Israel not target of Obama’s UN ire, Trump is

“Of course (Netanyahu) is angry about the UN Resolution,” writes Katz in his blog, but “so are all people who love Israel”. The Obama administration may well have drafted and promoted the Resolution on Israel, as Netanyahu claims, “but not because Obama, America or the present administration are anti-Israel”.

Katz says: “There is only one logical purpose in what is being viewed as a sea of anti-Israel madness in the White House and State Department… and that is that they fear Donald Trump and his incoming administration and State Department may tip the very delicate scale of seemingly pragmatic even-handedness that exists between the US and the Arab world.”

In a blog posted last week, titled: US unlikely to open Embassy in Jerusalem, says Katz, “I wrote why I did not think the US’s embassy would move to Jerusalem – as much, I added, that I would sincerely like to see the move.” 

That issue has been on the table since it was “unequivocally decided by US lawmakers in 1995” to move the embassy and “acknowledge Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel”, he writes today. Congress sent to then-President Bill Clinton a note to action the move. Neither Clinton, nor the successive eight-year-long governments of “George Bush (the Younger);” nor that of Barack Obama, “had made any moves in that direction,” writes Katz.

Trump and his team are taking no advice on this issue from State or the White House. So scared is the Obama administration of Trump’s rhetoric (the dangers it could impose on the ground), that it has seen fit to send him a stern warning of just how seriously they believe he could be blundering into this eons-old balancing act without understanding the consequences.

Trump, therefore, was the target of the US administration’s actions, he writes. Israel was simply the instrument they chose to get the message across to him.