Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

The Democratic candidate seemed to regard the Arab-Israeli conflict as a root of Middle Eastern disputes and Arab-Israel peace as the key to regional stability.

Audiences had to be reminded of the myriad leaflets the IDF had dispersed warning Palestinian civilians to leave combat areas and about the operation’s unprecedentedly low ratio of civilian-to-combatant casualties.

The notion of “linkage”—all Middle Eastern disputes are tied to that between Israel and Palestinians—became doctrine in the Obama administration and Jones’s belief in it bordered on the religious. As he once confessed to an Israeli audience, “If God had appeared in front of the president and said he could do one thing on the planet it would be the

Most egregiously from our perspective, Goldstone’s mission equated Israel, a democratic state with an independent judiciary, and Hamas, a terrorist organization with a covenant calling for Israel’s destruction and the annihilation of every Jew worldwide.

wrote an op-ed on how the defense system not only saved lives, but prevented wars by giving Israeli leaders time to work out a cease-fire. I

The prime minister’s sticking point was, as always, security. Hezbollah smuggled missiles over the Syrian, not the Israeli, border, and rockets reached Hamas via Egypt, not Israel. Accordingly, Israeli forces would have to guard the eastern frontier of any future Palestinian state to prevent it from becoming another South Lebanon or Gaza.

More than half a million Jews now lived beyond what was commonly called the 1967 borders, but which were in fact the armistice lines delineated in 1949 after Israel’s War of Independence.

Syria soon escalated into a civil war between an Alawite-led, Iranian-backed regime and its mostly Sunni, Saudi-supported opponents.

Part of the problem while possessing chemical arms, by removing them Assad became key to the solution. Henceforth, he would enjoy utter immunity while butchering his own people with barrel bombs and other conventional ordnance. The phrase “Assad must go” vanished from Obama’s vocabulary.