Obama Administration Scapegoating Israel as Mid-East Talks Collapse

"Look, if Israel would just cease to exist then the Middle East would be much better off. Then we could concentrate on sending selfies to Russia and borrowing more money from China."

This seems to be standard practice for Obama and his ilk. I guess it was too much of a stretch to blame Bush.

From The Washington Free Beacon article by Adam Kredo:

The Obama administration has been waging a secret media war in capitals across two continents blaming Israel for the recent collapse of peace talks with the Palestinians, according to former Israeli diplomats and Washington, D.C. insiders familiar with the peace process. 

Multiple sources told the Washington Free Beacon that top Obama administration officials have worked for the past several days to manufacture a crisis over the reissuing of housing permits in a Jerusalem neighborhood widely acknowledged as Israeli territory. 

Senior State Department officials based in Israel have sought to lay the groundwork for Israel to take the blame for talks collapsing by peddling a narrative to the Israeli press claiming that the Palestinians were outraged over Israeli settlements, the Free Beacon has learned. 

These administration officials have planted several stories in Israeli and U.S. newspapers blaming Israel for the collapse of peace talks and have additionally provided reporters with anonymous quotes slamming the Israeli government. 

The primary source of these multiple reports has been identified as Middle East envoy Martin Indyk and his staff, according to these insiders, who said that the secret media campaign against Israel paved the way for Secretary of State John Kerry to go before Congress on Tuesday and publicly blame Israel for tanking the talks.  

[...]  

Indyk, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration, as well as in several other roles, was appointed by Obama to act as the U.S. special envoy for peace negotiations. 

One former Israeli diplomat familiar with Indyk’s tactics said that he is a crass political player who has a history of planting negative stories about Israel in order to undermine the Netanyahu government and bolster his hand in the talks.  

[...]
Another Washington-based source familiar with the talks said that Kerry’s peace team has a track record of trashing Israel anonymously. 

“It’s one of the worst-kept secrets in Jerusalem that Kerry’s team leaks anti-Netanyahu quotes and claims to the Israeli press—not that is should be a mystery why Israeli reporters based in Israel keep producing anti-Bibi quotes from ‘American officials,’” the source said.  

[...]  

“When talks fell apart and the State Department needed a scapegoat, of course they chose Israel, except they picked the dumbest explanation imaginable,” said the source who serves as a senior official at a pro-Israel organization. 

The Obama administration seized on an announcement by the Israelis that 700 apartments would be built in Gilo, a Jerusalem suburb widely recognized as Israeli territory. 

The housing news was actually a reissue of an earlier pronouncement permitting these new apartments to be built, meaning that the substance of the decree had not changed for months and had not been a roadblock to the peace talks.

Planting stories to lay out the blame on an ally? Kerry and Obama would never, never do that. Especially not to Israel...