Tag Archives: netanyahu

Trump Continues His Love Affair With the Egyptian President

by LizzieKrtp Posted on April 10, 2017

Mother Jones

Have you noticed that everyone is paying less attention to President Trump’s tweets lately? I suppose it’s finally started to sink in that his tweets are just performance art for his fans, not an indication of any actual policy views. Plus, Trump’s tweets have gotten kind of boring. Maybe he lost his appetite for them after his random ejaculation about Obama wiretapping him—which he apparently intended only to distract the press for a day or two—turned into a massive, multi-month debacle for the entire Republican establishment.

Today, though, we got this:

Um, yeah. I’m sure we can count on that great humanitarian Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to respond effectively and prudently:

Late Sunday night, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi called for a three-month state of emergency….The army chief-turned-president also dispatched elite troops across the country to protect key installations and accused unidentified countries of fueling instability, saying that “Egyptians have foiled plots and efforts by countries and fascist, terrorist organizations that tried to control Egypt.”

As always, we’re left to wonder why Trump loves el-Sisi so much. Is it because Trump is an unusually brutal foreign policy realist? Because he likes anyone that kicks butt on the Muslim Brotherhood? Because Obama didn’t like el-Sisi? Because Netanyahu does? It’s all a mystery.

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Trump Continues His Love Affair With the Egyptian President

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John Kerry Plans to Give a Speech

by HarrisBenefield Posted on December 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the aftermath of the UN vote condemning Israeli settlements on the West Bank, John Kerry plans to give a speech today:

In a last-chance effort to shape the outlines of a Middle East peace deal, Secretary of State John Kerry is to outline in a speech on Wednesday the Obama administration’s vision of a final Israeli-Palestinian accord based on bitter lessons learned from an effort that collapsed in 2014.

….Mr. Kerry, the official said, has long wanted to give a speech outlining an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal but was held back by White House officials, who saw it as unnecessary pressure on Israel that would anger Mr. Netanyahu. But that objection was lifted last week as Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry agreed the time had come to abstain on the United Nations resolution.

I don’t really understand the motivation at work here. This has nothing to do with my skepticism about the peace process in general, but with the pointlessness of the speech itself. It’s sort of like writing a piece of fanfic, where you get to demonstrate to your circle of friends how cleverly you’d tie up all the questions and loose ends in the original work. Except it’s not even fanfic: it’s more like an outline for a piece of fanfic, and without the opportunity to even display any cleverness.

Both Israel and the Palestinians are keenly aware of every issue separating them. Their inability to make a deal has nothing to do with the lack of a clever-enough plan. They just don’t agree with each other and they don’t trust each other. Actual negotiations, in which Kerry applied pressure to compromise and helped to build trust, were perfectly defensible even if I personally think there was never any chance of success. But a speech outlining a plan? Why bother?

I dunno. With everything in tatters and only three weeks left in the Obama administration, maybe Kerry feels like he can rip off the diplo-mask and give a truly bracing speech of the kind that no American has ever dared to give. I suppose that could have a modest effect. But what are the odds he has that in mind?

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John Kerry Plans to Give a Speech

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Obama Says He Would Have Bombed Iran

by MicheliEtv Posted on March 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s another excerpt from Jeffrey Goldberg’s essay on President Obama’s foreign policy:

One afternoon in late January, as I was leaving the Oval Office, I mentioned to Obama a moment from an interview in 2012 when he told me that he would not allow Iran to gain possession of a nuclear weapon. “You said, ‘I’m the president of the United States, I don’t bluff.’ ”

He said, “I don’t.”

Shortly after that interview four years ago, Ehud Barak, who was then the defense minister of Israel, asked me whether I thought Obama’s no-bluff promise was itself a bluff. I answered that I found it difficult to imagine that the leader of the United States would bluff about something so consequential. But Barak’s question had stayed with me. So as I stood in the doorway with the president, I asked: “Was it a bluff?” I told him that few people now believe he actually would have attacked Iran to keep it from getting a nuclear weapon.

“That’s interesting,” he said, noncommittally.

I started to talk: “Do you—”

He interrupted. “I actually would have,” he said, meaning that he would have struck Iran’s nuclear facilities. “If I saw them break out.”

