That prompted a frosty response from Netanyahu, who said in a statement that he “expects” Obama to reaffirm President George W. Bush’s more favorable 2004 statements on the matter.
The pro-Israel lobby went into high gear, urging the White House to clarify things in Obama’s Sunday speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Word is they wanted Obama to toughen up on Hamas by referring to it as a terrorist organization. (He did.)
The second thing they wanted was to hear Obama dial back that border stuff to note that he was not calling on Israel to return to the precise 1967 borders. (He did.)
The third thing they wanted was for Obama to get closer to
the Israeli position that the Palestinian refugees have no
right of return to Israel. (He didn’t.)
The AIPAC speech may have smoothed a few feathers, but many strong Israel supporters remained ruffled. And Obama’s statements weren’t the only things that upset people.
Before the speech, former deputy national security adviser and assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams, for example, focused on what he called “a remarkable press release” from the State Department about Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg’s itinerary last week on his Middle East trip, during which he met with Israeli officials in West Jerusalem.
Abrams, writing in the Weekly Standard blog, noted that the release announced that Steinberg “visits Israel, Jerusalem and the West Bank.”
This raises the question, Abrams wrote, of whether the State Department thinks the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, is not actually in Israel.
“I urge some member of Congress to put this to . . . Secretary Clinton at her next appearance or some journalist to ask it . . . at her next press conference: ‘In what country is the Knesset? In what country is the Western Wall of the Temple?’ ” Abrams wrote.
(Good idea. Of course, someone would then pop up and ask her where the Dome of the Rock is, and off we go . . . )
In any event, from what we could tell, it appears that Netanyahu went home without his great “expects” fulfilled.
Cue that Eminem song
Lots of big news in Detroit on Tuesday. Chrysler repaid its $7.6 billion in loans from Canada ($1.7 billion) and the United States ($5.9 billion) more than six years earlier than it had to.
Even bigger news was that Rep. Thaddeus McCotter
of Livonia, a Detroit suburb, said he is “seriously eyeing a run for president,” according to the Detroit News, and will decide in the next two weeks whether to join the Republican field.
“The presumed front-runner of the group is former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney
, a Michigan native,” the News said.
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