Obama's Betrayal of Israel Is a Black Day for American Diplomacy

"Adding a final shameful chapter to a foreign-policy record that already runneth over with them, Barack Obama on Friday abandoned America's commitment to Israel's security, and to the vindication of democracy over sharia-supremacist aggression. In an act of cowardly venom, the president had the United States abstain from - and thereby effectively enact - a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemns Israeli settlement activity. At least, that's what the resolution ostensibly does. The reality is much more than that. The resolution undertakes to render our ally indefensible. It was a black day in modern American diplomatic history, a flurry of sinister wheeling and dealing while the nation - exhausted by the election, anticipating a weekend of Christmas and Hanukkah celebration - was looking the other way...

It is a disgraceful legacy of Barack Obama that his obsession over settlements and antipathy toward Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu - traits he shares with his old radical comrade, Rashid Khalidi - have made the already dim prospects for peace far more remote. At the root of the settlements controversy is the fiction that the territory at issue is 'occupied Palestinian' land. In point of stubborn fact, no matter how tirelessly the vaunted 'international community' evokes the scurrilous image of occupation, the territory is righteously disputed. It is Islamist-leftist dogma that Israel's millennia of attachment to its homeland count for nothing, and that the Jewish state owes its existence to a fit of remorse over Nazi barbarism - one of the reasons Holocaust denial is an Islamist pastime...

The true purpose of the resolution is not to stop settlement construction. It is to dictate a final disposition. It puts the imprimatur of the Security Council - which, for transnational progressives, is our ultimate global ruler - on a decree that says: The disputed territory is actually Palestinian territory, and that this Palestinian territory includes East Jerusalem (i.e., the most sacred portion of the city Israel regards as its eternal capital - again, for millennia of valid historic reasons)...

The boundaries the Security Council seeks to impose would be inadequate even if Palestinian leadership - including the Muslim Brotherhood's terrorist branch, Hamas - were not committed to Israel's destruction. Obama knows all of this. He also knows that the campaign to destroy Israel is politically waged with U.N. resolutions every bit as much as Hamas wages it with rockets. It is therefore essential that our nation, as a reliable ally, uses our veto power to protect Israel's security.

That is why Obama would not have dared abstain from the vote on such a resolution before Election Day. The only glimmer of hope on this dark day is President-elect Trump's willingness to use what limited leverage he had in Israel's defense. Perhaps more important was his vow, after the resolution was adopted, that things will be different come January 20 'as to the U.N.' It seems the incoming president has identified the real problem."