By Schmoel Yitzhak
Barack Obama once had a legion of friends in the American Jewish community.
A pair of the most prominent -- Ed Koch and Alan Dershowitz -- have turned against the president.
And it goes a lot farther than that.
Difficult as it is to believe, even a columnist in Haaretz -- which often reads like a Hebrew edition of Al Jazeera -- has ripped the White House. (And that cannot be blamed on global warming, either!)
Why have these seemingly topsy-turvy events occurred?
Perhaps a saying from the sages -- By their works shall ye know them -- says it all.
Or, if one bromide sums up Obama's relationship with Israel, it would be, "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"
Those of us who feared the boychik president long before he was elected are not the least bit surprised but the vast bloc of naive American Jews who are just beginning to get it; and I'll get to them in a moment.
But first let's take a gander at some significant events that have aroused the likes of Professor Dershowitz, former New York City mayor Koch and Haartetz's own Moshe Arens.
When Obama believes that the Jewish vote is important to him, he will praise Israel as a "friend" but hours after the words have left his forked tongue, yet another act of double-dealing is committed that undercuts Israel's security not to mention bargaining position with the Arabs.
The president's latest three-act charade began with his recent speech to the State Department -- ever hostile to the Jewish state -- prior to Benjamin Netanyahu's arrival in Washington. Act One could be called "The Gratuitous Kick In The Ass."
Common political courtesy demanded that the host in the White House allow his guest to deliver Israel's long-awaited blueprint for bringing the recalcitrant Arabs back to the negotiating table.
And common political savvy demanded that in advance of Bibi's arrivial, the president NOT establish demands -- or set new boundaries -- that should result ONLY from direct Israeli-Arab talks.
But what Obama plumbed with his actions was the absolute nadir in political perfidy.
By declaring -- while his guest was still in flight -- that Israel return to the "1967 lines" was like telling Bibi that the only thing for him on the White House dinner menu was cyanide-on-toast. Take it or leave it; but you had better take it!
In one fell swoop of a speech, the president pre-empted the Prime Minister, embarrassed him to the radical-50 and torpedoed any realistic vessel of peace that could sail through negotiations.
Even the vehemently anti-Bibi Haaretz saw fit to allow its columnist Arens to denounce the faithless Obama while supporting Netanyahu.
"Obama will go down as the great spoiler," wrote Arens. "He never seems to miss an opportunity to push the (peace) process into a dead end. He has done so again with his declaration that Israel should return to the '1967 lines' in any peace agreement with the Palestinians."
This is the same Obama who one year is embracing his buddy, Hosni Mubarak, and in another season not only knifes Mubarak in the back but essentially turns Egypt from Israel's ally to an enemy of the Jewish State. At the same time the White House mouths toothless homilies about Syria while Assad goes about the business of shooting dissenters left and right.
Arens: "Obama seems oblivious to the fact that the present fluid state of affairs in the Arab world, clouded by uncertainty regarding future developments among Israel's next-door neighbors, is hardly a propitious moment for risk taking by Israel. Rather than advancing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, he has managed to put obstacles in the way."
The White House seems to have forgotten that the Sadat-Begin Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty has virtually been shredded by the post-Mubarak regime which Obama helped ease into power.
Look at his record. You'll find that undermining Israel's basic security needs has been part and parcel of the president's modus operandi from the day after a majority of deceived American Jews got him elected.
Ever since Obama's visit to Cairo -- but as president, he has never visited Jerusalem nor Tel Aviv -- the president has ached to embrace the Islamic -- mostly militant -- world. Yet when it comes to Israel, he treats Netanyahu with the back of his hand.
That explains why the likes of Koch and Dershowitz have turned against him.
"Obama," says Dershowitz, "made one serious mistake that tilts the balance against Israel in any future negotiations. Without insisting that the Palestinians give up their absurd claim to have millions of supposed refugees return to Israel as a matter of right, he insisted that Israel must surrender all of the areas captured in its defensive war of 1967 subject only to land swaps.
"If the president is to play a positive role in bringing Palestinians and the Israelis to the negotiating table , he should insist that there be no preconditions to negotiation."
Ah, but Dershowitz is wrongly assuming that the Muslim president is an honest broker.
He is not and never has been and only now are some in the Democratic Party community beginning to understand that.
Koch says that American Jews believe that Obama, like every Democratic president, is another Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Those of us who have studied American history realize that FDR's inaction (his refusal to allow refugees from Hitler's Germany on SS St. Louis at Miami in 1939 as but one example) led to the deaths of thousands of Jews during World War II.
Some American Jews are on to Obama's double-tongued machinations. Many Israeli journalists, such as the Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick, figured him out years ago and is as right today as she was in 2008.
"Obama sided with Hamas against Israel by acting as though its partnership with Fatah is just a little problem that has to be sorted out to reassure the paranoid Jews," wrote Glick after Bibi's visit to Washington. "Hamas is a jihadist movement dedicated to the annihilation of the Jewish people and the establishment of a global caliphate."
Right you are, Caroline. Wrong you are, Barack.
By their works shall ye know them!
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