He added, “Now, the argument that can’t be resolved, because it’s entirely situational, was what constitutes them getting” the bomb. “This was the argument I was having with Bibi Netanyahu.” Netanyahu wanted Obama to prevent Iran from being capable of building a bomb, not merely from possessing a bomb.

“You were right to believe it,” the president said. And then he made his key point. “This was in the category of an American interest.”

But is he bluffing even now? We’ll probably never know.

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Obama Says He Would Have Bombed Iran

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BREAKING: The United States Spies on Israel

by ChetHarness Posted on December 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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The latest outrage in conservative circles is the NSA’s surveillance program. They aren’t outraged by spying on American citizens, of course—though more on that later. They’re outraged by spying on Israel. You see, when NSA surveillance of foreign leaders was exposed by Edward Snowden, President Obama promised to stop it—but with exceptions. And it turns out that Israel was one of those exceptions. As the Wall Street Journal reports:

There was little debate over Israel. “Going dark on Bibi? Of course we wouldn’t do that,” a senior U.S. official said, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname.

That’s not exactly surprising. I don’t imagine George W. Bush ever contemplated going dark on Bibi either—or any other Israeli leader, for that matter. Nor, quite obviously, have the Israelis ever eased up on their spying of us.

So what’s the outrage? First of all, NSA surveillance allowed Obama to keep current on Netanyahu’s relentless efforts to undermine his negotiations with Iran. Charles Krauthammer finds that outrageous:

This was about trying to get through the Congress the Iran agreement. That is not a validated “national security” purpose. This is a way to win a battle with Congress….And that is, I think, a violation of the power of the executive interfering with legitimate activities and interactions of the Congress.

Spare me. The executive branch negotiates treaties. Netanyahu was doing everything he could to torpedo an active negotiation. So Obama kept an eye on him. Right or wrong, there isn’t a president in history who wouldn’t have done the same thing.

But it turns out there was one thing even the White House was concerned about: when you spy on Bibi, you’re also going to end up spying on members of Congress, since Bibi talks to them all the time. When this happens, the intercepted information is supposed to be “minimized,” and that’s especially the case when it comes to members of Congress. Apparently the NSA did this, delivering only Bibi’s side of intercepted communications. Still, Republicans in Congress are suspicious.

I can’t say that I blame them. On the other hand, my sympathy is pretty limited since this is a very general problem, and Republicans in Congress seem aggressively uninterested in it when it affects anyone other than themselves.

So that’s that. The NSA spied on Netanyahu. That’s a nothingburger. Of course they spied on Netanyahu. And the NSA says that they properly minimized the congressional end of any conversations between Netanyahu and a member of Congress. Since conservatives insist that we should take their word for this in general, why shouldn’t we take their word for it now? Wake me up if it turns out there’s anything more to this story.

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BREAKING: The United States Spies on Israel

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Netanyahu’s Speech: Mansplaining Iran to Obama

by MathiasDelprat Posted on March 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress has been covered as a spectacle orchestrated (perhaps in a misguided fashion) by the conservative GOP-Likud alliance to undercut President Barack Obama’s effort to reach a deal with Iran limiting that government’s nuclear program. But this stunt did highlight a significant aspect of the the ongoing debate over Iran—Netanyahu’s position is extreme and unworkable: Iran should yield completely, or there will be war.

The ongoing negotiations between the United States and its allies and Iran have been a tough slog. But at the heart of the issue is a simple point: Will Iran be allowed to engage in any enrichment of uranium? Iran insists it is entitled to pursue a nuclear program, if only for civilian purposes. Netanyahu contends that if Tehran retains any nuclear program, there will be a risk that it can develop nuclear weapons with which it can threaten Israel’s existence. Obama’s aim is to impose severe restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program to limit any ability to produce a nuclear bomb—and to ensure that if there were to be an Iranian breakout from an agreement that it would still take Tehran some time to make a bomb. Obama wants to minimize greatly the risk of Iran going nuclear; Netanyahu wants to eliminate the risk.

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Netanyahu’s Speech: Mansplaining Iran to Obama

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When Will Benjamin Netanyahu Finally Go Too Far?

by MilfordMnh Posted on January 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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I keep wondering if it’s ever possible for Benjamin Netanyahu to go too far. He’s treated President Obama with truly astonishing levels of contempt and disdain for nearly his entire tenure, and he’s done it in the apparent belief that his political support in the US is so strong and so bipartisan that he’ll never be held to account for it. And so far he hasn’t been.

