According to the Times:

At its core, the official said, the argument the Israelis make is that once the Iranians get an “impregnable breakout capability” — that is, a place that is protected from a military strike — “it makes no difference whether it will take Iran six months or a year or five years” to fabricate a nuclear weapon, he said.

The Americans have a very different view, according to a second senior official who has discussed the concept with Israelis. He said “there are many other options” to slow Iran’s march to a completed weapon, like shutting off Iran’s oil revenues, taking out facilities that supply centrifuge parts or singling out installations where the Iranians would turn the fuel into a weapon.

The article points out that disagreement between the U.S. and Israel on this issue is inevitable, given Israel’s geographic proximity to Iran (also, that whole ‘wipe Israel off the map’ thing).

In November, Tablet addressed the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran, with Anshel Pfeffer asking Will They? and Austin Long asking Can They? Pfeffer argued:

The decision to go to war with Iran is not a political one. It is one of the few issues that transcends Israel’s left-right divide. Benny Begin and Moshe Yaalon, two of the most hardline right-wing ministers in the “Octet Forum,” the Israeli Cabinet’s main decision-making body, are currently opposed to an attack because they believe a military strike will cause a massive backlash from Iran and its proxies and should only be a very last resort. The motives of Netanyahu and Barak are more personal and historical than ideological. The prime minister, the son of a historian, views the Iranian issue through the prism of Jewish survival. In his view, safeguarding Israel against a nuclear threat is the generation’s duty, which has fallen to him. As leader of the opposition, from 2006 to 2009, Netanyahu constantly compared Iran to Germany circa 1938 and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler. As prime minister, he has refrained from this terminology but his perspective remains unchanged.

U.S. and Israel Split on Speed of Iran Threat [NYT]
Related: Will They? [Tablet Magazine]
Can They?
Rationale
Earlier: The Iranian Tipping Point Approaches

In December 2010, together with some 30 Israeli defense and political journalists, I boarded a bus that took us to a building on the top of a hill overlooking Glilot junction, five miles north of Tel Aviv. We had come to Mossad headquarters for a meeting with Dagan, who was then the head of the agency. It was supposed to be an off-the-record briefing. But this being Israel, within hours after the meeting ended, most of what Dagan told us was on the Web and in the papers.

What he said was shocking. The Mossad chief told us that Iran would obtain nuclear warheads by 2014 at the earliest, and thus, he argued, there was no need for an Israeli military strike for the time being. Dagan’s claim ran directly counter to the public line of Israel’s defense establishment: that Iran would obtain the bomb much sooner.

Since that meeting more than a year ago, Dagan has been on a crusade to stop Israel from launching an imminent military strike against Iran. He has reiterated the argument that he laid out to us in Mossad headquarters—against a strike and in favor of sanctions and covert operations—at various public events and private conversations over the past year. And though Dagan is no longer head of Mossad, his view carries tremendous weight: His perspective on a possible Israeli strike is shared by many of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet ministers and Israel’s security establishment.

Dagan’s campaign has enraged Barak and Netanyahu, who accuse him of undermining Israeli deterrence. Barak and Netanyahu support an Israeli military strike in the near future, and for the past few months, with increasing intensity, they have tried to create the impression that they are considering such an attack this year.

Which view will prevail? At stake is the future of Israel, the lives of Iranians and Israelis, the supply of oil to the United States and the West, and the stability of the whole Middle East.

***

The roots of the tension within the highest level of Israel’s political-military leadership go back nearly five years, when Barak, Dagan, and the rest of the Cabinet were faced with the delicate question of whether to bomb Syria’s nuclear reactor in the Dir al-Zur region. In summer 2007, the Cabinet, led by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, deliberated behind closed doors to discuss the assessments of Mossad and Israeli military intelligence of a big structure that Syria was secretly building near the Euphrates River. The undisputed conclusion was that Syria was constructing a reactor to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs and that the plans for the reactor had been provided by North Korea.

The Cabinet’s overwhelming decision was to order the Israeli air force to launch a military strike before radioactive materials would be introduced and it would be too late. Barak was the most senior Cabinet member to oppose the idea, and he argued that Israel could wait a few more months. Olmert, then-Chief of Staff General Gabi Ashkenazi, Dagan, and other Cabinet ministers were astonished to hear it. They suspected that Barak had a hidden agenda motivated by his own ambition to be prime minister. That summer, Barak and the Cabinet knew that within three or four months the findings of an inquiry commission investigating the 2006 Lebanon war would be released. They expected the commission would blame Olmert for major failures of the war, and thus he would be forced to resign. Barak hoped to replace him.

Over the course of a few weeks, Barak realized that he was in unsplendid isolation. Ultimately, he decided to join his Cabinet colleagues in approving the attack. (The Cabinet voted 13 to 1 to approve the attack. Avi Dichter, then minister of homeland security, opposed it.) In September 2007, eight U.S.-made Israeli F-16 fighter planes destroyed Syria’s nuclear ambitions when they bombed the reactor.

Barak’s behavior during that process caused Dagan and other military leaders to lose their faith in him. As one senior official put it, “If he zigzagged then, what assures us that his motives this time are pure?” Indeed, three years ago in private conversation, Barak opposed a military strike by Israel against Iran. So, what made him change his mind? It’s not clear. One possibility is that he wants to please Netanyahu in the hopes that the prime minister will take him aboard Likud and reinstate him in the Defense Ministry after the next elections, which are set for November 2013 but most likely will be sooner.

Continue reading: ‘When the sword is on our neck’

The Fatah-Hamas deal, struck by Mahmoud Abbas and Khaled Meshaal with the backing of emerging regional power broker Qatar, is as vague: The only step forward appears to be clear agreement that Palestinian Authority President Abbas, of Fatah, will be president. Yet there is some reason to believe that this deal may stick, at least for a little longer than the last one: Both sides need it a little bit more now. The P.A. is losing support, while Hamas is newly active in the West Bank; yet Hamas, which just had to abandon its longtime host in Damascus, is going broke. Just generally, the Palestinian cause needs a shot in the arm right now: As Prime Minister Fayyad pointed out last week, the Arab Spring has sapped what has frequently been the Arab world’s cause célèbre of its usual prestige and glamour. (Fayyad’s future will be a major roadblock as the unity government goes forward: Abbas will want him to stay on as head of government, in part because he is a crucial guarantor of Western support; but the Western-educated, technocratic, relatively moderate Fayyad is anathema to Hamas.)

There is the inconvenient but unavoidable fact that Hamas continues to insist on the right to armed struggle and to all of the land between the river and the sea. The peace process, however, has long been premised on the notion that each side is going to give up something. If Hamas will never give that demand up (and it may well not), then neither peace nor the unity government will work. As long as there is even a nominal peace process, however, we are operating under the assumption that Hamas is capable of adopting, as a negotiating precondition, the assumption that Israel has the right to exist. (Again, not saying it will do this, just that if it doesn’t all this talk is moot.) Moreover, Fatah-Hamas unity was going to have to happen to make the peace process work: Hamas’ popularity means it will need to be part of whichever group speaks on behalf of the Palestinian people. The best we can do is hope that the prerogatives of power and legitimacy and its being cut off from Damascus and Tehran will exert a genuinely moderating influence on the group. So, while Prime Minister Netanyahu is right to repeat the line he used several months ago, during Reconciliation 1.0—that Abbas must choose between peace with Israel or peace with Hamas—we observers can at least entertain the prospect of future Hamas reform.

And it’s telling that, while saying the above publicly (Netanyahu also said the time was “not good” for progress), the Israeli government—which surely knew this deal was coming—has also made some interesting offers privately. It suggested that the current West Bank barrier serve as the future borders of a Palestinian state—which would make for a smaller Palestine than the Palestinians would desire, but that’s why they call it negotiating. And, intriguingly, Israel stepped back from demands for permanent control of the Jordan Valley, insisting only on a “long-term” presence. (Zvika Krieger noticed this change.)

If I were a betting man—and given that I thought the Patriots were going to win last night, thank God I’m not—I’d bet against this working out: Hamas still believes what it believes, which is that Israel doesn’t have the right to exist, and it is not so hard-pressed to change tack. But Reconciliation 2.0 seems a little less ridiculous than Reconciliation 1.0, suggesting it’s conceivable that 4.0 or 5.0, a couple years down the road, will be promising.

Palestinian Factions Reach Unity Deal [NYT]
Support for Palestinian Authority Erodes as Prices and Taxes Rise [NYT]
Fayyad Says Palestinians ‘Marginalized’ By Arab Spring [Bloomberg]
Israel Proposes West Bank Barrier as Border [AP/ABC News]
Earlier: Is Meshaal Stepping Down to Step Up?
On Reconciliation, ‘The Devil Is in the Details’

• Prime Minister Netanyahu will address the AIPAC conference next month in Washington, D.C. It is not yet known whether he’ll meet with President Obama, though chances are good. [JTA]

• While we don’t know whether Israel will attack Iran, it seems clear that all the chatter is not merely idle (and not merely intended to bluff). It is on the table in even the most private discussions. [NYT]

• New York police have upped security at prominent Jewish sites in Manhattan, such as synagogues and the Israeli consulate, for fears of Iran’s retaliating for scientist assassinations and other covert actions. [CBS NY/Vos Iz Neias?]

• The special “shomer Shabbos” Nevada caucus turned controversial when participants had to sign something about their religious observance and when Ron Paul supporters flooded it and won. (Mitt Romney won most of the state easily.) [NYT]

• The Egyptian gas pipeline. It was bombed. For the 12th time in the past year. [Arutz Sheva]

Congratulations to the New York Giants on their fourth Super Bowl win—all of which have come in the past 25 years. They beat the Patriots 21-17. An even bigger congratulations to those who bet the prop that the first score of the game would be a Giants safety at 60:1 odds or better.

• International nuclear inspectors, just returned, will visit Iran again in three weeks. If nothing else, it’s a sign that both sides want to be seen as cooperating. [NYT]

• With the last round not yet implemented, the Senate is already working on new financial sanctions against Iran that would target individual leaders, including President Ahmadinejad. [FP The Cable]

• Eight rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel; they hurt no one. They may have been timed to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s visit to the region, including Gaza. [Israel HaYom]

• At the Herzliya Conference, Israeli central banker Stanley Fischer did not go easy on Israel. Among other things, he said the Haredim, many of whom deliberately subsist on generous government subsidies, have to start working. [Haaretz]

• “In the world of mohels … Mr. Sherman has become a kind of bold-faced name.” [NYT City Room]

• The emergent opposition claims President Assad no longer controls half of Syria. [Haaretz]

• Guess who the Syria issue’s really also about? Iran. [NYT]

• Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, of Gaza and Hamas, is visiting Tehran. Hamas and Iran have been on the outs recently due to Hamas’ abandonment of the Assad regime. [JTA]

• As predicted, Prime Minister Netanyhau cleaned up in the Likud primaries. [Ynet]

• The Orthodox Jewish Press responds to threats it has received over an op-ed it recently published by someone who identified as Orthodox and homosexual. [Jewish Press/Failed Messiah]

OK, Israel’s banker-in-chief didn’t put it quite that way in his keynote speech on the second day of the Herzliya conference, Israel’s premier national-security gathering. Fischer instead called the skyrocketing growth of these two distinct minorities “unsustainable.” He expressed particular concern about the ultra-Orthodox, who don’t work or serve in the army but receive a disproportionate share of government benefits.

While claiming to “very much appreciate our religion and our religious people,” he argued that having so large a group that does not work “cannot continue.” If it does, Fischer warned, “in the long run it’s going to be very difficult in our economy to supply our citizens with a standard of life that keeps improving.”

The numbers are all too well-known to Israelis, but less so abroad, where Israel is known largely as an economic miracle, given its small population and lack of oil and other natural resources. Indeed, most of the economists who spoke at a succession of panels yesterday highlighted aspects of Israel’s impressive economic performance, particularly in light of the global recession. The Jewish state enjoyed a growth rate of 4.8 percent in 2011, with low inflation (2.2 percent).

But Fischer stressed, and others agreed, that the country’s growth—not to mention its social cohesion—would be seriously jeopardized unless the country finds a way to address the challenge posed by these two burgeoning sectors of society.

The numbers he and others cited are truly staggering. In 1980, non-Orthodox Jews constituted 80 percent of the population. Since then, that population had dropped by some 12 percent. By contrast, in 1980 ultra-Orthodox Jews constituted 4 percent of the population; today they account for over 7 percent. While Israeli Arabs made up 15 percent of Israel’s population in 1980, they are over 20 percent today. Only 40 percent of ultra-Orthodox men are employed, while among Arab Israelis, less than a quarter of the women work. Such non-participation rates in the Israeli economy are stunning considering that unemployment in Israel hovers around 5 percent.

The growth of such large ultra-Orthodox and Arab families living off government pensions and other benefits has triggered a sharp rise in poverty in Israel, a situation that Prof. Alex Mintz, the dean of the Lauder School of Government at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center, called “intolerable” in his talk. The Israeli government, he said, had to declare a “war on poverty” before the gap between have and have-not Israelis grew even more dramatic.

