Compare the narrowly-neoconservative discussion at WINEP, trashing Obama, to this session at the Century Foundation between Mike Hanna and Knesset member Opher Paz-Pines, an effort to move the conversation into the 21st century.
The neocons want Obama to fail. This is why David Brooks is so meanspirited about the Obama Nobel; the more global capital Obama has, the worse-off is the neocons’ attack-Iran agenda. Meantime, liberals want Netanyahu to fail. I bet David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel are with us here. What progress can there be under the present gov’t? Paz-Pines:
–I think that the fact that Mr. Obama, number one, decided to deal with the conflict since day one in his office, it’s a tremendous thing and it’s quite different than what former Presidents did.–The fact is that Obama is a great friend of Israel . Obama cares a lot about Israel and its future. And I’m sure that there are some people in Israel that don’t like the fact that Obama is so involved in the process and there are some people that would like to create [for] Obama a bad image in Israel, but I’m sure that it won’t work.–The fact that the Labor party entered Netanyahu’s government, a coalition, is something that many of its voters will never forget. I think it was a huge mistake. The left in Israel at large is suffering from a serious crisis. And that connected to the fact that people in Israel lost hope in peace because of all the things that happened here in the last 10 years more or less since the failure of Camp David in 2001.–It’s a matter of leadership, courageous, brave leadership. We used to have it in the past.
