Eli Lake, Columnist

Israel Helped Obama Skirt 'Red Line' on Syria

An ex-ambassador says the failure to stop Syria showed Obama would fail to stop Iran.

June 15, 2015 at 10:15 AM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

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Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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Israel discreetly helped President Obama avoid bombing Syria in 2013 after Damascus had violated his "red line" against using chemical weapons, according to a new memoir by Israel's former ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, to be published this month.

Oren's book, "Ally," discloses for the first time that in late August and early September 2013, Israel's then-intelligence minister, Yuval Steinitz, floated a plan for Syria to relinquish its chemical weapons to the Russian government and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received Obama's blessing to move forward with the proposal.