Fischer and other economists stressed that poverty rates are tied to the growing number of unemployed ultra-Orthodox and Arab-Israelis: The larger the number of children a family has, the more likely it is that the children will be poor. In families where two parents were working, he said, there is little poverty. In families where no one works, poverty rates stand at 80 percent.

How is Israel’s middle class faring? Not great, it turns out.

A recent study by the Finance Ministry published by Haaretz found that wage mobility has been declining for decades and fell particularly sharply over the past 10 years. The study’s authors, Galit Ben Naim and Alex Belinsky, found that Israel had relatively little socioeconomic mobility compared to other Western countries. Tracking salary data for over a million Israelis between 2003 and 2009, the study showed that 65 percent of the people in the bottom 10 percent on average in a given year were likely to remain there in the following year. It also found that overall mobility decreased during the 6-year period they studied. While 49 percent of those in the lowest economic rung remained there a year later in 2004, 56 percent of those in that same category in 2008 remained there in 2009.

Dahlia Moore, dean of the department of behavioral science at the College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon LeZion, called this the “sticky floor.” But there’s apparently a sticky ceiling in Israel as well: Some 86 percent of the top 10 percent of earners were likely to stay there the next year. The lack of downward mobility was even higher for the top 1 percent and the top 0.1 percent. These lack of mobility rates are far higher than those of the United States and the European Union.

Such inequalities helped trigger the middle-class protests last summer in Tel Aviv and around the country—Israel’s own version of “Occupy Wall Street.” While the demonstrators did not openly blame the ultra-Orthodox for the growing financial pressures and rising housing prices they face, resentment about what secular Israelis consider a “leech” class, as one young student at the conference called them, runs deep.

The solution to such growing poverty and income inequality depends on “changes in behavior,” Fischer told the conference. Other experts spelled out what he implied: having smaller families, joining the army, and getting jobs. Some 6,000 ultra-Orthodox Israelis are now in college, Fischer said, a good indication that they might work after graduating. He added that there are already signs that reduced government welfare payments were having a positive impact on Arab-Israeli families: More Arab men are now starting their own businesses or seeking work.

Fischer’s tough warning is consistent with his blunt style. Greatly admired within the business community for his creative, but cautious, stewardship of the central bank, he is credited with having helped Israel avoid the financial bubbles that have swamped Europe in recent years by keeping credit tight and buying up billions of dollars in foreign currency reserves to ensure that, in a time of financial stress, Israel would not run short of hard currency reserves. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has run a responsible fiscal policy, he has said. Such policies may serve Israel well in an unpredictable region where political earthquakes can easily trigger economic and financial upheavals.

***

Jan. 31, 2012: The hottest ticket in town right now is the revival of Cabaret, the iconic musical set in 1931 Berlin about a star-crossed romance between Sally Bowles, a young nightclub singer at the Kit Kat Klub, and a naïve young American writer named Cliff Bradshaw. While the play was staged in Israel over 20 years ago, this is the first original Israeli production of the Broadway classic. Based on euphoric reviews and word-of-mouth in a country that hates the sound of silence, the run at Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theatre is sold out for the next three months.

Continue reading: A sense of foreboding

OK, OK, we get it!

Meanwhile, David Sanger had a valuable article over the weekend reporting that China has finally decided to understand what Israeli central banker Stanley Fischer told it almost two years ago: that Iran’s raising of the temperature would, for a number of reasons, increase economic instability and tamper with world energy markets—two things China loathes. “For years,” Sanger notes,

China resisted sanctions on Iran, since it buys so much Iranian oil. Now it sees that escalating sanctions are inevitable, so it is busy hedging its bets, looking for alternative sources (with help from the Obama administration) while delaying a crisis. “They are a little late to the game,” one of Mr. Obama’s aides said. “We have been telling them this was coming for two years now. But they are only now believing it.”

Fellow veto-wielding Security Council member Russia, by contrast, benefits from a crisis that raises energy prices: After all, it is the world’s largest producer of crude and a net energy exporter by a wide margin. To convince it to go along, Israel may need to get going on the Soviet-born Foreign Minister Lieberman’s meager feed.

Related: Confronting Iran in a Year of Elections [NYT]
Earlier: Iran Foes Try to Coax China
In Homefront-Heavy Speech, Iran Warned

And pointing to that line also masks the more complex reality. Mainly: Israel is officially antsy, as it is telling us through Ronen Bergman’s absolutely must-read New York Times Magazine feature published this morning. Israel now believes Iran has less than a year before it reaches “immunity zone,” when a military attack would no longer substantially postpone its alleged nuclear weapons program. (Yes, even Israeli officials who support the prospect of an attack admit they’d only be delaying it, for now.) The United States, perhaps reflecting its superior firepower, thinks there is more than a year of opportunity. Make no mistake: This is scary stuff. “According to Israeli intelligence,” Bergman reports, “Iran and Hezbollah have also planted roughly 40 terrorist sleeper cells across the globe, ready to hit Israeli and Jewish targets if Iran deems it necessary to retaliate.” But one can see how an Iranian bomb seems like even scarier stuff for Israel. And Bergman, in agreement with Austin Long and Anshel Pfeffer writing late last year in Tablet Magazine, predicts an Israeli attack this year. Which means what, exactly, for the United States? “Our ironclad commitment—and I mean ironclad—to Israel’s security has meant the closest military cooperation between our two countries in history,” went the president’s sole mention of the Jewish state last night.

And the U.S. options are limited, as laid out expertly by Helene Cooper this morning. In a nutshell: Even as it increases financial sanctions and imposes a vast oil embargo, the West, and particularly Europe, seems to be preparing itself to live with an Iran that would resemble Japan in lacking a nuclear weapon but possessing the means and technology to make one—the trouble being that Iran ain’t exactly Japan (which is why part of the bargain would have to be sustained inspections). The sanctions and embargo will further hurt the badly bruised Iranian economy but are as likely to push the Iranian regime up against a wall and lead it to fast develop a bomb as to break down and comply with Western wishes; ditto the covert assassinations and sabotage aimed at the weapons program. After all, Pakistan and North Korea have the bomb, and we don’t bomb them; Libya gave up its program, and we bombed the crap out of it. The debate over whether the Iranian mullahs are rational or irrational becomes less relevant if you decide that an irrational Iran would use its weapons aggressively while a rational Iran would at least move to obtain them, making the region a more unstable place. Really the only good news is that by most accounts Iran is more than a year away even from prospective Japan-status, meaning, as Jeff Goldberg argues, there’s still time to try to reach a deal. Unless Israel bombs Iran.

In public, Israel has essentially committed itself to not accepting even a Japan-like Iran (and can you blame it?). Yesterday, Prime Minister Netanyahu marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day by imploring the world not to let Iran commit a second Shoah, while U.N. Ambassador Ron Prosor chastised the U.N. Security Council (to its face! he’s got a pair!) for its inaction on the Iran question. The untidy scenario in the previous paragraph of a precarious, U.S.-led balancing act would be very rapidly mooted by Israeli jets screaming across the Qom, Natanz, and Bushehr skies.

As for last night’s speech, the other notable Jewish content came upon the president’s ceremonial entrance, which involved him adorably hugging not one but two wonderful Jewish women. Above is his greeting of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and here’s the other:

I can’t wait for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to run for office again. She shall return.

President Obama’s State of the Union Address [NYT]
Will Israel Attack Iran? [NYT Magazine]
Sanctions Against Iran Grow Tighter, but What’s The Next Step? [NYT]
How a Nuclear War Would Start in the Middle East [Atlantic Goldblog]
Israel to Iran: Tomorrow Will Be Too Late for Action Against Iran [Haaretz]
Related: Will They? [Tablet Magazine]
Can They? [Tablet Magazine]

• Meanwhile, Netanyahu ordered an investigation into Mufti Mohammed Hussein, Jerusalem’s top Muslim cleric, after he gave a speech that quoted a religious text referencing the murder of Jews. [JTA]

• The Syrian government rejected calls from the Arab League for President Assad to step down. [Washington Post]

• Sen. Mark Kirk, the 52-year-old U.S. Senator from Chicago who helped create the latest Iran sanctions, successfully underwent surgery after suffering a stroke. [JTA]

• Ancient Jewish scrolls, most likely belonging to Jewish merchants on the Silk Road, were discovered in northern Afghanistan and are currently in London. [Reuters/Yahoo]

• The man convicted in 1995 of killing Jewish Defense League founder Rabbi Meir Kahane has been denied the request for a new trial. [NYT]

And I thought he was going to talk about, you know, Iran, maybe Hamas. He said, “It’s The New York Times and Haaretz.” He said, “They set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world.”

I’m hopeful that Bibi has at least hastened the day when I can buy a t-shirt with “Haaretz” spelled in the Times‘ classic Gothic lettering. All the kids in Brooklyn will be wanting one.

Netanyahu Denies Saying Israel’s Biggest Enemies Are N.Y. Times, Haaretz [JTA]
Earlier: A Brief History of the NYT’s Israel Coverage

The family has long given generously to American politicians—more than $900,000 over the last two cycles, according to OpenSecrets. As is relatively common for canny businesspeople, they give across partisan lines, supporting both national committees as well as individual candidates who are diametrically opposed to each other. This year, for example, Jerome Falic, CEO of Duty Free Americas, maxed out his giving to Rep. Eric Cantor, a Republican and the House Majority Leader, and to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, head of the Democratic National Committee.

But when it comes to presidential politics, the family has consistently gone Republican. In 2007, several family members supported former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s primary bid, and then ponied up for Sen. John McCain in the general election. And, now, Perry. The erstwhile Texas governor raised $20,000 from two generations of the family last September, and, so far, remains the only presidential candidate to win their support. This despite the fact that he has not been considered a seriously competitive candidate since about October.

It’s not clear that their enthusiasm has had any effect on Bibi’s affections. Only a few days after their donations cleared Perry’s accounts, Bibi went on CNN to criticize a member of his own party, Deputy Knesset Speaker Danny Danon, for appearing alongside Perry at a pro-Israel campaign event in New York. “When I get to the point that I can control Knesset, including in my own party, it’ll be a good day,” Netanyahu told Wolf Blitzer. His donors, though, not so much.

One U.S. Family is Responsible for Half of Netanyahu’s Donations [Haaretz]
Earlier: The Company Rick Perry Keeps

But according to occasional Tablet Magazine contributors Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel, there is still the fundamental disagreement over the red lines: enrichment for Israel; weapon development for the United States. They note that Iran appears to be using Hezbollah to try to goad Israel into attacking. Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon complained about the Obama Administration’s unwillingness to take a tough enough stance again Iran (although, in a robust display of ignorance about American politics, he attributed this to election-year concerns). And reports have it that the United States has not received assurances from Israel that it won’t attack.

And what to make of the weekend’s news that the two countries are postponing joint military exercises scheduled for the spring? “Because it was not the right time,” was a Netanyahu spokesperson’s explanation. And the initial announcement was made by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who is no stranger to going rogue. If even he has been brought around to cooperating, then one suspects the U.S. administration has offered its own guarantees. But doing some reporting, Laura Rozen questioned the official Israeli line (which initially also included a reference to budget issues) and wondered whether the cancellation is a sign of strain between the two militaries, as well as Israel’s plan to take the “games” out of “war games.”

U.S. Warns Israel on Strike [WSJ]
Israel and U.S. at Odds Over Timetables and Red Lines for Iran [Haaretz]
Major U.S.-Israel Military Exercises Delayed [NYT]
U.S. Coordinating Iran Policy With Israel More Closely Amid Rising Tension [Bloomberg]
Earlier: “Bibi? It’s Barack”

• In a false flag operation that made President George W. Bush livid, Mossad agents reportedly posed as U.S. intelligence agents to recruit members of a Pakistani terrorist group into conducting operations, including assassination, in Iran. Huge scoop. [FP]

• Frequent Tablet Magazine contributor James Kirchick links the contemporary use (typically on the left) of terms like “Israel-firster” and “dual loyalism” to the anti-Semitic far-right. [Haaretz]

• Entering roughly the same debate, Eric Alterman defends his own record and accuses critics of think tanks like the Center for American Progress and Media Matters of practicing “Jewish McCarthyism.” [Forward]

• Iran continued to allege that Israel and the United States were responsible for yesterday’s and other assassinations of nuclear scientists (which the U.S. strongly denies) and hinted at reprisals. [NYT]

• Yet weirdly the head of Iran’s nuclear agency showed up at the scientist’s funeral, almost as though the scientist had not been merely a scientist. [Golnaz Esfandiari Twitter]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu acknowledged that sanctions are indeed harming Iran’s economy and possibly working toward their goal of making the country compliant with international nuclear standards. [Haaretz]

• The head of the Kremlin’s Security Council accused Israel of pushing the U.S. toward war with Iran. [Haaretz]

• The Palestinian Authority set a Jan. 26 deadline for concrete progress or else it will pull out of the series of talks in Amman. It’s … unclear what the stick is here. Or the carrot, for that matter. [JPost]

• PolitiFact says that the Democratic accusation that the leading Republican candidates (excepting Paul) would “zero-out” aid to Israel is ridiculous. [JTA Capital J]

• Which religion, out of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, offers the best average pay for clergy in America? Hint: Don’t over-think this one. [Slate]

• Tila Tequila is going to convert to Judaism. I am ashamed to admit that I have heard of Tila Tequila but proud to boast that I have no idea who she is. [TMZ]

• The Frugal Traveler (aka Matt Gross) visits Jerusalem! Now if only Bourdain would go. [NYT]

• According to American Airlines, Tel Aviv is the Middle East’s best gay city (well, duh). That’s just to distract you from the occupation, though. [ThinkProgress]

• Saad Hariri’s tweet “@” an Israeli Defense spokesperson could make things … awkward for the former Lebanese prime minister. [Abir G Twitter]

I imagine this video, starring Mayor Michael Bloomberg and with a cameo by former Mayor Ed Koch and set to the music of Lady Gaga, lets you feel what it’s like to take a lot of acid.

