WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Obama is scheduled to step down on January 20 and hand over the Oval Office to President-elect Donald Trump, against whom he energetically campaigned in vain during the 2016 election campaign. Trump has pledged to reverse many of Obama’s signature policies, including the ones on the Middle East.
Obama’s decision not to veto on Friday the latest UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s settlement building in the West Bank is consistent with US bipartisan policy on the peace process for decades. But it marks a dramatic abandonment of Obama’s own diplomatic behavior.
The outgoing president had previously steadfastly supported Israel both militarily and diplomatically. He approved a ten-year $38 billion military aid agreement earlier this year, which is by far the largest ever concluded between the two countries.
He retained his consistent support for Israel even in the face of personal actions of disrespect from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In 2012, Netanyahu took the unprecedented step for any Israeli prime minister of calling on American Jews to support a specific candidate in the US presidential election. In an act of remarkable disrespect to Obama, he called on Jewish Americans to support Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
Embarrassingly for Netanyahu, most American Jews did not heed his call and voted for Obama, the incumbent president who won easily by a margin of five million votes.
In a conference call with reporters on Friday after the US abstention allowed the UN Security Council condemnation to be passed, senior National Security Council official Ben Rhodes explained that the decision to abstain is the culmination of years of US frustration over Israeli settlement building.
"Netanyahu had the opportunity to pursue policies that would have led to a different outcome than we saw today," Rhodes stated. "This is not our preferred course of actions… If this was an outcome that we sought, we would have done this years ago."
Rhodes explained that frustration at continued Israeli settlement-building had led the Obama administration to conclude that Israel was not serious about wanting a two-state solution to its conflict with the Palestinians.
"We hear the words about a two- state solution then we see the actions… that make a two-state solution out of reach," Rhodes said. "We could not in good conscience veto a resolution that expressed concerns about the very trends that are eroding the foundation for a two-state solution."
US UNDERSTOOD THAT SETTLEMENTS DOOMED PEACE PLAN
Rhodes said Obama policymakers had been worried about those trends for years, though they never took any tough diplomatic actions to upset the Israelis before.
"We made this decision on the basis of the trend lines on the ground… We have been warning for years that the trend line of settlement activity was increasing Israel's isolation… We have tried a different approach for years here… We have seen an acceleration of settlement activity," he said.
Yet, Rhodes also made the remarkable admission that he knew US diplomacy over eight years and two successive secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton and john Kerry, had failed to make any headway whatsoever toward any Israeli Palestinian peace agreement.
Obama’s refusal to weld the US veto to protect Israel yet again is unlikely, however, to lead to any real change in US policy.
Within an hour of the abstention, President-elect Trump had already condemned it and vowed to reverse the policy and support Israel strongly after taking office on January 20.
Obama also delayed refusing to weld the veto until the very end of his administration when it was too late to apply the policy to significantly change or deter the Israeli government’s policy of continued and even accelerating nation building.
KERRY STILL HOPES TO INFLUENCE MID-EAST PEACE PROCESS
Rhodes indicated that the Obama administration had not quite given up its hopes of influencing the long moribund Israel-Palestinian peace process.
"Kerry will be providing a comprehensive vision," Rhodes said.
Obama never warned Trump in advance that he was going to refuse to veto a motion condemning Israeli settlement building on the West Bank, Rhodes admitted.
"I am not aware that [President] Obama and the president-elect spoke about this. I am not aware of any conversation we had about this," he said.
Trump had previously urged Obama to veto the resolution and responding to the president’s action by tweeting on Friday that after he took office he would act to reverse Obama’s policies on the UN Security Council vote.
OBAMA, TRUMP FAIL TO MAINTAIN COURTESIES
Not since Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter in January 1981 has the dislocation between outgoing and incoming US administrations been so stark.
The US abstention also provoked angry accusations from Israel that Obama had deliberately choreographed the drafting of the UN resolution before refusing to veto it.
Rhodes denied these allegations.
"The notion that we were involved in drafting this is just not true," Rhodes said. "We did not indicate to any un member how we would vote on the resolution."
Rhodes noted US diplomats at the United Nations did not know what the Egyptian-drafted resolution contained until it was presented publicly. He also said that only after the resolution had been made public and been studied by US officials was the decision taken not to veto it.
