politics to go: jeff dunetz

Bibi won’t heed O bid to rebuke Oren claims

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U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro asked Prime Minister Netanyahu to publicly rebuke former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren’s remarks that President Obama abandoned Israel by purposely driving a wedge between the countries, Ha’aretz reported. Bibi refused.

Oren has accused Obama of deliberately abandoning Israel from the time he entered the White House in 2008.

Perhaps Netanyahu refused to condemn Oren’s claims because they are true.

“From the moment he entered office, Mr. Obama promoted an agenda of championing the Palestinian cause and achieving a nuclear accord with Iran,” Oren wrote. “Such policies would have put him at odds with any Israeli leader. But Mr. Obama posed an even more fundamental challenge by abandoning the two core principles of Israel’s alliance with America” — that there would be no publicly visible daylight between the countries and “no surprises” (things would be discussed privately before being announced publicly).  

Obama complained to American Jewish leaders in 2009 that “when there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines and that erodes our credibility with the Arabs.” The explanation ignored Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and its two previous offers of Palestinian statehood in Gaza, almost the entire West Bank and half of Jerusalem—both offers rejected by the Palestinians.

In his “Wall Street Journal” op-ed last week, Oren talks about a commitment made to Israel by the previous administration that Obama broke in 2009, “to include the major settlement blocs and Jewish Jerusalem within Israel’s borders in any peace agreement.” 

As part of that commitment, Israel was free to add housing units to existing settlement communities in Judea and Samaria as long as they didn’t expand those communities, and they were free to add communities in agreed to areas in Jerusalem.

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