In a piece written for Commentary Magazine entitled, The Peace Process’s Turkey Problem, Evelyn Gordon makes the case that because Obama has reneged on promise after promise to the Jewish people in the Middle East, he has thereby eroded what little faith they may have had in him, thereby undermining the possibilities for peace between Jew and Arab in that part of the world.
Clearly, this isn’t the first time Obama has broken a promise to Israel. He reneged on his predecessor’s oral agreement to let Israel continue building in the settlement blocs, outraging even leftists like Haaretz editor Aluf Benn by denying the agreement’s very existence; he reneged on his predecessor’s written promise that any Israeli-Palestinian deal must leave Israel with the settlement blocs and “defensible borders”–a promise Israel paid for by vacating every last inch of Gaza and evicting every last settler–instead publicly declaring that the border must be based on the indefensible 1967 lines; and he reneged on UN Resolution 242, which also promised Israel both defensible borders and the right to keep some of the territory captured in 1967, thereby abandoning the position of every U.S. government since 1967. All this taught Israelis that his successors might similarly scrap any promises he makes Israel today.The heart of her article, however, is concerned with Netanyahu's regrettable and humiliating apology to Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan, under pressure from Barack Obama, for the attack on the Israeli navy during the Mavi Marmara affair.
Gordon writes:
While visiting Israel in March, Obama personally twisted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arm to get him to apologize and pay compensation for Israel’s 2010 raid on a Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza. Since the flotilla sought to break a blockade that even the UN recognizes as legal, and since the Turkish casualties occurred only because an “organized and violent” group of Turks attacked Israel’s boarding party with “iron bars, staves, chains, and slingshots” (to quote the UN’s report on the incident), wounding several soldiers and capturing and abusing three, most Israelis considered an apology unwarranted: The soldiers opened fire only in self-defense. Nevertheless, Netanyahu agreed, even making the telephoned apology in Obama’s presence.The Israelis know that hostile American president Barack Obama is simply not to be trusted with anything having to do with the Arab-Israel conflict, or the well-being of the Jewish State of Israel, and the fact that Obama refuses to stand by a deal that he brokered proves it.
In exchange, Turkey was supposed to return its ambassador to Israel, end its show-trials (in absentia) of senior Israeli officials, and otherwise restore normal relations. Five months later, not only has none of this happened, but Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc made clear last month that it never will, because Turkey has appended two new conditions that weren’t part of the deal: Israel must agree that it committed a “wrongful act” (in the original apology, whose wording was carefully negotiated, Israel acknowledged operational errors but not legal wrongdoing), and it must end the Gaza blockade.
Obama fell on his face early in his first term through his racist and counterproductive demand for "total settlement freeze" and has never had the grace to admit that, or any other, mistake on this issue. On the contrary, despite the fact that Israel has made numerous concessions to the local Arabs, and despite the fact that it was the Arabs, themselves, who have consistently refused to accept a state in peace next to Israel, Obama told Jewish leadership that their fellow Jews in Israel needed to search their souls, or words to that effect, in order to see if they really wanted peace.
In this way he, essentially, blamed the Jews of the Middle East for the foreseeable negative consequences of his own misguided foreign policy.
And this is why, at least in part, the "peace process" today is as moribund as it is, despite the recent announcement of a resumption of talks. Neither side trusts in the good faith of the Obama administration and thus neither side is particularly eager for the Obama administration to broker a deal between the parties.
Perhaps Barack Obama needs to search his own soul before he - in an exceedingly arrogant and imperious manner - advises the Jewish people to do so.
