Like so many campaign pledges, Obama's pledge of "commitment to the very best relations with Israel" have quickly fallen by the wayside. Friction between the two countries has caused both domestic consternation as well as hostility within Israel itself:
...While nearly 80% of American Jews voted for Mr. Obama, that friction has been visible enough to propel him to meet with American Jewish leaders recently to reassure them about his policies. But last month, despite those reassurances, both the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Anti-Defamation League issued statements critical of the president’s handling of Israel....
...But the Obama administration has managed to win the mistrust of most Israelis, not just conservative politicians. Despite his great popularity in many parts of the world, in Israel Obama is now seen as no ally. A June poll found that just 6% of Israelis called him “pro-Israel,” when 88% had seen President George W. Bush that way. So the troubles between the U.S. and Israel are not fundamentally found in the personal relations among policy makers. ...(WSJ)
The Obama Administration has done nothing to reassure Israel in the face of Iranian intransigence concerning its nuclear program preferring instead to concentrate on the Palestinian question:
...in fact following a highly ideological policy path. Its ability to cope with, indeed even to see clearly, the realities of life in Israel and the West Bank and the challenge of Iran to the region is compromised by the prism through which it analyzes events.... (WSJ)
Thus, in the face of intelligence assessments that indicate that Iran is merely "waiting for the Ayatollah's order," to begin building a nuclear weapon that it has promised to use against it, Israel will have no choice but to take its own action.
...Iran has perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead and is merely awaiting the word from its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to produce its first bomb, Western intelligence sources have told The Times.
The sources said that Iran completed a research programme to create weaponised uranium in the summer of 2003 and that it could feasibly make a bomb within a year of an order from its Supreme Leader....
...should Ayatollah Khamenei approve the building of a nuclear device, it would take six months to enrich enough uranium and another six months to assemble the warhead. The Iranian Defence Ministry has been running a covert nuclear research department for years, employing hundreds of scientists, researchers and metallurgists in a multibillion-dollar programme to develop nuclear technology alongside the civilian nuclear programme.... ( Times)
Word in Israel is that, should talks fail, an attack upon Iran may come as soon as October.
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