Obama, Israel, the United Nations, and the United States

Argyle Ellis
4 min readDec 28, 2016

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Obama is a sad figure, and history will regard him as a study in narcissistic hubris. Responsible for an acute aggravation of worldwide misery and suffering, in an age where global indicators of development and education are nevertheless positive, his calm and serious demeanor are but mere appearance in contrast with his lightweight and unserious reflection and behavior.

His easy-going and superficial personality make him an affable dinner companion but reveal an insubstantiality manifest in his international policy. In the litany of his crimes without number, the abetting of the slaughter of a half million Syrians is only the latest, and for which he self-exculpates by turning around and gut-punching Israel, the collective Jew.

He is undoubtedly the worst foreign-affairs president since the U.S. became a world power at the very end of the 19th century, worse even than Woodrow Wilson, who, contrary to Barack Obama, at least meant well even when his policies were misguided or unworkable.

Thanks to inspiration by the Obama Administration, the United Nations has now reached its Haile Selassie moment. The American failure to veto the Security Council resolution proclaiming the lack of “validity of legal status” of Israel’s settlements in that part of the Mandate of Palestine outside the 1949 armistice lines, was executed in typically Obaman passive-aggressive, pusillanimous manner. Even interest groups that should be pleased by the move are crying about it not being done sooner, when it “could have made a difference.”

This is in the line of Obama’s support for the Tehran theocrats against their population early in his first Administration and his later support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, not to mention complicity in the disaster once known as Libya. Not only has Obama injured further the already feeble moral voice of the UN, but also he has killed the Middle East peace process. This process, going back to the Oslo Accords, was based on the idea of “land for peace”. Despite the fact that the Israelis never got peace when they withdrew from land — whether the Sinai or Gaza (or Southern Lebanon )— they continued to honor the agreements that they signed. But Oslo is now a dead letter.

The U.N. resolution says that the Israelis have no land to trade for peace because their presence on the land is illegal. The resolution, stating that any territory beyond the 1949 armistice lines (often erroneously called the “1967 borders”) is illegally occupied, thereby takes away any incentive on the part of the Palestinian Authority to negotiate. It does this by fixing a priori the outcome of any future “negotiations.”

Obama has guaranteed that peace will not come to the Middle East and that a “Palestinian state” will remain a never-neverland lacking the attributes that characterize a state under international law. Israel no longer has any incentive to pursue negotiations, or even to resist from annexing the lands concerned.

Although there have been no definite indications yet, it seems likely that at least the U.S. contribution to UNESCO will be scaled back or eliminated, given its “approval” in October of two tragicomic motions holding that the Jewish people have no connection to any part of Jerusalem. Meanwhile, almost weekly archaeological finds continue to document the ties of the Jewish people to the land, despite attempts of the Muslim authorities who govern access to the Temple Mount to physically excavate and trash all such possible remnants.

Israel is concerned about delegitimation as South Africa was delegitimized, and what that could mean for its international relations. But rather than having the intended effect of delegitimating Israel, this action could have the longer-term effect of delegitimating the UN. Already strongly under criticism from member of the incoming Trump Administration, this organization has already lost a large amount of legitimacy in the public opinion of its largest financial contributor, the United States. The UN’s Human Rights Commission is run by some of the most horrific of the world’s abusers of human rights.

This disconnect from reality comes from an “international community” in this case led by the White House that has overlooked the slaughter of a half million Syrians over the past several years, including the most barbarous slavery, torture and execution of Christians and Yazidis.

That is the definition of genocide. And just as Aleppo is occupied amid continuing daily horrors, Israel is condemned by this hypocritical dissembling Security Council, where the U.S. Ambassador built her reputation as author a widely acclaimed book criticizing American inaction in the face of past genocides, only to participate now in the incitation of the Arab world in the propagation of a new one. (“Why would the EU give us all this money if they did not want us to finish what Hitler started?” is a sentiment common in the region.)

Israel is, with the possible exception of the United States, the only country in the world where the progressive and humanistic values of the European Enlightenment continue to animate social and political life. The U.S. has not lately shown such an inspiration but, having dodged the bullet of a Clinton presidency, has the chance under Donald Trump of becoming again true to its roots. Of all the economically advanced, industrialized countries of the world, the American population is distinguished in four respects as an “outlier” through its belief in individualism, the value of work and capacity to advance oneself through it, its religiosity, and its optimism. All these qualities are sorely needed today throughout the whole world.

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