“Bibi? It’s Barack.”

“Hey, whassup? It’s been, like, forever. Did you see that crazy shit about the Iranian physicist getting offed?”

“Yeah, actually that’s what I was calling you about. I mean, I, uh, I don’t know if you were involved, or anything, but if you were, I mean, it would be nice to get a heads up about it, you know? Given the unshakable bond and deep friendship between our two countries.”

“Oh, totally. I mean, no, it wasn’t us, but yeah, I get you, I get you, man! We’d totally tell you if we were gonna pull anything that obvious.”

“I mean, because it just makes it harder for us to do some things in the Strait of Hormuz and—I know this is delicate, but—those negotiations in Turkey.”

“Oof. Yeah, man. You sure you wanna bring that crap up?”

“Sorry. But there are other things, as you know. And we had such a good week with the rescues at sea and the Times coverage—”

“Oh, the Times, man, I can’t even believe you read them any more after what they said about your wife and all.”

“Yeah, I know, we’ve got that covered. Anyway, I was just trying to say that, like, if you were gonna do anything more, you know, serious—”

“Like what do you mean? What’s more serious than offing several fuckers in daylight in Tehran?”

“ … ”

“Which isn’t something we did or anything, just asking.”

“Well, you know, anything military … ”

“OHHH. You were … I got it! Yeah I get you, yeah, I totally feel you. No, we aren’t even. Don’t worry about it.”

“OK, OK, cool. Thanks, Pr— Bibi. All right, well, that was it. I guess I’ll see you in March?”

“Totally, totally. Take it easy, dude.”

“OK. Bye.”

Continue reading: Newt Gingrich, kneydel

• The Obama administration is beginning to make plans for helping the Syrian opposition, including a no-fly zone. [FP The Cable]

• Gerald Steinberg and others weigh in on the affair concerning certain anti-Israel tweets and blog posts by Center for American Progress staffers. As I wrote last week, the term “Israel firster” (or the implication that a senator is in AIPAC’s pocket) goes beyond mere criticism of support for certain policies. [JPost]

• Beit Shemesh has turned into the battleground against Haredi misogyny in part because many residents—including the eight-year-old girl whose harassment sparked the latest controversy—are American-born. [Forward]

• Rep. Ron Paul, the prominent Republican presidential candidate recently embroiled in charges over racist and anti-Semitic newsletters published under his name, denied he is an anti-Semite. [Haaretz]

• Meanwhile, several GOP candidates have said they would vote for Paul over President Obama in the general election—including frontrunner Mitt Romney (but not including former frontrunner Newt Gingrich). I’d be interested in the Republican Jewish Coalition’s take on this. [JTA Capital J]

• Conservative journalist Philip Klein, for one, disagrees with Romney. [Washington Examiner]

• The United States isn’t too worried about Iran’s threats to shut the Strait of Hormuz. [Yahoo! The Envoy]

• Due to the ongoing reconciliation talks with Fatah, Hamas has reportedly been ordered to cease attacks on Israel. [Haaretz]

• Six religious settlers have been arrested in connection with the riot earlier this month at a West Bank IDF base. [AP/WP]

• Casino magnate and prominent Republican donor (and Gingrich backer) Sheldon Adelson said he agreed with the former Speaker’s remark about the “invented” Palestinian people. What’s notable is he said it to a gathering of young Jews on Birthright trips. [Haaretz]

• Ignore the painting, admire the sentiment: the New England Patriots bought owner Bob Kraft a tribute to his late wife, Myra. [ESPN]

• Um, Prime Minister Netanyahu has a 180 I.Q., maybe. [JustASC]

Everybody saw this, right? Also: “We understand the East German judge made it a 9.”

• Prime Minister Netanyahu pledged that he would not negotiate with a Palestinian government that included Hamas, as Hamas and the Palestinian Authority currently plan. (Of course, he’s not negotiating with the Palestinian government that doesn’t include Hamas, either.) [Haaretz]

• Turkey may insist on poor relations with Israel as the Knesset debates whether to commemorate the Armenian genocide. (Of course, Turkey already insists on poor relations with Israel.) [NYT]

• Are policy-makers reckoning with the potential radioactive consequences of bombing Iranian reactors (and possibly seeing Israel’s bombed in retaliation)? [NYT]

• It’s being treated as a scoop, but it’s not really news that, as his former senior aide says, Rep. Ron Paul is genuinely anti-Israel. [Haaretz]

• Netanyahu appears to be forcing the closure of an independent television station that isn’t right-wing and has also reported embarrassing details about him and his family. [NYT]

• Do I need to tell you that Don Blanquito, Brazil’s newest funk sensation, is an L.A. Jewish kid named Alex Cutler? [NYT]

• Imagine if the White House had termites and no hot water. Israel is real estate. [JPost]

• A judge dismissed two students’ lawsuit alleging that Berkeley did not adequately protect them from anti-Semitism during a campus “Apartheid Week.” [JTA/Forward]

Matt Damon and (half-Jewish) Scarlett Johansson take a Hanukkah quiz. It gets very real a little after the two-minute mark.

• Mitt Romney won’t commit to moving the embassy to Jerusalem and isn’t sure how he feels about commuting Jonathan Pollard’s sentence, and said so to a group of Jewish leaders, who hopefully were able to recognize a mensch when they saw one. [Washington Jewish Week]

• The lost Jews of … the U.S. Marines! [WSJ]

• You think I’m mushy about Israel? You should see Lanny Davis! [Ben Smith]

• If you don’t remember Tamir Goodman, you won’t click on this no matter what. If you do remember Tamir Goodman, you’ll click on this no matter what. [D.C. Sports Bog]

• There’s a report that Ryan Braun’s positive tests were caused by treating a legitimate, private medical issue. Which would still technically make him guilty of taking banned substances, but would go a long, long way in the court of public opinion. [Kaplan’s Korner]

Bibi wishes Christians a merry Christmas. A correspondent writes: “Netanyahu knows which side his bread is buttered on. … He’s practically got a Santa suit on.”

But is it too little, too late? Many have pointed to a past policy of tolerance, or at least kid-glove treatment, of restive and even violent settlers as partly to blame for the current epidemic. “The tendency of the military and the police is to see their own role as protecting the settlers, the Israeli citizens, from the Palestinians,” prominent intellectual Gershom Gorenberg said, “rather than to fulfill their proper role, which is being responsible for keeping order and public safety in territories under military authority.” Further complicating this dynamic is the large (in fact, outsize) presence of religious Zionists in the armed forces—and indeed, there is concern that some soldiers tipped off the settlers who stormed a base in the northwest West Bank earlier this week.

Hopefully this will be a wake-up call. Past coddling of religious Zionists for political purposes—and yes, they were also evacuated out of Gaza, it has not been a complete free ride for them, but more often than not state policy has reflected their wishes—enabled and even birthed this sort of activity, and now, as with price tag attacks generally, that chicken is coming home to roost. The majority of religious Zionists would no doubt repudiate these acts, which is all the more reason the law needs to continue to crack down on the Jewish criminals without bias or prejudice in their favor. You don’t want the proof that you’ve failed to be another Yigal Amir.

Peres: Right-Wing Violence a ‘Disaster’ That Must Be Stopped [Haaretz]
Israel Leader Sets Curbs on Settlers for Violence [NYT]
Netanyahu: Jewish Extremists Not a ‘Terror Group’ But Will Be Given Military Trial [Haaretz]
Israel Has Long History of Lenience Toward Jewish Extremists [AP/WP]
Earlier: Who Buys ‘Price Tag’ Crimes?

The latest sign of its demise was Prime Minister Fayyad’s statement, which was of the obvious, that he will not remain head of government once that government is joined by Hamas. Fayyad is only able to head Fatah’s government by virtue of his rapport with its Western sponsors, and President Abbas’ recognition of his utility in that respect; once Hamas joins the government, there is no way he will hang on. (It’s also notable that with the U.N. moves stalled—the Palestinians are now members of UNESCO, but nothing else, and have been effectively stonewalled at the Security Council—it’s not just the peace process but also Fayyadism that is dead.)

All this is moot if Hamas doesn’t ever join the government. Unity has ostensibly been agreed to, with joint elections tentatively scheduled for next May. But if the past is prologue, elections won’t be held by May. The two sides can’t seem to agree even on whether there will be a unity government in the meantime. And the internecine swiping has begun, with a senior Hamas official accusing President Abbas of not really wanting a unity government.

It should be noted that the obvious lack of unity makes it easier for the Israeli government to continue to insist—not without validity, but it’s not like they’ve proposed any creative alternatives, either—that there is really nothing to be done. In compliance with the Quartet’s timeline, the Palestinian Authority actually submitted a peace proposal. As far as opening positions go, it sounds not bad: borders based on the Green Line but with two percent of the West Bank land swapped; a largely demilitarized West Bank; and permission for Israel to maintain a force along the Jordan River. It is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s turn to respond—and he hasn’t and says he won’t, not unless he gets direct negotiations, which he knows can’t be effective without unity, and which he knows that, with unity, would mean negotiating with Hamas, which he knows most of the world would see as a reasonable deal-breaker.

So, dead as a doornail. Merry Christmas.

Fayyad Won’t Lead a Unity Government [Haaretz/Forward]
Gaza Official: Palestinian President Opposes Unity [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]
Netanyahu Balks at Abbas Proposal for Palestinian State Borders [Haaretz]
Earlier: Fatah, Hamas Re-Up Alliance

Recently, however, not long after our seventh wedding anniversary and the birth of our first child, we got some unsolicited marriage advice from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. It arrived in the form of a series of videos produced by the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption as part of a campaign to encourage Israelis living abroad to return to the Jewish state. Each video depicts a different scenario of Israelis in America with their American partners and families, and the threat to their national identity if they remain there. One video shows the young daughter of Israeli parents mistaking Hannukah for Christmas.

It may be hard for the Israeli government to believe, but after 34 years of life as a committed American Jew, Lisa can consistently distinguish between Christmas and Hannukah, and she even knows which holiday we celebrate. Though Liel did exchange his passion for Krembos for a love for Malomars, he commemorates Israel’s Memorial Day each year, reflecting on the friends he’s lost. Lisa understands the importance of Yom Hazikaron and empathizes. But the American spouse in one of the Israeli government videos doesn’t: A pony-tailed American dufus, he mistakes his Israeli girlfriend’s yahrzeit candles for mood-lighting. As the video ends, a voice-over says, “They’ll always remain Israelis, but their spouses won’t always understand what that means. Help them come back home.”

Once upon a time, we used to believe that Israel could be our family’s part-time home. But this advertising campaign is just the most recent indication that Israel has no intention of making us feel welcome. From the Rotem Bill, which seeks to make a small group of ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbis the final arbiters over all Jewish rites, to the recent spate of anti-democratic legislation in the Knesset, over the past few years we’ve felt as if Israel is moving further and further away from the values—tolerance, plurality, and civility—that we believe are integral to Judaism as well as to our own lives. The videos are a painful reminder of this shift.

***

When we first got married, we spent a lot of our time traveling between New York and Tel Aviv. We were frequently met with a less-than-hospitable welcome at Ben-Gurion International Airport. On one occasion, Lisa was detained for nearly an hour, and on another she was subjected to a long and humiliating series of questions about her parents’ religious affiliation and other deeply personal matters. But we didn’t care: This intrusive screening, we rationalized, was the price Israel has to pay for its security.

Hanging out with friends and family on the beach or in cafés, we sometimes tried to talk about our life in New York, where being a part of the Jewish community is important to us. We attend services occasionally, are involved with numerous Jewish organizations, and spend a lot of our leisure time going to Jewish cultural events. To our Israeli friends, our interests sounded laughable. When Lisa wrote a novel about a Jewish-American teenager’s first encounter with, and burgeoning love for, Israel, she was told by several Israelis that no Israeli would ever read it—that Americans are just too naïve to be taken seriously.

