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No Reason for Attacks on Hagel

Ben Caspit writes that the attacks on Chuck Hagel are not serving Israel or US-Israel relations.
United States Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, leading an American observer group at the U.N. conference on global warming, confers on the phone with Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-West Virginia) from a working lounge at the Kyoto International Conference Hall December 10. It is hoped that an agreement can be reached among the 160 nations participating in the talks, on this final day on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions into the next century.

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Sometime in mid-2008 I was the author of an article that made the headlines of Maariv. It read: “Concern in Jerusalem: Obama is Getting Closer to the White House.” That article appeared after Barack Obama won several important victories in the Democratic Party primaries, placing him in a comfortable launching point to achieve the impossible, or at least the impossible until then. It looked like he could beat Hillary Clinton and then go on to defeat John McCain. The Jerusalem I was writing about was the Jerusalem of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. It was a Jerusalem of peace, negotiations and international stature. Israel’s legitimacy around the world was solid. Nevertheless, despite all that, Jerusalem was still worried about Obama, that unknown variable from Chicago, the man who came out of nowhere and managed to whip up every deep-rooted paranoia ever held by Jerusalem into a feverish pitch.

Four years have passed since then. Jerusalem itself has changed. Olmert and Livni are gone, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister Avigdor Liberman have taken their place. Barak is still there (but he has since swapped dog-tags). Obama has completed his first term in office and is now getting ready for his second term. As things turned out, despite all the “Concern in Jerusalem,” Obama has been the most favorable president ever to the Israeli right. True, he never meant for that to happen, but when all is said and done, settlements in the Occupied Territories flourished during his presidency, the peace process died, the US continued to veto every anti-Israel decision in the Security Council, intelligence cooperation between the US and Israel reached an all-time high, and so did the security and military aid that Israel received from the US.

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