Robert Gates Says Israel Is an Ungrateful Ally: Jeffrey Goldberg

[Purveyor]

It was an extraordinary scene: President Barack Obama, sitting impassively in the Oval Office in May as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lectured him, at considerable length and at times condescendingly, on Jewish history, Arab perfidy and the existential challenges facing his country.

What was extraordinary wasn’t the message -- it was not an untypical Netanyahu sermon. What was notable was that Netanyahu was lecturing the president live on television, during a photo opportunity staged so that the two leaders could issue platitudes about the enduring bonds between their nations.

That display of impudence left the president and his team feeling unusually angry. Shortly afterward, Obama’s chief of staff, William Daley, called the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Michael Oren, to communicate the displeasure of the White House in a reportedly heated way. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who watched her husband battle Netanyahu in the late 1990s, also expressed anger and frustration about the prime minister within the administration.

Nothing in Return

But it was Robert M. Gates, the now-retired secretary of defense, who seemed most upset with Netanyahu. In a meeting of the National Security Council Principals Committee held not long before his retirement this summer, Gates coldly laid out the many steps the administration has taken to guarantee Israel’s security -- access to top- quality weapons, assistance developing missile-defense systems, high-level intelligence sharing -- and then stated bluntly that the U.S. has received nothing in return, particularly with regard to the peace process.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-06/robert-gates-says-israel-is-an-ungrateful-ally-jeffrey-goldberg.html

[kenny blankenship]

1. In other news, water is wet.

What else can you expect when you treat a country like we've treated Israel for decades - everything they want we give, rarely a word of criticism uttered in public, never any consequences for their belligerent behavior, their intransigence, their slow motion genocide of Palestine.

Of course they're going to act & speak like Netanyahu. Gratitude? Gates must have forgotten who is the dog and who the tail in this relationship. Gratitude is for those whom one respects. The United States has given Israel no reason to respect it. You act like a servant long enough, you get treated like a servant.

[yurbud]

2. Israel should worry since the US has discovered the limits of force in the Middle East...

we might not be able to afford our Goodfella Joe Pesci Israel in the region when diplomacy (or at least the appearance of it) is more or less our only option.

[Lil Missy]

3. Time to cut off military aid to the ungrateful bastards. I'm tired of financing this bullshit anyway

We could make better use of the money here at home rather than paying them to stir up MORE shit.