By Caroline Glick, Jpost—
Over the past week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has changed his mind countless times regarding how and when he will implement Israel’s sovereignty plan in Judea and Samaria in consonance with President Donald Trump’s vision for peace. Netanyahu’s vacillations are clearly a product of the immense pressure being exerted on him to cancel the plan to apply Israeli law to the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria and to the Jordan Valley and turn his back on President Trump’s Middle East peace plan.
This is a shame. It is also absurd. When we consider the source of much of the pressure – and the reasons it is being exerted – it becomes glaringly clear that the critics and opponents must be ignored. Their actions are not being taken out of conviction so much as hostility or distress. Israel must cast aside their hectoring and pressure and implement the sovereignty plan with all due haste.
Consider one of the most talked-about recent efforts to pressure the Israeli public and Netanyahu to set aside the sovereignty plan and spurn Trump.
Last Friday, United Arab Emirates Ambassador in Washington Yousef al-Otaiba published an article in Yedioth Ahronoth. Otaiba threatened that if Israel implements its sovereignty plan in Judea and Samaria, the prospect of normalized ties with the Sunni Arab states in the Persian Gulf will fly by the wayside.
The media played up the author. But it quickly became clear that the idea of publishing the article in Hebrew in an Israeli newspaper didn’t come from Otaiba. Hours after the morning papers arrived, the media reported that it was Democratic mega-donor Haim Saban’s idea to have Otaiba publish his threatening article in Yedioth Ahronoth.
On its face, Saban’s role in the Otaiba opinion piece seems strange. The former Israeli billionaire is well-known for his support for Israel. He is a major donor to Friends of the IDF and to AIPAC. In an interview with Israel’s Channel 10 in 2010, Saban harshly attacked the Obama administration for its hostility towards Israel. Back then he said of Barack Obama and his team, “They are really left leftists, so far to the left there’s not much space left between them and the wall.”
At the time he made those remarks, Saban believed in cooperating with Republicans to advance the common goals of defending Israel and fighting anti-Semitism in the US and throughout the world. He spoke to Channel 10 at a conference of the Israeli Leadership Council in Los Angeles. The ILC, which later changed its name to the Israeli American Council was founded to provide an organizational home for the Israeli émigré community in the US It was a joint initiative by Saban and Republican megadonor (and owner of Israel Hayom) Sheldon Adelson.
In July 2015, the two men extended their cooperation to fighting the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Jewish students on campuses. They co-founded the Maccabees on Campus group to fight BDS groups.
So what has happened to Saban? What changed and made him want to use Otaiba as a means to spook the Israeli public and pressure Netanyahu to act in a way that would harm the sovereignty plan and through it, undermine Trump’s peace plan?
Apparently, the answer is found in the leftward lurch of his party. By 2015, Obama’s “left leftism” had become the mainstream position of the party. Today many Democratic activists revile Obama for what they view as his “conservative” positions. Continue Reading….