But what about his latest stunt? The fact that John Boehner invited him to address Congress is hardly surprising. Boehner needed to poke Obama in the eye to demonstrate his conservative bona fides, and this was a perfect opportunity since he knew Netanyahu would deliver plenty of trash talk about Obama’s Iran policy. But the fact that Netanyahu kept the invitation a secret from the administration and failed to even notify them he was planning a visit—well, that’s a whole different story. As former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk put it, “Netanyahu is using the Republican Congress for a photo-op for his election campaign….Unfortunately, the US relationship will take the hit. It would be far wiser for us to stay out of their politics and for them to stay out of ours.”

And it turns out that even two Fox News hosts agree. Max Fisher relays the story:

Two prominent Fox News hosts, Chris Wallace and Shepherd Smith, harshly criticized Boehner and Netanyahu on Friday for secretly arranging a Netanyahu speech to Congress that is transparently aimed at undermining President Obama, and set up without the White House’s knowledge.

….”I agree 100 percent,” Wallace said when Smith read a quote from Indyk criticizing the Boehner-Netanyahu maneuver. Wallace went on:

And to make you get a sense of really how, forgive me, wicked, this whole thing is, the Secretary of State John Kerry met with the Israeli Ambassador to the United States for two hours on Tuesday, Ron Dermer. The ambassador, never mentioned the fact that Netanyahu was in negotiations and finally agreed to come to Washington, not to see the president, but to go to Capitol Hill, speak to a joint session of congress and criticize the president’s policy. I have to say I’m shocked.

Smith said, “it seems like Netanyahu’s government thinks we don’t pay attention and that we’re just a bunch of complete morons, the United States citizens, as if we wouldn’t pick up on what’s happening here.”

Shep Smith goes off the Fox reservation all the time, so perhaps his comments aren’t too much of a surprise. But although Wallace is no Sean Hannity, he’s fairly reliably conservative and even he was shocked.

So has Netanyahu finally gone over the line? So far I haven’t heard much criticism from sitting US politicians, so I’d have to say not. Not yet, anyway. But it sure seems like the day is going to come. No matter how close an ally Israel is, there’s only so much contempt their leaders can show for a sitting American president and his policies. Eventually the American public is going to lose patience, even the folks who aren’t huge Obama fans themselves.

It hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it never will. But it sure seems as if Benjamin Netanyahu is hellbent on pushing the line until he finally rings a bell he can’t unring. The only question now is whether he stays in office long enough to make that final, fatal mistake.

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When Will Benjamin Netanyahu Finally Go Too Far?

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Israel Ups the Anti-Obama Ante

by Seraphinakbj Posted on November 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week Israel announced it would build 20,000 new settlement homes in the occupied West Bank. It kinda sorta withdrew this plan in the face of international outrage. Then Benjamin Netanyahu went on CNN to blast President Obama’s peace overtures to Iran, while a key advisor told the Financial Times that Israel was ready and willing to bomb Iran whether America liked it or not. Dan Drezner says the technical IR term for this behavior is “wigging out”:

Israeli jaw-jawing about a military strike puts it into a corner with no good exit option. Netanyahu’s definition of a bad nuclear deal seems to include… any nuclear deal. So say that one is negotiated. What can Israel do then? Netanyahu could follow through on his rhetoric and launch a unilateral strike. Maybe that would set Iran back a few years. It would also rupture any deal, accelerate Iran’s nuclear ambitions, invite unconventional retaliation from Iran and its proxies, and isolate Israel even further. If Netanyahu doesn’t follow through on his rhetoric, then every disparaging Israeli quote about Obama’s volte-face on Syria will be thrown back at the Israeli security establishment. Times a hundred.

“Right now,” Drezner says, “Israel is pretty much pissing all over the Obama administration.” Netanyahu obviously has good reason to think that Republicans will support him in this unreservedly, but he better be careful. Even Obama-hating tea party types can start to get a little antsy when a foreign leader is so obviously contemptuous of American interests and the American president.

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Israel Ups the Anti-Obama Ante

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