Equally ridiculed as the book Lisa had written were the books she’d read: Like many American Jews, she grew up on Leon Uris’ Exodus, a fact that was repeatedly mocked by our Israeli acquaintances. Hearing the book belittled in a Haifa café, we realized how absurd it was for American Jews to idolize Uris’ Israeli protagonists for their dismissive attitude toward the book’s gullible American characters. And now, it was us being belittled by modern-day Ari Ben-Canaans for not being tough enough, real enough, Israeli enough.

It was a recurring theme in our conversations with Israelis: We heard countless times, from even our most fervently secular friends, that if we really cared about being Jewish we’d move back to the Jewish state. We found this logic offensive, but we still believed that we could build a bridge between Israel and the Diaspora, and we dreamed of raising children who would be as at home in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem as they would on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

***

An interesting, and often ignored, element of Israel’s new campaign is that, beyond insulting videos, the government is offering substantial benefits for Israelis who decide to return. Particularly sought-after are former Israelis like Liel: The website associated with the campaign emphasizes the incentives awaiting any Israeli who holds a doctorate from a major American university—part of a plan to fight Israel’s serious brain drain. Yet rather than highlight these attractive offerings, and take other steps to bring people like us closer to Israel, the Israeli government has chosen to tell us that the most fundamental choices of our lives—whom to marry and where to live—are irredeemably flawed and dangerous for the Jewish people. The cure? Make aliyah and abandon other key aspects of our identities—even, possibly, our spouses—save for Israeli nationalism. The campaign, then, is much more than tone-deaf PR. It is an indication of Israel’s troubling mindset, which, as our friend Gal Beckerman noted, is frighteningly similar to that of the old-world Jews that the early Zionists mercilessly mocked: the Jews who see nothing but danger and fear outside of the small and stifling Pale of Settlement.

Often, we feel real remorse for abandoning this struggle we believe is so important, the struggle for Israel’s soul. Often, we feel as if we should brave the hurdles and the insults and jump back into the fray. But time, parenthood, and an Israeli government that seems dedicated to dismissing families like ours and driving American and Israeli Jews apart have all weakened our resolve. We cherish our family’s Jewish identity and our community, as do most American Jews we know. But our Jewish identities, and our sense of peoplehood, are based on inclusion—not exclusion and condescension. As long as Israel refuses to acknowledge this basic premise about the nature of Jewish peoplehood, we can’t call the Jewish state home.

• Particularly in the wake of the storming of the British embassy Tuesday, the European Union is clamoring for fresh sanctions against Iran. Meanwhile, Iran simply released the 11 “students” detained for doing so. [WSJ/AP/WP]

• German prosecutors allege an Iranian plot to attack U.S. bases there. [Haaretz/Forward]

• Turkey is upping sanctions against Syria, and the conflict looks like it’s spilling over into Lebanon. [NYT/NYT]

• Under Quartet guidelines, President Abbas offered a proposal for going forward with peace talks. No reply from Prime Minister Netanyahu. [Haaretz]

• At a Jewish Manhattan fundraiser, President Obama told donors that Israel was the country’s most important ally. [Reuters/Haaretz]

Comes yesterday a new television interview, in which Dagan warned that any Iran action could spark war—rockets—from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran itself, and perhaps Syria. He also added to what is becoming a bitter tit-for-tat with Barak. The defense minister recently claimed that a strike on Iran would result in 500 Israeli deaths max; Dagan said this is a gross underestimate. Barak argued, “When the head of the Mossad unprecedentedly brings journalists to Mossad headquarters and instructs them to oppose the prime minister … I think that is very serious behavior.” Dagan responded, “We are not living in an undemocratic country; in democratic countries, even people like me have the right to express their opinions.”

Finally, it seems like Dagan is indeed entering the political fray to the extent that he can: along with a few other notables, he is spearheading, according to Haaretz, a group that “will endeavor to immediately alter the system of government in Israel.”

If you have some free time this afternoon, I can’t recommend Yossi Melman’s Tablet Magazine profile of Dagan from January (when he retired) enough.

Former Mossad Chief: Israeli Strike on Iran Will Lead to Regional War [Haaretz]
Related: Uncloaked [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Dagan Continues Lonely, Loyal Opposition
Why They Listen to Dagan

The lightning-rod Harvard Law professor touched on many other topics as well, including the incident at Columbia in which a professor has been accused of “steering” a Jewish student away from a class taught by Professor Joseph Massad.

But, I mean, really! The prospect of Netanyahu and Abbas watching the episode together is as delicious as, well, Palestinian chicken. “Which reminds me of something Theodor Herzl once said.”

Brooklyn, Steering, and Palestinian Chicken: An Interview With Alan Dershowitz [Columbia Current]
Related: Unwelcome [Tablet Magazine]

• Iranian students (“students”?) have stormed the British embassy in Tehran. [WP]

• This comes following an official downgrading of ties with Britain, which came after further sanctions aimed at Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. [NYT]

• In Egypt, the news is that the first day of elections went down relatively smoothly and peacefully. [NYT]

• Now that he has held out a month and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is no longer threatening to break up the coalition over it, Prime Minister Netanyahu will likely unfreeze the $100 million in Palestinian Authority tax revenue. [Haaretz]

• Stalin’s daughter died at 85 in Wisconsin (!). Her first two loves were Jewish men; in neither case did her father approve. [NYT]

“Israel and Egypt have an interest to preserve peace and stability,” said Prime Minister Netanyahu in response. He added that “nothing would be better for prosperity, for security, for peace,” than for Egypt to be democratic. Which is of course dubious! A democratic Egypt is very likely an Egypt run by the Brotherhood—indeed, the unrest of recent days has if anything strengthened the hand of the country’s oldest and most organized political party. Already, the Brotherhood has been able to throw its newfound weight around: through Egypt and Jordan (whose monarch is scared of his own revolt), it has blocked the demolition of a bridge in the Old City of Jerusalem. The point isn’t whether you agree that the bridge should not be removed (some allege the project is intended to ease settlers’ access to the Temple Mount). It’s that already popular Islamist movements in the Arab world have been able to affect Israeli policy.

Regionally, this has wider implications. The New York Times’ indefatigable Anthony Shadid published an essay yesterday taking stock of the region and noting that the Islamist complication, among others, means that the Arab Spring, which at various times over the past year has seemed so neatly tied up, is going to go through several more messy stages yet. Elections held Friday in Morocco saw the Islamist Justice and Development (yes, that is also the name of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s party) win the plurality of parliamentary seats. In Egypt, there are a number of ways this could all play out. The military council offered to immediately form a new government with one ex-prime minister; protesters rejected this and instead proposed a National Salvation Government to be helmed by Mohammed ElBaradei, the once and perhaps future presidential candidate.

Notably, the National Salvation suggestion was put forth by a coalition of Islamist and secular protesters, a sign that Egypt could at the least be moving toward a Turkey-style model of official but comparatively moderate and tolerant Islamism. (Still not great for Israel, if Turkey is any indication, but given that the alternative is something closer to the government of Gaza … .) Another promising notion is the truism that the surest way for an ideological movement to lose support is for it to gain power and be summarily introduced to the compromises that power necessitates. So far, Egypt’s Brotherhood has maintained a deliberate ambiguity about what exactly their vision of politically realized Islamism is—they know the second they are forced to articulate it, many of their supporters will disagree. Which is a good reminder of why democracy is indeed the worst form of government except for all the others.

Egypt’s Turmoil Shadows First Post-Mubarak Vote [NYT]
Analysis: Islamists Strong Ahead of Egypt Poll [Reuters/JPost]
Egypt’s Activists Unite Against Military [WSJ]
Post-Uprising, a New Battle [NYT]
Netanyahu Delays Demolition of Jerusalem Bridge Over Egypt, Jordan Warning [Haaretz]
Political Islam at a Crossroads [LAT]

It was reported today that Lieberman, Israel’s Foreign Minister, told his ultra-right party, Yisrael Beiteinu, that he would leave Netanyahu’s coalition government if two settlement outposts—Givat Assaf and Migron—were demolished. The two outposts were ordered to be destroyed by none other than the Israeli Supreme Court. At a time when Israel looks to stand firm in a region undergoing massive upheaval as well as potentially strike Iran in the wake of its burgeoning nuclear program, this move is another ploy out of the hostage-taking playbook that has bent Netanyahu to the will of the right for much of his time in office.

Should Lieberman succeed in keeping these two outposts intact, he will defy one of the last institutions bringing political balance and clarity to a country that is lurching dramatically and unchecked out of democracy. Lieberman’s back-up plan: to withdraw from the coalition if tax money that is designed to keep Palestinian security apparatuses in place is delivered to the Palestinian Authority.

Should Lieberman leave and take the government down with him, he will enfeeble a country that a time when stability is most paramount, an act which may have been his goal this whole time.

Lieberman threatens to bring down government over outposts [JTA]

• A bill that would guarantee the government a majority in the committee dedicated to nominating Supreme Court justices. The judiciary and executive branches are currently separate entities, which explains, in part, Israel’s robust and critical court system. This, of course, is a problem for a government frequently dedicated to breaking the law, as Netanyahu’s administration does any time it colludes with settler groups. But the bill is not just a bit of ideological legislation; its practical purpose is to enable the appointment of Noam Sohlberg to the Supreme Court. Sohlberg’s record is worth a closer look; some of his highlights on the District Court include acquitting a policeman who killed a Palestinian despite admitting that the deceased was shot “without cause” and stripping an Israeli man who had dodged the draft of his passport.

• A bill that would require each candidate to the Supreme Court to appear before a special Knesset committee (currently made up mostly of right-wing legislators), without whose approval no appointment could go through.

• A bill that would rewrite Supreme Court justices’ term limits, tailored specifically to allow Asher Grunis, a conservative judge, to become the court’s next president.

• A bill that would severely limit the funding NGOs can receive from foreign governments. The bill’s mastermind, Likud’s Ofir Akunis, wasn’t too subtle about the proposed legislation’s purpose: The goal, he wrote in his draft of the bill, was to curb “the inciting activities of many organizations who masquerade as human rights groups and wish to influence the political discourse, the nature and the policy of the state of Israel.”

These bills, most likely, will pass. If they do, Israel will no longer be able to truthfully call itself a democracy.

Netanyahu’s ‘Draconian Laws’ Are Attack on Israeli Democracy, Say MKs [Haaretz]
Bills to Slash Foreign Aid to Israeli Dovish Groups Put on Hold, Pending Cabinet Debate [AP/WP]

Netanyahu’s Father-in-Law Dies at 97 [Ynet]
What Do a Bunch of Old Jews Know About Living Forever? [NY Mag]

And as if they did not have enough ammunition, you have an open-mike moment yesterday, in which French President Nicolas Sarkozy was overheard confiding in Obama (who is in Paris), of Prime Minister Netanyahu: “I cannot stand him. He is a liar.” To which Obama reportedly replied: “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day!” That Obama finds Bibi frustrating is about as newsworthy as the fact that the subway took too long and was too crowded this morning on my way to work. But it still serves to (further) confirm the impression that Obama and Bibi have a bad personal relationship and that, under their leadership, their countries have experienced a weakened one (surely U.S. ambassador Dan Shapiro was protesting a bit much when he insisted yesterday that the “special relationship” is “stronger than ever before”); and with just a little imagination, you could call this Obama’s fault.

At this point, the list of alleged personal slights at Bibi—the missed photo-op, the 45-minute Hillary Clinton phone call, the “‘67 borders’ surprise, and on and on—is long enough that this is just another drop in the bath. But it’s what we’re talking about today instead of, say, how Obama may very well be completely committed to preventing Iran from getting the bomb, even if it means the use of U.S. military force (such is Jeffrey Goldberg’s argument in his latest column). Which means it’s a good day for the GOP.

GOP Field Attacks Obama Foreign Policy With Tough Talk on Iran [NYT]
Report: Sarkozy Calls Netanyahu a ‘Liar’ [Ynet]
Why Obama Might Save Israel From Nuclear Iran [Bloomberg View]
Earlier: Perry’s Ascent Heralds Israel’s Rise as Issue
Frontrunning Romney Picks Fight on Israel

None of this actually has to do with the International Atomic Energy Agency report due out next week that is expected to show further Iranian progress and intransigence, right? (Here’s a thought experiment: What if the United States has yanked its IAEA funding by the time the report comes out?) This is for real, and not just deliberate bluster designed to be the stick (the report being the carrot) to goad the international community to further isolating Iran, surely? “Reasonable citizens, at this point quite worried, should take into consideration that a great deal is happening covertly,” write our friends Amos and Avi in Haaretz (and incidentally, even in light of the latest machinations, the Israeli public appears divided on the question of military action). “At least some of these moves are part of a carefully orchestrated campaign whose purpose is not necessarily an Israeli attack. It could be a means of sparking a broad diplomatic maneuver to ratchet up sanctions on Iran.”

They add:

While many people say Netanyahu and [Defense Miniseter] Barak are conducting sophisticated psychological warfare and don’t intend to launch a military operation, top officials, including some in the forum of eight senior ministers, are still afraid.

