Satloff: “Obama Delivered One of The Most Impassioned” Pro-Israel Speeches Ever by a POTUS

David Streeter — September 22, 2011 – 2:29 pm | Foreign Policy | Israel | Obama Comments (0) Add a comment

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s (WINEP) Robert Satloff reflected upon the overt pro-Israel nature of President Barack Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly in an article posted on WINEP’s site. Satloff wrote:

[O]n the emotive issue of the Palestinian request for UN admission as a state, Obama delivered one of the most impassioned statements in support of Israel ever made by an American president in the well of the General Assembly.

It was no surprise that Obama devoted considerable text to explaining his opposition to UN membership for Palestine, which—as he noted—appears to contradict his oft-stated support for the establishment of a Palestinian state. And it was no surprise that Obama made a ‘process’ argument, defending his position on the grounds that a Palestinian state can only truly emerge from a negotiation with Israel, rather than a ‘substance’ argument, which might have noted the attributes of statehood that ‘Palestine’ lacks (control over territory, for example) or the fact that the Palestinian Authority had, in the Oslo Accords, promised not to pursue these very sorts of international stratagems to circumvent negotiations.

What was surprising is that Obama went far beyond just making a case for negotiations as the only way to resolve the conflict. Rather, like an embattled attorney representing an unpopular client before a skeptical jury, Obama’s speech to the assembled leaders from more than 190 countries was essentially a call for people around the world to put themselves in the shoes of Israel and, most notably, the Jewish people….

Perhaps most remarkably, Obama did not pair that recitation of a fundamentally pro-Israel narrative with an equal but opposite recitation of the Palestinian narrative ... Instead, with no discussion of Israeli settlement activity, building in Jerusalem, or the difficulties of Palestinian movement through checkpoints, Obama limited himself to one side of the story. In essence, the punishment meted out to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas for rejecting Washington’s request to shelve his UN gambit was that Obama came to New York as Israel’s ally, not as an impartial mediator of peace diplomacy….

Many factors may have motivated the president to make his passionate statement opposing Palestinian UN recognition, but whether it was born of high policy, moral conviction, or crass politics, it will be compared in the annals of America’s lonely defense of Israel at the United Nations alongside Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s castigation of the Zionism-is-Racism resolution during the Ford administration, and John Negroponte’s declaration during the George W. Bush administration that the United States would veto any Security Council resolution on the Middle East conflict that failed to condemn terrorism against Israel. 

 

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