He could just as easily have been talking about his political fortunes. A Western-trained economist praised by many in Israel and the United States, Fayyad has emerged in recent years as an unlikely Arab visionary—the “Ben Gurion of Palestine,” as Israeli President Shimon Peres recently called him. To hear most observers tell it, Fayyad governs like the Michael Bloomberg of Palestine—managerially, with seemingly little interest in politics over policy. But his ability to implement his vision is being hindered by old-guard interests on both sides of the Green Line, the demarcation that separates Israel from the West Bank. It’s one of those paradoxical realities of the Middle East that the heralded technocrat of Palestine has no democratic legitimacy but serves entirely at the pleasure of P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas, who appointed Fayyad to his position. Abbas last month announced his intention to step down as the Palestinian Authority president, citing Israeli intransigence on the peace process. If Abbas—Fayyad’s constituency of one—leaves, many observers of the region agree, that could create a power vacuum in the P.A. and lead to a third intifada, unraveling all of what Fayyad’s administration has accomplished. But, until then, his leadership provides what seems to be Palestinians’ best hope for a more functional future, and the prime minister seems unfazed that progress is being held hostage to factionalism. “We have competing ideologies and concepts,” Fayyad said. “But there are two ways of doing things: to sit on our hands and do nothing until we figure it out by talking, or to get on with it and act in a manner that’s consistent with a shared, broader outlook. I prefer to get on with it.”

And so he has. By all accounts, in the two years since Fayyad was named prime minister, the West Bank has been transformed from a besieged and impoverished bantustan into a rough sketch of what a functioning Palestinian state might look like—if it ever comes to fruition. In August, Fayyad laid out the most ambitious, bottom-up plan ever devised for Palestinian nationalism, “de facto statehood,” which is spoken of respectfully even by Israeli officials who oppose it (and most do). Meanwhile, Fayyad’s homegrown critics say his proposal conforms a little too nicely to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own designs for the occupied territories. He’s still combating cynical and entrenched PLO interests, held over from the Arafat era, who don’t like transparent government. He’s also jockeying to reunify Gaza and the West Bank, two regions separated in the midst of an internecine civil war in 2006 and now governed, respectively, by the Islamist party Hamas and the secular party Fatah.

A man apart and an agent of change in a territory with a 40-year status quo, Fayyad has, unsurprisingly, accrued enemies and skeptics, though his biggest cheerleaders are Americans. “He’s a real revolutionary,” said Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic (and a Tablet Magazine contributor). “He’s done more to improve the quality of life in the West Bank than anyone else.” Indeed, concrete progress been made so rapidly under “Fayyadism”—New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s term for the prime minister’s ultra-pragmatic style of governance—that one former Bush administration official asked not to be identified for this article because “I don’t want to make Salam’s life more difficult by having someone like me praise him.”

* * *

Fayyad speaks perfect English with an accent marked by his cosmopolitan upbringing. Though he grew up in the West Bank city of Tulkarm—he was 15 years old when the Six-Day War broke out in 1967—and went to college at American University in Beirut, all of Fayyad’s graduate work was done the United States. In Texas, to be exact: he earned an MBA at St. Edward’s University, a Jesuit-run liberal-arts college just outside Austin, and a doctorate in economics from the University of Texas at Austin. His thesis adviser was a leading macroeconomist, William Barnett, who told me that one memory that stands out of Fayyad the student was how badly in debt he always was—not necessarily a compliment for a budding economist. But this was because, Barnett explained, Fayyad was constantly bailing out friends who were even worse off financially. How did a Palestinian expat comport himself in George W. Bush country? “I am a Jew,” Barnett said, “and he chose me to be his thesis adviser. Does that answer your question?”

Post-graduate stints at the St. Louis Federal Reserve and the World Bank followed, and then Fayyad went to work for the International Monetary Fund in 1995 as representative to the Palestinian Authority, which had been established a year earlier, under the Oslo Accords. He credits a sense of patriotism with his return home and his decision, in 2001, to accept the portfolio of P.A. finance minister, a job that Yasser Arafat was forced to offer him because of angry domestic protests about P.A. graft and corruption.

Throughout the 1990s, poverty was endemic in the West Bank, and yet Arafat and his wife, Suha, lived like royalty. The International Monetary Fund estimated that from 1995 to 2000 Arafat stole $900 million from the Palestinian Authority. Fayyad, with his advanced degrees, Italian suits, and reputation for incorruptibility, set to work modernizing and un-corrupting this third-world political economy. In 2003, he gave an interview to Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes in which he accused Arafat of using a network of monopolies in commodities like flour and cement to siphon off most of the cash. According to David Samuels, who wrote about Arafat’s reign of corruption in a 2005 profile in The Atlantic, “the price of a ton of cement in Gaza [was] $74, of which $17 went into Arafat’s private bank account.” The biggest sieve, though, was the Petroleum Corporation, which operated as a P.A. slush fund. “If there was not money in the treasury, [Arafat] went to the Petroleum Corporation,” Fayyad told Stahl.

Ultimately, Fayyad shut down the petroleum company, prompting speculation that he would be murdered by vengeful agents of the PLO. What saved Fayyad’s life was a mixture of morality and cunning: in one of his first major reforms as finance minister, he started paying P.A. security forces by direct deposit. Previously, they’d been paid in cash, and officials who handled that cash—including even P.A. ministers—routinely skimmed from it. By popular estimate, 50 percent of P.A. security personnel’s income was stolen every pay cycle, so Fayyad’s switch to direct deposit effectively doubled their salaries. “After that,” Barnett said, “when Salam walked down the street, even in Gaza, the police saluted him. He was probably safer than Arafat.”

His name was soon synonymous with integrity and honesty among both Palestinians and Israelis. Fayyad became a fixture on both sides of the Green Line, frequenting both the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem and the King David Hotel in West Jerusalem. His ease with President George W. Bush was apparent, if only in kitsch form, when the president greeted the onetime-Longhorn prime minister, on his first visit to the Oval Office, with the Texas “Hook ’Em Horns” sign.

“We found him easy to deal with,” a Likud Knesset member, Silvan Shalom, told Haaretz in 2007, “and [former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon] believed that if money is being transferred to the Palestinians then at least it should go directly to him.” Daniel Seaman, who now runs Israeli Government Press Office, agreed in an interview: “When it comes to accountability, especially with money, he’s the best the Palestinians have.” Fayyad’s universal charm was surreally captured in 2005, when he attended the wedding of the daughter of Dov Weisglass, the ultra-Likudnik legal adviser to Sharon. The future Palestinian premier was seated next to the acting Israeli one, and the two talked amicably about the chuppah.

