Binyamin Netanyahu humiliated after Barack Obama 'dumped him for dinner'

[T-Rock]

Looks like all those years of listening to Jeremiah Wright have taken root…

Binyamin Netanyahu humiliated after Barack Obama 'dumped him for dinner'

From The Times - March 26, 2010.


For a head of government to visit the White House and not pose for photographers is rare. For a key ally to be left to his own devices while the President withdraws to have dinner in private was, until this week, unheard of. Yet that is how Binyamin Netanyahu was treated by President Obama on Tuesday night, according to Israeli reports on a trip viewed in Jerusalem as a humiliation.

After failing to extract a written promise of concessions on settlements, Mr Obama walked out of his meeting with Mr Netanyahu but invited him to stay at the White House, consult with advisers and “let me know if there is anything new”, a US congressman, who spoke to the Prime Minister, said.

“It was awful,” the congressman said. One Israeli newspaper called the meeting “a hazing in stages”, poisoned by such mistrust that the Israeli delegation eventually left rather than risk being eavesdropped on a White House telephone line. Another said that the Prime Minister had received “the treatment reserved for the President of Equatorial Guinea”.

Left to talk among themselves Mr Netanyahu and his aides retreated to the Roosevelt Room. He spent a further half-hour with Mr Obama and extended his stay for a day of emergency talks to try to restart peace negotiations. However, he left last night with no official statement from either side. He returned to Israel yesterday isolated after what Israeli media have called a White House ambush for which he is largely to blame.

Sources said that Mr Netanyahu failed to impress Mr Obama with a flow chart purporting to show that he was not responsible for the timing of announcements of new settlement projects in east Jerusalem. Mr Obama was said to be livid when such an announcement derailed the visit to Israel by Joe Biden, the Vice-President, this month and his anger towards Israel does not appear to have cooled….

Read it all:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle7076431.ece

[BrainStorm]

I heard a news snippet while getting ready this morning that Obama may be moderating his position with respect to new housing in Jerusalem. I cannot find the story in my internet search.

Anyone else have a lead for me?

[Dozer523]

Another said that the Prime Minister had received “the treatment reserved for the President of Equatorial Guinea”.
As if Israel doesn't have enough problems.
Now they go piss off Equatorial Guinea. That is going to leave a mark.

[afchic]

Originally Posted by T-Rock

Looks like all those years of listening to Jeremiah Wright have taken root…



Read it all:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle7076431.ece

Maybe Netenyahu should have thought about that before he decided to start building in East Jerusalem, knowing that it would once again derail the peace process. He is lucky Obama decided to sit down with him at all as far as I am concerened. He also should have thought about how our Secretary of State was treated while she was in Israel this past week. Slap to the face work both ways my friend.

[greenberetTFS]

Originally Posted by Dozer523

Another said that the Prime Minister had received “the treatment reserved for the President of Equatorial Guinea”.
As if Israel doesn't have enough problems.
Now they go piss off Equatorial Guinea. That is going to leave a mark.

Good Dozer.............

Big Teddy

[akv]

Diplomacy aside, do you think Netenyahu actually wants to have dinner with Obama?

[LarryW]

akv, it's hard to entice Netenyahu to sit down to a plate of pork and beans.

What a master of diplomacy BHO is proving to be. This would not have been imagined as a source of weakness in the McCain camp. No one would have thought even BHO would be this stupid.

[T-Rock]

He also should have thought about how our Secretary of State was treated while she was in Israel this past week. Slap to the face work both ways my friend.

Refusing a four-point ultimatum from Clinton is considered a slap in the face - I don’t get it

Why should Israel make some sort of good faith gesture to the Palestinians when all they’re seeking is the peace of “Saladin” ?

Land for peace is not what this has ever been about and the elected leadership of Gaza has yet to remove from its charter that it rejects Israel’s right to exist and remains doctrinally committed to its destruction, yet Israel should “make peace” with them?

