TO ASK THE QUESTION IS TO ANSWER IT: What’s behind Barack Obama’s silence on Israel? “Obama supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He courted Turkey’s theocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan as ‘a strong Turkey that would step in and take on the role of a strong power in the Middle East that would allow the U.S. to step back,’ a Turkey expert told Politico in 2016. He left Iraq in the hands of Iranian puppet masters. And most infamously of all, he ceded the Syrian battlefield to, of all people, Vladimir Putin. What’s unfolding in Israel today is part of the plan, the broken eggs of the policy omelette. By the logic of Obama’s foreign policy, a hard strike to Israel could catalyse the balance-of-power reset that the former president had envisioned and for which he laid the policy infrastructure. For Obama, condemnation of Hamas actions would make little sense: in his eyes, the group’s attack is no more than a playing-out of the power logic precisely because Hamas is an extension of Iran.”