Obama’s Late Hit on Israel

Charles Krauthammer

It’s his final, most shameful, legacy moment. “When the chips are down, I have Israel’s back.”    — Barack Obama, AIPAC conference, March 4, 2012

"The audience — overwhelmingly Jewish, passionately pro-Israel, and supremely gullible — applauded wildly. Four years later — his last election behind him, with a month to go in office and with no need to fool Jew or gentile again — Obama took the measure of Israel’s back and slid a knife into it.

" Many people don’t quite understand the damage done to Israel by the U.S. abstention that permitted passage of a Security Council resolution condemning Israel over its settlements. The administration pretends this is nothing but a restatement of longstanding U.S. opposition to settlements. 

"Nonsense. For the last 35 years, every administration, including a reelection-seeking Obama himself in 2011, has protected Israel with the U.S. veto because such a Security Council resolution gives immense legal ammunition to every boycotter, anti-Semite, and zealous European prosecutor to penalize and punish Israelis. 

"An ordinary Israeli who lives or works in the Old City of Jerusalem becomes an international pariah, a potential outlaw — to say nothing of the soldiers of Israel’s citizen army. “Every pilot and every officer and every soldier,” said a confidant of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, “we are waiting for him at The Hague” — i.e., the International Criminal Court." . . .

"We are to believe that the ostensible sponsors — New Zealand, Senegal, Malaysia, and a Venezuela that cannot provide its own people with toilet paper, let alone food — had for months been sweating the details of Jewish housing in East Jerusalem."