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Award-winning journalist thrashes U.S. mideast policy

The commander-in-chief’s foreign policy errors will have lasting repercussions with American allies, according to Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens, who visited Beth Jacob Congregation in Beverly Hills on June 7.
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June 11, 2015

Whether it’s President Barack Obama’s take on nuclear negotiations with Iran or his stance on Israel’s relationship with Palestine, the commander-in-chief’s foreign policy errors will have lasting repercussions with American allies, according to Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens, who visited Beth Jacob Congregation in Beverly Hills on June 7.

“One of the interesting things when you go around and talk to the rest of the Arab world, they are looking at the administration’s behavior toward Israel. And they are saying, ‘If this is how the Americans behave toward their good friend Israel, how are they going to behave toward us?’ ” Stephens said during the event called “Has Washington Given Up on the Middle East?” 

“This is deeply damaging to the United States. Whether it’s Hillary [Clinton] or whoever else becomes the next president, they are going to have to somehow persuade these allies or former allies that we are a dependable superpower. The president is on a personal, almost nihilistic mission to demonstrate that he does not care what the reputation of the United States should be on Jan. 22, 2017.”

Stephens, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist, focused on the president’s remarks made last month at Adas Israel, a Conservative synagogue in Washington, D.C. He said Obama’s speech revealed what he sees as various double standards the administration utilizes in its public commentary of Israel’s actions. 

“The president has enunciated the position that he expects everything of Israel, and so should they fall short even by an inch or a foot, he will forgive them nothing,” Stephens said. “Whereas the view of the Palestinians is that they can transgress again and again and again and yet somehow be treated as entitled to international respectability, receptions at the White House and statehood.”

At Adas Israel, Obama admitted he holds Israel to an exalted sense of duty and feels compelled to call the Jewish state out when it does not measure up. 

“And it is precisely because I care so deeply about the state of Israel — it’s precisely because, yes, I have high expectations for Israel the same way I have high expectations for the United States of America — that I feel a responsibility to speak out honestly about what I think will lead to long-term security and to the preservation of a true democracy in the Jewish homeland. And I believe that’s two states for two peoples, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people on their land, as well.”

The president also recalled images of Israel in its infancy: “I came to know Israel as a young man through these incredible images of kibbutzim and Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir and Israel overcoming incredible odds in the ’67 war.”

Stephens asked what would happen if a previous president had spoken about the African-American community the same way Obama speaks about the Jewish-Israeli community. 

“Imagine if George Bush had said, ‘When I think of the African-American community, I think of people like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Martin Luther King Jr., and when the Black community doesn’t live up to those standards, then I’m going to have to speak out,’ ” Stephens said. “He would have been howled out of polite society.”

Stephens also chastised the Obama administration for its role in the international negotiations of Iran’s nuclear program, which he said is “increasingly divorced from reality.” 

Stephens, in response to a question from moderator Josh Block, president and CEO of The Israel Project (which sponsored the event with the Journal and Beth Jacob), spent several minutes playing devil’s advocate to those opposed to an Iranian nuclear deal — before tearing down such arguments. At first, Stephens mentioned the parallels between the United States’ current negotiations with Iran and its successful negotiations with China during the Nixon administration, but then he did an about face, saying there are important differences between the wounded Maoist China of the 1970s and Iran’s current economy. 

“Mao had no option but to reach a strategic accommodation with the United States,” Stephens said. “But Iran is winning on every front and is already a highly successful regional power. They are already getting sanctions relief. So why on Earth would they curb their ambitions?”

Stephens finished his conversation by offering a warning to American and Israeli Jews. In drawing upon accounts of Jews in Germany before the Holocaust, he asks Jews around the world to be prepared.  

“One of the things that I worry about most of all is that the Jewish people here or in Israel should never lose the instinct for danger,” Stephens said. “Israel has survived because it is a country founded on the instinct for danger, from Theodor Herzl to David Ben-Gurion to Ari Sharon, and I think that’s the essential point.”

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