Fascinating piece by the Nightflower himself, Steven Rosen, at Foreign Policy, saying that now that Israel has gone far right, the Israeli left has decamped to the U.S. and is at Obama’s elbow. And still: Dennis Ross is king.
This is compelling analysis not just politically, but as a description of how the lobby and Jewish identity work. Israel has no real foreign policy, it just has a war for the U.S. president, conducted among Jews here.
There is yet one more wild card in all of this: Obama’s door is open to advisors who want to break with Israel. Many on the left of the Democratic Party believe that Israel is the obstacle to peace and that a breakthrough could be achieved if Obama just twisted Israel’s arm. Of course, this was always the view of some of the storied Arabists in the State Department, but today, it comes more influentially from Jewish American critics of Israeli policy who depict themselves as pro-Israel and pro-peace. Faced with the reality that only the 3 percent of Israelis who vote Meretz share such views, and that the dovish camp led by Yossi Beilin has no prospect of winning an election in the actual Jewish state, the Beilinist Israeli left has moved to Washington. Their goal is to lobby the U.S. president to "save Israel from herself" by imposing terms on Israel that the great majority of Israelis would reject.
Obama is poorly positioned to reach over Netanyahu’s head to persuade the Israeli people to embrace this agenda. A Sept. 12 poll put Bibi’s approval rating at 65 percent, while similar polls by Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post found that only 12 and 6 percent of Israelis, respectively, think that Obama is pro-Israel…
Some Netanyahu advisors think that Obama is himself a man of the left and that top aides like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod are closet J-Streeters in the White House. Instead, however, Obama and his top advisors are instinctively drawn to the center-left, like Bill and Hillary Clinton. He is more likely to take advice from the National Security Council’s Dennis Ross than from more-leftist deputy Mideast peace envoy Mara Rudman or the ubiquitous peace pundit Daniel Levy.
The piece reminds me too of what Mearsheimer has called "reverse aliyah," all the Jews hellbent from Jerusalem to the Upper West Side cause they like a secular liberal society. And notice the governing assumption here of dual loyalty. The idea that even Jews in the Obama administration are concerned with Israel’s interests and are up against Likudnik Jews who are also out for Israel’s interest– this is the nightmare that the anti-Zionists predicted a century ago, and it is doing a number on the construction of Jewish identity. Something’s gotta give. Hey, it already has.
