BENEATH the shock-horror-revulsion of America’s assassination of Israel, erev Hanukkah at the UN Security Council, there was an ominous inevitability about Barack Obama’s back-stab, because the writing was on the wall from Day #1 of his White House tenure. Surrounded by a clique of gobby black radicals – Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan et al – all of whom harbored only bitter enmity towards Jews in general and Israel in particular, anyone who could make four out of two plus two should have long ago realized the 44th US President had little love for the Jewish state. Sure, he went through the hypocritical motions of wooing gullible Jewish liberals, programmed by default setting to vote Democrat, but usually with a nuanced sting in his words whenever Israel blipped on his radar, as it regularly did. And the fact that, in Bibi Netanyahu, he faced a formidable, vocal adversary, who refused to kowtow to bullying, only added to Obama’s festering malevolence that has finally erupted in the swansong months since his anointed successor, Hillary Clinton, blew her chance of being the US’s first female Commander-in-Chief. Fast backwards to Cairo, 2009, when, on his first foreign misadventure, Obama grovelled to the Arab League, setting out his cockamamie theory of reshaping the world’s worst neighborhood. Even though many scoffed at his effrontery, Obama careered on regardless, consumed by an ego the size of Alaska and the unswerving belief that, where other, shrewder American leaders had failed, he could beat swords into plowshares. There was never a snowball’s chance in Hades someone with no comprehension of the Arab mindset and Middle East history could succeed. And Obama proved this in spades, blundering in Iraq, letting loose the certifiably lunatics ruling Iran, displaying arrant cowardice in Syria and backing those godfathers of terrorism, the Islamo-fascist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt against the will of the people. To borrow the catchphrase of Forrest Gump’s ma, "Stupid is as stupid does." So it really shouldn’t have come as any surprise Obama would never forgive a perceived sleight – one of many he felt Netanyahu inflicted on him – and his final act of a botched presidency would be the vindictive betrayal of the West’s one, enduring and democratic ally in a region that’s the killing field of homicidal despots. Like many commentators, I warned of Obama’s malice aforethought towards Israel when I wrote in this space six weeks ago, “However, in the two-month ‘lame-duck’ period before President Trump assumes the Oval Office, Obama can still do the Jewish state serious harm.” Last week, rowing back on decades of America’s veto protecting Israel at the Security Council, Obama did, without even having the guts to instruct his mouthpiece, Samantha Powers, to back farcical Resolution 2334, which damned the 'settlements' as having "no legal validity". Instead she was told to abstain, but not forget to echo her boss’s condemnation of Israel's expansion, completely ignore the Oslo Accords and Jordan’s land-grab of the West Bank in Israel’s 1949 War of Independence. However, what of the other lickspittles who did the President’s ‘wet work’ and co-sponsored the trashing of Israel, after Egypt was persuaded to shelve a word-for-word resolution? Malaysia, another paragon of Islamic virtue, and the busted flush that’s Venezuela, neither of whom has diplomatic relations with Israel, could hardly raise their hands fast enough to vote. And if Netanyahu was expecting Muslim Senegal to repay some of the largess the Jewish state has lavished on the impoverished African state, it was an ask too far. Perhaps New Zealand, an Anglophone country – though noted for its radicalism – was the surprise lead sponsor. But, as one analyst noted on Radio NZ of Wellington’s eagerness to promote the vote, naked self-interest, not morality, were the motivating factors. “New Zealand is about to sign a free trade agreement with the Gulf Co-operation Council,” he explained. “There’s huge profits being made from exporting lamb and other products to the Arab states. “If there was to be a big-trade payoff, the calculations would be in favor of going with the Muslim countries.” So much, then, for the phony moral high ground claimed by New Zealand’s pro-Palestinian foreign minister, Murray McCully. And small wonder a local news website called him out for acting “like a rabid dog with a bone”, adding, “He has consistently excoriated settlements as the major obstacle to peace across the Middle East (while the greatest atrocity of our time unfolds on Israel’s northern border and the UNSC sits on its hands), and [he] has refused to label as terrorism the many murderous attacks by Palestinians against Israeli civilians.” Israel also recognizes a stitch-up when it sees one coming and Jerusalem read the runes when US Secretary of State, John Kerry paid McCully an unscheduled visit last month. The Jewish state was also tipped off by Arab sources of the plot Obama was hatching, an act diametrically against the grain for an outgoing US president, whose final months are not for nothing dubbed a lame-duck period, when he’s supposed to do nothing that encumbers or embarrasses a successor. Not even Jimmy Carter, now only the second worst C-in-C in American history, was moved to lumber Ronald Reagan with so malicious an act of ally treachery as Obama has parked on the White House lawn for Donald Trump to try and clean up. Ironically, the consequences of Obama’s denouement will be to have pushed Israel-Palestinian peace further over the horizon, underlined the laughing-stock status of the anti-Semitic UN and relegated New Zealand’s reputation to that of a Third World also-ran. So bye-bye, Barack. I can’t say knowing you hasn’t been a pleasure – because it hasn’t.