For the past eight years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has metaphorically spat directly into the face of US President Barack Obama. Not only has the Israeli leader tried to undermine Obama's foreign policy agenda, he has also scuttled US-led efforts to re-energise the Israel-Palestine peace process. During the 2012 US elections, Netanyahu broke the longstanding tradition that holds that allied states should not interfere in the democratic processes of an ally when he openly supported the candidacy of Obama's opponent Mitt Romney. During Obama's eight years in office, Israel has ignored US pleas to halt settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and ignored pleas for restraint when Israel slaughtered 1,600 civilians over the course of 51 bloody days in 2014. Time and time again, Netanyahu has taken every opportunity to not only defy Obama, but also to humiliate the US president. No one example is more defining than the 2010 visit to Israel by US Vice-President Joe Biden, during which Israel announced its intention to construct 1,600 new housing units for Israeli Jews in occupied East Jerusalem. Israel did not even have the good grace to hold off this international law-violating announcement until Biden's plane had lifted off. If Israel had been any other country, or if Israel had been aligned with, say, Russia's strategic sphere of influence, it would have been safe to assume that at the very least the US would have long ago imposed economic sanctions on the country. At most, the US might have already bombed selected high-value Israeli military installations. But this is Israel – America's most important strategic ally in the Middle East, despite no US official having ever offered a good reason for why the alliance is strategically important for the US. In fact, prominent international relations scholars have argued the very opposite. So no sanctions and no bombing and not even a disciplinary smack across the backside for good measure. It appears that US punitive measures are reserved only for other states and those that have too many Muslims. Instead, and despite its blatant refusal to abide by US demands and the demands of the international community, Israel has now been rewarded with a record $38 billion pledge in military aid courtesy of Barack Obama. Peter Beinhart, a Jewish-American journalist writing for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, makes the following trenchant observations. Country A believes that its ally, Country B, is pursuing policies that endanger both nations, he says. Country A repeatedly asks Country B to change course. Country B refuses. Meanwhile, Country B asks Country A to send it a vast supply of weapons. Country A agrees. Then, after the agreement is signed, Country A asks Country B to change course again, this time in a particularly dramatic and high-profile way. Ask any diplomat to analyse this scenario and he will likely tell you that Country A's behaviour is absurd. Why give Country B what it wants unconditionally, thus forfeiting any leverage? Why ask for something after throwing away the bargaining chips that give a chance of actually getting it? But as Beinhart rightly remarks the absurd is normal when it comes to the manner in which the United States manages its relationship with its client state of Israel. While absurdity best defines the nearly seven-decades-long US-Israel alliance, Obama's inauguration as president in 2009 promised to herald a new dawn. Given the Muslim faith of Obama's father and the fact that a portion of Obama's childhood was spent in Indonesia, the Palestinians and many in the broader Middle East were hopeful that an Obama presidency would reverse many of the policy positions favoured by his predecessor George W Bush. Such hopes were raised further when it was reported that Obama had agreed with his military joint chiefs' assessment of the Middle East to the effect that grievances against the US in the region were fuelled by the United States' biased and uncritical support of Israeli policies. As such, resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became one of the Obama administration's highest priorities. Obama's prioritisation of the conflict was reflected in his speech delivered at Cairo University in June 2009 when he promised “a new beginning" to US policies in the region. But illegal Israeli settlement construction not only continued, but also expanded, during the eight years of Obama's presidency. A report compiled by the anti-settlement group Peace Now shows that Israeli government-issued bids grew “steadily” since 2009 to reach nearly 4,500 units in 2015. More significantly, at least from a peace process perspective, there was a 40 per cent increase in construction during 2014, with more than two-thirds of new construction taking place in settlements “east of the outline proposed by the Geneva Initiative, the areas most challenging for the two-state solution” to the conflict, according to Peace Now. For a US president who promised the Israeli-Palestinian peace process so much, Obama has achieved very little. In fact, as observed by International Crisis Group analyst Nathan Thrall, Obama, unlike his recent predecessors, will leave office without a “single achievement to his name” in this regard. Given Obama's willingness to give Israel greater tools to further deepen and enforce its occupation of Palestinian land and his authorisation of Israel's request for access to a $1 billion stockpile of weapons during its 2014 siege of Gaza, one might argue that his legacy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will read like this: He was complicit with Israel's international law and human rights violations, including the killing of Palestinian children. Obama now has fewer than five more months in office to change this historical judgement. Let's hope he's listening. The writer is a US commentator and the author of Crucifying America.