* * *

In 2006, Fayyad ran for a seat on the Palestinian Legislative Council, the P.A.’s parliament. He was on a so-called “Third Way” ticket with Yasser Abed Rabbo, a veteran politician, and Hanan Ashrawi, a human rights activist and disciple of the Columbia University postcolonial theorist Edward Said. Though the slate received a meager 2.4 percent of the vote, Fayyad and Ashrawi both won seats on the Council, and Fayyad’s reputation was strong enough in elite circles to ignite rumors that he’d be appointed prime minister in the forthcoming government. He responded at the time that he wouldn’t accept the position as long as Hamas—the Islamist party, which won the election in a landslide—refused to recognize Israel. So Fayyad instead once again became finance minister in a short-lived Fatah-Hamas coalition government. After Hamas attempted a coup in 2007, and a brutal civil war erupted between the two parties that left Hamas in control of Gaza, Abbas, the Fatah leader, named Fayyad prime minister of a new “independent” Palestinian Authority, governing the West Bank. The move violated the Palestinian Basic Law, a kind of proto-constitution, which mandates that a prime minister be approved by the Palestinian Legislative Council—where Hamas still held a majority—but Abbas invoked executive privilege, citing a time of “national emergency.” That Fayyad is technically an illegal prime minister is dismissed by his admirers. “Remember that Ben Gurion had very undemocratic techniques,” said Seaman of the Israeli Press Office. “Sometimes for the establishment of a country, that’s necessary.”

Two years after Fayyad’s installation, with the peace process again stalled and increasing signs that the Obama administration’s efforts to restart it are hopelessly idealistic, the socioeconomic disparity between Gaza and the West Bank is depressingly stark. Gaza now faces massive unemployment and starvation, worsened by last winter’s Israeli war against Hamas, while the West Bank’s economy is expected to grow at 5 percent in 2009, according to Fayyad’s old employer, the World Bank, usually a purveyor of gloomy annual forecasts. Ramallah is awash with construction cranes and new shopping centers. Since 2008, the World Bank found, 6,000 news jobs have been created. Trade with Israel is up 82 percent; tourism in Bethlehem is up 94 percent; and agricultural exports are up 200 percent. Since Netanyahu took office, the IDF has dismantled dozens of manned roadblocks, increasing mobility in the territory; according to numerous reports, there are also plans to allow several hundred Palestinian businessmen free access to Israel.

“They’ve been easing our restrictions, yes,” Fayyad acknowledged, “but we want more to produce a critical mass of change in a way that’s going to impress the business community. Incrementalism isn’t good.” The key to past and future successes, he said, is bolstering internal security, perhaps his biggest preoccupation: “The main reason we have seen improvements in the economic sphere is that—long before Israelis eased restrictions—there were improvements in our security. Security is as much a Palestinian need as it is an Israeli one.” Of the 25,000 members of the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, about 2,100 paramilitary troops have been trained by U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton; their capabilities are such that Fayyad has used them to conduct autonomous operations against sectarian militants, especially those affiliated with Hamas.

Fayyad is no longer “safer than Arafat” on the streets of Gaza. Since he replaced Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as P.A. prime minister, he’s become anti-Islamist No. 1 in the occupied territories. Hamas officials have called him a “traitor” and threatened an “earthquake” of a response to his administration. But so far, most of the tremors have been of Fayyad’s own making. In May, he ordered a raid on a Hamas stronghold in the West Bank town of Qalqilyah that resulted in two dead Hamas militants, three dead P.A. soldiers, and one dead bystander. According to Newsweek, PA security chiefs were “uniformly critical” of Fayyad’s decision not to give the militants more time to surrender. Hundreds of Palestinians saw the raid as a shameful echo of Israeli policy. “Dayton’s Army serves the Jews,” one 24-year-old Palestinian law student shouted at passing P.A. troops. Since Fayyad took office, his forces have arrested 8,000 Palestinians, 700 of whom are still in jail, prompting complaints of a creeping authoritarianism.

“Any excesses or violations of basic rights do not reflect government policy,” Fayyad told me. As to claims that he’s overseeing the emergence of a micro police state, Fayyad was quick to indicate what preceded him, a West Bank mired in “a very bad state of lawlessness and chaos.” Part of the goal of his administration, he insisted, is to build public and civil institutions that ensure that “excesses and violations” are dealt with accordingly, and that West Bankers feel safe but not sorry. “Now we have confidence in our capacity to deal with our own security by improving detention facilities, banning any form of abuse, mental or physical, dealing with crowds and demonstrations,” Fayyad said. As evidence that abuses are on the wane, he mentioned an anti-government protest that occurred 10 days before our conversation. “There was not a single cited violation by security services. We even received letters from the demonstrators acknowledging that.”

* * *

If any of Fayyad’s policies is liable to undermine his reputation as a law-and-order dogmatist, it’s the one with unquestionably revolutionary import. In late August, the prime minister announced the boldest Palestinian plan for nation-building ever conceived: the creation of a de facto Palestinian state by 2011. In a 65-page “blueprint,” Fayyad laid out a reunified country with enough infrastructure, municipal services, and tax incentives for foreign investors to make actual statehood viable—and, he hopes, legal statehood ultimately inevitable. Fayyad envisioned an oil refinery in the West Bank, an international airport in the Jordan Valley, and a reclaimed Qalandia airport just north of Jerusalem “to receive [President Obama] landing in his Air Force One,” as he gleefully told U.S. officials upon unveiling his blueprint. Obama seems willing to help that contingency come to pass; he promised an additional $20 million in aid to the P.A. shortly after Fayyad’s announcement.

Indeed, Fayyad’s goal to “end the occupation despite the occupation” by creating material conditions—or “facts on the ground,” as he puts it, co-opting a slogan of the Israeli pro-settlement community—enjoys broad international support. In September, Tony Blair, chief envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East—a diplomatic conglomerate that represents the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia—hosted the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee for Assistance to the Palestinians on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. There, donor nations offered $400 million to the P.A. by the end of 2009.

It also resembles, at first blush, Netanyahu’s own call for “economic peace,” which likewise places the immediate emphasis on bottom-up Palestinian development in anticipation of a formal political statehood. But if Fayyad is seconding an Israeli agenda, he’s the last to admit it. “Look, I’m an economist by training, not someone who would cast any doubts on the importance of economic improvements,” he told me. “Nevertheless, economics is just one leg on which a future Palestine must stand. To think that ‘economic peace’ is going to be a substitute for the political tract—that’s not something I would agree with.”

That doesn’t seem to be a risk. While Fayyad conceded that Israeli officials have read over his document “carefully and methodically,” he said he’s discouraged that both Netanyahu and Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman have balked at de facto statehood, arguing that it violates the letter of the Oslo Interim Agreement, established in 1994, which recognizes the PLO as the sole Palestinian negotiating partner for a permanent-status agreement. The Interim Agreement prohibits either side from taking “any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, pending the outcome of the permanent status agreement,” something that Netanyahu and Lieberman suggest Fayyad is in fact undertaking unilaterally. “My response to that,” Fayyad countered, “is that what we’re building toward statehood and getting ready for statehood, and that’s a Palestinian responsibility. It is unilateral. But it is positive unilateralism. Nowhere in that document do we mention the unilateral declaration of statehood. That’s a political declaration and that’s the purview of the PLO. So we’re very careful there.”

