In years past, leaders in Washington, D.C. and Jerusalem had “secret understandings” and “gentlemen’s agreements”. America would support Israel in nearly every move it made, and in exchange, Israel would do whatever it felt like doing, knowing that its stalwart might occasionally rebuke it in public, but behind closed doors, they would remain unambiguous cohorts.
That time has passed. Barack Obama’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu grows colder by the day, with the former unwilling to yield in his conviction that the status quo of allowing settlements to continue to grow at the detriment of the peace process is no longer acceptable, and the latter angry, bewildered and concerned that the president’s backbone on the issue could topple his unsteady coalition government.
It’s a stunning reversal of our realpolitik foreign policy, and one that could, if not delicately handled, damage the soft power of even an immensely popular president. To say no to Israel inside the beltway is to court unseemly allegations from AIPAC and to invite rebuke from officials within both major parties. The under-reported death of the Chas Freeman nomination earlier this year proved that mandate or not, there are coalitions that will not go quietly into the night, whose agendas will not become circumscript at the behest of the leader of the free world.
Within Obama’s own party, many of Israel’s staunchest enablers are airing their disagreement with him over the issue. A recent Politico story found Democrats Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.), Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) pushing back for the Holy Land, in a carefully worded sort of way. And in a truly bipartisan move, 329 members of Congress signed a letter by AIPAC calling on Obama to work “closely and privately” with Israel. Clearly, bringing change to a political landscape that resembles nothing if not the trenches on the Western Front during World War I will be a trial by political correctness.
