Neocon Group: Obama ‘Not Pro-Israel’; Netanyahu Demurs

The right-wing pro-Israel lobby group the Emergency Committee for Israel launched an ad campaign attacking President Barack Obama for his record on Israel. The ads, featured on billboards, public transport and with a web ad on the New York Times website, go after Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides, accusing him of, as the campaign’s tagline goes, being “Not Pro-Israel.” In a television spot, ECI — led by Bill Kristol, Gary Bauer and Rachel Abrams (with Noah Pollak as a mere figurehead) — shows a few clips of hardline pro-Israel hawks from both parties decrying Obama’s Israel policies, whereupon the narrator says:

Democrats. Republicans. It seems everyone agrees President Obama is not pro-Israel.

As it turns out, not everyone agrees that Obama is anti-Israel. Perhaps Netanyahu had in mind the international diplomatic cover the U.S. gives — and has pledged to continue giving — to Israel. Or perhaps it is Obama’s work within U.S. policy and international diplomacy to slow Iran’s nuclear program — a top priority for Netanyahu’s government. Maybe it was Obama’s close cooperation with Israel to reportedly develop and deploy the Stuxnet computer virus against Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, a broader part of the program that prompted Netanyahu himself to comment this May at the AIPAC summit that “our security cooperation is unprecedented.”