Foxman. "This president is determined to make peace between Israel and the Arabs."

To many Jews, it seemed highly improbable that a brand-new president would choose to alienate Israel, America’s oldest and most loyal ally in the Middle East. But then, in July 2009, when Obama made his first overseas trip, he chose to visit three Muslim countries – Turkey, Saudi Arabia (where he bowed to King Abdullah) and Egypt. During a landmark speech in Cairo, he announced his intention to seek "a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world."

Understandably enough, American Jews were annoyed that the president had failed to include Israel in his Mideast swing. But what rankled them even more was that Obama seemed to adopt the Arab narrative to explain the existence of Israel – namely, that Israel deserved to exist because of past Jewish suffering in Europe, particularly during the Holocaust. Nowhere in his Cairo speech did Obama mention the fact that Jews had a 3,000-year history in the Promised Land.

Things went from bad to worse when the president called a meeting of Jewish leaders in July. Fourteen major Jewish organizations were represented at this meeting.

"I agree with your goal to bring peace to the Middle East," Foxman told the president. "But the perception is that you’re only pressuring Israel and not the Arabs." Foxman said the president agreed. Another Jewish leader at the meeting said, "If you want Israel to take risks for peace, the best way is to make Israel feel that its staunch friend America is behind it."

"You are absolutely wrong," the president replied. "For the past eight years [under the Bush administration], Israel had a friend in the United States and it didn’t make peace."
　
On March 10 of this year, a relatively low-level official in the Interior Ministry issued a permit for 1,600 new housing units for Israelis in the Ramat Shlomo section of east Jerusalem. The ill-timed announcement came on the very day Vice President Joe Biden arrived to kick-start a round of indirect peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu immediately apologized to Biden, who accepted his expression of regret. But Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, called off the "proximity talks."

The next day, at the regularly scheduled weekly breakfast meeting between the president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Obama made his feelings clear. He was livid. As he saw it, the Israelis had purposely humiliated his vice president and tried to sabotage his peace plan. It was a personal affront, and he wouldn’t stand for such treatment. He instructed Clinton to call Netanyahu and read him the riot act.

The following day, during a 43-minute harangue, Clinton delivered a set of ultimatums to Netanyahu. Prefacing each remark with the phrase "I have been instructed to tell you," she demanded that Israel release a substantial number of Palestinian prisoners as a token of goodwill; lift its siege of Gaza; suspend all settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem; accept that a symbolic number of Palestinians be given the "right of return" to Israel under a future peace treaty; and agree to place the question of the status of Jerusalem at the top of the peace-talks agenda.

"If you refuse these demands," Clinton told Netanyahu, according to my sources, "the United States government will conclude that we no longer share the same interests." Netanyahu bit his tongue and remained noncommittal about the American demands, though he did eventually agree to ease the blockade of Gaza.

That same Friday, [Israel's] Ambassador Michael Oren was summoned to the State Department and given a severe dressing down. Someone who saw him that night at a party described him as "shaken." And things did not end there. Ten days later, Netanyahu was invited to the White House, where he was treated less than elegantly.

The White House seemed strangely indifferent to the feelings of resentment that its treatment of Netanyahu aroused in the Jewish community. For shortly after Netanyahu returned to Israel, the president risked provoking even greater Jewish outrage by insinuating that American troops were dying in Iraq and Afghanistan because Israel refused to agree to peace with the Palestinians. The Israeli-Arab conflict "is costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasures," he said.