“Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are.” Barack Obama
Next week, Netanyahu will return to power at the head of a coalition even more intractably right-wing clique. All of this while Netanyahu has authorized building in the E1 area, effectively making it impossible or the Palestinians to believe that Jerusalem can be a shred capital. “When informed about the Israeli decision, Obama, who has a famously contentious relationship with the prime minister, didn’t even bother getting angry. He told several people that this sort of behavior on Netanyahu’s part is what he has come to expect, and he suggested that he has become inured to what he sees as self-defeating policies of his Israeli counterpart.”
Netanyahu seemingly does not understand that Israel’s survival depends on a vision longer than the next election. What sort of bad thinking led him to openly pull for Mitt Romney ? Does the Israeli PM actually think he benefits from a dismissive attitude toward Abbas? .Is the the prime minister a political coward or the sort of irrational sycophant to the base Mr. Romney showed America?
Jeff Goldberg at Bloomberg writes:
I wouldn’t be particularly surprised, either, if Obama eventually offered a public vision of what a state of Palestine should look like, and affirmed that it should have its capital in East Jerusalem. ….
Obama, since his time in the Senate, has been consistent in his analysis of Israel’s underlying challenge: If it doesn’t disentangle itself from the lives of West Bank Palestinians, the world will one day decide it is behaving as an apartheid state.
….But it is in terms of American diplomatic protection — among the Europeans and especially at the UN — that Israel may one day soon notice a significant shift. During November’s vote on Palestine’s status, the U.S. supported Israel and asked its allies to do the same. In the end, they were joined by a total of seven other countries, including the Pacific powerhouses Palau and Micronesia.