Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to Netanyahu three or four times as often as to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, according to former State Dep’t aide David Makovsky
‘Netanyahu is moving us to extremes so we eventually go off a cliff into chaos’ Rep Lloyd Doggett of Texas said, in stressing Israel’s isolation in the world, and unsuccessfully opposing a Congressional resolution to attack the UN Security Council over settlements.
Senator Cory Booker and Democratic megadonor Haim Saban may have a marriage made in 2020: Both have slammed President Obama’s decision to allow a UN Security Council resolution against settlements. Booker calls it anti-Israel and joins 11 other Democrats in sponsoring a resolution hammering the UN vote, while Israeli-American Saban says it’s against the “national interest.”
John Kerry’s closing act as secretary of state is a 72-minute speech devoted to a problem, Israeli settlements, that was removed from the Democratic Party platform just five months before. The bitter failure of the Obama administration to take on Netanyahu untill the last minute is proof of the power of the Israel lobby inside American liberalism. The Democratic Party will support justice in the Middle East only if it takes on the forces of intolerance in its own ranks. That means the Israel lobby. You can’t defeat an enemy if you can’t name it.
President Obama’s decision to allow passage of a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements as illegal has done more to change the shape of the conflict than any other action in the last ten years, even than Israel’s massacres in Gaza. Israel supporters always said that the country would not move toward peace if the U.S. was tough on it. But the UN Security Council resolution against settlements shows the opposite to be true: a little distance is already causing huge positive developments, isolating the country in world opinion and licensing criticism of PM Netanyahu. Obama has nudged Israel, and the media, toward recognition of the country’s new status, as a rogue state.
Since the election, one target of President-elect Donald Trump’s criticism of corporate America has been the Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter program. Interestingly, Trump’s criticism coincided with the delivery of the first two out of 50 F-35 jets to Israel, the first foreign country to receive them. Donald Trump claims he wants “to make good deals for this country,” and if he is serious, he would reassess the horrible deal that currently exists between the U.S. and Israel.