Who were the US Presidents who were the most friendly to Israel, and who were the US Presidents that were the most unfriendly to Israel? There is no question that Harry Truman and Donald Trump seemed to be the US President’s who were the most friendly, at least via their policies. But as for the most hostile Presidents to Israel – it was either Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama. This video may just place Obama as the #1 most hostile President to the State of Israel.
Jimmy Carter was an unknown politician when he catapulted to the leadership of the Democrat Party and into the Oval Office. He certanly did not have strong foreign policy credentials. At a certain point in his struggling Presidency, he decided to make human rights across the world his signature issue. He was failing miserably with his domestic policies. Both Democrats and Republicans gave him tremendous angst via stiff opposition to his efforts to balance the budget and curb deficit spending. Truth be told, he tried very hard where very few others did, and should probably have been given more support for those efforts. But the pressure from Congress to keep up spending was too strong. So Carter looked abroad where he had more leeway to exercise policy without as much opposition from Washingon.
But Carter simply saw the entire Middle East problem from a squrely anti-Israel perspective. To the end of his life, he has always seen Israel as the aggressor and the root cause of the problems in the Middle East. He viewed Israel as the violator of human rights of Arabs with legitimate claims to a homeland of their own. No matter how much terror Israel endured, he never saw the Arabs as the aggressor. He was flat wrong on everything about Israel.
Carter pressured Begin to give up the entire Sinai in order to achieve “peace” with Egypt. Israel ended up giving in on nearly every demand from Sadat. Israel has not had a warm fuzzy relationship with Egypt since then. But at least, there have been no wars with Egypt in more than 40 years. This should not be underestimated. It was a major and historic accomplishment in the Middle East, and it was the opening to other peace treaties with other countries – Jordan, UAE, Bahrain…
But Barack Obama has done nothing that helped Israel or the Middle East. He cared less about human rights in Iran, and allowed Iran to kill and jail human rights protesters without doing anything substantive about it. He could have squeezed Iran finanically and that may have led to the toppling of the radical Islamic regime in Iran. Instead, Obama chose to put the squeeze on Israel and Netanyahu. ISIS went from a minor annoyance to a major threat to the entire Middle East under Obama’s tenure, and the Syrian Civil War festered for years. Moreover, Obama has brought anti-Israel policies to be the new norm in the Democrat Party for many young and future Congressmen and Congresswomen.
The negative effects of the Obama Presidency will be felt for many years to come in the Democrat Party.