Fresh off of his convincing electoral victory last November, Barack Obama is managing to hold his own against the Republican Party in Congress in a series of government-funding-crisis confrontations. He still gets pretty good mileage from campaign-like trips out to the boondocks beyond D.C. to gather political support, buoyed by his strong poll-numbers.

But that’s within the US borders. In the Middle East, on the other hand, he’s not so popular, as the Süddeutsche Zeitung reminds us:

Im Nahen Osten ist @BarackObama unbeliebt. Trotzdem steht er jetzt in der Pflicht, einen Kompromiss auszuhandeln. http://t.co/rHg20G086l

March 20, 2013 8:40 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@SZ

Süddeutsche Zeitung

Yet that is where the President is currently off to, namely to Israel, where, as the journalist Peter Münch puts it

In the West Bank they have abused his pictures with shoes and set them on fire, in Israel a survey has shown that only 1 out of ten likes him.

Wait, doesn’t anyone remember Obama’s epic 2009 Cairo speech, reaching out to Iran and to the Arab world? Yet now he is disliked from all sides! Why is that?

Obama’s first foray into the Near East peace process failed because it was well-meant but not well-made. In the manner of an itinerant preacher he made loud promises that he could not keep, and added to them mild threats that he withdrew at the slightest resistance. This lack of consistency has exacted a bitter revenge: the region drifts towards new conflicts and the USA has lost influence there.

Yes, and there was the minor additional thing that Binyamin Netanyahu openly campaigned last year for Obama’s Republican challenger, Mitt Romney! (more…)

For all of the 60+ years since 1945, diplomatic relations between Germany and the State of Israel have been very ticklish, and they will no doubt continue to be that way for at least another 60 years – and if you don’t immediately realize why, then you are simply unaware of some rather basic history, involving figures like “6 million.” (OK, actually up until 1990 it was West German – Israeli relations that were ticklish, not East German, because the latter Soviet client-state had no patience with any concept of guilt from the Nazi-times, preferring to view itself as a victim of the fascists, and never established diplomatic relations with the Jewish State.)

That hardly means that German government officials are not welcome to conduct official visits to Israel, of course, and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier did that earlier this week on Monday. Because Steinmeier is at the same time SPD candidate for Chancellor in the upcoming September elections, this was probably the last time he is to visit Israel (and Syria, and Lebanon) in that capacity. Still, in retrospect, the timing for the visit seems most unfortunate: on the one hand the topics for discussion could not help but include Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank, which the US and Europe want Israel to put a much-tighter leash on (and that for starters), while on the other Netanyahu has lately been acting like the pressure is really getting to be too much for him – for example, as recounted in a report picked up on Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish, calling both Rahm Emanuel (President Obama’s chief-of-staff) and David Axelrod (his senior political adviser) “self-hating Jews.”

Sure enough, as we learn in an account in Der Spiegel by Yassin Musharbash (How Netanyahu startled Steinmeyer with a Nazi concept), the explosion duly arrived. (more…)

For all the anticipation over the first official meeting, coming up on Monday, between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, there’s another very important event for the MidEast peace process starting today, in Cairo, that seems to be under the radar of most of the press. But not that of the German business newspaper Handelsblatt; it has put out a commentary (Why the Palestinians cannot unite), by one Abdel Mottaleb El Husseini, a free-lance journalist, on the conclave scheduled in Egypt between representatives of the two main organizations claiming to represent Palestinian interests, namely Fatah (of the West Bank, headquartered in Ramallah) and Hamas (of Gaza). (more…)

I wanted to pass along this remarkable photo that I spotted from an on-line article in the Dutch daily Trouw which merely reports that the Israelis are now having national elections, what the weather is like there for them, etc. The scene is apparently in Israel, which of course makes sense for the display of election-billboards for both Kadima candidate (and current Israeli foreign minister, and woman) Tzipi Livni and Likud candidate Binyamin Netanyahu. Furthermore, it’s evident that Netanyahu’s billboard is in Hebrew, which also places the scene somewhere in Israel.

On the other hand, for some reason Livni’s billboard is in French, and reads Tzipi Livni: L’homme de la situation, which means “Tzipi Livni: The man of the situation”! Remarkable, even if the expression is the equivalent to the English “The man for the hour.”