Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide

And like the Holocaust before it, Tikkun Olam tended to sideline Israel as the focal point of American Jewish purpose. How can we donate to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, liberal Jews increasingly asked, when children went hungry in Honduras?

Part of the problem while possessing chemical arms, by removing them Assad became key to the solution. Henceforth, he would enjoy utter immunity while butchering his own people with barrel bombs and other conventional ordnance. The phrase “Assad must go” vanished from Obama’s vocabulary.

America’s new policies set conditions for talks that Israel could never meet and that Palestinians could not ignore.

The UNHRC never condemned even one of the thousands of Hamas rocket strikes on Israel, but rather blamed Israel for provoking those attacks and for perpetrating war crimes.

Syria soon escalated into a civil war between an Alawite-led, Iranian-backed regime and its mostly Sunni, Saudi-supported opponents.

More than half a million Jews now lived beyond what was commonly called the 1967 borders, but which were in fact the armistice lines delineated in 1949 after Israel’s War of Independence.

The entire Middle East, and especially the Iranians, now knew that America would dither before enforcing an ultimatum.

No amount of spin can separate the public’s prurient fascination with Israel from the media’s hunger for ratings.

In spite of his declared sympathies for the downtrodden, Obama became the first president in twenty years to refuse to receive the Dalai Lama for fear of alienating China.