Jerome Slater, at his blog, writes on "Obama’s Dilemma" and offers a bleak analysis of Obama’s choices:
However, even if Obama privately shared the views of, say, J Street and Americans for Peace Now—and for that matter, of those critics (like me) well to the left of those organizations–it is far from clear that his policies would, or even should, differ from his current ones. First of all, there are probably insurmountable problems with the domestic politics of Israeli issues. Obama and the Democratic party can only lose if they antagonize the American Jewish community, whose financial and electoral support may be crucial in any close congressional or even presidential election…
[I]t is highly doubtful that anything the United States can do would result in meaningful changes in Israeli policies. Consider the strongest action the U.S. could take: making its diplomatic, economic, and military aid to Israel conditional upon a two-state settlement. Not only is it the case that such a dramatic change in U.S. policies is all but unthinkable, new policies would probably not work: even if Netanyahu was inclined to bow to US pressures (in any case, unlikely), he would almost certainly face fierce and violent domestic resistance, and it is by no means certain that the Israeli army, in which the settlers and the religious fundamentalists are increasingly powerful, would side with the government.
To put in bluntly, Israel is probably a lost cause and can no longer be saved from itself: it is hard to see what could arrest the country’s headlong flight into paranoia, moral collapse, increasing domestic repression of even Jewish dissidents, and general national stupidity.
In that light, what would the critics of Obama—and emotionally I share their reactions—have him do? Would they really have Obama risk the loss of his domestic program, his congressional majority, his reelection prospects, and the return of the increasingly neanderthal Republicans to national political dominance, all for the sake of policies which would have little chance of working and could easily make things even worse?
In short, if Obama is thinking along these lines, that would represent not craven pandering to the Israel Lobby or to domestic politics in the narrow sense, but—I fear–rational calculation, the logic of which seems compelling.
