He is making the same mistakes, viz-a-viz the Arab-Israel conflict, now as he made in the beginning of his first term, which leads one to wonder whether we are dealing with presidential malice or stupidity? Then, as now, he is making an issue of the fact that Jews build housing for themselves within existing Jewish communities in Judaea and Samaria.
Jeffrey Tobin, writing in Commentary, says the following:
Kerry’s current objective is to get both parties to agree to a framework for continued talks. As has been widely reported, Netanyahu has already signaled his consent to the framework even though he and his Cabinet have grave misgivings about where the talks may eventually lead. By contrast, the Palestinians have repeatedly and publicly rejected the framework. The Palestinians have angrily rejected the framework’s requirement that they recognize Israel as a Jewish state, which is to say they agree to end the conflict rather than merely pause it. They also reject the West Bank security guarantees included in the framework even though it also contains their basic demands about a Palestinian state whose borders will be based on the 1967 borders while leaving open the possibility of territorial swaps. In other words, the Israelis have already given Kerry what he wanted while the Palestinians have done the opposite.This is a major part of the story of the long Arab war against the Jews.
Consistently, decade upon decade, Israel has agreed to another Arab state within the traditional Jewish heartland only to be told "no" by the very Arabs who claim that they want such a state. Then the international community pressures Israel to make concessions and to agree to what it has always agreed to since the Peel Commission of 1937.
The great majority Jews in the Middle East have always accepted the notion of yet another Arab state. The Arabs of Judaea and Samaria refuse to accept such a state and then people like Barack Obama tell the world it is because Jews are building housing for themselves in Judaea.
There are currently twenty one Arab states in the world. They are Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Sudan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Somalia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Libya, Lebanon, Oman, Kuwait, Mauritania, Qatar, Bahrain, Djibouti, and Comoros.
The Arabs, following the example of their warlord prophet, conquered the entire Middle East and hold over 99 percent of that land mass today.
So, clearly, we need another Arab state at the expense of the tiny, lone, sole, Jewish state, which represents the only part of the Middle East which the Arabs failed, ultimately, to conquer and hold.
Obama, it must also be stressed, is leading current trends in the delegitimization campaign against the Jewish people. In his recent interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, he said the following
Israel doubled West Bank Settlement Construction in 2013...As the FresnoZionist points out:
President Obama and most of the journalists who use the expression “settlement construction” are native English speakers. Yet they persist in using this misleading expression, which anyone who didn’t know differently would think means “building (new) settlements.” But in fact, the construction they are referring to is construction of houses and apartments within the boundaries of existing communities. The truth is that there have been virtually no new settlements established since the 1990s, except for unauthorized outposts which the government often demolishes by force.Precisely.
When president Barack Obama complains about "settlement construction" he gives people the impression that the Jews are - heavens to mergatroid! - building new townships for themselves on historically Jewish land. They are not. They certainly have every right to, because that small bit of land is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, but they want to "make nice" with the west and therefore comply with Obama's racist demand that Jews not build townships for themselves or their children on the very land that Jews come from.
The effect of this today, just as in Obama's first term, is to suggest to Mahmoud Abbas that Obama has his back in the ongoing rejection of both Israel and "Palestine" by the Arab world.
Either Barack Obama knows what he is doing, in which case he is malicious, or he does not know what he is doing, in which case he is dumb. I have to say, while I do not believe that Obama is nearly as intelligent as his sycophants tell us he is, he is certainly not dumb. Stupid people may, perhaps, get to be president of the United States, but I do not believe that they ever get to be the president of the Harvard Law Review.
In any case, the "non-peace process" is rolling out more or less as predicted.
This is what we are looking at:
1) The US and the EU demand negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
2) The parties agree to talk and then the PA, the US, and the EU demand various concessions from Israel for the great privilege of sitting down with the PA's foremost undertaker.
3) Israel fails to meet all the concessions, thus causing the PA to flee negotiations, which they never had any intention of concluding to begin with.
4) The PA and the EU and the Obama administration place the blame for failure at Jewish feet.
5) The EU and various European countries announce additional sanctions, thereby essentially joining the anti-Semitic anti-Zionist BDS movement.
6) Arabs seek to murder Jews.
Keep up the great work, guys.
