The Israeli public does have a limited capacity for its government mismanaging relations with the US. Granted, today there is much that is mitigating this--including Netanyahu's incessant complaining that Obama is not a friend to Israel, Obama's own style and rhetoric when it comes to Israel, and genuine anxiety about regional developments. But the last time US-Israel relations appeared to be taking such a downturn, when Yitzhak Shamir (Likud) and George H.W. Bush clashed over loan guarantees in the early 1990s, the public widely expressed disatisfaction. Polls indicate that one reason (among many) for Shamir's defeat in the 1992 elections was that the population was unhappy at the growing rift in US-Israel relations. At some point, especially if Obama is reelected, it's likely the Israeli public will tire of this game. (This would be immensely helped if Obama could get his message of support across more successfully to the Israeli population.)

The Israelis are right about the Turks. Gates is right about the Israelis. Netanyahu is right about Obama -- the part about being able to embarrass him with impunity, mostly because a large number of Democrats in Congress are as desperate to show their eagerness to take direction from Tel Aviv as any neoconservative Republican.

And Goldberg is right, sort of. Netanyahu is not a long range thinker; he will keep to the course that is maintaining support for his government in Israel until it isn't doing that any more. Eventually, it won't be. The question is when this will happen, and specifically if it will happen if President Obama gets a second term.

I have my doubts about that. Obama and his team have struggled to articulate administration policies and the reasons for them even when the subject is the relatively uncomplicated problem of Iran -- an avowedly hostile government acting in numerous and occasionally lethally unhelpful ways. The case of Israel, a country with deep and diverse ties to the United States and a government committed to a small number of policies unhelpful to us, is much more difficult. The Obama administration could theoretically move beyond expressions of irritation offered on secondhand and on deep background, but I wonder if Obama or his Secretary of State really know how to do that, even without the political trouble surrounding this issue.

Walter Russell Mead had a fascinating column on his blog a few months ago that perfectly explains why Netanyahu feels free to ignore the sensibilities of the Obama Administration; there is simply no downside to doing so. In fairness to the Israelis, the President's weakness is on ample display to all of America's friends and adversaries around the world. The Israelis know it; so do the Iranians. The Turks know it; so do the Chinese. The Western Europeans know it; so do the Russians.

Speaking of Obama, here's what Mead had to say,

"Three times he has gone up against Netanyahu; three times he has ingloriously failed. This last defeat — Netanyahu’s deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama’s foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties — may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American President a foreign leader has ever delivered.

Netanyahu beat Obama like a red-headed stepchild; he played him like a fiddle; he pounded him like a big brass drum. The Prime Minister of Israel danced rings around his arrogant, professorial opponent. It was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters go up against the junior squad from Miss Porter’s School; like watching Harvard play Texas A&M, like watching Bambi meet Godzilla — or Bill Clinton run against Bob Dole.

The Prime Minister mopped the floor with our guy. Obama made his ’67 speech; Bibi ripped him to shreds. Obama goes to AIPAC, nervous, off-balance, backing and filling. Then Bibi drops the Congress-Bomb, demonstrating to the whole world that the Prime Minister of Israel has substantially more support in both the House and the Senate than the President of the United States."

Mandarins like Gates, Mitchell and other members of the Obama Administration just don't get it. They believe that their expertise means that they should set the direction of American foreign policy based on their assessment of American interests. The problem for them is that the United States is a democracy and our foreign policy direction is ultimately set not based on a cold calculation of American interests but on the wishes of the American electorate.

Here's Mead again,

"As the stunning and overwhelming response to Prime Minister Netanyahu in Congress showed, Israel matters in American politics like almost no other country on earth. Well beyond the American Jewish and the Protestant fundamentalist communities, the people and the story of Israel stir some of the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the American soul. The idea of Jewish and Israeli exceptionalism is profoundly tied to the idea of American exceptionalism. The belief that God favors and protects Israel is connected to the idea that God favors and protects America.

It means more. The existence of Israel means that the God of the Bible is still watching out for the well-being of the human race. For many American Christians who are nothing like fundamentalists, the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land and their creation of a successful, democratic state after two thousand years of oppression and exile is a clear sign that the religion of the Bible can be trusted.

Being pro-Israel matters in American mass politics because the public mind believes at a deep level that to be pro-Israel is to be pro-America and pro-faith. Substantial numbers of voters believe that politicians who don’t ‘get’ Israel also don’t ‘get’ America and don’t ‘get’ God. Obama’s political isolation on this issue, and the haste with which liberal Democrats like Nancy Pelosi left the embattled President to take the heat alone, testify to the pervasive sense in American politics that Israel is an American value. Said the Minority Leader to the Prime Minister: “I think it’s clear that both sides of the Capitol believe you advance the cause of peace.”

