‘I can’t stand him. He’s a liar,’ Sarkozy said of Netanyahu.
‘You’re tired of him; what about me? I have to deal with him every day,’ Obama replied.
(CNN, November 8, 2011)
This is the private exchange between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.S. President Barack Obama that was caught on an open microphone at last week’s G20 Summit in Cannes.
But as far as diplomatic faux pas and insults go, this is barely worthy of comment. Which I suppose is why no less a person than the spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly responded to it by saying, in essence, that everybody talks about everybody.
Nevertheless, it has often been said that supporters of Israel living in America are more Zionists than Jews living in Israel. This is why these (predominantly Republican) supporters treat Israel and all who champion its national interests as sacred cows. More to the point, this is why they are treating Obama as a veritable traitor for not upbraiding Sarkozy for dissing Netanyahu:
President Obama’s response to Mr. Sarkozy implies that he agrees with the French leader.
(Statement by ADL Director Abe Foxman, CNN, November 8, 2011)
This is total bullshit of course. In fact, far from being a “disaster” – as CNN pronounced this faux pas, Obama showed just how composed and, yes, diplomatic he is when conducting America’s foreign affairs even behind closed doors. But frankly, he would have been forgiven by all informed and fair-minded people for chiming in that Netanyahu is not just a liar, but an arrogant SOB as well!
After all, since 1967 Israel has shown utter contempt for the efforts of every U.S. president to broker peace in the Middle East by continually building settlements in disputed territories, defying repeated calls by the U.S., EU and UN to stop doing so.
But Netanyahu is the first Israeli prime minister who dared to show contempt for a U.S. president to his face when he sat in the Oval Office earlier this year and, with cameras rolling, lectured Obama on the ABCs of forging peace in the Middle East. Never mind that neither Netanyahu nor any other Israeli prime minister has anything to show for his/her efforts as peacemaker over the past 60 years.
What is truly remarkable about this, though, is that no president has been more adamant in declaring his support for Israel than Obama. Moreover, there is no substantive difference between his Sisyphean efforts to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians and those of every other U.S. president in recent history.
But what is most telling is how Obama’s critics conveniently overlook the fact that he has never come even close to returning Israel’s contempt the way one of his (Republican) predecessors did. I duly recounted this episode recently as follows:
[I]t might be instructive to recall that such unbridled contempt for America’s efforts to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations provoked [James Baker] way back in 1990 – as secretary of state under former President George H.W. Bush – to issue the following iconic reprimand during congressional testimony:
‘Everybody over there should know that the telephone number for the White House is (202) 456-1414. When you’re serious about peace, call us!’
And to back up his words, Baker threatened to withhold loan guarantees unless Israel promised not to use the funds to settle Russian Jews in the (Palestinian) West Bank. Not so widely reported, however, was the undiplomatic language he used in a less formal setting a couple of years later, when Baker reportedly said, ‘Fuck the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway.’
(Israel talks about settlements the way Iran talks about nuclear weapons, The iPINIONS Journal, March 15, 2010)
This makes Obama’s purported faux pas seem positively genteel, no? And, again, this was from a (white) Republican administration. Yet Obama’s critics would have you believe that his silence in the face of Sarkozy’s fulmination against Netanyahu reflects an unprecedented strain of antipathy towards Israel that runs through his administration.
In any case, here’s my last word on the partisan debate between conservatives and liberals (in the U.S. and Israel) on whether or not Obama is a closet anti-Semite:
You say anti-Jew, I say anti-black. You say ignorance, I say arrogance;
Anti-Jew, anti-black, ignorance, arrogance, Let’s call the whole thing off….
Related commentaries:
Israel talks about settlements…
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