MJ Rosenberg has a typically smart piece on TPM arguing that Obama is actually going to bring Netanyahu to his knees, that the lobby doesn't have the ability to buck a popular American president.
As for the lobby, it will not go head-to-head against this president. It won't because it doesn't like losing any more than it likes losing access to the halls of power. As for the Democratic majority in Congress, with the exception of a few House members who are to the right of Likud, they will stick with the president who gave their party its first electoral landslide since 1964.
In short, Barack Obama is uniquely positioned to achieve two states for two peoples. It's now or never. And if it's never, we will see the "one state solution" instead. That one state won't be called Israel.
One thing I like about Rosenberg's piece is that he is not all that sentimental about the Zionist dream of Israel. A man who has thrown himself into support for a better Israel since his college days in the late 60s, Rosenberg refers at one point to the possible end of the "Zionist enterprise," due to the ballot box, and doesn't go crazy against the idea–though he obviously wants to preserve the Jewish state.
Jeff Blankfort passed along the Rosenberg piece, and, surprisingly, Blankfort, who has chronicled the lobby's power for years, agrees that the lobby has lost influence due to Israel's pariah status.
When AIPAC barely lost the AWACs battle with Reagan in 1981, in which Reagan was forced to expend virtually all his political capital, it enhanced AIPAC's reputation in Congress, and Reagan did not choose to pick another fight with it while he remained in office. With the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, supposedly with a green or at least orange light from SecofState Al Haig, the media images of Israel's bombing of civilian targets and press reports were so negative that all sections of the organized Jewish community were mobilized to perform "damage control." CAMERA came into being and more emphasis was focused on building grass roots networks that could put pressure on local media and politicians to toe the pro-Israel line.
Re Obama and the settlements, I think it has become quite clear in Washington, apart from Congress, that Israel is veering dangerously out of control and could bring disaster to US interests in the region and around the world. It cannot be argued in any rational manner that support for Israel serves US strategic interests but it wan't necessary that people believed it was as long as it was not a direct threat to those interests which, I am convinced, the wiser heads in the White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies now conceive it to be. I don't think Emanuel,while a Zionist, is either a fool or a zealot, and perhaps, ironically, he will give Obama the cover to resist Netanyahu and the lobby. I say, perhaps, which is the optimistic view, and then again, I wonder exactly what kind of Palestinian state Obama has in mind.
