Obama first sought to evade the question about Israel by redirecting the focus onto the United States' commitment to reduce its own nuclear stockpile. He then tried to demur on the Israeli issue.
"As far as Israel goes, I'm not going to comment on their program," Obama said, before adding: "What I'm going to point to is the fact that consistently we have urged all countries to become members of the NPT," the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which Israel has refused to sign.
(Interestingly, although it was a Post reporter who asked the question about Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal, the increasingly neoconservative newspaper failed to mention anything about Israel in its two articles on Wednesday about the nuclear summit.)
A Drift to the Right
Netanyahu may have reason to hope that the pro-Israel bent of major U.S. news organizations, also including the New York Times and CNN, will continue to give his Likud government cover to stall on peace talks and to keep hiding its nuclear arsenal.
Yet, reality may be asserting itself. Israel's steady drift to the Right, as ultra-Orthodox political parties have come to control key government ministries, has alienated more and more former supporters, including many American Jews who are alarmed by policies that many believe have crossed the line into racism and bigotry.
For instance, an under-reported element of last month's flare-up between the Obama administration and Netanyahu's government over the announcement of 1,600 more Jewish housing units in East Jerusalem was that the Housing Ministry is now in the hands of Ariel Atias, an ultra-Orthodox religious fanatic.
Atias, a rising star in the religious Shas Party, has publicly called for imposing legal and physical constraints on the housing choices of Israel's Arab population. But his demands for segregation do not stop at Arabs. He also targets secular Jews who don't follow strict religious rules.
Last July, Atias told a conference of the Israel Bar Association that Israel's Arab population must be prevented from buying homes in many parts of Israel.
"I see [it] as a national duty to prevent the spread of a population that, to say the least, does not love the state of Israel," Atias declared, also speaking favorably about relying on aggressive ultra-Orthodox Jews, known as Haredis, to keep the Arabs in line.
In Atias's vision for Israel, certain lands would be sold to Arabs, others to ultra-Orthodox Jews, and still others to secular Jews, creating a nation segregated along inter- and intra-religious lines.
"I, as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, don't think that religious Jews should have to live in the same neighborhood as secular couples, so as to avoid unnecessary friction," Atias explained. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Israel's Troubling Tilt Toward Apartheid."]
This growing religious intolerance inside Israel gets little attention from the U.S. news media, which continues to follow the old template of Israel as an embattled democratic ally surrounded by violent Islamic extremists. Much of the criticism of Israel is simply dismissed as anti-Semitism.
If this old media template holds and if Obama doesn't back down he may face the kind of political destruction that Jimmy Carter encountered in 1980 when an earlier Likud government concluded that a second Carter term would have meant unacceptable pressure on Israel to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians.
So, behind the scenes, Likud leaders threw their support to Republican candidate Ronald Reagan, whose administration later rewarded Israel by letting up on the peace pressure, green-lighting an invasion of Lebanon, and collaborating with Israel on secret intelligence operations, such as the Iran-Contra weapons shipments.
Later in the 1980s, as Israel faced public-relations damage from exposure of these operations, it relied on influential U.S. neoconservative media outlets to cover its flanks, from The New Republic to the Wall Street Journal's editorial page to the Washington Post op-ed section. [For more on this history, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
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