[BrainStorm]

Originally Posted by afchic

Maybe Netenyahu should have thought about that before he decided to start building in East Jerusalem, knowing that it would once again derail the peace process. He is lucky Obama decided to sit down with him at all as far as I am concerened. He also should have thought about how our Secretary of State was treated while she was in Israel this past week. Slap to the face work both ways my friend.

The last paragraph of the OP indicates that Netanyahu brought evidence that he was not in the loop about the announcement. There was an apology and Biden accepted it. Three days later Obama had Clinton call Netanyahu and create the current crisis. Furthermore, the area of Jerusalem where the houses were to be build were never in any of the agreements with the US where building was to be suspended. And these areas are not areas that would with any likelihood not be part of Israel in the future. Now Obama, unlike all previous presidents, wants Israel add these areas to the negotiations.

All the facts should inform whatever opinion you choose to hold.

[TrapLine]

To me this treatment of one of our allies, and the lone long standing democracy in the Middle East, is only amplified by the POTUS's apology tour through the region.

[T-Rock]

I don’t see why Israel would ever want to deal with the Palestinians as “peace partners” again - Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to withdraw from 97 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of the Gaza Strip in 2000 among a whole host of other radical concessions, and what did the Arabs do - suicide bombings of Israeli restaurants and buses, which resulted in over 1,000 Israelis killed, as well as 64 foreign citizens - they’d be crazy to agree with any more concessions…

Interesting to note that Reverend Wright’s Disciple is giving Israel an ultimatum on Shabbat Hagadol.

It’s similar to what he did with Poland regarding missile defense - He broke the news on Poland’s 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion…

Frogs are gonna fall from the sky
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7As_q6PSKSM

[Sigaba]

From The Economist. Source is here.

American-Israeli relations

Where did all the love go?
Mar 18th 2010 | JERUSALEM AND WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

No crisis, says the White House, but American patience with Israel has run out

IT HAS been like a lovers’ tiff without the love—quickly tamped down but with none of the kissing and making up, and no soothing of the underlying rage. As Palestinian violence flared in Jerusalem, Barack Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said through gritted teeth on March 16th that Israel and America enjoyed “a close, unshakable bond”. On the same day Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, said he had been misquoted in a widely leaked report that he had called the quarrel the worst crisis between the allies for 35 years. And on March 17th Mr Obama himself chimed in, denying any crisis but admitting that “friends are going to disagree sometimes.”

And how. The spark was the approval by Israel’s interior ministry of 1,600 new homes in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish suburb in East (Palestinian) Jerusalem. This coincided with a visit by Vice-President Joe Biden (above, left) and also with the eve of the “proximity talks” America had at last persuaded Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, to enter with Binyamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister (above, right). Mr Biden is known for his affection towards Israel but took the announcement as a gratuitous insult. So did Mrs Clinton, who on March 12th berated Mr Netanyahu for three-quarters of an hour on the phone. She reportedly told Mr Biden to “condemn” the announcement rather than merely “express concern”.

Friends have spats, but this seems to be more than that. America has not simply accepted Mr Netanyahu’s prompt apology. Opinion in the administration is said to be divided. Mr Biden himself and many State Department officials, together with George Mitchell, who was to have supervised the now-stalled proximity talks, advised cooling things down. But, whether out of rage or calculation, Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton preferred to escalate.

On television on March 14th David Axelrod, the president’s chief policy adviser, called Israel’s announcement an “affront” and an “insult”—extraordinary language in exchanges with an ally. And notwithstanding that “unshakable bond”, Mrs Clinton still insists that Mr Netanyahu must comply with a string of fresh demands. These reportedly include shelving the building plans, avoiding new provocations, agreeing to talk about “core issues” such as Jerusalem in the proximity talks, and offering a new concession, the details of which are not yet clear, to the Palestinian side.

In a confrontation with its superpower patron, must Israel blink first? Perhaps not. “No government of Israel for the last 40 years has agreed to place restrictions on building in Jerusalem,” Mr Netanyahu told the Knesset on March 15th, eliding the distinction between building in all-Jewish suburbs (albeit in territory internationally recognised as Palestinian) and inserting Jewish settlers into Palestinian suburbs, which he encourages or at least condones. Tensions spilled over on March 16th in a splurge of rioting. There are plans for more building projects in many of the Jewish suburbs. Mr Netanyahu would be hard put to stop them and survive politically.

