The Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations

At Commentary, "A Statement on the Crisis in the U.S.—Israel Relationship":

The relationship between the United States and Israel is in jeopardy because, from the moment his administration began, Barack Obama has consciously, deliberately, and with malice aforethought sought to jeopardize it. He did so in part because he is committed to the idea that Israel must retreat to its 1967 borders, dismantle its settlements, and will a Palestinian state into existence. He views Israel’s inability or unwillingness to do these things as a moral stain.

But the depth of Obama’s anger toward Israel and Netanyahu suggests that there is far more to it than that. Israel stands in the way of what the president hopes might be his crowning foreign-policy achievement: a new order in the Middle East represented by a new entente with Iran. Netanyahu’s testimony on behalf of his country and his people is this: A nuclear Iran will possess the means to visit a second Holocaust on the Jews in a single day. His testimony on behalf of everyone else is this: A nuclear Iran will set off an arms race in the Middle East that will threaten world order, the world’s financial stability, and the lives of untold millions. Simply put, Obama finds the witness Israel is bearing to the threat posed by Iran unbearable.

Elliott Abrams has called the speech kerfuffle a “manufactured crisis.” He is right, and the assembly line has been rolling without letup for six years.

Read it all.

The editors point out that the Democrats have increasingly become anti-Israel, and it's apparent that the sources are both bottom-up and top-down. On the one hand, the virulent racist anti-Semitism on college campuses has seeped upward into the precincts of the Democrat Party establishment (at the presidential nominating conventions, for example), and on the other, the Israel-hatred at the Obama White House has tricked-down, providing über-legitimacy for the entire spectrum of Israel-hatred on the political left.