The foreign policy elites from Secretary Gates to Daniel Drezner may find this reality objectionable. Secular leftists may also regret it; but none of this matters. Support for Israel is deep and abiding in the United States and while Americans may not have particular or deeply held preferences about the details of Israeli-Palestinian or even Israeli-American relations, they do believe that to support Israel is to support American values.

Netanyahu can afford to treat the American President like he's a school child because that American President is deeply unpopular, widely viewed as a failed President and amazingly is less trusted by Americans on Middle East policy than the Prime Minister of Israel is.

There is little as entertaining as watching critics of Israel bemoan this reality. For more, see here,

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/05/25/the-dreamer-goes-down-for-the-count/

No U.S. administration, regardless of party, wants Iran to wipe Israel off the map. Atlantic piece, Israel's leaders see the flight or non-immigration of the talented and ambitious as the true "existential threat" they face. I think they're spot on -- they're building a nation of the old and the fanatical.

All Hamas needs to do to keep this going is to fire a few rockets into the desert, and the Israeli press and politicians do the heavy hysteria lifting.

This is not a minor point: Israel wants the US to pressure Iran to stop what it's doing to further its own interests in the region. Iran's support for the Palestinians is a good wedge issue against the rival audis, who look like Israeli allies by comparison. Israel's out-loud musing about a de facto alliance with the Royals is I'm sure deeply appreciated by the Iranians.

Anyone shocked that Iran would cynically use the Palestinian situation for their own purposes? Hey, many of them, I'll bet even some of the leaders, are also sincere about their religion and belief that Jerusalem is sacred to Muslims.

Iran will not quit because it sees israel as a wondrous gift in its long-range plan to push the Saudis out of the picture in the region. Their better relations with Turkey help quite a bit with this.

In the long run, I think Turkey and Iran, two technologically forward-looking nations with educated populations -- are going to defeat the house of jumped-up tribal leaders who keep their people addled with consumer goods and ignorant.

As usual, we're backing the wrong horses.

No U.S. administration, regardless of party, wants Iran to wipe Israel off the map.

Ian has no intention of "wiping israel off the map," at least not by using WMDs. Amenidijad often predicts that Israel will be destroyed -- so do many Israeli critics, and even friends, who read its actions as suicidal. And his Holocaust denial is stupid, but scarcely an existential threat.

Iran's threat to Israel is that it supplies and encourages the highly successful Hizbollah movement, which the brilliant attack of 2006 catapulted to leadership role in Lebanon, and supports Hamas in Gaza.

Israel's Jewish population is shrinking because most rational people are reluctant to settle in a war zone, in a place whose leaders are always warning could face disastrous attacks. Meanwhile, the Arabs continue to grow their population.

As Jeff Goldberg mentioned in a major Atlantic piece, Israel's leaders see the flight or non-immigration of the talented and ambitious as the true "existential threat" they face. I think they're spot on -- they're building a nation of the old and the fanatical.

All Hamas needs to do to keep this going is to fire a few rockets into the desert, and the Israeli press and politicians do the heavy hysteria lifting.

This is not a minor point: Israel wants the US to pressure Iran to stop what it's doing to further its own interests in the region. Iran's support for the Palestinians is a good wedge issue against the rival Saudis, who look like Israeli allies by comparison. Israel's out-loud musing about a de facto alliance with the Royals is I'm sure deeply appreciated by the Iranians.

Anyone shocked that Iran would cynically use the Palestinian situation for their own purposes? Hey, many of them, I'll bet even some of the leaders, are also sincere about their religion and belief that Jerusalem is sacred to Muslims.

Iran will not quit because it sees israel as a wondrous gift in its long-range plan to push the Saudis out of the picture in the region. Their better relations with Turkey help quite a bit with this.

In the long run, I think Turkey and Iran, two technologically forward-looking nations with educated populations -- are going to defeat the house of jumped-up tribal leaders who keep their people addled with consumer goods and ignorant.

As usual, we're backing the wrong horses.

I got to say, it takes a lot of courage to write about Israel from an actual realistic perspective; here's hoping there's no avalanche of 'Israel is the real enemy' from the Walt crowd...

What I don't understand is why Obama's admin hasn't been more forceful in expanding the timeframe and consistently communicating the inevitability of Israel without a peace agreement.... an apartheid or Arab majority state. If Israel becomes an apartheid state, what value would it have to the US, measured against its cost? Are there enough hawks in the US to maintain political support in such a situation?