As for Mr Obama, a president in a titanic struggle over health reform may find it dangerous to inflame the Israel lobby. By the time Israel’s ambassador at last denied having called this the worst crisis for 35 years, Israel’s friends had rallied to its side. The America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) called on the administration to handle differences with Israel privately, “in a manner befitting strategic allies”.

Many in Congress echoed the sentiment. Senator Joe Lieberman, who caucuses with the Democrats, said he found the public scolding “very troubling”. Mrs Clinton and Mr Netanyahu are due to attend AIPAC’s conference next week, as are nearly half the members of Congress. AIPAC, it is true, no longer has the field to itself. A newish and doveish pro-Israel lobby group with rising resonance, J Street, urged Mr Obama to push at once for redrawing Israel’s borders on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed land swaps. But the new organisation is still a tiddler, and the White House knows that more than six out of ten Americans sympathise more with Israel than with the Palestinians (see chart), a proportion that has risen sharply since the terror attacks on America of September 11th 2001.

How to handle Bibi?

Since becoming prime minister for a second time in 2009, Mr Netanyahu has struggled to befriend Mr Obama and enlist his help against Iran while presiding over a coalition dominated by ultranationalist and religious parties. One school of thought holds that Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton escalated their reaction in order to make Mr Netanyahu abandon his rightist allies and tread the American path to peace. Some even say the president was waiting for a chance to destabilise him and force his replacement by a more pliant Israeli leader. But a rival theory is that there is no plan: Ramat Shlomo simply ignited the rage that has smouldered in Mr Obama’s breast since Mr Netanyahu refused his call last year for a total freeze on settlement and forced Mr Mitchell to waste nearly a year niggling for a temporary compromise.

Aaron David Miller, a veteran diplomat now at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, is one of those who suspect that the administration has been driven by anger rather than calculation and that its war of words could misfire. “If the president backs down, round two also goes to Netanyahu,” he says. “The administration has created a problem for itself and I’m not sure how they climb down unless Bibi himself helps them.” But patching over the tensions will be hard. General David Petraeus, hero of Iraq and America’s commander in the wider Middle East, told a Senate committee this week that the unresolved conflict in Palestine was fomenting anti-Americanism in the region. An obvious point, perhaps; but yet another reason why some of the love is draining out of a special relationship.

I'm a nationalist. To paraphrase my seventh grade home room teacher, the vice president may be a jack ass, but he's our jack ass.

If the leader of a foreign country deliberately embarrasses the vice president publicly (something Mr. Biden is fully capable of doing on his own), I'm going to be a little miffed.

My $0.02. YMMV.

[T-Rock]

If the leader of a foreign country deliberately embarrasses the vice president publicly (something Mr. Biden is fully capable of doing on his own), I'm going to be a little miffed.

It’s all part of the Zionist Conspiracy

[6.8SPC_DUMP]

Originally Posted by T-Rock

It’s all part of the Zionist Conspiracy

Joe Biden (who was selected as VP in part for his foreign policy experience) said in April 2007:

"I'm a Zionist. You don't have to be a Jew to be a Zionist."
Link

I think Biden should at least explain what interpretation of Zionism he believes in - seeing as there are more than one - and you may notice a gaff about battleships the interview linked above.

Also:

Nearly 300 members of Congress have signed on to a declaration reaffirming their commitment to "the unbreakable bond that exists between [U.S.] and the State of Israel", in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Link

American's who want to blame the Jews for everything are nutty. OTOH, excepting that "what's best for Israel is always what's best for America", doesn't seem sane either IMHO.

I'm fortunate to have close Jewish friends but that doesn't make me Israeli.

Just my .0000002

[Dozer523]

Originally Posted by T-Rock

It’s all part of the Zionist Conspiracy

yeah. Looks like there will be some new neighborhoods in Equatorial Guinea. Oy Vey!