‘Short-sighted criticism’

There was a time when U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations would aggressively defend Israel against biased resolutions seeking to condemn any number of alleged wrongs committed by the State of Israel. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Richardson, and John Bolton were some of those representatives that strongly advocated Israel’s legitimacy as a sovereign nation.

This past Friday, the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, publicly stated that, “the United States agrees with the rest of the council and the wider world about the folly and illegitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity.”

This questionable and short-sighted criticism of our ally Israel, the only true democracy in this volatile region, serves only to embolden Palestinian intransigence. The naïve posturing of the Obama administration reeks of rhetoric that Israel used to hear only from its enemies. It does call into question why this administration’s Israel policy is so different from that of prior administrations.

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