Pointless to argue with someone who twittered that he "desperately wants Obama to bitchslap Netanyahu in front of the White House press corps". Nevertheless, the main reason Israeli PM acts as he does is because he believes Obama has left him no choice. Netanyahu compromised a lot - he committed himself to Palestinian statehood, he endorsed partial removal of settlements, he implemented an unprecedented building freeze in the West Bank which was tacitly extended to Jerusalem as well, he took many steps to revive Palestinian economy, he acted with restraint against Hamas - and for all that he got no credit in the White House. In Netanyahu's view, Obama took upon himself to represent Palestinians vis-a-vis Israel and went further than Palestinians themselves. In Jerusalem's view, three demands that derailed the peace process - full open-ended settlement freeze, September deadline and "1967 borders" are all Obama's fault. Because of the chain of petty abuses and media leaks, Netanyahu believes that Obama had wanted him either out of office or as a puppet head of a different, more "peace-friendly" coalition. And the majority of Israelis quite agree with their PM. The social protests had proven that the Israeli public is not enamored with their current government and knows how to express their anger. But if forced to choose between Netanyahu and Obama, they'll choose Netanyahu (unlike in the 90-s when Israelis went for Clinton against Netanyahu).

There is the additional concern by Israel's government that an apology for what the Palmer report called a legal and legitimate blockade, and legitimate defense of it, would cripple Israel's right to defend itself.

The Palmer report specifically points out the ongoing attempts by HAMAS (and while unsaid in the report, the attempts by Yasser Arafat to smuggle weapons to Fatah, remember the Karine-A interception) to bring heavy military weapons into the Gaza strip.

The problem with Goldberg's argument falls along the lines of what 'A New Dawn' stated. Obama, whether he meant to or not, has a flawed view of his foreign policy. His POV was that the US had grievously sinned against the Muslim world and attempted to placate it with repeated apologies and subservient gestures. I remember the flap when he went to Saudi Arabia and bowed before King Abdullah, only to have the Sauds toss off the gesture by words and deeds that denigrated the US President. His public attempts to woo Iran, Russia, and other hostile states, came in parallel with denigrating not just Israel, but European allies as well.

While the administration may be working closer with Israel behind the scenes, out in front, Obama gave the appearence of pushing it under the proverbial bus. Such perception gave rise and support to the idea that Israel was being cut loose and therefore open to attack.

This premise has been repeated during the Arab spring. Hosni Mubarak, leader of a US allied country was sent packing, while Bashar Assad, a key Iranian ally, who has commited much greater violence and repression against his own people, has been given the kid-glove treatment.

At the same time, Mohmar Khadaffi, who tried to work with the US and British governments to end its WMD program, including its nuclear plans, was bombed out of power by NATO, while North Korea, which is shooting at South Korean villages, killing civilians, and sinking South Korean Naval warships, continues to receive aid all while holding onto its nuclear weapons program and horribly abusing its own people.

visible strike-outs is grade-school / bush-league editing. If you mean to say something, have the brass gonads to say it.

Using the cross-outs cheapens the message you have to say. Either say it, or don't.

But cutsey crossouts in an attempt at wit falls flat on its face.

America’s Fatal Love Affair With Israel Gained Us a Permanent War.

If we had followed George Washington’s advice in his “Farewell Address”, we would not have become involved in the “War on Terror”. I loaded his complete address in my blog and highlighted the parts that are of special interest to Americans that believe in the American limited constitutional republic type of government.

By intervening in the Israel-Muslim conflict, we created the conditions that started the American war with Muslim terrorists. Intervening in other countries always leads to war and enemies. Terrorism is the strategy of the powerless when they fight the powerful. The next step in this permanent war is that terrorists will detonate dirty or conventional nuclear bombs on the NATO countries and America. We have to stop the steps that are leading us to this end and change the strategy to win and end the war before it escalates. In 10 years and after spending $5 trillion, we have no victories or enemy body counts to show. Most of our enemies had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. They are puny bands of terrorists that could have been defeated 10 years ago by using special forces and air power. Stop the occupations and interventions and defend our borders where the real threat is coming from Mexico.

Why are we providing Israel annually with $3.5 billion American taxpayer debt dollars? They are rich and can afford to defend themselves. The population of Israel is just 7.7 million people. They should demand financial support from the majority of Jews that live abroad many are wealthy and can afford to support their religious state as Christians support their churches with 10% of their income. Israel has nuclear weapons and a strong military; they don’t need our money or participation in this Israeli-Muslim conflict that has been going on even before the founding of Israel in 1948. Why are we paying Egypt annually over $1.5 billion in foreign aid? The American taxpayer is paying foreign aid to many nations, but Communist China has no foreign aid. China buys oil fields, mines and finances the government debts of the American and now European governments. China is obtaining real power and influence by following the policy that George Washington explained in his “Farewell Address” advice to the American people.