But Israel also hasn’t rejected Fayyad’s proposal outright, as Seaman of the Government Press Office points out. “What we’re doing is not negotiating through the media,” Seaman said. “You don’t just accept something like that. Anytime there’s a position we see as being acceptable or having room for thought, it becomes a starting point that deteriorates from there. Compared to everything else—Oslo, the Cairo Accords, President George W. Bush’s “road map”—what Fayyad’s suggesting is not inconceivable. But we worry that people on their side are not serious about taking responsibility”—he means security responsibility, Palestinians preventing attacks on Israel—“for what comes along with the plan.”

Palestinians aren’t unified behind Fayyad’s plan, either. Never mind Hamas; even Fatah power brokers have unequivocally dismissed Fayyad’s two-year plan as a bureaucrat’s capitulation to Zionism—a “governmental intifada.” “The PLO is dominated by Fatah members and Fatah senior cadres and not all of Fatah is supportive of Fayyad because he represents a new way of doing things,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, a Washington-based group devoted the emergence of a Palestinian state existing peacefully alongside Israel. “Fatah and the PLO have a long history of being revolutionary armed movements, and Fayyad’s approach is furthest from that.”

Fayyad isn’t reluctant to challenging PLO orthodoxy. In mid-August, right before he released his blueprint, Fayyad told Haaretz that he was agnostic on the question of whether or not Israel should be classified as a Jewish state—one of Netanyahu’s preconditions for restarting the peace process. “Israel’s character is Israel’s business and nobody else’s,” Fayyad said. A month earlier, he had told a large crowd at the Aspen Institute in Colorado that Jews would be allowed to live in any future nation of Palestine and they “certainly will not enjoy any less rights than Israeli Arabs enjoy now in the state of Israel.” That same month, the only substantive resolution passed at Fatah’s General Assembly was the one recommending an investigation into how, exactly, Israel assassinated Arafat.

But the prime minister is quick to play down these differences. “Both constitutionally and morally, the government I have is a Palestinian government, so clearly there cannot be a situation where there’s a Fatah contradiction or difference in position or view. I’m an independent, but we all operate under the umbrella of the PLO.” Ibish suggests that he’s done more to separate party and state than he cares to admit: “The president’s cabinet contains fewer Fatah members than it did before Fayyad came to power.” But the bulk of the credit, Ibish insists, is owed to the Palestinian president. “What Abbas acknowledged is that it’s healthy both for Fatah and the government to have some distance between each other. Fayyad’s approach to governance is consistent with the Abbas policy on the future of Palestine—that it is more important than pleasing every Fatah figure.”

* * *

Now that Abbas is likely on his way out—determined, he keeps saying, not to stay on as president—one must wonder if Fayyad harbors political ambitions of his own, to go along with his enormous geopolitical ambitions. He says he does not. “I have no plans to run for the presidency,” he told me. “I’m campaigning for de facto statehood on the strength of what we’ve been able to accomplish over the past several years.” Ibish, too, doesn’t see Fayyad breaking out of his administrative mold into a glad-hander and baby-kisser. “He’s not a politician in the classic sense, although he does have a party and they do stand people for elections. The time when he can stand as a viable independent candidate for president, however, is a long ways off.”

And, anyway, the fate of democracy itself in Palestine is uncertain. Hamas is planning to boycott the parliamentary elections set for January, and Ibish doesn’t see how a secular party like Fatah can ever realign with an Islamist party—and Iranian patron—like Hamas. “That’s a circle you can’t square,” he said. But he also noted, pointedly, that “a reconciliation that sacrifices the Fayyad strategy would not be worth it.” Fayyad disagrees. “Ultimately, reunification is going to happen because it’s a popular demand,” he said, insisting that it’s the sine qua non for Palestinian statehood. But the prime minister is vague—like, one might note, a politician—on how two fratricidal groups with contradictory purposes can be brought together again. He puts the most faith in his people’s awakening to material conditions.

Fayyad thinks like an economist, and though he may not be a political climber, his strategy is undoubtedly shrewd—offer the Palestinians a kind of Pepsi Challenge of self-determination: misery and religious totalitarianism in Gaza, or prosperity and growing freedom in the West Bank. Fayyad’s mantra is the economist’s version of the screenwriter’s imperative to show, not tell. “We’re not different from other countries with different parties and ideologies,” he said. “Our future will be decided by the Palestinian people, not by arguing on split-screen television. I am trying to produce results on the ground and then let the people decide.”

Iran, Israel Attend Secret Nuclear Meet in Cairo [Haaretz]

Palestinian Official: We’re Ready for Talks With U.S., but Not Israel [Haaretz]

So does this mean Nozette a spy who got caught or a megalomaniac with high-level clearance? So far, signs suggest the latter. “The complaint does not allege that the government of Israel or anyone acting on its behalf violated US law,” the AP says.

FBI Nabs Scientist on Espionage Charges [JPost]

There is also the matter of Goldstone’s flagging faith in the body that commissioned the report in the first place—the United National Human Rights Council, which in its decision to pass the report onto the General Assembly affirmed only those claims critical of Israel. The HRC’s language, Goldstone charges, did not reflect the even-handedness with which he indicted both sides in the war. The jurist told Agence France-Press, “There is not a single phrase condemning Hamas as we have done in the report.” Yes well, anyone familiar with the short but sordid history of the Human Rights Council—an organization that, with the encouragement of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, has called five out of ten special sessions to condemn Israel, yet none to call to account Sudan for the ongoing genocide in Darfur—might have anticipated.

The question now becomes this: If Goldstone wishes to portray his own report as a tentative first-draft study and not a thorough and responsible basis for legal action, and he wishes to distance himself from the organization that commissioned it—where does that leave the 575-page document responsible for so much mayhem and ill will around the world?

Goldstone Slams UNHRC for Ignoring Hamas [JTA]

According to the series’ website, Ayrilik “brings to life the bleeding wound of Palestine,” and needless to say, the Israeli government is incensed. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman called the Turkish ambassador in Israel to a meeting with high-ranking Israeli officials, and one of his deputies, Naor Gilon, told the envoy, “This kind of incitement is likely to lead to physical harm being done to Jews and Israelis who arrive in Turkey as tourists.” Lieberman went further, accusing the Turkish government—the show runs on a state-owned television network—of being complicit in an incitement to anti-Semitic violence.

Meanwhile, yesterday Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the “conscience of our people” impelled him to exclude Israel from joint war game exercises. “I had to be the voice that expresses the existence of my people,” Erdogan said in an interview with the al-Arabiya new channel in Dubai, “and my people were rejecting Israel’s participation.”

