Republican presidential candidates blasted President Obama on Tuesday for undermining Israeli security and set him up to take the blame if the United Nations votes this week to establish an independent Palestinian state.
In a direct appeal to Jewish-American voters, candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Perry challenged Obama to revoke U.S. aid to the U.N. and to the Palestinians if the Palestinian Authority successfully gains sovereignty by sidestepping direct negotiations with Israel.
“What we are watching unfold at the United Nations is an unmitigated diplomatic disaster,” said Romney, a former Massachusetts governor. “It is the culmination of President Obama’s repeated efforts over three years to throw Israel under the bus and undermine its negotiating position. That policy must stop now.”
Like Perry and Romney, Obama opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state without Israel’s consent. But his critics doubt his allegiance to Israeli interests.
Standing alongside a handful of Jewish leaders not far from the U.N. conference in New York on Tuesday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry sharply criticized Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East as “naive, arrogant, misguided and dangerous.”
Perry accused Obama of emboldening the Palestinian Authority to “shun” direct talks with Israel in May when Obama called on Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders as a prelude to restarting peace talks.
Perry also chastised Obama’s handling of the Arab Spring, when anti-government movements swept the Middle East and North Africa, saying the president was “complacent in encouraging revolt against hostile governments in Iran and Syria” and slow to recognize the risks posed by new regimes in the Middle East.
Obama’s “muddled” foreign policy has “destabilized the Middle East,” he said.
The president has been called on repeatedly to defend his policy toward the Arab Spring, which varies in each affected nation.
He will get another chance to justify that approach and to reaffirm his commitment to Israel in a major speech before the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday.
The speech will also be an opportunity for Obama to reconnect with Jewish voters after Democrats lost a New York congressional seat they had held for decades, in part because Jewish voters turned against the Democratic candidate to send a message to Obama.
Republican Bob Turner won that special election to replace former Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat.
“Jews don’t just vote [only] upon the issues relating to Israel, but certainly, if Jewish voters were held to the Israel issue as one of their chief filters by which they vote, they are going to vote against Obama,” said Michael Rubin, former editor of the Middle East Quarterly.
If the U.N. agrees to recognize the state of Palestine, Obama will “pay a price” at the polls, even though the president has only one vote in the 193-member organization, Rubin said.
“This may not have been Obama’s idea [to establish Palestinian statehood through the U.N.],” Rubin said, “but certainly he owns this and he’ll ultimately pay a price.”
