By Jonathan Tobin
The ground is fast sinking beneath the feet of President Obama’s Jewish defenders. While the president is trying to raise money from Jewish donors by patting himself on the back as Israel’s greatest friend in the White House, the Secretary of Defense has now made it clear that he sees the Jewish state as responsible for the isolation it faces. Equally as egregious is the fact that Howard Gutman, Obama’s ambassador to Belgium, told an audience this week he thinks Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians is responsible for the creation of a new kind of anti-Semitism that he believes is understandable on some level.
Panetta’s speech on Friday at the Brooking Institution in Washington and Gutman’s comments to a conference held by the European Jewish Union were obviously not coordinated, but they combine to give us a clear view of the distorted mindset of administration officials. This is an administration that sees Israel as a source of trouble, not an ally. Combined with the sorry history of three years of Obama’s picking fights with Jerusalem, the positions of both Panetta and Gutman give the lie to the notion this is an administration friends of Israel can trust.
That the secretary of defense would choose to blast Israel in this manner just as Obama is starting to crank up his re-election campaign speaks to the cognitive dissonance many Jewish Democrats are experiencing. For Panetta to claim Israel is responsible for its own isolation just as Obama boasted of his friendship for the Jewish state shows either a lack of coordination between the Pentagon and the White House or a desire on the president’s part to signal the Arab world he is prepared to put the screws to the Israelis as soon as the election is concluded.
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