Jeffrey Goldberg's surmise of the latest escalation in tensions between the United States and Israel is well taken:
There is much speculation that this kerfluffle over 1600 theoretical apartments on the wrong side of the green line in Jerusalem will lead to a rupture in American-Israeli relations, but analysts who suggest this are missing the point of President Obama's maneuverings. I've been on the phone with many of the usual suspects (White House and otherwise), and I think it's fair to say that Obama is not trying to destroy America's relations with Israel; he's trying to organize Tzipi Livni's campaign for prime minister, or at least for her inclusion in a broad-based centrist government. I'm not actually suggesting that the White House is directly meddling in internal Israeli politics, but it's clear to everyone -- at the White House, at the State Department, at Goldblog -- that no progress will be made on any front if Avigdor Lieberman's far-right party, Yisrael Beiteinu, and Eli Yishai's fundamentalist Shas Party, remain in Netanyahu's surpassingly fragile coalition.
But meddling in internal Israeli politics is exactly what the White House is doing, as Jeff indicates by the foregoing sentence. Obama is trying to do is one of two things: At most he's trying to change the democratically elected government of a foreign state (and I await the book-length thesis on pernicious influence of the "America Lobby" in Israel); at minimum he's trying to force Israel to undergo another Altalena moment by repudiating its reactionary and disruptive fringe, which claims to be acting on Zionist principles but in reality threatens the Zionist project. Bill Clinton tried this in 1999 and more or less succeeded, but that was because Clinton understood the Israeli mood better and was squaring off against a younger, less experienced Netanyahu who owned three very deficient commodities: a third world economy, a post-Oslo peace consensus, and a failed Mossad assassination attempt against a Hamas operative. Things change.
There is every indication that Obama is not up for the same challenge of Levantine power brokerage. For starters, It shouldn't be so difficult for a president who is currently mired in talks of "reconciliation" over health care at home to understand that international diplomacy very often follows domestic policy. Netanyahu is hostage to the ultra-Orthodox parties in his shaky coalition government, which is why his partial 10-month settlement freeze was a remarkable occurrence. It wasn't quite "unprecedented" for Israel, as his new-minted telephone frenemy Hillary Clinton put it at the time (a freeze of this sort was implemented during the Camp David Accords; then there's the simple but evidently forgettable fact that Israel froze and shattered every Jewish settlement in Gaza in 2005). But it was unprecedented for Netanyahu. His Bar-Ilan speech last July, in which he grudgingly acknowledged the two-state solution, marked the overdue end of the ideological platform of the Likud party. It also landed Netanyahu, however unwillingly, on the progressive side of an ongoing civil war between secularists and messianists that extends beyond the Greater Israel question to include social disputes, such as the one over Israel's marriage laws (taking nuptials out of the hands of the rabbinate). This civil war has its epicenter in Jerusalem where it's easy to be distracted by the more headline-friendly Arab-Jewish fighting. Yet right now there are settlers in the West Bank who have declared themselves enemies of state by vowing to build on hilltops where bulldozers can't tread and by denouncing their own prime minister--who is the most conservative the country has had since Menachem Begin--as a quisling and a sell-out. This is news that deserves wider U.S. reporting if only so that J Street can understand it.
The current Israeli political milieu also deserves better "maneuvering" by the White House, especially one which hasn't restored multilateralism as the regnant U.S. foreign policy but replaced it with multiculturalism. How shall we treat one of our longest and most natural allies in war and peace? By referring to a contentious piece of real estate in the South Atlantic as the "Malvinas" islands and taking an agnostic position on a long-settled conflict. (By the way, if Obama gets Livni into power, will she then be allowed to travel to Great Britain without fear of arrest?) From here it's easy to see how, for the sake of earning the respect of those great defenders of human freedom, Bashar al-Assad and Ayatollah Khamenei, our chief executive would proceed by "condemning" the Israeli government as an obstacle to the Mideast peace process whilst acquiescing to the Palestinian Authority's nose-thumbing of that process in the very same week.
Mere hours after Vice President Biden left Ramallah, the PA named a city square in the West Bank after Dalal Mughrabi, a woman who in 1978 landed on a beach between Haifa and Tel Aviv, lethally shot an American photographer, Gail Rubin (also the niece of U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff), then set about hijacking two buses with her PLO Fatah confederates. They eventually blew up the first bus, to which they'd transferred their hostages, and blew it up. Mughrabi and company killed 38 Israeli civilians, 13 of them children.
Now I think I know enough about Palestinian politics to be able to explain how the decision to honor this blood-boltered bitch was undertaken by Arafat-era hardliners without the endorsement or encouragement of the Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and his pragmatic cohort, which are rightly more concerned with developing "de facto statehood" by courting foreign investors and freeing up enterprise in the West Bank. Even so, was this sordid naming ceremony conducted by Mahmoud Abbas's government not an "acute embarrassment" to the United States, to borrow the term the New York Times used to describe the east Jerusalem provocation? Greenlighting the construction of 1,600 new apartments in Ramat Shlomo does not involve the glorification of the murderer of an American national. One would think the U.S. State Department capable of weighing the difference.
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