Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

Is Barack Obama Anti-Israel?

The meaning of being anti-Israel in the context of the Obama administration’s Middle East policies.

November 6, 2014 at 11:15 PM UTC

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

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What does it mean to be anti-Israel? This is a question that arises in Washington. Republicans have argued for years that President Barack Obama is anti-Israel, and -- just a wild guess here -- we will hear this charge even more frequently as 2016 approaches.

A perennial goal of Republicans is to separate American Jews from the Democratic Party. I have no doubt that if Hillary Clinton runs, Republican strategists will argue that she a) carried water for the notoriously anti-Israel Obama and b) never really liked Israel anyway (expect the imminent resurrection of the once-famous photo of Clinton kissing Yasser Arafat’s wife).