What if any was the point of Obama’s message to Israel’s president?

… by Alan Hart

As only readers of the Israeli newspaper Ha-aretz know, when Israel’s President Reuven Rivlen was received at the White House on 9 December, President Obama said the following to him: “With no peace process the U.S. is at a loss on how to defend Israel diplomatically.”

The question those words provoked in my mind was the following.

Were they just a measured expression of Obama’s despair or were they a warning to the effect that if Israel continues with its defiance of international law and denial of justice for the Palestinians, the time would come when the U.S. would not be able to veto UN Security Council resolutions critical of the Zionist state’s policies and actions?

In other words, was Obama’s message to Reuven something like this: “Tell Netanyahu that unless he does some re-thinking and becomes serious about peace on terms the Palestinians could accept, America’s strained relationship with his Israel could reach breaking point.”

If that or something very like it was the message Obama wanted Reuven to convey to Netanyahu, and assuming the Israeli president did pass it on, would it make any difference?

I think the answer is an emphatic NO and a brilliant explanation of why was contained in Uri Avnery’s weekly article with the headline King Bibi.

It included the following.

Bound by his father’s ideology, he is unable even to contemplate giving up an inch of our holy fatherland. Like many Israelis he does not believe in God, but believes that God has promised us this land. (Netanyahu’s father was one of the most extreme and fanatical Zionists).

Some Bantustan-like disconnected enclaves for the Palestinians – why not, as long as we cannot drive them out altogether. But not more.

This prevents any effort for peace. It guarantees an apartheid state or a bi-national state with a permanent civil war. Netanyahu knows that very well. He has no illusions. So he has uttered the logical answer: “We shall live forever by the sword”. Good Hebrew, terrible statesmanship.

Under his rule, Israel will irrevocably slide down the slope towards eventual disaster. The longer his reign, the greater the danger.

All in all, Netanyahu is a man without intellectual depths, a political manipulator without real solutions, a man with an imposing front but empty inside.

So if Obama’s words to Reuven were a warning that he hoped might cause Netanyahu to do some serious re-thinking, he was, to say the least, naive.

I am open to the idea that in what is left of his presidency Obama would like to consign American vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israel’s policies and actions to the dustbin of history; but he won’t out of fear that he would be playing into the hands of the Zionist billionaires who fund and drive the Republican Party and enable them to improve the currently close to zero prospects of its eventual nominee winning the race to the White House.

As things are and look like going Hillary Clinton is going to be America’s next president. That will not please Netanyahu because he would rather have a Republican president and best of all one who would keep his election promise to tear up the nuclear agreement with Iran and impose new sanctions on it.

Who could that be? Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio.

At the time of writing there is informed speculation that he is shortly to be endorsed by the Republican Party’s biggest and most influential provider of election campaign funds – Zionism’s casino owning billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

In October Rubio’s courtship of Adelson provoked Donald Trump into tweeting the following. “Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mould him into his perfect little puppet.” What being an Adelson puppet might mean is suggested by some of his own policy positions.

Adelson has

– called for a nuclear bomb to be dropped on Iran;

– rubbished a two-state solution;

– denied the existence of the Palestinians as a distinct people; and

– dismissed concerns that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is undermining its democracy with a “So what?”

To win Adelson’s support Rubio not only vowed to renege on the nuclear deal with Iran and impose new sanctions on it, he echoed Netanyahu’s view that the conditions for a two-state solution do not exist. (Actually Rubio is right about that but for the wrong reason.

In his view, like that of Adelson and Netanyahu, the conditions do not exist because the Palestinians are not interested in peace with Israel and only want to destroy it. In reality, which is not something supporters of Israel right or wrong are capable of grasping, the conditions do not exist because of Israel’s on-going colonization of the occupied West Bank, ethnic cleansing slowly and by stealth).

The Palestinians and Iran in particular (and the whole world in general) are fortunate that, as I suggested above, the prospects of any Republican replacing Obama in the White House are close to zero.

But Netanyahu has nothing to fear from Hillary. There is absolutely no reason to believe that as president she would get even close to deciding that in order to best protect American’s own interests (and actually those of the Jews of the world) she should use whatever leverage was necessary to try to end Israel’s defiance of international law, to set in motion a real peace process – by definition one that would end with peace based on an acceptable amount of justice for the Palestinians and security for all.

That’s not going to happen whoever occupies the White House unless and until enough American voters insist that it does.

Could it be that deep in himself Obama believes such a day will come and that’s why his words to Reuven were not a measured expression of his despair but a warning? Or perhaps both?

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Alan Hart

Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who has covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. His Latest book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Vol. 1: The False Messiah, is a three-volume epic in its American edition. He blogs on AlanHart.com.