Tom Rose Could Take on Bibi AND Imus

Tom Rose, the former publisher and CEO of the Jerusalem Post, is to the right of hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, “if that is genetically and strategically possible,” he told Imus. Now based in Indianapolis and hosting some talk radio shows, Rose commented on the recent unpleasantness between President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Bibi.

During Biden’s trip to Israel last week, a low-level bureaucrat made the untimely announcement that Israel had approved the fourth of a seven-step process to expand the controversial neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo in Northern Jerusalem.

“If low-level administrative government incompetence were an Olympic sport, Israel would certainly challenge the U.S. for the gold medal ever four years,” said Rose, calling the ill-timed revelation not an affront to Biden, but  “a far Right-wing attempt to embarrass Netanyahu.”

The most disturbing part of the incident has been the aftermath, in which Netanyahu apologized publicly and personally to Biden, but Obama decided to “escalate a diplomatic inconvenience, an insult, into a huge crisis on confidence between two strategic allies,” Rose said.

No Israeli Prime Minister of any political persuasion has ever been asked, as Netanyahu has now been, to freeze housing construction in Jerusalem. And any scuttle in direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians had more to do with Obama’s policy shift than with settlement building.  

“One of his first comments on foreign policy during the transition was that he was going to demand a complete and total Israeli settlement freeze as a condition for negotiations,” Rose said. “At that point the Palestinians found themselves in an impossible position: how in the world can we negotiate with Israel when the President of the United States is more extreme in his demands than we are?”

As a result, talks between Israel and the Palestinians have ceased for more than a year now. Rose’s theory on this most recent skirmish is that Obama is “a little baby” who took an insult and conflated it into a threat to American national security.

He’s not mature enough yet, Rose added, “to be able to distinguish between something that may or may not be a personal slight, and that which challenges or threatens the national interests.”

General David Petraeus said yesterday that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root cause for unrest in the Middle East, and that it harms U.S interests. “Of course it does,” said Rose. “It harms Israeli interests! It harms Palestinian interests! It’s a conflict that harms everyone except those who wish to propagate it.”

This morning, however, Imus was most interested in propagating his guest’s recent—and so far, successful—battle with testicular cancer, telling Rose, “You’re got big enough balls to suit me!”

Gross.

-Julie Kanfer