Obama says US must criticize Israel if it is to defend it

President Barack Obama says that his overt criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the immediate wake of March’s elections in Israel lends him credibility when he defends the Jewish state in international forums.

Obama, in a wide-ranging interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, says that his criticism of Netanyahu, who on election day had warned in a frantic video that Israel’s Arab citizens were streaming to the polls “in droves,” relates to the very “nature of the friendship between the United States and Israel.”

That criticism, which rattled the already fraught relationship between the two governments, was due to Netanyahu straying from “the very language of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which explicitly states that all people regardless of race or religion are full participants in the democracy,” says Obama, who also took Netanyahu to task for asserting in the run-up to the election that there would be no Palestinian state on his watch.

Both statements by the prime minister appeared geared to rally right-wing voters, although the comment about Arab voters was also widely criticized as racist.

“When something like that happens, that has foreign-policy consequences, and precisely because we’re so close to Israel, for us to simply stand there and say nothing would have meant that this office, the Oval Office, lost credibility when it came to speaking out on these issues,” Obama continues.

“And when I am then required to come to Israel’s defense internationally, when there is anti-Semitism out there, when there is anti-Israeli policy that is based not on the particulars of the Palestinian cause but [is] based simply on hostility, I have to make sure that I am entirely credible in speaking out against those things, and that requires me then to also be honest with friends about how I view these issues.”