Obama Pwns Netanyahu

The president’s revenge the following evening was perhaps rendered with the swagger of a man who had a few hours before enacted a reform that eluded all his Democratic predecessors. Then again, maybe not. “I think it’s safe to say that Obama really, really dislikes Netanyahu,” says an unpaid White House foreign policy adviser. In a calculated snub, the Israeli prime minister was ushered into the White House for a meeting with no photographers to record it. After 90 minutes of unfriendly discussion, he was left to stew in the Roosevelt room with his advisers while Mr Obama went and ate supper alone (his family was in New York). They then resumed their meeting.

It may sound trivial. But by the standards of diplomacy, particularly those of US-Israeli diplomacy, Mr Obama’s behaviour was rude. It was read as such in Israel – with quite a lot of Israelis approving, according to the country’s media.

It has become obvious that Obama would much rather be dealing with Tzipi Livni or Ehud Barak. The White House has finally decided that Likud, Netanyahu and his fanatical and racist coalition partners are part of the problem, not the solution.

It will be interesting to watch the schizophrenic incoherence this will doubtless cause in Harper's government here in Canada; on the one hand the Tories have been working over-time to define pro-Israel to mean pro-Likud, and anything less as antisemitism. On the other hand, the central unifying theme of the geopolitical thinking of the Canadian Conservative Party is 'Give the Americans anything they want.'

Their triangulation just developed a decided tilt.