Israel Matzav

Why Obama hates Israel

The name Rabbi Pruzansky rings a bell, although at first I wasn't quite sure why. Perhaps somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of my youth group past, I knew a Pruzansky who was not yet a rabbi. But I had certainly never seen Rabbi Pruzansky's blog. As it turns out, when I read his biography, we were college classmates at Bir Zeit on the Hudson, and we both went to law school, but he was smart enough to leave the profession for gains in the next world. So I pulled out my college yearbook (for the first time since I showed my daughter-in-law what her uncle - another college classmate - looked like 30-odd years ago), and the picture did not look familiar except as a plausibly younger version of the man pictured on the blog. Oh well....

Anyway, Rabbi Pruzansky has written an important analysis of why President Obama hates (and unlike the Rabbi, I will use the term without quotation marks) Israel and why there is nothing we can do about it, although we can certainly take actions to cope with it (Hat Tip: Stephen D).

Historically, there are three compelling factors that drove the America-Israel relationship, both as friends and as allies. Loosely, they can be defined as the Religious Factor, the Values Factor, and the Strategic Factor. The three somewhat overlap, sometimes intersect, and, to be sure, various presidents have allocated the weight of the three in differing ways, resulting in slightly different approaches....

THE RELIGIOUS FACTOR: Americans, a religious people, have long been enamored with the Bible and the story of the Jews. Presidents from the time of John Adams have been avid proponents of the return of Jews to the land of Israel, and that support – with obvious exceptions motivated by antipathy to Jews and the need to scurry favor with Arabs – has animated American policy and been consistently reflected in the attitudes of the American public for the last two centuries....

THE VALUES FACTOR: Americans have perceived the State of Israel since its re-establishment in 1948 as a beacon of light in a region blighted by darkness....

THE STRATEGIC FACTOR: Concomitant with shared values and engendered by them is Israel’s strategic value to America. Especially during the Cold War, and after PM Ben-Gurion cast Israel’s fate with the West and not the Soviet bloc, Israel was long perceived as America’s only true ally in the Middle East....

...

Obama’s Israel problem can be traced to the fact that he subscribes to the merits of none of these factors. The media drumbeat that clamored for his election did its best to suppress the implications of the fact that Obama was spiritually reared not in the mode of traditional Christians but in a church that was a unabashed exponent of black liberationist theology – that the Bible was the “white man’s religion” (Malcolm X’s phrase) and needed to be redefined as an instrument that would advocate the overthrow of oppressors of the black man. As they saw it, the Bible justified racism, slavery, segregation, economic discrimination and other societal ills. Such a Bible is not to be used as a proof text for Jewish rights anywhere, and the “real Jews,” according to the hard-core theologians are the oppressed blacks overcoming the persecution of the new “Egyptians,” the Americans. No wonder Obama had to throw Reverend Wright under the bus; the real question is how he could have sat in those pews for 20 years listening to this claptrap, unless he himself believed at least some of it.

Thus, Obama does not naturally see America as a force for good in the world, the only nation that spreads liberty and freedom to oppressed nations. His default position is that the US is an imperialist nation, a colonizer that has exploited the Third World, and even increased the suffering of millions. That is why Obama has seen fit to go around the globe apologizing for American misdeeds (Africa, Asia, Arabia, South America) without even acknowledging the life-saving, civilizing benefits of American interventions, and why the disdain he feels towards Israel is also directed at allies such as Britain or Canada. No prior president ever ridiculed, as Obama has, the notion of “American exceptionalism,” that the US is different than other nations and uniquely suited to exporting virtues like freedom, liberty, individual rights and democracy. The “shared values” that have always bound America and Israel are perceived by Obama as contrived, hypocritical, phony and arrogant – if anything, they are grounds to downgrade the relationship, as he has done.

Consequently, it seems clear that President Obama sees Israel as a strategic albatross, not an ally. His outreach to the Muslim world is complicated, if not impaired, by the America-Israel relationship that he inherited and that has been a staple of American foreign policy for decades. The Cold War is long over, and itself was founded on a bi-polar view of the world in which America was the natural leader of the free world, a locution that this president likely finds troublesome and rejects. Israel exists, in Obama’s strategic view of global affairs, only as an irritant – and the alliance is a relic of the past that has to be rolled back.

Nothing in the Israeli narrative resonates with Obama and so his dislike for Israel is ill-concealed, and reflected in his policies and attitudes. Indeed, Obama’s discomfort with the narrative and foundational principles of Israel mirrors his discomfort with the narrative and foundational principles of the United States. There are several implications of this analysis.

Read the whole thing.

A reminder to those who know it: Using my last name in the comments will force me to delete your comment....

Labels: Barack Obama, Rabbi Pruzansky, US-Israel relationship

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:10 PM