Team Obama's Pointless Attack on Israel

Team Obama's Pointless Attack on Israel

10/28/14

John Allen Gay

Diplomacy, Israel

So what if it's true—what does the White House hope to gain by trashing Netanyahu in the press?

What does the Obama administration hope to accomplish by trashing Israel in the press? This is the most important question after an apparently coordinated wave of anonymous quotes welled up in Tuesday’s press. Relations with Israel have steadily worsened over the course of Obama’s presidency, and little of what was said was out of step with some views being expressed in broader policy circles. But why say it, and why now?

The wave began Monday night, with Foreign Policy’s Gopal Ratnam saying that the White House was “undermining” Israeli defense minister Moshe Yaalon during his recent visit to the United States by denying him access to several key officials. This wasn’t surprising—Yaalon had called Secretary of State John Kerry “obsessive and messianic,” among other insults. But the tone of the snub was sharp. Ratnam quotes “a pro-Israel congressional aide,” who we can reasonably assume is a Democrat close to the administration, saying of Yaalon that “there is a limit to how much you can shit all over the White House and expect to get every meeting you want...I don't know why the Israelis continue to feel the need to express their disagreements in offensive terms with this administration.”

But the executive excreta fell much thicker on Tuesday afternoon in a column by the influential journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who quoted “a senior Obama administration official” calling Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “chickenshit.” Goldberg asked “another senior official who deals with the Israel file regularly” about this assessment, and the official “agreed that Netanyahu is a ‘chickenshit’ on matters related to the comatose peace process, but added that he’s also a ‘coward’ on the issue of Iran’s nuclear threat.” The first official also said that Netanyahu is “scared to launch wars,” is principally concerned with his own political survival, and has “got no guts.” And the second official crowed that it is now “too late” for Netanyahu to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, saying that “a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic” meant that Netanyahu “ultimately...couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger.” Said the second official, “The feeling now is that Bibi’s bluffing.”

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