Daniel Berehulak
/ Getty Images
Here's the latest dispatch from my NEWSWEEK colleague Richard Wolffe, who's reporting from Barack Obama's globetrotting roadshow:
One of the tests for Barack Obama on this week's foreign trip is how
well he navigates the crosscurrents of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. So on a day when he traveled from the Palestinian president's
office in Ramallah to the rocket-shelled Israeli town of Sderot, how
did he do?
First, the day was not gaffe-free. Answering
an Israeli reporter's question in Sderot, he was confused about which
Senate committee he served on. "Just this past week, we passed out of
the U.S. Senate Banking Committee—which is my committee—a bill to call
for divestment from Iran as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to
ensure that they don't obtain a nuclear weapon," he said. Just one
problem: he actually sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
It
wasn't Obama's only mistake of the press conference, held in front of a
pile of spent rocket shells that were launched from Gaza into Sderot.
When pressed about his pledge, in an earlier Democratic debate, to talk
directly to the leaders of rogue states without preconditions, Obama
recalled a different response. "I think that what I said in response
was that I would at my time and choosing be willing to meet with any
leader if I thought it would promote the national-security interests of
the United States of America," he explained. "And that continues to be
my position." While Obama did indeed explain his pledge in those terms,
that nuanced response came much later than the initial debate, held a
year ago.
Knowing he'd be under a microscope, Obama had
clearly prepared carefully for the trip—so why did he trip up? He gave
a clue to the Likud Party's Benjamin Netanyahu, at the start of the
day's meetings with Israeli leaders. After an intense five days of
travel to Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq and Jordan, Obama—like the rest of
his staff and press corps—is exhausted. When Netanyahu asked how he was
feeling, Obama said, "I could fall asleep standing up."
Still,
those were the only blemishes on an otherwise robust day of repeated
commitments to Israel's security and the close alliance between the
United States and Israel. In Sderot, he turned an expression of support
for the terrorized town into something more personal. "If somebody was
sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep every night,
I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that," he said. "I would
expect Israel to do the same thing."
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