Early in his first term Obama tried to similarly link Israeli peace efforts and U.S. action on Iran’s nuclear program.
By: Jewish Press News Briefs

U.S. President Barak Obama intends on offering Israel more U.S. pressure on Iran in exchange for greater Israeli overtures to the Palestinians, the British publication, The Sunday Times, reported today.

Early in his first term Obama tried to similarly link Israeli peace efforts and U.S. action on Iran’s nuclear program. In testimony to Congress in April 2009, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that, “For Israel to get the kind of support its looking for vis-a-vis Iran, it can’t stay on the sidelines with respect to the Palestinians and peace efforts. They go hand in hand.”

Clinton’s statement was part of an intense push by the Obama administration, which began shortly after Obama’s inauguration, to force newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to endorse Palestinian statehood and make concessions to the Palestinians. In June 2009, Netanyahu endorsed the two-state solution for the first time in a major policy address at Bar Ilan University.

Obama reportedly intends to visit Israel as well as Jordan this coming March. It would be his first visit to Israel since he was first elected President.

Typically, such a presidential visit would be used to push for progress on a major issue, such as reaching a peace agreement, though almost all reports about the trip predicted that Obama would not be using the visit for such a purpose.

By JPOST.COM STAFF

The reason behind the urgency of the US president’s trip to Israel in spring – a time flagged by Netanyahu as significant in the Iranian nuclear program – is to tell him to leave the matter to the US, officials tell Army Radio.

The main purpose of US President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel in the spring is to warn Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu against attacking Iran, unnamed officials told Army Radio on Sunday.

According to the officials, the urgency of the trip is because in his speech to the United Nations in September, Netanyahu had flagged the spring of 2013 as a significant time in the context of the Iranian nuclear threat.
Read more…

Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought”
“Israel Hayom”, February 8, 2013,

The 2009 visit was driven by an assumption that a newly-elected charismatic US President could turnaround the US economy and reform US healthcare, while simultaneously implementing UN-like multilateralism, lowering the US unilateral profile, transforming the world from confrontation to engagement, mollifying the Muslim World, coax Iran into abandoning its megalomaniac aspirations and resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.  The 2009 visit reflected a worldview focusing on the Palestinian issue as the, supposed, core cause of Middle East turbulence, the crown jewel of Islamic policy-making, an essential link in forging an anti-Iran Arab coalition and the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict.  Israel was perceived as a secondary ally, at best, and a burden, at worst.
Read more…

Israel says “No” to the Status Quo

By Barry Rubin, PJ MEDIA

Political Analysis

I’m not against this but I think it is a mistake on Obama’s part. Here’s why.

While such a visit would resolve previous criticism that Obama never visited Israel as president, it is a mistake, especially given the timing, for a number of reasons.

–Obama will have a new foreign policy team which won’t have much time to evaluate the situation and what it wants to do. It has just been announced that Secretary of State John Kerry will visit these places in the spring. Usually the way it would be handled would be to let Kerry go and then evaluate if there was a good basis for a presidential visit.
Read more…

Testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa

Michael Rubin, Ph.D. Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute

February 5, 2013

Chairwoman Ros-Lehtinen, Ranking Member Deutch, Honorable Members, thank you for the opportunity to testify before this Subcommittee today on this important topic.

Far from advancing peace, to encourage Hamas-Fatah reconciliation and to subsidize any coalition government will accelerate conflict. At issue is not only the sanctity of diplomatic agreements which form the basis for Middle East peace efforts, but also the outcome of a battle between more secular movements struggling against a radical Islamist revival.

The Obama Administration’s desire to fund the Palestinian government does more harm than good not only to moderate Palestinians who desire to live in peace with Israel, but also to U.S. regional interests and prospects for Arab-Israeli peace. Read more…

By Ben Hartman, JPOST

By Pinhas Inbari

The reported Israeli military strike on a Syrian arms convoy destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon and the non-conventional weapons production center near Damascus has put the Jewish state in the midst of the Syrian conflict. Israel can no longer afford the luxury to view the war across its border with indifference. It must hurry and decide what kind of Syria it would like to have on its doorstop, as other powers have already been trying to bend Syria’s political future to their ends, which do not serve Israel either politically or on matters of security. In the best-case scenario the linkage between Iran, Syria and Lebanon would be severed.
Read more…