Turkish TV Show Has IDF Soldiers ‘Killing’ Palestinian Kids [Ynet]
Erdogan: My People Rejected Israel’s Participation [Ynet]

Fayyad to Obama: Tell Israel no Mickey Mouse State [Reuters]

The big question is whether this memo reflects Palestinian Authority President and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas’s view (Abbas has previously been sanguine about the status quo, citing dramatic economic and security gains in the West Bank as reason enough not to pursue a peace deal with the Israelis as quickly as the United States and Europe would like), or if it reflects the views of Fatah’s Office of Mobilization and Organization, which issued the memo. Now that Abbas has come out against advancing the Goldstone Report—the U.N. Human Rights Council investigation that accused the IDF of war crimes in Gaza—to the Security Council, Palestinians could also argue that Abbas has similarly “caved” to White House pressure.

Fatah Memo: We Lost Hope in Obama for Caving to Zionist Pressure [Haaretz]

There’s little love lost between the Netanyahu government and J Street, but by refusing to even engage with the organization, Israel is more or less delegitimizing it as a foreign ally of the Jewish state—an embarrassment that’s going to be hard to combat in J Street’s U.S. public-relations work. Imagine a pro-American group in, say, Egypt being told that the State Department won’t meet with its representatives because it puts American interests at risk.

‘J Street Could Hurt Israel’s Interests’

On the other hand, fellow laureate Elie Wiesel is pleased with the decision to honor someone who is just starting to make change in the world, pointing out that “the mystery of beginnings is part of Jewish mysticism.” He is also one of the few to acknowledge a milestone the Nobel committee left out: “He is the first black person to hold that high office.”

And one unstinting hat tip came from Israeli President Shimon Peres, himself a past winner and now acting as Israel’s best face forward in trying to repair weakened relations with the United States. Peres wrote Obama directly, saying, “Very few leaders if at all were able to change the mood of the entire world in such a short while with such a profound impact. You provided the entire humanity with fresh hope, with intellectual determination, and a feeling that there is a lord in heaven and believers on earth.”

After that characterization, a settlement freeze and de-nuked Iran should be easy, no?

Barack Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize [Washington Post]
World Reaction to a Nobel Surprise [NY Times]
Obama’s Fellow Laureate Wiesel: ‘I Confess Surprise’ [NPR]

Given Oren’s state employment, his essay might be written off as the work of a stooge—were it not for the fact that his civilian scholarship and analysis has appeared in TNR for years and been taken quite seriously. Bibi may be ideological, but he’s not stupid, and Oren’s appointment looks now to be almost enough to make up for the disaster of Avigdor Lieberman’s.

Deep Denial [TNR]

Even if this is bluster, the reason behind the bluster matters. Abbas is taking heat from Arab leaders who believe the rumors and news reports that he backed off of advancing the Goldstone report—the United Nations investigation into the Israeli assault on Gaza that blamed the IDF for war crimes—to the U.N. Security Council. Seen as a devastating blow to Israel’s international standing, the report was to have been the P.A.’s easy cudgel to wield against Israel—but Abbas, according to this narrative, buckled under White House pressure not to jeopardize any prospective deal with the Netanyahu government. The riots have only added to the sense that Abbas has lost whatever remaining confidence Palestinian supporters had in him to re-establish a unity government with Hamas and strengthen his hand against Israel. The fear, then, is that politics has gone out of the politicians and into the hands of aspiring terrorists.

Erekat: Israel is ‘Lighting a Big Fire’ [JPost]

Benjamin Disraeli: Dead Cool [Daily Beast]
Related:
Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]
What Disraeli Can Teach the GOP [Tablet]

Upon returning to Honduras on September 21, where he was offered refuge at the Brazilian Embassy, Zelaya said that “Israeli mercenaries” were subjecting him to “high-frequency radiation.” One ardent zelayista O’Grady cites is Honduran radio host David Romero Ellner, who spouts charming insights like this one: “Sometimes I ask myself if Hitler wasn’t right when he wanted to finish with that race, through the famous holocaust, because if there are people that are harmful to this country, they are the Jews, the Israelites.”

Revolutionary Anti-Semitism [WSJ]

Whatever legal ramifications ensue from the Goldstone Report, Yossi Klein Halevi argues in The New Republic that its very composition and global reception “may well mark the end of Israel’s limited wars against terrorist groups. Israel cannot afford to continue to be drawn into mini-wars against terrorists hiding behind their own civilians to attack Israeli civilians, given that each such conflict inexorably draws the Jewish state one step closer toward pariah status. Limited victories on the battlefield are being turned into major defeats in the arena of world opinion.”

Palestinians Halt Push on War Report [NYT]
The Goldstone Factor [TNR]

New Israeli Data Pointing Toward An Erosion of The Middle Class [Forward]

Survey: Jews back Obama, by narrower margins [Politico]

Though it may only be a symbolic gesture coming from a forum not known for its sympathies with Zionism, the resolution does benefit Israel in implicitly censuring one of its most hostile neighbors, whose rulers have pledged to wipe Israel off the map. Another minor triumph for the Netanyahu government was Obama’s climb-down in rhetoric against settlement building—he spoke yesterday of the need to “restrain” it as opposed to “freeze” it, a word choice that has conservative pundits skeptical of Obama’s initial policy claiming, “I told you so.”

U.N. Security Council Adopts Measure on Nuclear Arms [NYT]

EXCLUSIVE: Israel Makes Secret Offer on Settlements [Washington Times]

When asked how aggressive the Obama administration should be in forestalling an Israeli attack, Brzezinski reminded Posner that the U.S. still controls Iraqi air space and added, just to be clear, “If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse.” By “Liberty,” Brzezinski was referring to the incident in which Israeli jets and torpedo boats hit the USS Liberty in international waters during the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel said it was an accident, the result of friendly fire. Brzezinski, unless he chooses his analogies carelessly, seems to think otherwise.

How Obama Flubbed His Missile Message [Daily Beast]

The Wall Street Journal, where Kristol wrote a monthly column for 25 years, carries an unsigned editorial pointing out that he “helped shape the basis for many opposition ideas to the modern political left, in both domestic and foreign policy. American politics rarely bends for long to the ideas of one person, a modest truth that Irving Kristol understood. So it should be noted that he enlisted a small army of similarly minded intellectuals (‘like-minded’ would be an oxymoron among this crowd) to carry the fight.”

James Q. Wilson in the Journal writes: “Irving Kristol’s talents were remarkable: He did for The Public Interest what he had earlier done for Commentary, the Reporter and Encounter—find good people and induce them to say important things even when it did not improve the revenues of the magazine. The Public Interest always relied on financial support from a few friends and rarely sold more than 12,000 copies. That didn’t bother Irving at all: What counts is who reads it, not how many read it. And for 40 years a lot of important people did read it.”

As for Kristol’s most memorable line—that a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality—Kristol’s friend and City Journal editor-at-large Myron Magnet observed: “What he really meant, of course, was simply a liberal who’d been mugged—who’d seen that all the liberal, welfare-state ideals for the uplift of the poor, and especially the minority poor, had in the end produced a criminal underclass, exactly the opposite of the intended uplift. The good intentions counted for nothing with him and even sparked a certain dry contempt; it was the result that mattered.”

