During the campaign to become President, Barack Obama pledged “unshakable commmitment” to Israel’s security.
From Haaretz:
“There is not a single trace of me ever being anything more than a friend of Israel and a friend of the Jewish people,” Obama said, telling the crowd not to believe fliers and e-mails that suggested otherwise.
“Judge me by what I say and what I’ve done. Don’t judge me because I’ve got a funny name. Don’t judge me because I’m African-American.”
From CBC:
“The state of Israel faces determined enemies who seek its destruction, but it also has a friend and ally in the United States that will always stand by the people of Israel,” Obama told reporters in Sderot, a southern city subjected to daily rocket barrages fired by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip before a fragile truce between Israel and Hamas last month curbed the attacks.
As he toured Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Sen. Barack Obama yesterday sought to reassure Israelis, and that nation’s backers in the US, that he is committed to protecting their security. The AP reports Obama yesterday “professed ‘an unshakable commitment to the security’ of Israel, whether the threat comes from terrorists, Iran or elsewhere.” Obama said, “The way you know where somebody’s going is where have they been. And I’ve been with Israel for many, many years now.”
Barack Obama is promising an “unshakable commitment” to Israel if he is elected president.
PBS had video of him saying it.
Today, however, there seems to be a different tone in his speeches. The Israelis are not buying it anymore. and commentators in Israeli newspapers think Obama’s speech yesterday marks the beginning of a new era is the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
Commentary by Eitan Haber in Yediot Aharonot
The speech was balanced but this is exactly the problem… For light years we were spoilt by the lack of US balance in our favour… The speech yesterday is the beginning of a “new countdown” in the relations between Washington and Jerusalem. It seems there will be no intimacy in the relations, that intimacy that granted Israel and its leaders a unique, special status among the leaders and nations of the world.
Commentary by Yoaz Hendel in Yediot Aharonot
Only over one evil the new American prophet weeps – the settlements … What is left as an obstacle to peace, according to Obama, are those settlers… They are the ones responsible for the Israeli-Arab conflict… Had we not been witnesses to the result of the dismantling of the settlements in Gaza, someone in Israel still could believe that this is right.
Commentary by Yo’el Marcus in Ha’aretz
Today, 5 June, 42 years after the Six-Day War, the time has come to respond to the question posed by President Lyndon Johnson to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol: What kind of Israel do you people want? Yesterday, Obama made it clear what the answer should be, and that we should view his sycophantic speech in Cairo as a true alarm.
Commentary by settler Benny Katzover in Ma’ariv
Obama reiterated his wish to establish two states for two peoples. Balance and equality between Jews and Arabs as it were. But Obama “forgot” that in the Jewish state there are more than a million [Israeli] Arabs who enjoy democratic rights unknown to their brothers in Arab countries. No one stops them from building… But for us Jews in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] it is forbidden to live, build or to buy land. Obama, who is supposed to be sensitive to racism, has turned himself into a racist.
The question now becomes, how does Israel respond to this? I don’t see any shift coming soon from Iran, Syria, Egypt. I don’t see Hamas or Hezbollah suddenly shifting gears towards peace.
Caroline Glick at The Corner also found the speech, “deeply disturbing.”
In his address, while Obama admonished the Arabs for their pervasive Jew hatred and Holocaust denial, he effectively accepted and legitimized their view that Israel owes its existence to the Holocaust when he said, “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied,” and then went on to talk about the Holocaust.
Just as abominably, Obama compared Israel to Southern slave owners and Palestinians to black slaves in the antebellum south. He used the Arab euphemism “resistance” to discuss Palestinian terrorism, and generally ignored the fact that every Palestinian political faction is also a terrorist organization.
It seems that Obama’s “unshakable committment” to Israel security takes a back seat to his desire to mend fences with the Muslim world.
After all, why would the Palestinians make a deal with Israel when they know that Obama will blame Israel for the absence of a peace agreement?
Exactly.
