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Who Will Mediate Between Israel and Obama?

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 07:30 PM PDT

At the end of September, Obama is set to mediate a summit
between Israel and the PA's Abbas. But the real question is who will
mediate between Israel and Obama?

The Obama Administration's general hostility toward Israel, as
well as its efforts to prevent Jews from building houses in Jerusalem and
Judea and Samaria, has resulted in a poll showing that the majority of
Israelis believe that Obama is biased toward the Palestinian Arab side,
with barely a third believing him to be neutral. Now the same pundits and
diplomats who clamored that the US must be seen as an honest broker, must
explain how Obama will show that he is an honest broker.

In the
post-election reality, Obama has demonstrated with that he shares none of
Israel's concerns, whether over POW's, terrorism or Iran's nuclear
program; but all of the concerns of the Palestinian Arab side. He has
showcased that with the areas his administration has chosen to focus on
most. His administration has not only appointed radical anti-Israel
figures, including Samantha Power, who talked about invading Israel, but
has appeared willing to implement its agenda. While Gibbs and the State
Department demand that Israel stop building housing in East Jerusalem in
order not to prejudice the outcome of final negotiations, the US Consulate
in Jerusalem openly treats East Jerusalem as Palestinian Arab
territory.

Clearly the Obama Administration has no problem
prejudicing the outcome of the negotiations on the side of the terrorist
groups that they continue to fund and pressure Israel to negotiate with
and make concessions to. What they have a problem with is Israel asserting
its own rights in any way. By objecting to Jewish housing but not Arab
housing, the Obama Administration is demonstrating not only its open bias
against Israel and its bigotry, but that it has already determined that
Israel should surrender its own capital to terrorists. The same terrorists
whose chief Mahmoud Abbas was the recipient of Obama's first phone call to
a foreign leader.

It has been a decade since Israelis have elected
a left wing Prime Minister. In the last election Israelis brought a
center-right coalition to power, defeating the center-left coalition that
backs the Obama administration's agenda. Yet while Obama has insisted that
his critics acknowledge that he won and that as a result American policies
would change, he has been unwilling to extend the same acknowledgment
toward Israel and the policy changes produced by its own democratic
process. Instead Obama's victory has produced unrelenting administration
pressure on Netanyahu's government to reject the will of the Israeli
people, in favor of the will of Obama.

Obama has promised that the
era of the US dictating to other countries was over. But that promise
clearly applies only to countries whose politics and ethnicities meet with
Obama's approval. Israel very clearly does not. The Obama Administration
has tried to claim that the presence of Jewish advisers proves that it
can't be biased against Israel or Jews. That is an insulting argument
right up there with a company arguing that it can't be racist because it
has black employees. And the Obama Administration's policy of ignoring and
repressing the will of the Israeli people has had its natural outcome in a
poll which shows that only 4 percent of Israelis think Obama's agenda is a
positive one toward Israel.

Had the same poll been taken of
Palestinian Arab Muslims, the media would treat it as a crisis and blame
the administration. Instead the media has responded to a fundamental
breach between Israel and the United States by blaming Israeli ignorance
of Obama's policies. But the problem is not that Israelis are ignorant of
Obama's agenda. It is that they understand his agenda and its implications
all too well. Obama's sympathies have been all too obviously on display in
Egypt and Turkey, and while some American Jews may choose to delude
themselves, Israelis don't have luxury.

And with Obama's popularity
sinking at home, the next stage of the scenario is an all too familiar one
for Israelis. It is something they have witnessed from President after
President looking to divert the public's attention from one disaster by
trying to shake down Israeli for more aggressive concessions to terrorism
in order to bring forward the photo ops in the name of peace. This time
out though, Israelis may have had enough as the alliance between the two
nations has increasingly become an abusive relationship.

It has
become a given that the terrorists leaders in the West Bank and Gaza will
never be held accountable to any standard. It is also a given that the
media and foreign diplomats will repeatedly blame Israel for stalling,
when Israel attempts to nail down points in the negotiations, accuse
Israel of not wanting peace when Israeli diplomats ask that Fatah and
Hamas recognize Israel and abandon terrorism, and finally threatened with
economic and diplomatic sanctions under the table if the negotiations
don't produce the expected photo ops.

All those givens have cost
countless Israeli lives, and still more children torn apart by shredded
nails while eating pizzas, young girls missing arms and legs and
bloodstained bus routes. These atrocities were not simply the products of
terrorism, they were the result of negotiations which disdained the rights
of Israelis to live in peace and security, while emphasizing every
Palestinian Arab demand as vital and crucial. It is only when Israel
stopped making concessions and began building walls, when Israeli tanks
smashed into Arafat's Muqata and when checkpoints were securely manned,
that the bloodshed began to diminish. Now Obama is eager to turn back the
clock and begin extracting more concessions and empowering the same
terrorists who were responsible for so much horror over the last
generation.

Obama may be eager to meditate between Israel
and the terrorists, but first Israel needs someone to meditate its talks
with Obama. With the majority of Israelis believing that Obama is biased
against Israel, and with the Obama Administration prejudicing the outcome
of the negotiations before they have even happened, such negotiations
would be nothing more than a kangaroo court lacking the support of the
Israeli people.

It is time for the United States and Israel to
reevaluate their alliance and decide what they want and need from each
other. If the only use that the US has for Israel is as a tool for winning
Muslim favor by extracting territorial concessions for terrorists, as the
Obama Administration is bent on doing, then maybe it's time for both
nations to move on.