Reading Obama in Jerusalem

US President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy comes under scrutiny in the Israeli press after the publication of Jeffrey Goldberg’s exhaustive interviews with the president and some of his top advisors. The Atlantic Magazine article gets particular attention in the Hebrew media on Friday because of its discussion of Obama’s relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yedioth Ahronoth spares no expense. Goldberg’s line that Obama believes Netanyahu is “too fearful and politically paralyzed” to make the two-state solution a reality is splattered across the front page — with no context — in an obvious swipe at the prime minister. The paper’s reportage on the Atlantic article, however, is more level-headed, giving a fairly straightforward rendition of its contents.

Israel Hayom’s Boaz Bismuth jabs once again at the White House in his reporting on Atlantic Magazine’s “Obama doctrine” article and in a follow-up oped he writes in the paper on Friday. One of Bismuth’s key takeaways from Goldberg’s piece appears to aim to reassure Israelis that their perception that Obama doesn’t care about Israel is correct.

“Obama has come to a number of dovetailing conclusions about the world, and about America’s role in it. The first is that the Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests,” Goldberg wrote, and Bismuth cherry picks. Netanyahu’s 2011 meeting with Obama in which he “launched into something of a lecture” also gets particular mention, but is phrased more sympathetically to Netanyahu than Goldberg’s original.

Israel Hayom notably leaves out Goldberg’s remark about Netanyahu being “fearful and politically paralyzed” in a move that a US official previously quoted in a Goldberg article might call “chickenshit.” In the space it could have given to that significant snippet, the paper instead reports that former prime minister Ehud Barak now has a beard.

In his op-ed, Bismuth kicks it up a notch. “He doesn’t want an isolated America, but he also doesn’t want a suicidal America,” he says of Obama. “But his policy harmed the position of the US as a superpower. [Even so,] American power was built up over generations, so one president, in two terms, can’t ruin the glorious inheritance he received from his predecessors.

“History could remember August 30, 2013 as they day on which Obama prevented the United States from intervening in a deadly Muslim civil war, and also as the day in which the threat of chemical weapons against Israel, Turkey and Iran was lifted,” he says, referring to America’s agreement to remove Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal from the war-wracked country. “Or the same day could be remembered as the day he allowed the Middle East to slip into the hands of Russia, Iran and the Islamic State.”

Guess which Bismuth believes it is.

If Israel Hayom’s interpretation of the article is that Obama doesn’t care about the Middle East and has left it to tear itself apart, Haaretz’s is that Goldberg confirms that Obama is just as frustrated with Netanyahu as Haaretz itself has been. The paper highlights how Obama lashed out at Netanyahu in the above-mentioned meeting in 2011, and how Obama stood by providing Israel with military aid.

But Haaretz doesn’t devote front-page space to the story, instead looking at a potential future president of the United States. In a rambling oped/nightmare, Chemi Shalev envisions an anti-Semitic, xenophobic, dictatorial Donald Trump’s rise to power in the coming eight months under the GOP frontrunner’s fictional new campaign slogan, “Making the Real America Really Great Again.”

In his dystopia, violent anti-Semitism triggered and promoted by Trump’s ascendancy to power (through overwhelming support from whites in red states) precipitates mass exodus of American Jews to Israel, which has the unintended consequence of pumping liberal blood into the Jewish state’s political system and toppling Likud power in the next election.

Besides the White House, a well-regarded IDF general’s fall from grace amid sexual assault allegations continues to make front page news. IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot’s decision to turn down embattled Brig. Gen. Ofek Buchris for a top post, and to add injury to insult by extending his suspension by another month in the face of criminal investigations into allegations of rape and misconduct, are the latest wrinkles in a story that still stuns the nation’s newsrooms.

Despite the prominence given to the story in Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth, both of which feature it on Page 2, they are careful to note that a senior IDF officer insists the decision to turn Buchris down for the position of the chief of the army’s Operations Division was unrelated to the allegations against him.

Yedioth Ahronoth, however, reports that while sources close to Buchris say the decision has to do with the expectation that the investigation will take some time and the important position needs to be filled, “it’s reasonable to assume that the findings that arose in the investigation thus far had considerable weight in the chief of staff’s announcement.”

Haaretz downplays the story, shunting it to Page 7, and instead runs an exclusive on how a right-wing settler group has filed a battery of lawsuits in a bid to kick Palestinians out of their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan in recent months. The paper reports that the cost of state-funded security for families living in the tiny settler enclave in East Jerusalem, down the slope from the Old City, costs around a million shekels ($258,000) per year.