Yitzhak Benhorin in Y-Net reports:
The US State Department described Israeli actions as "unacceptable" 87 times in 2014, with only three countries being more "unacceptable," according to a Foreign Policy article published last week.
Journalist Micah Zenko searched the State Department's website for usage of the term, and his "top ten" list shows Israel sandwiched right between North Korea and Pakistan. Zenko pointed that the US officials regularly use the phrase "but then do very little in response to prevent or deter those actions from reoccurring."
Most of the condemnations relating to Israel involved building in settlements or the announcement of plans to construct additional housing behind the Green Line.Six years and this administration has learned next to nothing.
They continue to double-down on the notion that Jewish people have no right to live, and therefore build, in the land of Judea and even find Israel to be more "unacceptable" as a country than Pakistan. The injustice of it and the bigotry of it and the counterproductiveness of it - and the fact that it justifies centuries of theocratically-based Arab-Muslim contempt for Jews - seems entirely beyond the intellectual capacity of this administration.
Just as Kennedy's "best and the brightest" holdovers in the Johnson administration would not help extract the US from the Vietnam War, because most of them - with the notable exception of Adlai Stevenson protégé George Ball - were too ideologically rigid and invested in the war, so the Obama administration cannot bring itself to rethink its initial conclusions concerning where Jews may be allowed to live despite the fact that those conclusions have been proven exceedingly unhelpful and are prejudicial on its face.
In this way Obama's policy flies directly in the face of its liberal ideology.
This president, much to my disgust, continues to demand that Jews be allowed to live in some places, but not others. We may be allowed to live in New York and Oakland, California or Istanbul, Turkey, but not Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and not Amman, Jordan and not Hebron, Israel.
What kind of contempt must one have for the Jewish people to insist that we have no rights to live in Judea? This is profoundly prejudicial and unjust, but the Obama administration clings to the notion like a wolverine with a hot pastrami sandwich.