“He used every considerable means and influence of the United States to help us. We owe him a special measure of gratitude. This attests to the strong alliance between Israel and the United States. This alliance between Israel and the United States is especially important in these times of political storms and upheavals in the Middle East.” Guess who made these comments and to whom they were directed.
Hard to believe, but these warm words of gratitude were uttered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They were directed at Barack Obama, the same American president who, on the day he vacated the Oval Office for Donald Trump, elicited a huge sigh of relief from Netanyahu. The prime minister had expressed his heartfelt thanks to Obama on Sept. 10, 2011, a day after an enraged mob stormed the Israeli Embassy in Cairo.
“I asked for his help,” Netanyahu declared at the time. “This was a decisive and fateful moment.” Obama, he went on to say, promised he would do everything in his power to save the six besieged embassy staff, “and he did.” A senior Israeli official involved in managing the crisis said Obama’s personal intervention had a significant impact on the Egyptians' quick response to extricate the Israelis, “because we were just minutes away from tragedy.”
True, Obama did not relocate the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — and at the moment, Trump isn’t rushing to make good on his promise to do so, either — and Obama did not lash out at Muslims. He understood that when, to quote Netanyahu, “political storms and upheavals” are shaking the Middle East, a responsible American president is not entitled to sit around doing nothing. Unfortunately (but in the eyes of Jewish and Muslim rejecters of peace fortunately), Obama’s efforts to bring about an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not yield results. Admittedly, Obama did not, like Trump, name an enthusiastic advocate of Israel’s West Bank settlement enterprise such as David Friedman to represent the United States in Tel Aviv. Instead, he only sent Israel an aid package worth billions of dollars to fund sophisticated defense equipment. Granted, Obama did not follow Netanyahu’s orders to tighten sanctions on Iran, but in professional circles, including in Israel, there is broad agreement that the nuclear deal with Tehran is proving to be successful.
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