Commentary Editor-in-Chief John Podhoretz remembers Kristol’s acumen as a fundraiser for little magazines. Having started the conservative college magazine Midway (later Counterpoint) at the University of Chicago in 1979, Podhoretz “called [Kristol], and he instructed me on the fine art of writing a grant proposal to a new foundation he had begun called the Institute for Educational Affairs. A few weeks later, he called me to report that a grant of $2,000 had been approved and, moreover, that he had used our little magazine as an example of what might be done on college campuses to encourage non-Leftist thinking among students. The board of the foundation found his pitch compelling, and it was decided that efforts should be made to encourage the creation of other publications like Counterpoint. From this seedling came a project that would, by the mid-1980s, lead to the creation of more than 50 college newspapers and magazines across the country engaged in a vital intellectual project to bring ideological diversity to campus life.”

Slate’s Christopher Hitchens recalls a dinner in Manhattan at which he and Kristol were in attendance and from which Hitchens took away the following: “Irving Kristol’s great charm … was that he didn’t care overmuch for the charm business. Most of his celebrated quips and interventions had a tough-guy street feel to them, a manner probably retained from his Marxist days. Typical of him (and I think also truthful) was the claim that he hadn’t known about CIA funding for Encounter but wouldn’t have given much of a damn if he had known.”

Damon Linker at The New Republic is less flattering: “What’s less often recognized is that while Kristol was growing more conservative he was also undergoing a different sort of transformation—from a dispassionate analyst of American politics and culture to a fully engaged advocate for a comprehensive political ideology. Lamentably, it is this change more than Kristol’s gradual drift to the right that may have done more to shape the contemporary conservative mind.”

The New York Times noted that Kristol “never sought celebrity; in fact, he was puzzled by writers who craved it…. He was happier consulting with a congressman like Jack Kemp about the new notion of supply-side economics and then watching with satisfaction as Mr. Kemp converted President Ronald Reagan to the theory.”

And The Washington Post quotes Karl Rove as saying that Kristol “made it a moral imperative to rouse conservatism from mainstream Chamber of Commerce boosterism to a deep immersion in ideas.”

Israel seeks Obama backing on Gaza probe [Haaretz]

“[F]or them it is about the ‘good’ oppressed peoples’ fight against their enemies, the ‘outsiders’, who attack ‘their’ culture, however that may be defined; the ‘good people’ who are lied to and cheated by propaganda or other influences from ‘outside’.

And since one of the oldest conspiracy theories on record is that the Jews control the world, Vogel writes, it makes perfect sense that Chavez and his allies (like Nicaraguan head of state Daniel Ortega and Bolivian President Evo Morales) would align themselves with Holocaust deniers, theocrats, and guerilla proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah.

False Friends [Qantara]
Related: United By Hate [Boston Review]

Garlasco was outed as “Flak 88,” a frequent visitor to websites devoted to discussing combat paraphernalia of the Third Reich. In one forum, he was quoted as saying, “That is so cool! The leather SS jacket makes my blood go cold it is so COOL!”—a sign of obsessiveness about a macabre subject that led various bloggers, as well as Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, to question his motive for reporting on alleged human rights abuses committed by Israel in wartime. As NGO Monitor, a group that investigates supposed anti-Israel biases and inaccuracies in human rights reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict, wrote at the time, “It is bizarre enough for a ‘human rights’ activist to choose the name of a gun as an internet screen name and for his car license plate. Coupled with the neo-Nazi iconography, however, the adoption of “Flak88” as Garlasco’s alter ego is evidence at the very least of highly questionable moral judgment.”

At first, HRW issued a press release vigorously defending Garlasco and his work. It claimed his extracurricular interests were purely scholarly and not at all driven by a covert or latent sympathy for fascism. Garlasco also wrote a self-defense for the Huffington Post, saying that he regretted “causing pain and offense with a handful of juvenile and tasteless postings I made on two websites that study Second World War artifacts.”

Rights Group Assailed for Analyst’s Nazi Collection [NYT]
Responding to accusations [HuffPost]
Earlier: HRW Official Collects Nazi Memorabilia
Related: Broken Watch [Tablet]

Jewish Leaders Converging on D.C. for Advocacy Day on Iran [JTA]

A Hamas delegation is due to arrive in Cairo Tuesday, on the heels of several high-profile visits to the city by the group’s leader Khalid Meshal. This announcement of intra-Palestinian reconciliation was timed to coincide with imminent release of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, who has spent more than four years in a Hamas prison, and comes about a week before P.A. President and Fatah head Mahoud Abbas is set to meet with Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu as a preliminary to peace talks.

Hamas, Fatah Set to Reconcile by 2010 [Haaretz]

Israel Tries to Placate Settlers by Allowing Some Construction Before Freeze [NYT]
Lieberman: Despite Settlement Freeze, Right Won’t Topple Gov’t [JPost]

The agency has wanted the U.S. and other Western government to disclose more of their intelligence suggesting Iran has belligerent intentions (specifically, against Israel)—the mullahs, along with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have long insisted they want nuclear energy for civilian purposes only. Nevertheless, the forthcoming report is said to call for tougher penalties on Iran, which has failed to answer the IAEA’s outstanding questions.

Iran: US ‘forged’ documents to prove we are building bomb [J-Post]

According to Steven Bayme at the American Jewish Committee, U.S. Jewish organizations have lost 25 percent of their wealth since the market went south (though Bernie Madoff’s graft surely helped fritter away institutional funds and private wealth that would have gone toward donations, too). As a result, writes Rachel Zoll at the AP, many synagogues are doing what they can to offer free admission to Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana services, including putting off repairs, cutting jobs, and canceling programs.

Dilemma for High Holidays [Chicago Sun-Times]
Synagogues Under Stress as High Holy Days Approach [AP]

According to Eyal Zisser, a senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, any possible sequel to 2006’s Israel-Lebanon War would be “ten times worse.” This is due, he and other experts agree, to three factors: Hezbollah’s re-amped military capability, its top-down infiltration of Lebanon’s political system, and Israel’s adoption, since the end of the last war, of the so-called Dahiya Doctrine, which stipulates that Israel now makes no distinction between terrorist or paramilitary groups and state government in the event that the former is in any way represented in the latter. “What Israel is doing now,” said Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Center for the Defense of Democracies, “is trying to remind everybody, ‘If you start a war, this time we’ll destroy the place.’” Indeed, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “If Hezbollah joins the Lebanese government as an official entity, let it be clear that the Lebanese government, as far as we are concerned, is responsible for any attack—any attack—from its area on the state of Israel. It cannot hide and say: ‘It’s Hezbollah, we don’t control them.’”

How likely is Hezbollah to provoke Israel into war again?

