McCain: Obama’s Expectations Responsible for Strain with Israel

Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said President Barack Obama’s “very unrealistic expectations” on Israel have created the worse relationship he has seen in his “lifetime.”

In discussing House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress, McCain said, “There’s a real crisis going on and that is these negotiations with Iran which many of us believe are already fatally flawed, that the speaker felt the overriding concern was to have him appear before the American people and tell them about the dangers of a very bad agreement with Iran on nuclear weapons,” adding, “I certainly agree that we don’t need their permission given the state of relations.”

On the current state of U.S.-Israel relations the Arizona senator said, “It’s poor, as we know, and it’s the worst that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, and that in itself is a tragedy because it’s the only functioning democracy in the entire Middle East,” adding, “I  think because the president had very unrealistic expectations about the degree of cooperation he would get from Israel particularly on the Palestinian issue as well as the nuclear issue with Iran, and I’m not putting the entire blame on the president of the United States, but I will see this, no other president has had such difficult relationship with the state of Israel since it became a country.”

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