President Obama’s favorite journalist Jeffrey Goldberg made headlines in Israel when The Atlantic published his latest article about the President.
In his lengthy piece titled “The Obama Doctrine,” Goldberg gave an overview of Obama’s foreign policy and discussed the President’s disillusionment with the attempts to change the Middle East for the better.
Yes, Obama really thought that his policies in this problematic region would bring a positive change when he entered the White House at the beginning of 2008.
“This is the moment we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East,” he told a crowd of 200,000 Germans in Berlin when he was still a presidential candidate.
Things did not go as planned, as is now visible to even the most uninformed spectator, but it seems Obama regrets little. He has finally come to the conclusion that the Middle East cannot be fixed, but he is not to blame.
According to the president, it is all the fault of the leaders in the Middle East and one in particular.
“Some of his (Obama’s) deepest disappointments concern Middle Eastern leaders themselves. Of these Benjamin Netanyahu (the Israel Prime Minister) is in his own category,” Goldberg wrote.
“Obama has long believed that Netanyahu could bring about a two-state solution that would protect Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority democracy, but is too fearful and politically paralyzed to do so,” Goldberg added.
Needless to say, Obama didn’t utter a word of disappointment with PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, who, even according to Secretary of State John Kerry, blocked all progress in the various peace initiatives that were launched during Obama’s presidency. Abbas is not even mentioned in Goldberg’s article.
Obama’s contempt for the Israeli Prime Minister was best illustrated by Goldberg’s revelation about what happened during an undated meeting between Obama and Netanyahu in 2011.
When Netanyahu tried to explain to the President that the Middle East is a very brutal and dangerous region to live in, especially if you are a Jew, Obama became annoyed.
Obama told Goldberg that he felt Netanyahu was behaving “in a condescending fashion, and was also avoiding the subject at hand: peace negotiations. Finally, the president interrupted the prime minister.
“Bibi, you have to understand something. I’m the African-American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do,” Obama told the Israeli Prime Minister according to Goldberg.
Commentators in Israel were quick to point out that Obama based his alleged expertise on the Middle East on the fact that he is the African-American son of a single mother and managed to occupy the White House for a couple of years.
The President relayed to Goldberg how he thought that by going to Cairo and by delivering an outreach speech to Muslims he could trigger a discussion in the Muslim world that would end the old game of blaming Israel for all the ills in the Middle East.
“My argument was this: Let’s all stop pretending that the cause of the Middle East’s problems is Israel. We want to work to help achieve statehood and dignity for the Palestinians, but I was hoping that my speech could trigger a discussion, could create space for Muslims to address the real problems they are confronting—problems of governance, and the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity. My thought was, I would communicate that the U.S. is not standing in the way of this progress, that we would help, in whatever way possible, to advance the goals of a practical, successful Arab agenda that provided a better life for ordinary people,” Obama said to Goldberg.
In 2016, the Muslims are still blaming Israel for all the problems in the Middle East and Iran holds illegal drills with ballistic missiles that they openly say are designed to annihilate Israel.
But Obama thinks the Iranians deserve to “share the Middle East with their foes,” as Goldberg puts it.
“The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians—which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria and Iraq and Yemen—requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace,” the president said.
The cold peace has turned into an endless bloody war in places like Iraq, Syria and Yemen, but Obama now cynically thinks that the Middle East is in need for a “few new smart autocrats.”
“If only everyone could be like the Scandinavians, this would all be easy,” the President reportedly tells his aides now.
“History is full of leaders who have warned against inaction, indifference, and especially against silence when it mattered most,” Goldberg quotes John Kerry as saying and he adds that Kerry counts Obama among these leaders.
The Israeli public begs to differ. An overwhelming majority of Israelis thinks that Obama’s inaction; indifference and many mistakes have led the Middle East to the abyss and now endanger the future of the Jewish state.
“The average Israeli probably thinks that he is a nice guy, but he is naive. He doesn’t get the Middle East, doesn’t understand how the Mideast functions, and he doesn’t therefore, understand what dangers Israel has to face,” Israeli historian Alexander Yacabson said in September 2015.
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