It pays to revisit how the last war, known to Israelis as the Second Lebanon War (the first was in 1982), broke out three years ago. On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israeli border towns to distract from a more carefully coordinated attack: a cross-border raid by Hezbollah agents, who ultimately killed three IDF soldiers and kidnapped two more. Although Beirut, under the premiership of Fouad Siniora, officially disclaimed responsibility for these assaults, Israel ultimately placed the blame on his government, which included two Hezbollah ministers in Siniora’s cabinet. Thus, particularly after the first week of targeted aerial bombardment of known Hezbollah strongholds and weapons depots, the IDF began destroying large swaths of Lebanon’s infrastructure to preclude the enemy’s maneuverability. In the end, 400 miles of roads, 73 bridges, 350 schools (said to house Hezbollah militants), two hospitals, 15,000 homes, and Beirut’s Rafiq Hariri International Airport were all hit or destroyed by Israeli war planes. Over 1,000 Lebanese—mostly civilians—were killed and a million more displaced. Israel lost 44 civilians and close to 100 soldiers, and up to half a million Israelis in the southern border towns were displaced. The war ended officially with the passage of United Nations Resolution 1701, which called for the complete disarmament of Hezbollah and Israel’s full withdrawal from Lebanon, and the joint deployment of the Lebanese Army and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to patrol southern Lebanon.

At the international level, Israel’s allies cited its right to self-defense and George W. Bush included the conflict in the broader “war on terror,” but it precipitated massive protests in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. Inside Israel, the self-recriminations were particularly searing. By August 25, 63 percent of Israelis polled wanted Olmert to resign because of his perceived mismanagement of the fighting, which failed to rescue the kidnapped IDF soldiers (whose remains were later transported home). By October, the IDF’s chief education officer was the first military or government official to publicly declare that Israel had lost the war—an assessment that was validated by the Winograd Commission Report, which found that the war was a “missed opportunity” that ended “without a defined military victory.” And yet, Israeli introspection, according to Zisser, should not be mistaken for weariness or hesitation. “There is agreement in Israel that a war against Hezbollah can’t be won. You can’t occupy Lebanon, you can’t destroy an Iranian proxy,” he said. “The question is: how painful the blow should be dealt.” The current Israeli strategy, he pointed out, is to avoid another escalation but to conclude it much more quickly if it does happen. “One of the problems last time was that Bush gave Israel a free hand,” Zisser said. “The war would have come to an end three days after it started. As far as Israel was concerned, two or three weeks were a waste of time.”

And since 2006, little inside Lebanon has changed to forestall Hezbollah from committing further acts of adventurism, according to Lee Smith, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute. As he indicated, even though the pro-Western, Sunni-aligned March 14 Alliance won a decisive victory in June’s election, the nature of Lebanon’s pluralist political system means that Hezbollah, whose own Shiite-Islamist alliance came in second, is still accorded influential roles in the upcoming government. According to Haaretz, it is widely expected that newly elected Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s 30-member cabinet will include 15 ministers from his own coalition, 10 ministers from Hezbollah’s, and five independents to be chosen by Lebanon’s Maronite Christian President Michel Suleiman. To get a sense of how precarious and vulnerable such a system is, Smith said, Hariri is forced to include a terrorist group widely rumored to have planned and executed the 2005 car-bomb assassination of his father, Rafiq Hariri, whose murder was the event which sparked the Cedar Revolution and ended Syria’s decade-long occupation of Lebanon.

“The government, whether under Siniora or Hariri,” said Smith, “can’t restrain Hezbollah from doing whatever it wants, whether it’s starting another war with Israel or going through West Beirut and murdering Sunnis. Lebanon isn’t really a functioning democracy, it’s a place where a terrorist organization has weapons and sets the agenda.”

However, Hezbollah is restrained by one entity: Iran, its patron and arms dealer. “There’s no such thing as a non-state actor,” Badran said. “If Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khameini decides to activate Hezbollah—either to retaliate against a future Israeli bombing of Iran’s nuclear program, or for some other reason—then another war will happen.” He added that a “game-changer” that might prompt a preemptive strike by Israeli would be Hezbollah’s acquisition of certain anti-aircraft weaponry which could take out IAF warplanes. At all events, Badran said, the Dahiya Doctrine makes any future conflict nationally encompassing.

Coined by Maj. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, the Dahiya Doctrine refers to the IDF’s destruction of a Shiite quarter of Lebanon in 2006 after that quarter had been overrun by Hezbollah commandos. The rules of engagement for that operation, said Badran, have now been expanded into both a means of deterrence as well as a broad-stroke plan of attack should deterrence fail. In that grim contingency, he added, where government buildings and civil institutions in Beirut are pounded, Lebanon’s center would likely fall, creating a power vacuum or civil war. “The result would be sectarian religious warfare, which nobody wants—certainly not the Israelis.”

Zisser said that within hours of any future war, Israel would take out Lebanon’s electricity, its main airport would be incapacitated, and major roads and bridges would be destroyed. Strategically, Badran noted, this makes sense because Hezbollah’s defenses are stationed mainly in the north, above the Litani River. Citing the Dahiya Doctrine, and the IDF’s release of a video allegedly showing Hezbollah agents trying to commandeer residential homes in a southern Lebanese village (before being turned back by the villagers and Lebanese soldiers), Badran painted a hypothetical scenario in which Hezbollah had to mobilize. “Let’s say Hezbollah tries to move weaponry and personnel into the Shouf Mountains, which they did in 2006 when they moved into Mari, a Druze village. The villagers denied them access then, and the Israelis worked with them by hitting various access routes which Hezbollah was using. Now what happens if next time the villagers prefer to avoid skirmishes with Hezbollah? What will Israel do then—level the village?”

Abbas said last week that he’d be willing to meet with his Israeli counterpart. He then clarified yesterday, saying he wouldn’t meet with Netanyahu until the P.M. agreed to a complete settlement freeze. Still, rumors of an impending meeting prompted Shmuel Rosner of The New Republic to write, “the agreement of all sides to meet signals an end to the antagonism and bluster that have characterized U.S.-Israel relations since the beginning of Obama’s term”—which is as close to enthusiasm about peace as any Israeli pundit has come in the last six months. Indeed, the Haaretz disclosure runs counter to claims made recently by Israeli President Shimon Peres that a talk is being planned and facilitated by the U.S.

Diplomats: ‘Trilateral Obama Meet With Abbas, Netanyahu Highly Unlikely’ [Haaretz]

Qaddafi Cancels Plans to Stay in New Jersey [NYT]

Report: Meshal to Fly to Cairo to Approve Shalit Deal [Haaretz]

This news comes just after Palestinian sources said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas would meet, albeit informally, with Netanyahu at the upcoming U.N. General Assembly, and P.A. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s announcement that the West Bank would become a “de facto state” by 2011, based on its progress on development and security.