Ostensibly, Israel is in a win-win situation. If its scare tactics work, the international community will impose paralyzing sanctions on Iran. If the world falls asleep at its post, there are alternatives.

But this is a dangerous game. A few more weeks of tension and one party or another might make a fatal mistake that will drag the region into war.

Happy Thursday, everyone!

Israel and Iran Are Fighting a War of Nerves [Haaretz]

• Yesterday Israel successfully tested a missile that would be capable of reaching Iran from Israel. [AP/WP]

• Syria agreed with an Arab League plan to end the seven-month-long bloody clash with protesters, Syria said. The Arab League says it never got any agreement from Syria. [NYT/DPA/Haaretz]

• Israel is speeding up East Jerusalem building in response to the Palestinian Authority’s acceptance into UNESCO. [NYT]

• The groundwork is being laid for the return of Israel’s ambassador to Cairo, after he left, in extreme haste, two months ago. [Haaretz]

• Beleagured Times Jerusalem bureau chief cancels appearance at 92Y with conservatives. [Ben Smith]

It concludes, “These antagonistic Palestinian policies cannot reasonably be understood apart from the personal conduct and goals of Palestinian Authority Chairman Abbas.”

Yet sharp Israeli journalist Amir Mizroch argues that the person with whom Lieberman is really picking a fight is not Abbas but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Noting that Netanyahu’s stated policy is to continue to push for direct talks with a P.A. run by Abbas, Mizroch notes,

Lieberman is saying these nasty things about Abbas because he knows Bibi won’t fire him or call him to order. Bibi can’t fire Lieberman, unless he’s willing to jettison Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party and bring Kadima into the coalition, which he doesn’t want to do ([Kadima leader Tzipi]Livni won’t do it either unless Bibi agrees to resume substantive peace talks). If and when Netanyahu does decide to fire his wayward foreign minister, Lieberman can make a play for the more right-wing elements of the Likud, the National Religious Party, as well as others, and head into the next elections as the official representative of the Right. Bibi fears this more than anything else, and is loathe to see Lieberman, his one-time employee, as the champion of the Right, heading into elections.

Palestinians: Lieberman’s Remarks Are an Explicit Threat on Abbas’ Life [Haaretz]
Lieberman’s Onslaught on Abbas Continues [Ynet]
By Lashing Out at Abbas, Lieberman Targets Netanyahu [Forecast Highs]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu penned a letter to those whose family members were killed by prisoners Israel is about to free. He said he understood their “negative feelings” about the Gilad Shalit deal. [JTA]

• In an interesting twist on the Kaifeng Jews journalistic genre, we catch up with these descendants of Persian traders in Jerusalem. [LAT]

• Nextbook Press’ The Eichmann Trial; Nextbook Press deputy editor Wayne Hoffman’s Sweet Like Sugar; friend-of-The-Scroll Josh Foer’s Moonwalking With Einstein: all are among Heeb’s top ten books of the past year (that would be 5771). [Heeb]

• Onetime basketball star Kenny Anderson now has a gig coaching high school ball—for a Jewish day school. [NYT]

• Rabbi Andy Bachman, to whom attention must be paid (by me, anyway), opposes Occupy Wall Street. Here’s why. [Water Over Rocks]

Occupy Sukkot happened over the chag. NPR reported from Boston. And here, apparently, are police tearing down a sukkah at one demonstration.

And quite a plan: Haaretz reports there will be 11 phases, a series of preordained moves in which the several sides (the Israelis, Hamas, the Egyptians) take various steps to reassure the others that they will follow through on their ends of a bargain that will ultimately see over 1,000 prisoners go free. For example, Israel releases a few dozen female prisoners; then Shalit is transferred, via the Rafah crossing, from Gaza to Egypt, only at which point will Israel begin releasing some of its male prisoners. (Upon transfer from Egypt to Israel, Shalit “will be given his old cell phone in order to telephone his mother.”) Prime Minister Netanyahu is playing an extensive, symbolic role in the latter part of the proceedings. After all, this was his decision, and his to own—for better and for worse. He was reportedly difficult to persuade throughout, right back to when chief negotiator (and former Mossad official) David Meidan first made informal contacts with Hamas.

It was not hard to see why Netanyahu, or any Israeli, might hesitate to make this deal, and the disclosure of the names of nearly 500—almost half—of the Palestinian prisoners whom Israel will release makes it even less hard. “These are not just prisoners with ‘blood on their hands,’” Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff (who wrote about the Shalit situation for Tablet Magazine) report. “Rather, the list includes some of the founders of the Hamas military wing, such as Zaher Jabarin and Yihya Sanawar, and prisoners involved in some of the most ignoble terror attacks in Israel, including the 1989 attack on bus 405 and the 1994 abduction of Israel Defense Forces soldier Nachshon Wachsman.” And the people behind the 2001 Tel Aviv night club attack. And the 2001 bombing of the Jerusalem Sbarro. And the Passover massacre at Netanya in 2002 (for me, the always-remember-where-I-was moment of the Second Intifada). More names, and the crimes they committed, are listed here.

It is therefore unsurprising that the deal has not been greeted with unanimous approval. Three cabinet members—Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the Yisrael Beiteinu head; Uzi Landau, the infrastructure minister, also of YB; and Moshe Ya’alon, of Netanyahu’s own Likud—voted against the deal outright. Interior Minister Eli Yishai, head of Shas, suggested freeing certain Jewish terrorists as part of the deal for the sake of “balances.” And speaking of: one entrepreneurial soul, an Israeli Jew who claimed he was related to terrorist victims, vandalized Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s grave in protest (click for ugly, important picture). Victims’ families have the opportunity to petition the High Court to overturn releases, but the court is expected to stare the government’s decisis on this one. In a touching article, the Times’ Ethan Bronner reports on two families of victims of prisoners who will be released—one of which opposes the deal, the other of which supports it. Two Jews, two opinions. (A new poll suggests that 79 percent of Israelis support the exchange.)

Is it a gift to terrorists? Plainly. Is it massively, just gargantuan-like, lopsided? Inarguably. The only consolation to be taken is that some of the terrorists Hamas has wanted these past five-plus years were not included (and nor is Marwan Barghouti, although he is a special case: it is far too complicated to try to parse whether Israel should truly wish him jailed, or Hamas truly wish him freed). It’s not even clear that Hamas will honor elements of the deal barring the return to the territories of some prisoners, who are being deported upon their releases. Is it going to lead to further kidnappings of Israeli soldiers in exchange for further prisoners? Well, why wouldn’t it? This is what happens when you literally negotiate with terrorists.

Meanwhile, is Israel getting much in return besides Shalit? Freeing Israeli-American Ilan Grapel will require more Israeli prisoners released. Turkey claims it aided the mediation, but Egypt disputes it, and certainly the deal is not suddenly going to repair Israeli-Turkish relations. Aaron David Miller is quite correct when he notes that this will have no effect on the peace process—in fact, in empowering Hamas and marginalizing the Palestinian Authority, it’s pretty sure to hurt it (further).

If the deal seems totally bewildering to non-Israeli readers, well, maybe it’s simply bewildering. Or maybe we don’t understand what it means to live in a society where one soldier can be everyone’s son, and everyone’s son can provide a reason for staying together, and engineering a major strategic defeat is worth it so that none of your citizens can claim they were never alive at a time that Gilad Shalit was a free man.

Shalit Swap: The Step-by-Step Guide [Haaretz]
Behind the Scenes of the Shalit Deal [Ynet]
Israel Releases Names of 477 Prisoners to be Freed in Trade [NYT]
In Shalit Deal, Israel Crossed Its Own Red Lines [Haaretz]
A Yearning for Solidarity Tangles Public Life [NYT]
Related: News of a Kidnapping [Tablet Magazine]
Everyone’s Son [Tablet Magazine]

There is something fishy going on here. And it involves an American citizen.

Grapel has been detained for nearly four months. Because he entered Egypt with his American passport (he has dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship; his father is Israeli), he is under U.S. jurisdiction and is the United States’ responsibility. Duly, he was able to meet with U.S. diplomats. And only last week, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (previously head of the Mossad’s U.S. counterpart, the CIA) visited Cairo in part for the express purpose of seeking Grapel’s freedom.

Here is where it gets interesting. Panetta failed, but he was in Cairo—we now know—either at the same time or mere days before Israeli negotiator David Meidan—a former Mossad senior officer (who therefore must have worked with Panetta before) who was Israel’s Shalit pointman—and Hamas officials were also in Cairo. They were negotiating not with the usual German mediation but with Egyptian mediation. Flash forward to yesterday morning, when reports appeared that Egypt was now raising the stakes vis-à-vis Grapel: extending his prison stay yet again and still without an indictment, accusing him of throwing fire bombs at Egypt’s Interior Ministry building, and—wait for it—demanding the release of 78 Egyptian prisoners in Israeli jails in exchange for his freedom. That was yesterday morning; by yesterday evening, Grapel was quietly freed under the backdrop of the Shalit deal.

This is all speculation, but doesn’t it seem possible that Grapel was held by Hamas and Egypt as a further bargaining chip, one who, all importantly, caught the attention not only of the Israelis but of the Americans? Actually, we almost know for a fact that Grapel was part of the bargaining, because otherwise there would be little reason to let Grapel go as part of the Shalit deal (the other explanation could be that Egypt wanted to bury the news of the release to save themselves the embarrassment, but that is a pretty contrived explanation). This would also explain the sudden burst of activity on the Grapel front yesterday morning, followed by the reversal yesterday evening: it could have been the Egyptians upping their leverage on the Americans so that the Americans would push the Israelis to strike a deal.

If Panetta were involved in the negotiating, then who else got what? The United States would like to see Hamas turn away from its alliance with Iran, which has never been less convenient seeing as it exists through Syria, where Hamas is headquartered, and Syria may well fundamentally change in the coming months. The United States might also be more eager than usual to see Hamas score this victory over its main rival, the Palestinian Authority (securing the release of one thousand Palestinians), given the recent goings-on at the United Nations.

If Grapel were a part of the deal, it would also suggest that Hamas got a far better deal than they would have gotten without Grapel, because they were able to exert additional bargaining power by appealing to the Americans. This seems plausible, too. We do know that previous negotiations put the number of prisoners exchanged in the 250-350 range, not the over 1,000 that will be released under this deal; on the other hand, in the earlier talks, many prominent figures who won’t be released, such as Marwan Barghouti, were on the table. Getting a look at the prisoners being released may tell us more. Are any of them based in Egypt rather than the Palestinian territories? Do any of them pledge allegiance more to the Brotherhood?

This entire episode occured, of course, in the context of the close ties Hamas has enjoyed with the post-Mubarak Egyptian government, which earlier this year helped negotiate the (failed) Hamas-Fatah reconciliation and which has been sympathetic to Hamas’ cousin organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. Did negotiations fail for almost five years and then succeed after only a few months not because of Shalit but because of Grapel? (Grapel was arrested about two weeks before the fifth anniversary of Shalit’s kidnapping.) Was Egypt less a mediator then merely a part of Hamas’ side?

Finally, this line of inquiry leads to a yet more tantalizing (if less consequential) one. Namely: is Grapel a spy? He has always seemed less Mossad and more particularly dumb Hitchcock protagonist, an idealistic bro who put photos of himself in Tahrir Square on his Facebook page and suddenly found himself caught up in intrigue he had nothing to do with (“he had a satellite phone like I’m an astronaut,” his father memorably put it). At the same time, if you are Egypt, why hold him so long? We may have our answer: according to Meidan, the top-secret negotiations have been ongoing for several months—which is to say, likely since before Grapel’s June arrest. Egypt may have arrested him and quickly realized that he was perfect leverage: someone they could both semi-plausibly accuse of spying for Israel (he had been an IDF paratrooper and had lied about being a journalist upon entry) and use to get the Americans involved. This is maybe what happened—probably, even.

But there is only one thing I feel I can state with confidence, and that is that there is something we have not yet been told.

Israel, Hamas Reach Gilad Shalit Prisoner Exchange Deal, Officials Say [Haaretz]
U.S. Defense Secretary Fails to Secure Egypt Release of Accused Israeli Spy [AP/Haaretz]
Earlier: Deal for Shalit Signed
Israeli-U.S. Law Student Detained in Egypt

He continued: “We will finally be a normal family.”

Since Shalit’s 2006 capture, Israeli leaders have ignored calls to secure his release by freeing Palestinian prisoners, saying it would compromise national security. In 2010, Shalit’s parents, Noam and Aviva, marched across the country to demand a deal and then moved into a white tent outside the prime minister’s residence. They’ve remained there for 14 months—and, along the way, gained thousands of supporters who saw in Shalit far more than the story of just one prisoner. Instead, the young captive became a symbol of the teens recruited to the army, as well as the state’s responsibility to the soldiers it sends to guard its borders. Shalit was a terrifying example of the worst fate that can befall an Israeli in uniform, said supporters interviewed in Jerusalem last night.

