Many in the American Jewish community are aghast
to discover that President Obama is planning to appoint former Senator
Chuck Hagel to serve as Defense Secretary. If you want the skinny on how
Hagel has come to be known as one of the few ferociously anti-Israel
senators in the past generation, Carl from Jerusalem at Israel Matzav provides it.
Meantime,
all I can say is I don't understand how anyone can possibly be
surprised. Shortly after word came out that Hagel is the frontrunner for
the nomination, I read a quaint little blog post written by a
conservative leaning commentator voicing her belief that Obama wouldn't
want to risk his relations with Israel's supporters by appointing Hagel.
But as Powerline
pointed out today, this is the entire point of the nomination. Obama
isn't stupid. He picks fights he thinks he can win. He hasn't always
been right about those fights. He picked fights with Netanyahu thinking
he could win, and he lost some of those.
But
he is right to think he can win the Hagel fight. The Republican Senators
aren't going to get into a fight with Obama about his DOD appointee,
especially given that it's one of their fellow senators, even though
many of them hate him. The Democrats are certainly not going to oppose
him.
Obama wants to hurt Israel. He does not
like Israel. He is appointing anti-Israel advisors and cabinet members
not despite their anti-Israel positions, but because of them.
Some
commentators said that Susan Rice would be bad because she was
anti-Israel and they hoped that Obama would appoint someone pro-Israel.
But John Kerry is no friend of Israel. And as far as I was concerned, we
would have been better off with Rice on the job.
Unlike
Kerry, Rice is politically inept. She walked into Sen. John McCain's
office with the intention of convincing Sens. McCain, Lindsey Graham and
Oympia Snowe that she was competent to serve as Secretary of State
despite the fact that she deliberately misled the public on what
happened at the Sept. 11 jihadist attack on the US consulate in
Benghazi.
But she failed. In commenting on the meeting, all three senators said they were more
concerned after speaking with Rice than they were before they did. That
is, they said she was a political incompetent. Can there be any doubt
that Sen. Kerry will be able to play the politics of Capitol Hill far
more effectively than Rice?
And what reason
does anyone have to believe that Assad's great defender will be any more
supportive of Israel than Rice would have been? But with him in the
driver's seat now, instead of having a political incompetent whom no one
can stand serving as the spokesman for Obama's anti-Israel foreign
policy, in Kerry we will have a competent, reasonably popular politician
on the job.
It's time for people to realize the game has changed. Obama won.
Obama
won with 70 percent of the Jewish vote despite the fact that his record
in his first term was more hostile to Israel than any president since
Jimmy Carter. No one can expect him now, after his victory, to feel even
slightly constrained in his desire to weaken the US relationship with
Israel.
So far, he has made clear that he
feels no constraints whatsoever. Take the Palestinians at the UN for
example. Obama enabled the Palestinians to get their non-member state
status at the UN by failing to threaten to cut off US funding to the UN
in retaliation for such a vote.
Both
Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush issued such threats during their
tenures in office and so prevented the motion from coming to a vote.
Given that the Palestinians have had an automatic majority in the
General Assembly since at least 1975, the only reason their status was
only upgraded in 2012 is because until then, either the PLO didn't feel
like raising the issue or the US threatened to cut off its financial
support to the UN if such a motion passed. This year PLO chief Mahmoud
Abbas said he wanted to have a vote and Obama responded by not issuing a
threat to cut off UN funding. So the Palestinians got their vote and,
as expected, it passed overwhelmingly.
Seeing the upgrade as a Palestinian move is a mistake. It was a joint Palestinian-American move.
And Obama made that move and no one balked. Indeed some New York Jews applauded it.
Let there be no doubt, Obama will get Hagel in at Defense. And Hagel will place Israel in his crosshairs.
The
only way to foil Obama's ill intentions towards Israel even slightly is
to be better at politics than he is. And he's awfully good.
Moreover,
one of his strongest advantages is that Israel's supporters seem to
have never gotten the memo. So here it is: Obama wants to fundamentally
transform the US relationship with Israel.
He
isn't playing by the old rules. He doesn't care about the so-called
Israel lobby or the Jewish vote. As he sees it, to paraphrase Jim Baker,
"F#&k the Jews, they voted for us anyway."
As
strange as it may sound, I am slightly relieved by Hagel's appointment,
and by my trust that Kerry will be a loyal mouthpiece of Obama's
hostility. The more "in our faces" they are with their hostility, the
smaller our ability to deny their hostility or pretend that we can
continue to operate as if nothing has changed. As we face four more
years of Obama - and four years of Obama unplugged -- the most urgent
order of business for Israelis is to stop deluding ourselves in thinking
that under Obama the US can be trusted.
So welcome aboard Secretary Hagel. Bring it on.
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