The Push to Pressure Israel Intensifies Amid Violence

It might have taken a terrorist attack that included the death of an American, about a mile away from Vice President Joe Biden’s meeting in Jaffa, Israel, this week, to wake up Americans to the ongoing terrorist wave that has been sweeping Israel for months. The victim was Taylor Force, a 29-year-old Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, killed by an Islamic terrorist. Force’s wife was among 10 others stabbed by the same Palestinian terrorist, and she is in critical condition.

The futility of Biden’s last ditch effort to help give President Obama an additional notch on his legacy belt was underscored by the event, especially since the administration has sought to undermine Israel on several key issues, including the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement.

Through the use of U.S. Customs and Border Control, the Obama administration recently further politicized trade with Israel by requiring that imports from the West Bank be labeled as being from that area rather than from Israel, reportedThe National Interest in February.

“The penalty states that products must no longer be labeled ‘Made in Israel,’ because the United States views the West Bank as territory illegitimately controlled by Israel,” report Asaf Romirowsky and Benjamin Weinthal. In other words, the Obama administration is playing politics with trade, and with Israel’s legitimacy.

While members of the BDS movement often liken Israel to an apartheid state, it is interesting that one of Israel’s highest ranking soldiers is a Muslim. Yet pop culture shows continue to demonize the Israelis. According to the Zionist Organization of America, the ABC TV show Quantico “falsely claimed in Episode 4 that Israel bombed the Gaza greenhouses, when, in fact, Israel gave these multi-million dollar greenhouses to Gaza’s Arabs, and Palestinian Arabs looted and destroyed the greenhouses.” It also portrays the Israel Defense Forces as “war criminals.” Those are just two of many examples from this show that demonizes Israel and its people. With such misinformation as part of the common culture, it is not surprising that some Americans have called for divestment. Divestment is often defined as the opposite of investment, in this case done for political purposes.

“From the beginning of Obama’s time in office his administration demanded that Israel halt settlement activity,” write Romirowsky and Weinthal, arguing that President Obama assumes that solving the Israeli-Palestinian debate would resolve Middle Eastern tensions. Of course, the informal arrangement with Iran, known as the Iran deal, is supposed to bring about peace, too—ostensibly eliminating Iran’s ability to construct nuclear weapons.

As we have reported, the unsigned Iran deal is a debacle and farce that will empower Iran to conduct terror throughout the Middle East. This, in reality, is President Obama’s foreign policy legacy. In fact, just this week it was revealed that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is no longer allowed to disclose any possible Iranian violations of the so-called agreement. As a result, Fred Fleitz of the Center for Security Policy argued that “This is more evidence that the nuclear deal with Iran is a fraud. U.S. officials gave away everything to get this legacy agreement for President Obama that will not stop Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons.”

If you recall, the agreement between the IAEA and Iran was the one agreement in this whole arrangement that was supposedly signed, and we were told at the time that Secretary John Kerry and President Obama weren’t even allowed to see it. Now we understand why we were told that. Also this week, Iran has threatened to walk away from the “deal,” now that they’ve received their $100-plus billion dollars. That’s all they were ever looking for. They never had any intention of giving up their nuclear weapons program, a program they never acknowledged having in the first place.

When Congress signed into law the Trade Facilitation and Enforcement Act, it expressly outlined that American government policy would be against the BDS movement, including against sanctions on the territories it controls. Naturally,according to The New York Sun, President Obama claimed that the law was contrary to “longstanding bipartisan United States policy.”

“Somehow Mr. Obama, in his reference to ‘longstanding bipartisan policy,’ forgot to mention the vote in the Congress against boycotts and sanctions against the territories was a bipartisan tally,” reports The New York Sun. “But when he inked the measure, he put out a memorably obnoxious signing statement. He derided the law he’d just signed as ‘conflating’ Israel and Israeli-controlled territories and suggested he might defy it,” said the Sun editorial. The law, in fact, didn’t conflate the two.

While there is longstanding bipartisan Congressional support for Israel, there has been little support for this long-time ally coming from President Obama. Instead, he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have had an acrimonious relationship, at best. Daniel Greenfield has recounted much of the acrimony in this piece for FrontPageMag, which argues that Obama’s plans for his final year in office are designed to put unprecedented pressure on Israel, and would be “BDS’s biggest gift.”

Greenfield writes that “Obama is planning to deal a final blow to Israel,” possibly through a UN resolution that “would amount to an 800-pound thumb on the scale of the peace process by giving the PLO everything it wants, giving Israel nothing…”

The New York Times reports, with a different emphasis, that President Obama wishes to leave a legacy framework for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Such a framework would undoubtedly favor the Palestinians. The Times reports that President Obama hopes to “enshrine the proposals Secretary of State John Kerry made during his last failed effort at peacemaking in 2014,” and that President Obama is frustrated “about his failure in the peace process and its impact on his legacy.”

Each article the mainstream media pens discussing President Obama’s legacy contains a great deal of spin—and omits important details. Back in 2014 Kerry sought the input of Israel’s detractors, including Qatar, for a peace deal with the Palestinians.

As we wrote in August 2014, “the Kerry proposal speaks in broad language about ‘ending all hostilities’ and addressing ‘all security issues.’” However, “No mention is made of Hamas’ underground tunnels, or underground attacks at all.”

Newsweek’s Yardena Schwartz reported on March 8 that “Hamas is Tunneling its Way Into Israel, Again.” Schwartz writes of Israelis who hear construction underneath their homes, knowing that these tunnels will eventually bring death and destruction.

“Hamas has started bragging publicly about its ability to reach into Israel,” Schwartz reports, continuing, “an Israeli intelligence source tells Newsweek that more than 10 tunnels already do, and that Israel has not yet pinpointed the exact locations.”

“The re-emergence of tunnels as a weapon of war has coincided with a series of attacks by individual Palestinians on Israelis in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Tel Aviv,” writes Schwartz.

“This latest Palestinian uprising, which began in October, has resulted in the deaths of 29 Israelis, three foreign nationals and 170 Palestinians—roughly two-thirds of them while attacking Israelis and the rest during clashes with Israeli soldiers, according to the army.”

Palestinians continue to zealously shed the blood of Israelis and refuse to recognize the state of Israel. Any framework for peace that President Obama creates must first require that the Palestinians recognize Israel’s right to exist, or there can be no peace. But the Palestinians have rejected offers to have their own state, side-by-side with Israel, three times since the year 2000. As we’ve reportedin the past, President Obama’s heavy handed tactics toward Israel have actually made a deal between Israel and the Palestinians much less likely in the foreseeable future.

“Iran’s ally in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority, encourages the unyielding knife attacks against Israelis by Palestinians,” writes Pete Hoekstra for The Sacramento Bee. Hoekstra is a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and now with the Investigative Project on Terrorism and a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, “Fatah, the political party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas,” writes Hoekstra, “recently called for killing all Israelis throughout the country—‘in all their neighborhoods’—in a music video broadcast on the Fatah-run Awdah TV channel.”

Judicial Watch reports that “the Obama administration scrubbed [Homeland Security’s] ‘Terrorist Screening Database’ in order to protect what it considered the civil rights of suspected Islamic terrorist groups.” These “new Homeland Security documents confirm the modification of nearly 1,000 terrorist suspect reports,” said Judicial Watch.