Obama’s Ghosts

[don-o]

Obama’s Ghosts

By Martin Peretz
April 13, 2017 • 12:00 AM

An accounting of the Democrats' legacy in the Middle East, and where they can go from here

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/228258/obama-israel-democrats

I.

Michael Oren is an eminent American historian and Zionist who became the Israeli emissary to the United States during Barack Obama’s presidency. An undergraduate at Columbia and a graduate student at Princeton, where he received his doctorate, he later held three distinguished visiting professorships, at Georgetown, Yale, and Harvard. He knows America well— very well. Oren is now a member of the centrist party Kulanu in the Knesset: He has been designated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as deputy premier for diplomacy in a pointed effort to stem the flow of right-wing megadrama from the most disgusting big-mouthed, small-minded members of the cabinet, Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett.

Oren is a diplomat, both politically and psychologically. He veers away from hysteria, Jewish hysteria especially, about anti-Semitism in America or about Israel. But since the publication of his memoir in 2014, and a little before, he has come out as a fierce critic of the record of the most recent Democratic presidential administration on Israel, and, by extension, on the strongest single guarantor of the safety of the world’s Jews. What is most upsetting is that he is not wrong. Alas, I, who am a registered but not sworn Democrat and have been that for more than half a century, certainly cannot vouch that the party will long stand up for one of the few vigorous democracies on Earth.

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Well worth a full read. "Hold accountable" is a very popular phrase. It must be applied to Obama.

[r9etb]

It isn’t that the president hated Israel. It’s that, to those of us who feel for Israel in our bones and feel its closeness to America as a fellow beacon of liberalism, and who look for that feeling in our presidents, his words never said that he did, too.

Actually, Mr. Peretz, I think his actions and choice of personnel suggest that even if it was not outright 'hatred,' it was nevertheless a rather strong, contemptuous, and damaging dislike -- the source of which was rooted in the fact that Israel had the effrontery to not swoon at his every utterance.

I think the entire world is now willing to admit that the narcissistic man-child "was a catastrophe on international affairs."