Monday, Harvard Law professor emeritus and self-proclaimed liberal, Alan Dershowitz, appeared on Fox News to discuss President Obama’s foreign policy legacy, as well as his abstention from the recent United Nations resolution regarding Israel–and he did not hold back.
First, he talked directly about the U.N. resolution:
“It’s the most undemocratic thing a president can do, to tie the hands of his successor during the lame duck period. And what he did was so nasty; he pulled a bait-and-switch. He said to the American public: ‘Oh, this is all about the settlements deep in the West Bank.’ Yet he allowed his representative to the U.N. to abstain–which is really ‘for’–a resolution that is basically ‘Jews can’t pray at the Western Wall; Jewish-Arab students can’t go to Hebrew university; Jewish and Arab patients can’t go to Hadassah hospital; Jews can’t live in the Jewish Quarter, where they’ve lived for thousands of years.’ And he’s gonna say: ‘Whoops! I didn’t mean that…'”
When asked by Ed Henry why Obama would abstain from the resolution, Dershowitz said:
“Well, I think he was just trying to get even. Look, he called me into the Oval Office before the election, and he said to me: ‘Allen, I want your support, and I have to tell you, I will always have Israel’s back.’ I didn’t realize what he meant is that he would have [their] back to stab them in the back.”
Dershowitz added that the U.N. resolution will make attaining Israeli-Palestinian peace much more difficult because it will encourage the Palestinians to avoid negotiating with the United States.
Finally, he hit Obama hard regarding the president’s overall foreign policy:
“He will go down in history–President Obama–as one of the worst foreign policy presidents ever. What he did to Syria, and what he did, and was partially responsible for, in Aleppo, creating a vacuum for Russia. I have to tell you, you know, I supported his domestic policy, I liked him on Supreme Court appointments, but he created a terrible conflict for people, many like me, liberal Democrats who support his domestic policy but think he was an appalling, appalling president when it came to foreign policy.”
In the end, Dershowitz noted that the United States, in its abstention, is essentially aligning itself with the likes of China, which occupies Tibet, as well as Russia, which occupies parts of Ukraine.