Hebrew University student Roni Ofer, 25, said she served in the army at the same time as Shalit. But while she completed her service, he remained a captive. “It was shocking,” she said. “When we are drafted, we know we will be taken care of. Suddenly someone was kidnapped and nothing was done.” Others saw in Gilad Shalit a stand-in for their own children. Ofer Nuna, 40, drove an hour from his home in Rishon Lezion yesterday to bless the Shalits. He stood outside their tent with his 3-year-old son on his shoulders.

“It’s a soldier in the army, it’s like a child of ours,” said Nuna, who still serves on reserve duty. “How can you keep a kid in captivity for five years?”

But news of the soldier’s return brought a wide range of supporters, including skullcapped young men belting out prayers to the beat of a hand drum and Sara Nagani, 53, a homeless woman living in a tent encampment in Jerusalem who last night was waving a blue-and-white Gilad Shalit flag. In summer, throngs of Israelis stood on the same street and demanded more economic equality and a welfare state. Yesterday, the rally was a meeting of people whose demands had finally been met.

Haim Shalom, 33, a reform rabbi in Jerusalem, said Shalit’s release was a correction of “a terrible injustice that we as a society allowed to happen.” He went on: “I think it’s quite appropriate that straight after Yom Kippur and as we go to dwell in our tents, we are finally able to leave this tent here, the tent of Gilad Shalit,” he said.

Just after midnight, Gilad’s father, Noam, arrived. Wearing a blue collared shirt, he pushed his rimless glasses up and offered a smile. Behind him were pictures of his son.

“The Israeli government succeeded after more than five years, 1,934 hard days and 1,935 long nights, to bring Gilad home,” he said. “Tonight we ask to strengthen and bless the prime minister on a brave decision and on leadership he showed despite the great deal of time that has passed.”

Noam Shalit thanked the million activists in Israel and worldwide who have supported him. “From our point of view, this issue will be closed when we see Gilad arrive home and go down the stairs to the house,” he added. “Then we will be able to say the circle has been closed.”

For most of the revelers, 1,000 released Palestinian soldiers was a steep but necessary price to pay for Shalit’s release. But not for Lea Schijveschuurder, 20, whose parents, brother, and two sisters were killed in a bombing in a Jerusalem pizza restaurant 10 years ago. Throughout the evening, as word spread that Abdullah Bargouti, the mastermind of that attack, was one of those to be freed in the deal—rumors later disabused by the media—she was among those standing nearby holding anti-deal signs. Schijveschuurder’s read: “My parents’ blood shouts from the grave.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained his thinking in a speech to his Cabinet. “I believe that we have reached the best deal we could have at this time, when storms are sweeping the Middle East,” he said. “I do not know if in the near future we would have been able to reach a better deal or any deal at all.”

Rather than follow the same script as scores of anxious parents before them, Aviva and Noam Shalit refused to assume a passive role and let the government’s leaders negotiate for Gilad’s freedom. Instead, they camped across the street from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s house, drawing streams of supporters and publicly questioning the government’s every move. Led by Shalit’s parents, the movement organized marches and demonstrations that drew previously unprecedented crowds, convinced some of the country’s top musical artists to record songs demanding Shalit’s release, and distributed symbolic yellow ribbons that soon became ubiquitous. Considering the contentious political assertion at the heart of their campaign—the demand to free hundreds of Palestinian militiamen, some guilty of murder, in return for Shalit, a moral dilemma that had traditionally divided Israelis—their success is nothing short of astonishing.

Nothing about the smiling, scrawny young man in the pictures hanging across Israel suggests a particularly powerful symbolic presence. Which, perhaps, is the whole point of Gilad Shalit. For the most part, previous Israeli prisoners of war belonged to several distinct categories. Some, like Ron Arad—the air force navigator who was captured in Lebanon in 1986—were career soldiers, the sort of men for whom captivity, presumably, was an occupational hazard. Others, like Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, whose capture by Hezbollah in 2006 sparked the Second Lebanon War, were reservists, older men with families and careers. Others still were captured en masse. But Shalit was very young and all alone, an ordinary boy who was nabbed by the enemy less than a year after putting on uniform. He was, in other words, an everyman.

As such, there was no end to the energy Israelis were ready to invest in seeing Shalit return home. Unlike, say, Natan Sharansky, another famed ideological prisoner who became a symbol in Israel, Shalit represented nothing but himself, which is to say an ordinary Israeli living under extremely difficult conditions and wanting nothing more than a quiet, peaceful, dignified life. Few Israelis could imagine life under Soviet repression, but every Israeli who had ever served in the army—the vast majority of Israelis—could imagine the nightmarish scenario of a patrol gone horribly wrong, ending in years of imprisonment. This is what led virtually every renowned Israeli musician to participate in a project organized by an Israeli newspaper to record songs in Shalit’s honor, and this is what brought massive crowds to a tribute concert in Jerusalem in July 2010. In addition to its stated goal, the movement for Shalit’s release had always had a potent subtext, a cri de coeur of beleaguered citizens rallying against a government they perceived as corrupt, uncaring, and out of touch.

Exactly a year after that Jerusalem concert, the activists who initiated the social justice demonstrations were moved by many of the same reasons. Shalit’s portrait was largely missing from the tent encampments in Tel Aviv and elsewhere, but had it not been for the success of the Shalit marches and the bold refusal of activists on his behalf to trust Netanyahu and his Cabinet to do the right thing, the socio-political climate in Israel, arguably, wouldn’t have been ripe for a mass movement of any kind.

When Shalit—slated to be released soon in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners—returns home, Israelis are likely to feel a rare moment of joy. When the celebrations die down, they will have time to reflect on the other, equally significant achievement of the Free Shalit movement: In a nation accustomed to experiencing grief and bereavement collectively, the majority of the population transcended the ideological debate, ignored the severe advice of retired generals who warned that releasing prisoners would only incite more kidnappings, and focused instead on the intensely private fate of one utterly ordinary young man. There’s no better example of true social justice.

• Countries ranging from the United States to European nations to Turkey berated Russia and China for vetoing the U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria this week. [AP/WP/AP/WP]

• Field Marshal Tantawi, Egypt’s de facto ruler, announced that the governing military would not field a presidential candidate in the forthcoming elections. [NYT]

• Following a report that he had pushed for clemency for Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard only to be rejected by President Obama, Vice President Biden agreed to meet with Jewish-American leaders on the issue. [JTA]

• Nick Kristof apportions a significant amount of the blame for Israel’s current woes to Prime Minister Netanyahu. [NYT]

• Apple impresario and inventor Steve Jobs died at 56. He was inspired to work in personal computing after reading a 1971 article by Tablet Magazine contributor Ron Rosenbaum. [NYT]

Though price tag attacks have been something of a trend recently (in response not only to perceived Palestinian attacks but also official Israeli actions such as the uprooting of settlement outposts), this morning’s incident appears to be the first time in at least awhile that one has taken place in (for lack of a better term) Israel proper.

Both Prime Minister Netanyahu and opposition leader Tzipi Livni condemned the attack, as did several prominent Arab Israeli politicians. (I’ve received similar statements from the Orthodox Union and the Anti-Defamation League as well.) But perhaps the most moving words came from Israel’s ultimate éminence grise, President Peres, who announced that he and several chief rabbis would be visiting the site at an unrelated ceremony this morning. He said,

It is unconscionable that a Jew would harm something that is holy to another religion. This act is not-Jewish, illegal, immoral, and brings upon us heavy shame. I strongly condemn this horrible act in every language. This is not only a difficult day for the residents of Tuba Zangria, it is a difficult day for all Israeli society. As the President of Israel, during these days of introspection between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I call upon all to denounce these terrible acts. These acts, destroy relations between us and our neighbors, and between the various religions in Israel.

We will not allow extremists and criminals to undercut the need to live together equally in equality and mutual respect. Arabs and Jews as one.

That “in every language” is a very subtle and very justified dig at the way Peres’ counterparts act when similar attacks occur.

Last month, inspired in part by our article on young women who are Jewish settlers, a prominent religious Zionist rabbi questioned who ought to be held responsible for the price tag epidemic.

Mosque Torched in Northern Israel [WP]
Netanyahu: Galilee Mosque Arson ‘Horrifying’ and Has No Place in Israel [Haaretz]
Earlier: Who Buys ‘Price Tag’ Crimes?

Let’s look at the replay. The Quartet statement, which was pushed through by the United States (one of its four members, along with the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia) at the same time that the Palestinians submitted their membership resolution to the U.N. Security Council, calls on both sides to “refrain from provocative actions” yet also dictates talks “without preconditions,” so you can read it either as demanding a settlement freeze or not demanding one, and both sides have duly read it the way they would prefer. Last week, Israel’s cabinet failed to come to a position on it. This indecision was likely designed to provoke the Palestinian Authority into a screw-up, but instead, the P.A. put forth cautious, ambiguous statements, insisting that talks commence—and insisting that the resolution insists that talks commence—only once Israel has agreed to a settlement freeze. Then, later last week, Israel announced new construction in East Jerusalem, dubbed, yes, a provocative action by Secretary of State Clinton, who was essentially responsible for putting the resolution together. In football terms, Israel, rather than drawing the defense offside, got slapped with a false start penalty—Eli Yishai might be the offending far-right tackle, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel the referee who threw a flag—which left it forced, yesterday, to accept the Quartet resolution, avec spin: “Israel welcomes the Quartet’s call for direct negotiations between the parties without preconditions, as called for by both President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu,” its statement read. The State Department responded with similarly laudatory words (and similar spin: “… negotiations without preconditions”). Palestinian ball, their own 20-yard line. What will they do? (End of metaphor. An actual football post, however, is forthcoming!)

Hussein Ibish has a nice summary. I’m not sure their incentives to engage on the Quartet resolution, especially as it is construed by the White House to demand talks without a settlement freeze, are especially high. Ibish doesn’t even cite doing so as one of the five tacks they could take—the closest he comes is to suggest that the Palestinians try to persuade the Quartet to adopt more favorable language. Egypt slammed the Quartet resolution almost as soon as it dropped, so President Abbas will definitely be covered if he dithers. The U.S. Congress continues to make noise about conditioning P.A. aid on the dropping of the U.N. path, but since the Obama and Netanyahu administrations both understand that such a move would be disastrous for Israel, this is highly unlikely ever to happen—and the P.A. knows that, too. Israelis, for their part, appear to understand that the peace process is dead, yet, for them, this does not represent the end of their lives or their country.

Given that a continuing push at the Security Council will result in a drawn-out process and then either a very possible, humiliating defeat by non-veto votes or, alternatively, a certain defeat by U.S. veto, Abbas, I think, would be wise to turn to the General Assembly, where he can get a quick vote either with E.U. cooperation or on his own (both are suggestions of Ibish’s). It’s not a touchdown (sorry I’m going back to the football analogy), but it will give them good field position. The choice Ibish doesn’t mention, of violence, would be the worst outcome, in all ways, for everyone except the extremists.

Israel Accepts Peace Talks Plan [WP]
Abbas Aide Urges Quartet to Press for Israeli Settlement Halt [WP]
Where Do We Go From Here? [Foreign Policy]
Egypt Drops Cold Water on New Middle East Peace Process [FP Turtle Bay]
Related: Israel’s Cabinet Fails to Reach Consensus on Quartet Plan for Talks With Palestinians [Haaretz]

Prime Minister Netanyahu returned the favor, appearing on the Meet the Press and insisting he did not want to get tied up in American domestic politics—which, if you look at his actions last May, isn’t actually true, meaning it was his way of making nice with the Obama administration. “They’re all friends of Israel,” he said of the Republican presidential aspirants (as well as Obama). And he took additional care to denounce his own Likud colleague (albeit rival) Danny Danon for appearing with Gov. Perry last week.

And if you don’t think Israeli and U.S. leaders are working on their frequently acrimonious relationship, take a look at Eli Lake’s inaugural Newsweek blockbuster (bunker-buster?), reporting that the administration, through the thick and thin of the diplomatic relationship, has continued the trend of increasing military-to-military cooperation, and has even sold Israel bunker-busting bombs—weapons that would be mighty useful if Israel found itself wanting to destroy, say, underground Iranian nuclear weapons facilities. I don’t come to slight Lake’s reporting—he’s one of the very best, and some of the details concerning the hardware transacted no doubt is stuff that he, and we, aren’t supposed to know (especially since a WikiLeaks-released cable reported that neither side wanted the sales to become public). But his piece does fit into the narrative the nascent Obama re-election campaign is trying to tell when it comes to Israel, and it would make sense if that was the result of the Israelis trying to make nice with the folks who just got their backs at the U.N., and are continuing to do so with regard to the peace process.

This feels like a zany week, as opposed to the seriousness of last, so let’s close with Perry dancing with Chabad rabbis (it comes toward the end). Who said he’s a fair-weather friend?

