It seems that the Israeli left and center is really really pleased, even excited, but President Obama’s speech yesterday. From Haaretz:
Sometimes it takes someone from the outside, like U.S. President Barack Obama, to show up and tell it like it is to the Israelis: You’ve got a wonderful country, you’re wise and just, you suffered and you deserve a state, and as long as the United States exists you’ll never stand alone – but for God’s sake, enough! Stop the settlements, stop the occupation, stop the deportations, stop the ongoing abuse of the Palestinians, and stop the settlers’ violence. Enough.
Haaretz’s Bradley Burston :
For Barack Obama to come to Jerusalem, and speak to Israeli students and talk persuasively of the possibility of a secure and peaceful future, for him to do that and garner a roaring ovation of approval, he would have to have given one hell of a speech.
He did.
This was the speech that these young Israelis not only needed but wanted to hear. A speech that radically redefined centrism in Israel, bringing it down to extraordinary common denominators in directions Israelis have learned to think of as diametrically opposed.
He spoke of security and peace as inextricably and necessarily linked, not a narrow choice between options, but a conscious choice for both.
They roared.
Is Hillary Clinton too conservative to win the Democratic nomination? Well, her 2008 platform probably is. From Ruby Cramer at Buzzfeed:
Hillary Clinton’s reversal on same-sex marriage is a sign she is “ready to revisit a campaign platform that has been all but frozen in amber since she left the political stage for the State Department four years ago.”
“Because the former Secretary of State jumped from the campaign trail in 2008 to Washington’s Foggy Bottom, where she was barred from talking domestic politics, Clinton will have to dust off, and likely shift, her policy positions, Democratic strategists say, if she wants to run for president in 2016 in a party that has moved sharply to the left in recent years.”