Mr. President, and what if the Israelis are right?

Should U.S. President Barack Obama allow the U.N. Security Council to adopt a resolution against the settlements, he would effectively ratify the unfortunate U.N. resolution falsely equating Zionism with racism. The Jewish people have a long memory, they will not forget this.

Despite their cordial meeting last month, U.S. President and the Israeli Prime Minister are once again at loggerheads. Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to mitigate the consequences of a draconian court ruling ordering the uprooting of hundreds of people from their homes in Amona, a 21-year-old outpost. Obama is practically apoplectic over the thought that Netanyahu plans to build new homes for the evacuees in an area that is the focus of a bitter diplomatic dispute, near the biblical site of Shilo .


The Jewish settlement enterprise on biblical land has always been intolerable as far as Obama is concerned. Much like during his first meeting with Netanyahu eight years ago, the President still expects Israel to refrain from placing "not even one brick" in Jerusalem or Judea and Samaria. Now, free of political pressure as the end of his presidency draws near, the American President is mulling over the possibility of abandoning Israel to a harsh Security Council resolution.


In 2011, when the Palestinians promoted a U.N. resolution seeking to denounce settlements and undermine their legal status, Obama imposed the one and only veto of his presidency. This coming fall, as he readies to depart from the White House, the Palestinians and their supporters are gearing to present a similar draft resolution. As far as we know, Obama is still deliberating between the Israeli expectation of a U.S. veto and his own position on the matter; between the professed policy of the Israeli government, the representative body of the Jewish people in 2016, and the advice of the majority of Jewish Americans he knows and that of the New York Times.


Ahead of this fateful decision, Obama and his advisers would be wise to reflect on the history of Israel-U.S. relations and remember the historic mistakes their predecessors made with regard to Israel. Here is a brief reminder

1. The significant opposition by the U.S. State Department and the New York Times to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Today, in hindsight, Washington is proud of the fact that then-President Harry Truman ignored this opposition, and was the first to recognize the sovereign State of Israel.

 2. The weapons embargo the U.S. imposed on Israel following the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

3. The delay by President Richard Nixon and his (Jewish) Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in supplying Israel with munitions during the most difficult days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

4. The harsh American condemnation of the 1981 bombing of the nuclear reactor in Iraq during Prime Minister Menachem Begin's government.

5 .The Obama administration's wrong assessment of the Arab Spring.
In those cases, and in others not listed here, Jews in Israel had a clear view of reality, while their brethren overseas did not, dragging the U.S. administration down into an abyss of errors.

As a historical lesson, it would be wise by Mr. Obama to consider that there is solid logic behind the Israeli leadership's position on the settlement issue, arguing the settlements are a security necessity, consistent with historical justice.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman have convinced Israeli voters that it would not be peace that fills the void an Israel withdrawal would create, but Hamas and Islamic State militias – a development that would pose as much a threat to the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria as it would to Jews in Israel.

Above all, the American President has to understand that pushing for a U.N. resolution against Jewish communities in the heart of the historic land of Israel means denying the moral right of Jews to settle anywhere between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean – not just in the "West Bank". After all, Israel is the same country on both sides of the Green Line, and that right applies equally to both. This is why there is essentially no difference between the Security Council resolution denouncing the settlements and the shameful 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism.

The man who is referred as "the most Jewish president the United States has ever had" knows the Jewish people have a long memory. To this day, these people remember the Pharaoh who enslaved them, and Cyrus, who liberated them. This nation will remember Obama. How it remembers him is now entirely up to the American President himself.

read this column in hebrew

The column was published in "Makor Rishon" newspaper

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