Why
is US President Barack Obama coming to Israel today? In 2008, then
president George W. Bush came to celebrate Israel's 60th Independence
Day, and to reject Israeli requests for assistance in destroying Iran's
nuclear installations.
In
1996, then-president Bill Clinton came to Israel to help then-prime
minister Shimon Peres's electoral campaign against Likud leader Binyamin
Netanyahu.
It
is possible that Obama is coming here in order to build up pro-Israel
bonafides. But why would he bother? Obama won his reelection bid with
the support of the overwhelming majority of American Jews. Their support
vindicated his hostility toward Israel in his first term. He has
nothing to prove.
It
is worth comparing Obama's visit to Israel at the start of his second
term of office, with his visit to Cairo at the outset of his first term
in office.
Ahead
of that trip, the new administration promised that the visit, and
particularly Obama's "Address to the Muslim World," would serve as a
starting point for a new US policy in the Middle East. And Obama lived
up to expectations.
In
speaking to the "Muslim World," Obama signaled that the US now
supported pan-Islamists at the expense of US allies and Arab nationalist
leaders, first and foremost then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
Moreover, in castigating Israel for its so-called "settlements";
channeling Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by intimating that
Israel exists because of the Holocaust; and failing to travel from Cairo
to Jerusalem, preferring instead to visit a Nazi death camp in Germany,
Obama signaled that he was downgrading US ties with the Jewish state.
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