U.S. Drops Demand for Israel Building Freeze in East Jerusalem [Haaretz]

Palestinian Officials: ‘Abbas Willing to Meet With Netanyahu’ [JPost]
Earlier: Palestinian State by 2011, Fayyad Says

Palestinian PM: We’ll Form de Facto State by 2011 [Haaretz]

Meanwhile, East Jerusalem is the source for further real-estate controversy as the city is denying claims by a pro-settler group that it approved the construction of 104 new houses in Ras al-Amud , a predominantly Arab neighborhood. The Ir Amim association, which opposes the construction, said that the plan is build a bridge to connect Ras al-Amud to the Jewish neighborhood of Ma’aleh Hazeitim, a claim that the city denies. The controversy has fractured the Jerusalem City Council—in favor of more conservative, pro-settler elements—with some members, such as Meir Margalit, a Meretz Party councilman, wishing the United States would bring greater pressure to bear on the Netanyahu government to squash such expansionism.

Salloukh Denies Peres’ Claim Hizbullah Has 80,000 Missiles [Daily Star]
Group Says Left ‘Distorting’ East Jerusalem Construction Plan [Ynet]

But here’s the interesting part: Some suspect that Scotland has had the wrong man all along. One theory, described in 1989 by David Tal of Israel’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, holds that Iran, not Libya, was actually behind the attack, that it was revenge for the accidental downing of an Iranian passenger plane by the USS Vincennes over the Straits of Hormuz in 1988. According to Tal, the attack itself was carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a terrorist cell based in Damascus. Tal wrote that evidence was found on Popular Front agents caught in West Germany just months before the bombing, including bombs designed like the one that took out the Pan Am plane, and flight timetables. In 1997, Abolghassem Mesbahi, an Iranian dissident, told German officials that Iran was indeed behind Lockerbie—a claim Iran denied.

Scotland Releases Lockerbie Bomber [AP/JPost]

ElBaradei, a 2005 Nobel Peace Prize winner, is vacating his position this November, and the Israelis are hoping that his replacement, Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano, will be more forthcoming about how far along Iran’s nuclear program is. The IAEA has in the past referred Iran to the United Nations Security Council for being in breach of various regulations governing uranium enrichment, something Iran officially claims it’s doing for “peaceful” energy-producing purposes.

Sources: UN watchdog hiding evidence on Iran nuclear program [Haaretz]

[ObamaSmearBusters.com]

According to the HRW report, titled “White Flag Deaths,” IDF soldiers fired on a convoy of unarmed civilians waving white flags. “All available evidence,” the report’s introduction reads, “indicates that Israeli forces had control of the areas in question, no fighting was taking place there at the time, and Palestinian fighters were not hiding among the civilians who were shot.” HRW has called upon the Israeli government to investigate these allegations; in response, the IDF has said that its soldiers are ordered not to fire on anyone waving white flags, but that Hamas militants often used civilians draped in them as subterfuge. While HRW does seem to have a penchant for hiring people with feverish ideological backgrounds, the charges are serious enough to warrant investigation.

Who Is Human Rights Watch’s Joe Stork? [Commentary translation of Ma’ariv article]
Previously: Human Rights Watch Goes to Saudi Arabia
White Flag Deaths [Human Rights Watch]

Although Fatah’s sixth general assembly, which concluded last week in Bethlehem, produced little more than conspiracy theories about how Yasser Arafat died (guess who killed him?), pro forma denunciations of Israel, and a refusal to recognize the country as a “Jewish state” (something Netanyahu demands before moving forward on a peace deal himself), there is yet another indication that Abbas and company are content to inhabit a wait-and-see mode. The reason is that, fundamentally, they agree with Netayanhu’s “economic peace” plan, whereby Israel lessens strictures on enterprise and investment in the Palestinian territory, while not committing itself to any political rapprochement with Palestinians. Consider this interview Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad gave to Haaretz for today’s edition, in which he sounds almost conciliatory on the Jewish identity question: “The character of Israel, as the total character that Israel would like to have, is Israel’s own choice. It characterizes itself in the way that it wishes to characterize itself. Why raise it now?” He also sounds like a second for Netanyahu when he says: “I realized that security was the glue between a thriving economy and proper government and achieving liberty for the Palestinian people.”

So Abbas has it both ways: he gets to watch with delight as the Obama administration puts the screws to Israel while Israel continues to facilitate the development of Abbas’s home turf. Who wouldn’t like that status quo?

Palestinian PM to Haaretz: It’s not our business whether Israel is Jewish [Haaretz]
Related: The Lucky Likudnik [Tablet]

Netanyahu’s surer hold on power is due in large part to savvy political instincts. As he admitted in private discussion with colleagues recently, reported by Haaretz, his July speech at Bar-Ilan University, in which he for the first time consented to Palestinian statehood, cooled somewhat the domestic media’s hatred of him. But Bibi’s boom is also related to a more ephemeral political phenomenon: luck.

For starters, the ongoing legal woes of his controversial foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who looks set to resign any day, have only consolidated Netanyahu’s singular influence in a top-heavy and overloaded cabinet. Second, the recent turmoil in Iran helped legitimize a perennial pessimist who’s been saying for years that Islamist governments can’t be negotiated with. And perhaps most impressively, Netanyahu has benefited from taking on Barack Obama—perhaps the only politician in the world of whom this could be said.

Netanyahu’s skills as a political tactician have improved greatly in the last decade. Indeed, understanding the unlikely successes of his second term requires knowing a little about the failures of his first.

Originally elected in 1996, half a year after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Netanyahu was never fully embraced by a constituency still reeling from the late failure of dovish hopes. Back then, “he was lucky to be elected,” said Jerusalem Post pundit Shmuel Rosner. “He was never accepted by elites who thought he was just this young, hawkish guy who stole the election from Shimon Peres. He never got the legitimacy he needed, either from the Israeli people or from the Clinton administration.” According to Noah Pollak, a blogger on the Middle East for Commentary, who’s regularly in touch with officials in the prime minister’s office, Netanyahu was seen back then as an “impediment to the peace process, the naysayer,” running against an enormous tide of sympathy for reconciliation with the Arabs. As such, he was someone whom Bill Clinton—always perceived as a friend to the Jewish state—could easily undercut by appealing directly to the Israeli people. Netanyahu’s response was to buckle to U.S. pressure, making concessions to the Palestinians that he had vowed during the campaign never to make, such as withdrawing from 80 percent of Hebron in 1997, and signing the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, which outlined further withdrawals. Both of these gestures alienated Netanyahu’s allies on the far right and cost him reelection in 1999. As Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote at the time, “the would-be Israeli Churchill began to morph into a Chamberlain.”

Other neophyte mistakes, too, complicated Netanyahu’s maiden effort at governing. Matt Silver, a communications professor at the Academic College of Emek Yezreel, remembers vividly the unsuccessful assassination attempt of Hamas leader Khalid Meshaal in 1997, which Silver viewed then as Netanyahu’s attempted macho rite of passage gone awry. “One journal called him a ‘mysterious bungler,’” Silver recalled. “He had to prove himself, that he wasn’t this Johnny-come-lately, [that] he was a real Israeli.”

