Obama wants Israel to stop fighting now. He wants Israel to leave the undemolished tunnels in place, to leave the unfired missiles and missile launchers in place, and leave Gaza. In other words, he wants Israel to leave itself vulnerable to the next attack by Hamas, or the U.S. will make life difficult for Israel. Excerpt: Barack Obama may have stopped short of reading the riot act to Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, but the White House version of the two leaders’ phone conversation left no room for doubt: The U.S. President was ratcheting up the rhetoric and the pressure on Israel to end the fighting in Gaza, and to end it now. Both the tone and the content of the official readout of the phone call conveyed a sense of assertiveness and urgency that was significantly blunter than the language used by Obama since the start of the Gaza campaign. The immediate assumption was that the White House was venting its anger at the full frontal assault on Secretary of State John Kerry that was launched after the Israeli cabinet’s rejection of his cease-fire proposals on Friday and reached fever pitch in Sunday’s Israeli media reports. A second explanation, alternative or supplementary, was that Obama was expressing his own sense of anguish and distress with the scenes of death and destruction in Gaza that were exposed for the world to see during Friday’s 12-hour cease-fire.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 22:10:55 +0000
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