Mitt Romney’s campaign released excerpts of a speech he’s scheduled to give on Wednesday before the Republican Jewish Coalition, in which he will criticize President Obama’s handling of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Specifically, Romney will attack Obama’s proposal that Israel adopt “indefensible borders,” and the president’s purported timidity “in the face of the existential threat of a nuclear war.”
As for Romney’s own stance on Israel, he will reportedly tell the Coalition, “I will travel to Israel on my first foreign trip. I will reaffirm as a vital national interest Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. I want the world to know that the bonds between Israel and the United States are unshakable.”
Among Romney’s other recent criticisms of Obama, he’s knocked the president for making the claim at a New York fund-raiser last week that his administration has done more to secure Israel’s security than any previous administration; Romney said that Obama has repeatedly thrown Israel under the bus.
According to Israel newspaper Haaretz, Jews have no problem with Romney or his Mormonism, and with respect to the 2012 general election, the paper reported in late November that “Romney is the Republican candidate who is poised to make the most serious inroads into the traditionally Democratic Jewish vote.”