No longer. According to Sherman and Rosner, Netanyahu has learned from serving in subordinate roles in government in the past decade. His tenure as both foreign minister and finance minister under Ariel Sharon, many long-time observers of his career argue, taught him the value of compromise and alliance-building—what his critics in the Israeli press, including Nahum Barnea, the influential reporter for Yedioth Aronoth, call “opportunism.” To Rosner, however, it was telling that this time around, Netanyahu reached out to the Labor Party, which received only 13 seats in the Knesset in the last election, when he could have simply forged a narrow right-wing coalition government. Retaining as defense minister Ehud Barak, with whom Netanyahu served in the same IDF unit and is said to get along with well personally, was also savvy. “He learned this from Sharon,” said Rosner. “Bibi never liked Sharon, never trusted him, but he learned from his achievements.”

And in the confrontation with the White House over settlement expansion in the West Bank—the starkest challenge Netanyahu has faced so far—Netanyahu has astonishingly emerged less scathed than Obama. Unlike in 1996, the U.S. gambit of taking the case straight to the Israeli people has backfired, Rosner and Pollak said, with Israelis siding with Netanyahu over an even more internationally admired Democratic president. (Since announcing the settlement freeze, Obama’s approval rating in Israel, according to a Jerusalem Post-sponsored Smith Research poll, has dropped from 31 percent to six percent.)

“Obama began exactly where Clinton left off—at Camp David,” Pollak said. “He tried to weaken Bibi politically by making the Israeli public fear a crisis in the relationship with the U.S. But Obama, unlike Clinton, was elected with the baggage of Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi, and Bill Ayers—these were strikes against him in Israel. He compounded them by giving his first interview to Al Arabiya, and making his first two big speeches in Arab Muslim venues, Turkey and Cairo.”

Pollak suggests that Obama should have tried to cultivate a stronger rapport with the Israeli street before attempting any “arm-twisting.” Furthermore, halting construction in settlements that will likely go to Israel in any prospective peace agreement—particularly the East Jerusalem suburb of Ma’ale Adumin, which has 30,000 residents—is not nearly the cause célèbre in Jerusalem that it is in Washington. “There is no way you can have an agreement with Israel on a settlement freeze that would be meaningful,” said Barnea, who thinks Obama should have simply called for a freeze, which would have made Netanyahu sweat, but not tried to negotiate the details of one, which Israel can’t do, “legally or politically.” Negotiating the freeze “didn’t benefit Bibi,” Barnea added, “it damaged the Obama administration, and made it look ineffective in the eyes of the Arabs.”

Although Netanyahu has dismantled more outposts and roadblocks in the West Bank than did his predecessor Ehud Olmert, and vowed to double the number of Israeli inspectors of settlement construction, these seeming capitulations to White House demands have been carried out with little or no publicity.  According to Pollak, that’s the price of being a pariah prime minister—not receiving credit for aiding Palestinians—but so far, at least, Netanyahu’s coalition hasn’t rebelled against him again for these concessions.

Additionally, an unforeseen international crisis has tacitly bolstered Netanyahu’s credibility. Ayatollah Khameini’s ultra-violent reaction to protests in Iran, following the contested reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also appeared to justify what Israel’s most recognizable national security hardliner has been saying for years: that the mullahs can’t be trusted. Yet Netanyahu has not sought to take credit for being proven right. According to Daniel Seaman, director of the Israeli Government Press Office, Netanyahu’s reticence was strategic. “There’s an old Hebrew saying, ‘The work of the righteous is done by others.’ To people, it’s clear where Bibi stood on this issue. If he starts saying something about it, there’s going to be an opposition. This way, he gets all the benefits out of being right without claiming to be, and the opposition isn’t emboldened.”

Finally, Avigdor Lieberman, the far-right nationalist head of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, whom Netanyahu appointed foreign minister much to the chagrin of liberals at home and abroad, is facing a likely indictment for corruption charges, and may soon be a headache no more. Lieberman has promised to resign if he’s indicted, and a source in the prime minister’s office said that in that likely scenario, Netanyahu will keep the position vacant. “He can say he’s leaving it open to Lieberman until he’s exonerated, or leave it open to entice Kadima,” the source said. According to this theory, Netanyahu will run the foreign ministry alongside Barak—longtime chum of Hillary Clinton and Israeli’s preferred diplomat to the United States and Western Europe—and Danny Ayalon, the current deputy foreign minister, who represents the gentler face of Yisrael Beiteinu. As a troika, these men have all along been crafting Israel’s foreign policy without the help or input of Lieberman, who’s been there as a salve to his base. In fact, already “Lieberman is foreign minister in name only,” said Rosner.

Of course, Netanyahu’s fortunes may soon turn again. “Public opinion here, like in the states, is very flexible and exposed to mood,” said Barnea. “Bibi is lucky because, temporarily, the day-to-day security is basically good. Since the end of Operation Gaza, we don’t have any rockets, any terrorist attacks inside Israel. It’s springtime for the government.”

Barnea is quick to point out that this is only the beginning of a tenuous coalition; what’s more, it’s the summer, when as many as 400,000 Israelis (roughly 10 percent of the population) are vacationing abroad in Turkey, Europe, or the United States. “The feeling is that the country is on hold, in a way,” said Barnea, who, in covering Fatah’s sixth general assembly in Bethlehem, said the only thing people he interviewed wanted to talk about was food. “There’s no political news, only criminal. So let’s talk about the murder of a homosexual in Tel Aviv, or the murder of a baby by a father who wants to revenge his wife. If this is Bibi’s luck, OK. I call it August.”

Nevertheless, a rosier picture has thus emerged of Netanyahu’s prospects than anyone last February would have painted. “The day after Bibi formed his government, people were giving it a year at most,” said Silver. “Now it’s two or three years.”

Settlers agree to evacuate West Bank outpost Bnei Adam [Haaretz]

Some more Jewish defenders of Mary Robinson [JTA]

“It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling,” Roth said. “My character gets to beat Nazis to death. That’s something I could watch all day. My parents are very strong about Holocaust education. My grandparents got out of Poland and Russia and Austria, but their relatives did not.”

What drives Tarantino nuts about Jewish perspectives on Jewish violence is the “hand-wringing,” the mishegas over whether or not taking a life—even if it’s a Nazi life—is morally defensible. Having not seen Ed Zwick’s Defiance, about a group of East European Jewish resistance fighters during World War II, Tarantino rightly guessed that there’d be trigger pulling, following by hair-pulling, over the righteousness of fighting back.

This is an old quandary that Goldberg doesn’t attempt to answer, but one that reminds me of something Moshe Dayan once told his students at an Israeli military academy. Having war-gamed the beginning of an IDF confrontation with Arab armies in the Middle East, Dayan asked for the students’ tactical gambits. “And I want no Jewish solutions here,” he said, meaning no agonized thinking that would paralyze quick, decisive actions. Looking at Israel today, one wonders if Jewish solutions still exist outside of Hollywood production companies.

Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger [Atlantic]