Obama's attack on Israel, failure of Obama's approach is fairly obvious

Israel’s Obama Problem

By Daniel Greenfield
Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Hints have begun trickling out of Washington D.C. that the Obama administration has realized that it went too far in attacking Israel, and may now be looking to take a step back. With general opposition from Israelis, street protests, and a forceful rejection from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the failure of Obama’s approach is fairly obvious. But that doesn’t mean that Israel’s Obama problem is over. Not by a long shot.

The Obama administration’s hard line on Israel was a show of arrogance by people who assumed that they owned the American Jewish community and that Netanyahu would quickly knuckle under. They proved to be wrong on both counts. But that initial setback only means that a new administration plan will rely less on an overt frontal attack.

In their first engagement, Netanyahu succeeded in tangling Obama in ambiguities, while letting the administration’s own aggressiveness blunder into making Jerusalem an issue up front. That disastrous approach helped unify Israelis and even the American Jewish leadership into taking a stand against Obama. Obama’s own overt thuggishness hurt him badly, with all but the Israeli far left backing away from him.

Netanyahu leveraged Obama’s thuggishness to overturn Livni
Obama hoped to leverage Israel’s political rivalries to undermine Netanyahu. Instead Netanyahu leveraged Obama’s thuggishness to overturn Livni who had become Obama’s main Two State Solution proponent in Israel. Now with her Kadima party headed for a split, Obama’s pressure on Netanyahu will have actually helped to strengthen the ruling Likud-Labor coalition.

Obama had brought a club, while Netanyahu had brought Judo lessons. And the outcome left Obama shaking his head and wondering what happened.

Meanwhile the American Jewish leadership has not proven nearly as tractable as expected. Obama’s attempt to include the Soros funded Anti-Israel group, J-Street, on a par with real Jewish American organization was a bust, because all the weight Obama throws behind J Street cannot transform it into a valid representative of the Jewish community. Meanwhile his marginalization of non-left wing groups in his Roosevelt room meeting only fed the backlash against him within the American Jewish leadership, leading to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations issuing a strong statement in support of Israel’s right to Jerusalem.

Obama’s promoters had worked very hard to create the illusory consensus of mass Jewish support for Obama, particularly by bandying about the phony 78 percent figure. In the real world though Obama’s “baseâ€