Jerry Slater has a fine piece in the Buffalo News that applauds the Goldstone report, implicitly calls for sanctions, and analyzes Obama’s climbdown. There was a popular line when Walt and Mearsheimer first hit, that the Israel lobby has a stranglehold on Congress but doesn’t affect the presidency. Slater shows that this is absurd. Emphasis mine:
There are a number of signs that Obama is essentially continuing the failed policies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and other previous presidents. First, most of his appointments have gone to down-the-line supporters of Israeli policies, including Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose future political ambitions make it unlikely that she will want to take on the “pro-Israel” forces…
Obama is rapidly returning to traditional U. S. policies, which amount either to essentially unconditional U. S. support of whatever Israel does or, at most, weak hand-wringing — for example, “the settlements are an obstacle to peace” — unaccompanied by any firm measures and therefore routinely disregarded by Israel. Indeed, Obama already has made it known that U. S. diplomatic and military aid to Israel will not be used as leverage to get the Netanyahu government to agree to end the occupation and allow the creation of a Palestinian state. Therefore, there is no chance that it will.
What accounts for Obama’s reversals? The most obvious explanation is that Obama is giving priority to his ambitious domestic agenda and rightly fears that real pressure on Israel would backfire in Congress, where it is likely that some key members would, in effect, hold their support for Obama’s domestic programs hostage to his Israeli policies.
