Obama on What a President Must Do to Help Israel

By Jeffrey Goldberg

This is from my May interview with President-Elect Obama on the subject of the Middle East. I hope this means that Obama will sit down with the next Israeli prime minister and talk about the self-destructiveness of settlements, in addition to talking about the destructiveness of Hamas:

Obama: I want to solve the problem, and so my job in being a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth and say if Israel is building settlements without any regard to the effects that this has on the peace process, then we're going to be stuck in the same status quo that we've been stuck in for decades now, and that won't lift that existential dread that David Grossman described in your article.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2009/01/obama-on-what-a-president-must-do-to-help-israel/9304/