Palestinians Roll Out Hero’s Welcome for Abbas [NYT]
Plan for Mideast Talks Gets Mixed Reception [WP]
White House Briefs Jews on Quartet [JTA]
Netanyahu: All W.H. Contenders ‘Friends of Israel’ [Politico Live]
Netanyahu Rebukes Perry Ally [Ben Smith]
Let’s Make a Deal! [Newsweek]
Israel and Middle East Falsehoods [Attack Watch]

• Ten members of the so-called Irvine 11, who disrupted Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at the University of California-Davis, were found guilty by a jury of two misdemeanors. [JTA]

• More (since we first linked Wednesday) on how John J. Mearsheimer, of The Israel Lobby fame, has blurbed a book by an honest-to-God, self-proclaimed self-hating Jew who has some particularly troubling things to say about the Holocaust. [Adam Holland]

• Meet Shelly Yachimovich, the new leader of Labor, who has her work cut out for her. [NYT]

• Prompted in part by the Emergency Committee for Israel’s campaign, several Jewish leaders have cautioned that Israel ought not to be turned into a partisan wedge issue. [Forward]

• Last year, at his press availability in New York, President Ahmadinejad served bagels and lox. [The New Yorker News Desk]

• President Clinton major-league disses Prime Minister Netanyahu. [FP The Cable]

• Peggy Noonan praises President Obama on Israel and chastises Gov. Perry. Wait, what? [WSJ]

• A new study found that younger Conservative rabbis may be more politically left than their elders, but are still staunchly pro-Israel. [Forward]

• Prominent Jewish journalist Ruth Ellen Gruber was honored by the government of Poland. [JTA]

• Israel has pledged $1 million to Auschwitz’s upkeep. Which, read the wrong way, comes off sounding pretty ironic. [AP/WP]

• The German fashion company Hugo Boss has formally apologized for its onetime ties to the Nazis. [Imprint]

• What are you doing next Wednesday? You’re watching Rush Hashanah on VH1, of course. [The Daily Swarm]

• Did Germany’s reunification in part lead to a neo-Nazi resurgence? [Jewish Chronicle]

Happy 62nd birthday to a man who is frequently mistaken for a Jew but is always accurately captured when deemed the Boss.

• Diplomats are working to craft an apparatus whereby the Palestinian resolution would be postponed in the U.N. Security Council, in order to allow for direct talks to resume. [LAT]

• The remaining hikers in Iran were released. [Yahoo! The Envoy]

• The Obama campaign had a massive conference call yesterday in order to begin its efforts to shore up the Jewish vote. [WP The Plum Line]

• Iran’s ambassador hewed closer to the Hamas line on President Abbas’ plans, declaring U.N. recognition merely one step toward eliminating Israel. [Investigative Project on Terrorism via Ben Smith]

• Turkey has joined sanctions against Syria and is on the verge of erasing relations with its neighbor. [Ynet]

Bibi’s Brain

Dermer’s title is senior adviser to the prime minister, and he’s a jack-of-all-trades—strategist, pollster, and speechwriter for Netanyahu, as well as his chief proxy in foreign affairs. A constant presence in Netanyahu’s meetings in Washington, he has helped shape Israel’s posture in the American capital most notably through Netanyahu’s spring speech to the U.S. Congress, which foiled President Barack Obama’s effort to pressure the prime minister into meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians. “Bibi doesn’t move an inch without talking to him,” said one person who has been in meetings with both men.

At 40, Dermer has a full head of dark hair under his small knit kippah and the hyperkinetic energy of a man who is still young. A Wharton-schooled economist and Oxford-trained political theorist with Machiavellian political instincts, Dermer comes across as equal parts George Stephanopoulos and Karl Rove. He is a ferocious competitor who quarterbacked Israel’s flag-football team in the sport’s World Cup three times. “He cannot abide anybody being better at him than anything, particularly physically,” said his friend Tom Rose, a former publisher of the Jerusalem Post. “He wouldn’t let a 3-year-old beat him at Ping-Pong.”

Dermer is in some ways a successor to the Americans and returning expatriates who figured prominently in Netanyahu’s first stint in the Aquarium, from 1996 to 1999. One was David Bar-Illan, the late newspaper editor and Juilliard-trained pianist who served as Netanyahu’s chief spokesman. Dore Gold, the Connecticut-born academic who was Netanyahu’s first-term ambassador to the United Nations and now runs a national-security think tank in Jerusalem, is another.

But the current Netanyahu government is perhaps more Anglo-inflected than any other in Israeli history. Gold’s one-time Columbia classmate, the historian Michael Oren, serves as Netanyahu’s ambassador to the United States, a post Oren renounced his American citizenship to accept. The MIT economist Stanley Fischer governs the Bank of Israel, a position that required him to take on Israeli citizenship and learn some Hebrew. Until last year, Netanyahu’s chief scheduler was a California-born immigrant named Ari Harow, who first met Dermer a decade ago when the two squared off on opposing Israeli flag-football teams.

Yet of all the Americans in the Aquarium, Dermer is uniquely fluent in Israel’s convoluted coalition government system, and he is adept at defending Netanyahu’s partisan flanks. His professional political background gives him another asset: exceptionally deep and longstanding relationships with Washington’s Republican establishment, particularly its neoconservative wing, which are entirely independent of his connection to Netanyahu. The youngest son of a Miami Beach politico, Dermer took a job right out of college in Washington as an assistant to Frank Luntz, the Republican consultant who engineered the watershed 1994 “Contract With America” House campaign for Newt Gingrich. His second was in Jerusalem, as a pollster for the Soviet-dissident-turned-Israeli-politician Natan Sharansky, a connection forged with help from Richard Perle, the Reagan (and, later, George W. Bush) Administration defense specialist.

For a young, ambitious wonk there was no question where the better action was. “In those years—1993, 1994, 1995—public policy was fairly insignificant,” Dermer said in an interview last month in his Jerusalem office. “When I came to Israel the excitement about it was that the decisions ahead of it were so consequential to the future of the country and to the Jewish people.”

He arrived in the shadow of the Oslo Accords and Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination to find a country divided: not just between doves and hawks, he said, but between secular and religious Jews, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, between native-born Israelis and newcomers from the former Soviet Union. It was, in other words, exciting. “I wanted to do something where every day I could do what I wanted to do, not something where maybe 20 or 30 or 40 years later I could maybe have some influence on some decision,” Dermer told me, leaning back in his chair. “I wanted to have an impact in some way, and an influence in some way on a country that was making these great historic decisions and that still had to make those decisions.”

Armed with luck and excellent connections, Dermer enjoyed an accelerated ride into the heart of the country’s power structure that would have been difficult if not impossible to match stateside. “He made the right choice,” said Luntz, his former mentor. “He maintains his American sensibilities but he always had an Israeli mind, and he could function there in ways many of us could not. You’ve got to be tough to not just survive but to thrive.”

Dermer still thinks of himself as an American, and he still defines his political decisions by Washington standards. “When I think about Israel, I always ask myself, I call it the WWAD question: ‘What would America do?’ ” he said, smacking the desk with his palms for added effect. “As somebody born and raised in the United States, I have absolutely no doubt that America would take more forceful action if faced by the threats facing Israel.”

Netanyahu, who lived in New York and Philadelphia as a kid and went to college and graduate school at MIT, hardly needs an American like Dermer to help him speak American. Dermer offers the Israeli prime minister something deeper. He embodies the ideal combination of intellectual pedigree, physical prowess, and family commitment prized by Israelis of Netanyahu’s generation. He shares—and, by his choice to become Israeli, affirms—Netanyahu’s conviction about the outsize role that Israel plays in the grand sweep not just of Jewish history, but also of Western history. Perhaps most important, 15 years after moving to Israel, Dermer retains the brash confidence of a born Yankee—a quality that’s harder to pick up than an accent and precious to a politician like Netanyahu, who plainly yearns for his fellow Israeli Jews to feel they share the same superpower birthright as their American cousins.

Heilemann cites my case that Gov. Rick Perry and other Republicans fervently and frequently proclaims his support for and love of Israel because Israel (and Iran) are where Obama is most vulnerable, national security-wise—among not only Jews but everyone. He calls this “perfect bullshit,” and just in case it’s not clear enough, I’m pretty sure—I hope!—he is referring to the Republican argument that Obama’s Israel policy reveals him to be a blame-America-first ultra-dove, and not, er, my argument that the Republicans will try to use Israel to pin that label on Obama. (Here is the post Heilemann quoted from. I also made it clear here that I consider Obama’s policies to be pro-Israel. And I interviewed Tevi Troy and Matt Duss about it.)

Heilemann’s piece surely went to press before Perry published his op-ed chastising Obama on Israel; and before Perry announced a $2500-a-head kosher fundraiser in New York; and before (yikes) Perry announced he would be holding a press conference Tuesday in New York with MK Danny Danon, the politician most closely associated with the plan to annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank; and before (yikes!) Netanyahu’s people mentioned the prime minister might make a side trip to New York’s ninth congressional district, site of last week’s Israel-heavy special election. Stuff like that vindicates people like him and me, and I’d like to submit a corollary: Israel’s relevance in the United States is going to embolden the right on both sides; they are feeding off of each other at this point, and the thing is going to take on a momentum all its own.

That rumor about Netanyahu is a good segue back to the article, which contains plenty of evidence that Bibi’s chief concern is and has always been Bibi, at the expense, certainly of the U.S.-Israel special relationship and, arguably, at the expense of Israel itself. You should read the whole thing. What follows are a few things that especially caught my attention:

• Heilemann defends Obama: “His role here is not that of the callous assailant but of the caring and sober brother slapping his drunken sibling: The point is not to hurt the guy but to get him to sober up.” Americans can know what’s better for Israel than the Israeli government: this is exactly the J Street line. J Street is not mentioned in the piece. To me, that is a sign that J Street has not succeeded in making itself prominent enough to be an effective “blocking back” for Obama.

• A man named Barack Hussein Obama received four percent more of the Jewish vote than John Kerry did. That tells you that the 78 percent Jewish-vote figure was unusually inflated, likely by both the general decisiveness of Obama’s victory and the presence of Sarah Palin on the other ticket. It would be insane to expect Obama to get 78 percent again, eve if he hadn’t pissed off the Jews.

• Obama has pissed off the Jews. “The perception of Obama as harboring antipathy to Israel, they argue, makes 2012 a ripe opportunity for the right Republican to swipe a larger than usual share of Jewish votes and/or pick the Obama campaign’s pocket,” Heilemann argues. “Skeptical? I would be, too, except for one thing: the sight of the Obamans scrambling to make sure it doesn’t happen.” Hiring Ira Forman as the new director of Jewish outreach, he adds, “is a tacit acknowledgment that the White House has badly handled the continual care and feeding required to keep major donors sweet.” Heilemann is especially worth listening to here: he wrote the seminal early story about how Obama was outraising Hillary Clinton.

• “Within the Republican donor class, Romney is the strong favorite.” Makes sense.

• “Regarding the call for a settlement freeze, the Obamans defend the decision without a trace of apology.” That is disturbing. The settlements are illegal and an obstacle to peace; they also weren’t the prime problem, and from a pragmatic perspective, were exactly the wrong thing to bring up.

• A crucial line from former chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, one of the few former Obama officials to go on the record (which tells you he also helped shape the story): “We had an obligation—and this is where we deserve a yellow card—to explain what we were doing with the Palestinians or Arabs, to put more air in the tires on that side. Not tone down what we said on settlements, but work harder so there was more recognition of the parity that existed with the Arab violations.” It’s a great point, except I believe he means that they deserved a ten-yard penalty, because we do not make soccer metaphors in this country.

• Obama should have gone to Israel when he was in Cairo. “‘We made a mistake,’ admits one senior administration foreign-policy adviser. ‘Nobody thought of it as a big deal at the time, but, I mean, you’re in the neighborhood, you’re right down the street, and you don’t stop by for coffee?’” We already knew this, of course. But now the Obama people know it. It may, however, be too late for them.

The Tsuris [NYMag]
Earlier: Perry’s Ascent Heralds Israel’s Rise as Issue
The Problem With Perry

Most days, it’s packed with people trying to get from Ramallah to Jerusalem, young children selling bootleg CDs and small Qurans to the drivers stuck in huge traffic jams, and drug dealers. But on Wednesday, all of that might vanish if hundreds or thousands of Palestinians try to storm the checkpoint in an act of protest against the Israeli occupation. They will be there to support the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood at the United Nations.

If the strategy goes according to plan, Palestinians will hold mass demonstrations all over the West Bank on that day. The Palestinian leadership has announced that they prefer for these demonstrations to take place in the heart of the Palestinian cities—not close to Israeli checkpoints or settlements. But the problem is that while the generation that fought in the Second Intifada has tired of violent confrontation with Israel, no official, not even President Mahmoud Abbas, can control the young Palestinians in Ramallah and elsewhere who may want to directly confront Israeli soldiers.

On the other side of the checkpoint, hundreds of Israeli soldiers and border policemen will be waiting for the demonstrators. Hoping to prevent any casualties, they’ll be armed with nonlethal weapons: tear gas, guns with rubber bullets, and the latest—a big truck that sprays disgusting-smelling liquid to disperse crowds. Yet Israelis fear that if thousands of unarmed Palestinians try to walk toward the checkpoint, tear gas or rubber bullets might not manage to deter them—and that the IDF will then be forced to use live ammunition in order to stop the crowds from getting inside Jerusalem.