The global interventionist policy gained us Israel’s enemies. The terrorist attack on 9/11 is a result of intervening in a conflict that concerns Israelis and Muslims. Osama Bin Laden’s strategy was to draw America into conflict in the Muslim world to bankrupt us like what happened to the former interventionist, expansionist Soviet Union. The Afghanistan war and the many Soviet global interventions bankrupted the Soviet Union and caused its ignoble collapse in 1991. We have been playing Osama’s game since 9/11 and we are losing our wealth and power.

We get most of our oil from Canada and other suppliers that are not in the Middle East. The Communist Chinese announced last year that they now have a controlling interest in Iraqi oil and proudly announced the receipt of the first oil shipments. It is clear that they have a strategy of gaining real power at the expense of the follies of other powers. We are fighting a war against maybe 2,000 Al Qaeda terrorists without a military strategy to win the war. Instead, the military talks about the nonsense of “nation building” and “democracy building” in Iraq and Afghanistan. We just added thousands of new enemies by intervening in Libya. The Libyans that Obama killed have families. Every bomb that falls in the American Muslim war is financed by debt and represents a nail in our coffin. We really know how to win friends and influence people.

An economist estimated that the total cost of the war on terror is $5 trillion. 57% of Americans that are fighting this war are contractors, not military personnel. The war contractors are now a powerful special interest group. They are not likely to voluntarily abandon this lucrative business and join the underpaid and overtaxed American civilian population.

The terrorists have more time and supporters than we have money. To survive we have to stop all interventions and occupations in the world. We must defend our borders and attack only targeted actual terrorists. This total divorce from the world's problems will eventually cause the terrorists to focus on their own internal affairs because they will see that America is out of their area and that it's in their best interest to end terrorism against America to keep us out. This is the only way to end this permanent war before we enter the terminal stage of our economic and social cancer.

The $1.65 Trillion dollars out of a budget of $3.7 Trillion, that the Federal government has to beg and borrow for the fiscal year 2011 and every year, should not be spent on war contractor profits and foreign affairs. Confront reality; The USA is the largest debtor in world history. The annual national current account balance losses are over $700 billion (this is wealth that is lost according to the formula national assets-liabilities). Industry is only 9% of the economy. According to the official government statistics, 36% of males 16 to 64 years old are permanently out of the labor force and don't count. The Federal, State and local governments must reduce their size by 37% to fit actual taxes. There are not enough taxpayers to support this huge government of over 20 million people and an equal number of people that are employed by dependent government contractors. Taxes are too high already. Most taxpayers are struggling with increasing local property tax increases and the rising cost of living. The bottom 50% of American households own just 2.5% of national wealth. 51% of American households are too poor to pay income taxes. Who will pay the national debt of over $14.5 trillion? We just added another $2 trillion to the debt ceiling to get us by another 18 months.

We need to re-industrialize to become financially and politically independent from the global corporations and special interests. America has to nation build to restore its prosperity. American companies cannot compete with imported global corporate products made with cheap labor. We cannot survive competing with Chinese that earn $200 a month. In the past 10 years, the politicians enabled globalists to ship out 57,000 American industrial plants and over 6 million jobs to China and other cheap labor places so that they could profit from wages of $100 a month. We have an illegal alien invasion that is destroying local taxpayers. Illegal alien women receive Medicare and welfare benefits as soon as they become pregnant which is a permanent condition. Taxpayers must also pay the social costs of the invaders by providing free public education. We cannot afford to support a large population of poor people.

The politicians have no ideas other than the status quo. In my blog, I offer a 28 point program to restore American prosperity before we become a totally failed state as Haiti and Somalia. We are living on borrowed money and time. Focus on our own problems, end globalization, mass immigration and re-industrialize with free enterprise competitive American owned companies before we become another failed state.

Roman Gil
http://roman-gil1.blogspot.com

With due respect to everyone’s emoting I really liked the attitude of foreign minister Avigdor when he stood by the decision of not apologizing because I think if you keep changing your decision about so important think by taking in to consideration the thought of society ,it may lead to some unwanted situation in country

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Why doesn't anybody ask the question should a group of people be controlled by another

We need to re-industrialize to become financially and politically independent from the global corporations and special interests. America has to nation build to restore its prosperity. American companies cannot compete best gardening tips with imported global corporate products made with cheap labor. We cannot survive competing with Chinese that earn $200 a month.