'Image' Trumps All

John Bolton writes (in the New York Post):

...Ironically, Obama is expending more energy pressuring Israel than he did in the Security Council, the Human Rights Council or the nuclear-review conference to protect US and Israeli equities. This pattern also typifies Obama and his key advisers: They find it is far easier to bend their friends into submission than to stand up to America's determined adversaries.

America's Western European allies, by and large, already are happy to agree that the Gaza blockade violates "international law." This view in part explains why even Britain and France failed to join the US in the Human Rights Council, and negotiated too closely with Turkey in its efforts to slam Israel in the Security Council.

Third World radicals will doubtless build on Europe's position in their ongoing, decades-long efforts to delegitimize Israel entirely. There is equally little doubt that Obama himself is susceptible to these kinds of foreign pressures, especially when withstanding them might cause his own international image to suffer. Here, Israel is merely collateral damage in guarding the cult of our first post-American president...

After all, in the long run (and even in the short run), what's more important: Israel's survival as the world's only Jewish state and the Middle East's only functioning democracy, or the survival of Barack H. Obama's image?