In that worst case, they fear, the confrontation could ignite a Third Intifada.

**

On the Separation Fence across from the Kalandia Checkpoint are graffiti portraits of the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Fatah’s current leader, Marwan Bargouti. As the leader of Fatah’s militia, the Tanzim, Bargouti is considered the man responsible for the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Arafat was the president who didn’t want to stop it. Arafat died in November 2004. Bargouti, who was arrested by Israel in April 2002 and is serving five consecutive life sentences, still exerts major political influence from behind bars. He now admits that one of the major mistakes made by the Palestinians was to take up arms against Israel.

Today, Abbas and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad emphasize that they are not in favor of militarizing the struggle. Just last week, Abbas reiterated that the demonstrations around the statehood bid must remain peaceful. But in the case of Wednesday’s planned protests, no one can guarantee that militants affiliated with Hamas or Fatah won’t start shooting at Israeli forces, and, in doing so, transform the intended popular struggle into a very bloody one.

Yet that word—intifada—is nearly absent from the vocabulary of the people who live in the Kalandia refugee camp and, for that matter, in other villages throughout the West Bank. The common feeling among Palestinians is that chances for a Third Intifada are very slim. “People are too tired, too exhausted,” one hears again and again. “We had enough fighting; we just want to make a living.”

At the beginning of August, on the first day of Ramadan, two young Palestinians who live in the Kalandia refugee camp were shot and killed by Israeli troops while the IDF was attempting to arrest one of their neighbors. The boys were not armed. Their posters hang on the walls of houses near the checkpoint, but their deaths did not lead to further confrontations. Even their family members said they didn’t want a violent intifada against the Jewish state. “Forget it,” they told us. “We just want to live.”

A very similar attitude was expressed to us by a group of former gunmen, previously considered wanted terrorists by Israel, in Nablus’ Old City. During the last years of the Second Intifada, these men were part of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah. In 2007 they formed a break-off militia known as Fursan Al-Leil, or the Horsemen of the Night, which attacked Israeli soldiers and settlers.

M., their leader, met with us a weeks ago. He now makes his living selling toys for children. M. was given amnesty by the Israeli authorities following an agreement made between the Palestinian Authority and Israel’s security forces in the summer of 2007. Israel promised full amnesty for wanted al-Aqsa members who would stop taking part in any terrorist activity and relinquish their weapons. His colleague S., who sells cakes and candies in the old city market, did the same.

“We paid our dues. We are not going to take part in a Third Intifada. We are now in the family business—raising our children and educating them. We are not in the fighting business anymore,” M. said. “Who should we fight for? The PA who neglected us?” S. added.

Life in the West Bank has dramatically improved in the past few years under Fayyad’s leadership. The economy has flourished, although it has slowed down somewhat in the last nine months. Law and order are back on the streets of cities like Jenin and Beit Lehem, the IDF keeps a fairly low profile, there are fewer checkpoints, and the roads are open. If there is a violent escalation with Israel, people are afraid all of this would be lost.

***

So, why do people, especially Israelis, fear a Third Intifada? First and foremost, politicians on both sides, but especially on the Palestinian side, have made crucial mistakes that have increased the likelihood of violent confrontation. There was the Palestinians’ demand for a complete stoppage of settlement building as a precondition for resuming peace negotiations. When Israel refused—and this came as no surprise—the Palestinians decided to go the United Nations.

As M. and S. emphasized to us in Nablus, another major factor is that there is a new generation of Palestinians raised entirely under Israeli occupation, whose reactions no one can easily predict. In a sense, these young people are the greatest unknown. Perhaps they will take their inspiration from the Arab Spring, using Twitter, Facebook, and rallies that might include stone throwing, but not guns, to force change. Or maybe not.

It shouldn’t have come to this. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu completely failed to attempt a diplomatic move that would delay the Palestinians’ statehood bid. Under pressure from his foreign minister, the hardliner Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu refused to act. A harsh report published in late August by Shaul Mofaz, chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, criticized the prime minister for his failure to come up with any initiative that would persuade the Palestinians to give up their U.N. move. Though the Obama Administration has launched a last-ditch effort to prevent a diplomatic showdown later this week, it seems unlikely to bear fruit.

If Palestinian statehood comes up for a vote in the U.N. Security Council, as Abbas said late last week was the plan, the United States will block the bid with its veto. But what will a failed Palestinian attempt mean for Israel? Defense Minister Ehud Barak made headlines a few months ago when he warned of a “diplomatic tsunami” awaiting Israel after September. Given recent events in Egypt and Turkey, that seems increasingly likely.

Other senior members of the Netanyahu Cabinet disagree with Barak’s gloomy forecast. Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon believes that pessimistic scenarios are widely exaggerated. “Compared to September 2000, when the Second Intifada broke out, Israel faces a totally different Palestinian leadership today,” Yaalon told us. “Abbas is not interested in violence. Yasser Arafat was.”

Seven years ago, as the IDF’s chief of staff, Yaalon talked about the need for “deep internalization by the Palestinians that terrorism and violence will not defeat us.” In other words, the only way Palestinians would end their intifada was if they were convinced that an armed struggle wasn’t worth the trouble, because the price they’d pay would always be much greater than the damage inflicted on Israel. Yaalon is convinced this has been achieved.

Netanyahu and his closest political ally, Barak, have given strict orders to IDF commanders regarding the protests later this week: contain, contain, contain. During the last week of August, the IDF general staff spent five hours of its weekly Monday morning meeting debating preparation for events in September, dubbed Operation Seeds of Summer. The IDF has devoted a huge amount of time to training forces for this operation, briefing the junior and mid-level commanders, and distributing nonlethal weapons to soldiers at the checkpoints and in the settlements.

The trouble is that the junior command has been given conflicting orders: avoid civilian deaths that could lead to further escalation, and, at the same time, prevent the crowds from storming the checkpoints and the settlements. Even if the IDF were to pull both off, success depends heavily on cooperation with Palestinian security forces, which may not come through if things deteriorate. “Don’t be mistaken: If thousands of Palestinian civilians tear down the fence around Beith El [a large settlement near Ramallah] and attempt to get in, we will have to shoot live ammunition,” warned a senior IDF officer. A similar scenario happened this spring along the Syrian border, when Israeli soldiers shot at Palestinian and Syrian demonstrators who crossed the border. Dozens were killed.

After failing with wars (in 1948, 1967, 1973), suicide-bomb attacks (from 2000 to 2004), and missiles and rockets (during the Second Lebanon war and afterward), Israel’s opponents could discover that mass, nonviolent demonstrations will be their most effective strategy against the Jewish state. “We don’t deal with Gandhi very well,” admitted Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli defense official, to his U.S. counterparts, according to a recently published WikiLeaks document. The Israeli army has never had to confront an unarmed rally of thousands of people marching toward an Israeli checkpoint or a settlement.

On Wednesday, perhaps we’ll see what that looks like.

Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal’s New York Times editorial earlier this week, warning the White House that such a veto would mean losing Saudi Arabia as an ally, is only one part of the Middle Eastern campaign against the Americans. Even when Israel is the ostensible target of the region’s ire, it is the Obama Administration that led the Palestinians up a tree and kicked away the ladder, as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas put it.

Obama’s supporters in the pro-Israel camp are eager to jump on any evidence that the president is a great friend of Jerusalem, even if he doesn’t afford the same love to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would to one headed by Netanyahu’s left-leaning rival, Tzipi Livni. Thus, those supporters have made much of Obama’s assistance in securing the safe escape of the Israeli Embassy’s staff from Cairo, assistance for which Netanyahu was rightly grateful.

But it’s worth noting that when Turkey sent an angry mob after Israeli security personnel, the White House took a very different approach. After Israeli forces boarded the Turkish-sponsored Mavi Marmara in May 2010 to prevent it from running the maritime blockade of Gaza, the commandos found themselves faced with armed passengers and killed nine on board. The United Nations’ Palmer Report recently cleared Israel of any illegality in the incident. But the White House still wanted Israel to apologize to Turkey for killing the terrorists on the ship.

The administration was apparently looking to give the Turks something in exchange for agreeing to host an early-warning radar system. Moreover, Obama is eager to make Turkey happy because in his strategic view, Ankara is a key player capable of exercising influence across the Middle East. It’s a skewed perspective that the Turks share.

The fact that Israel will be the only regional actor left standing by the administration after this upcoming diplomatic storm is, paradoxically, the result of how badly Obama has mishandled the Jewish State. Creating daylight between the United States and its only loyal regional ally has been an invitation to regional governments in trouble to distance themselves even further from Israel—and, therefore, from the United States. Since every government in the region is in trouble, the Obama Adminstration’s policy of “even-handedness” is not likely to result in peace but rather in turmoil, bloodshed, and a further reduction in American influence.

The Turks are making noise not just because of their genuinely anti-Israel disposition but because they want to position themselves as powerful advocates of the Palestinians. That’s why they expelled the Israeli ambassador to Turkey earlier this month instead of a year and a half ago. The issue, then, is not Israeli action on the high seas but U.S. diplomacy in overcompensation mode. Ankara doesn’t deserve a tit-for-tat from Washington for hosting a radar system: It’s part of the NATO membership fee. But instead of reining in the Turks, the White House turned on Jerusalem last week when it leaked a story claiming that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates thinks that Netanyahu is “ungrateful.” Some in official Israeli circles believe that the Gates story is payback to Netanyahu for not apologizing to Turkey. In any case, it sends a strange message on the eve of the U.N. vote: The Americans are backing Israel, but they’re holding their noses as they do so.

And so the pre-veto campaign against Israel has already begun. Saudi papers criticized the Israelis, as did Jordan’s King Abdullah II. Israel, said Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “is the West’s spoiled child.” In Cairo, Erdogan explained how “a Palestinian child’s pain hurts the heart of mothers in Ankara.” The hurt of those Turkish hearts is hardly going to be salved if Washington’s U.N. Ambassador, Susan Rice, votes against a Palestinian state.

**
For almost 40 years the U.S. order for the region has been built on the back of its Israeli ally, whose wars, especially in 1967 and 1973, effectively secured American hegemony in the Middle East. With Israel positioned as the region’s reigning military power, the United States could accommodate its other regional clients by compelling Israel to sit with its adversaries and, from time to time, give up land in exchange for an uncertain peace. Meantime, its enemies were rewarded with advanced weapons systems. In other words, for the United States the peace process was important not because it necessarily brought about peace, but because it showed Washington to be a cunning grandmaster, able to control the movements of all the pieces on the chessboard.

From an American perspective, the problem with the Obama Administration is not that it lacks the natural warmth for the Jewish state that Bill Clinton and the second Bush White Houses radiated. Rather, it is that it does not understand the rules of the game it is playing—chess—and so is incapable of assessing the value of the queen, Israel.

Obama came to office with the idea that what mattered was not the game but real movement on the peace process, resulting in the establishment of a Palestinian state. He believed the experts when they said that he had to go hard on the Israelis. In reality, the sticking point for Netanyahu and the right was never really, or not only, that they couldn’t stop settlement construction, but rather that the Israeli electorate had lost patience with phony talk about peace and was no longer willing to indulge the fantasies of American politicians at the price of their own lives. The sentiments of Israeli voters may change in the short term, or it may take much longer. But right now their memories are still bright with the images of rockets being shot from the lands they voluntarily gave up in the vain hope of peace. Any Israeli leader who tried to give up the West Bank after the experiences with Lebanon and Gaza would be committing political suicide.

That doesn’t mean there’s no game. It just means that the chessboard looks entirely different now that it did five or 10 years ago. Once the White House cornered both Abbas and Netanyahu, leaving neither man any room to maneuver, the result was not a swift march toward peace. Rather, the Americans lost control of the board: Netanyahu balked. The Palestinians decided to go to the United Nations to declare their state. Post-Mubarak Egypt brokered a reconciliation deal between Hamas and Fatah. Turkey moved against Israel to advance its own position. And Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, which had been quietly praying that the storms of the Arab Spring might pass them over, came out to sound off against the Israelis.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, including the testimony of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah and other regional leaders who wanted Obama to focus on Iran, the White House believed that the region’s central issue was the Arab-Israeli crisis and the obstacle was Israeli intransigence. With the arrival of the Arab Spring, Washington’s experts were proven decisively wrong. As the Arab Spring turns into a long, hot summer, shaken rulers like Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the mullahs in Iran, and their clients in Lebanon will also look to stir up trouble for Israel in the hopes of distracting their people from the problems at home.

The shakiness of these regimes suggests that a shooting war is in no one’s interest right now. At the same time, the larger political instability of the region may also encourage these countries to act in ways that might ordinarily seem reckless. The vacuum created by U.S. abandonment of the old order has encouraged an intense competition for influence and power that has fueled the most recent upsurge of provocations and violence against the Israelis—a pattern that is likely to grow more intense after the statehood vote and can easily spiral out of control. If that happens, the Israelis will either acquit themselves well or else they won’t. Either way, America’s remaining prestige in the region will go up in smoke.