In a statement of support for Israel, Florida Senator and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio was quick to place blame for the increasing number of terrorist attacks squarely on the shoulders of President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:
Indeed, the indifference that President Obama and Hillary Clinton display toward incitement and violence against Jews fits a long-running pattern of callousness and neglect toward the Jewish state. In June 2009, President Obama reportedly told American Jewish leaders that he wanted to put daylight between America and Israel. He went on to demand a full settlement freeze to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations — an extraordinary precondition that even Abbas himself never made.
The president’s demand destroyed any hope of moving forward on peace, asking too much of Israel and giving Abbas no incentive to negotiate. The Palestinians refused to enter negotiations until the last month of the freeze, but Hillary Clinton reserved her anger for a 45-minute rant aimed at Prime Minister Netanyahu. Over the next five years, this pattern persisted — administration officials largely absolved the Palestinians of responsibility for incitement and terror while threatening to reassess relations with Israel and calling the leader of a close ally a “chicken — .”
By distancing the United States from Israel, President Obama has created an atmosphere that rewards the provocative behavior of the Palestinian Authority.
Rubio ends his statement by declaring: “With the Middle East in flames, the best way to stabilize our role in the region is to restore our ties with Israel as the Israeli people once again are under attack.”
His is an interesting foreign policy theory in light of Russia’s growing involvement in the region. In an attempt to become the leading “peacemaker” in the Middle East, Putin is framing Obama’s actions as the reason for escalating destabilization in Syria. Putin is using this as an excuse to go public with his alliance with Iran and, by proxy, radical Islamist terror groups. Rubio, on the other hand, is using Obama’s failures to motivate the repairing of relations with Israel, America’s most likeminded ally in the Middle East. The question then becomes, how would a Rubio administration handle a potential conflict with an axis of powers led by Putin?
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