TORONTO — People should should be skeptical of U.S. president-elect Barack Obama’s position on the Israel-Palestinian conflict,  Yoram Ettinger, a retired Israeli ambassador toWashington, said in Toronto late last month.

Ettinger, who writes a hawkish online newsletter, the Ettinger Report, works as a consultant on U.S.-Israel bilateral relations with both American legislators and Israeli members of Knesset.

Speaking to an audience of more than 40 people at the downtown offices of law firm Cassels and Brock on Nov. 26, Ettinger warned that Obama is a neophyte when it comes to the Middle East.

“Obama lacks any experience in foreign policy,” he said, adding that the president-elect’s worldview “is reflected in his advisers, [who are] being drawn from the Carter and Clinton administrations.”

Ettinger, who was in Toronto as part of a speaking tour, warned that many of those advisers played key roles in previous U.S. administrations’ “complacency in the face of global, rising Islamism.”

Last week, Obama selected Susan Rice – a staff member of U.S. president Bill Clinton’s National Security Council in the early 1990s, as well as Obama’s foreign policy adviser during the election campaign – as ambassador to the United Nations. He also made Senator Hillary Clinton his secretary of state.

Terrorists used to think of former president Clinton as “a paper tiger,” and the same thing may happen to Obama, Ettinger said.

He said that based on his talks with U.S. political insiders, Obama and his advisers believe that “the UN should play a high role”in Mideast peace talks.

“Obama and his advisers are among those who consider terrorism to be a law enforcement problem, not to be tackled unilaterally, but preferably, multilaterally,”Ettinger said, before adding that this doesn’t “bode well”for Israel in its fight against Palestinian terrorism.

“How long would a NATO force sustain itself after it lost scores of forces to improvised explosive devices in Judea and Samaria?” Ettinger asked. “Anyone suggesting that Israel has to give up Jewish geography to save Jewish demography is devastatingly wrong.”

Despite his bleak outlook, Ettinger offered hope for continued U.S. support of Israel, saying Congress acts as a “check and balance” on the president.

“Congress does wield power, and Israel is supported by the American people [on the whole],”he said. “Most substance injected into U.S.-Israel relations since 1948 had its origins on Capitol Hill, and mostly in defiance of [presidents and their administrations], and even sometimes in defiance of Israeli administrations.”

And just because Congress is controlled by Democrats doesn’t mean a Democratic president will have a “free ride,” Ettinger said.

“Obama will not have an automatic majority in the House or Senate, and certainly not on the matter of Israel” because every congressman or senator has to answer to his or her constituents.

There are “fundamental shared values” and a “fundamental affinity by Americans to the notion of a Jewish state,” which is reflected in the allegiance of the majority of American legislators, Ettinger said.

Speaking to The CJN after his talk, Ettinger said he believes Canada and the United States can help transform Palestinian society from one of “corruption eroding it from within” to one based on western democratic ideals.

Ettinger advised Ottawa to send the following message to the Palestinian Authority: “No negotiation, no contact, until you eradicate completely… hate education. Only when you prove [to Canada]… after two or three years have gone by without any form of hate education – not in schools, media or mosques – only then will Canada resume relations.

“Anybody… that persists in negotiations with the PA while they conduct hate education is indirectly, and sometimes directly, abetting terrorism and distancing Israelis and Palestinians from peace. Because hate education is murder.”

Ettinger’s talk was co-sponsored by the Speakers Action Group and the Canadian Jewish Civil Rights Association.