But if every new administration makes mistakes, and learns from them, President Barack Obama’s self-appointed task of bringing peace to the Middle East may get more difficult with the mid-term elections Tuesday, when the House, and perhaps the Senate, will fall into the hands of a Republican party that is poised to push back against an administration that is commonly perceived as less friendly to Israel than its predecessors.

House Republicans have pitched their rhetoric high. Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, for instance, described the current White House as “the most anti-Israel administration in the modern history of the state of Israel.” Indeed, there’s some concern in pro-Israel circles that the bipartisan nature of support for the Jewish state is starting to show cracks. Fifty-four Congressional Democrats (but no Republicans) signed a letter urging Obama to “press for immediate relief for the citizens of Gaza” suffering under Israel’s blockade. A few months later 78 House Republicans wrote a letter to the Israeli Prime Minister expressing their “steadfast support” for him and Israel. The same divide seems to hold true with the electorate as well. An October poll conducted for the Emergency Committee for Israel showed that of “those intending to vote Republican this fall, 69 percent would be more likely to vote for a candidate who was pro-Israel” while only 40 percent of Democratic voters are more likely to vote for a pro-Israel candidate. It appears that the new Congress will be very much in line with the man likely to become its new majority leader, Virginia’s Eric Cantor, the House’s lone Jewish Republican, who recently told the White House that playing “hardball” with Israel “jeopardizes our national security.”

The emergence of Israel as a partisan political football is representative of not only a political difference but a philosophical one as well. One segment of the American political class sees Israel as an exceptional, and like-minded, ally and the other sees it as merely another nation-state—and a problematic one at that. Obama, it seems, is of the latter camp. He came to office with the hardly novel idea that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the Middle East’s central issue and that ending the conflict would cool off the Muslim masses whose hatred of the United States is supposedly tied to Washington’s “unconditional support” for Israel. A peace deal would also be a powerful means—perhaps the only available means, given the improbability of any kind of further American military action in the Middle East—of reducing the strength of the region’s radical actors, especially Iran.

The president pushed the Israelis hard, which only gave the Palestinian Authority incentive not to negotiate but rather to wait for Obama to deliver the Israelis. Domestically, the administration’s bullying of Israel angered some key Democrats, like New York Sen. Charles E. Schumer and many Jewish Democratic donors. Once the midterms are over, Obama will have at least six months before he has to worry about alienating Jewish fund-raisers for his 2012 re-election campaign. Then, as one source in Washington’s pro-Israel community puts it, “we will see what the administration has learned in 18 months; if they’ve understood that the way to move the process forward is to make the Israelis feel confident by embracing them in friendship, and not club Netanyahu like a fish you’re reeling in.”

It’s not clear yet how, or if, the divide over Israel within the administration has been resolved. Both the pro-Israel faction and the faction less friendly to the Jewish state have lost prominent figures (including former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel from the former and James Jones, the national security adviser, from the latter). In another internal fight, it appears that Dennis Ross is gaining the upper hand on George Mitchell, who has dropped his chief of staff, Mara Rudman, who was famously in favor of ratcheting up the pressure on the Israelis. But it was the secretary of State who gave perhaps the clearest indication of where things stand in the administration with one of the most sober assessments in the history of American Middle East diplomacy. “The future holds the possibility of progress,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told guests at the American Task Force for Palestine’s annual banquet last week, “if not in our lifetimes, then certainly in our children’s.”

If the State Department is clearly chastened by the failures of the past 18 months, the fact is that the president makes foreign policy. And this particular commander-in-chief has shown not only a reluctance to delegate important matters to subordinates (as Bush handed off all Middle East policy, save Iraq, to Condoleezza Rice), but also that he is willing to stand his ground to do what he thinks is right and only he can get done, regardless of the political cost. For their part, the Republicans will do what they can to put on the brakes.

Already Eric Cantor has touched off a minor crisis by suggesting that a Republican majority would seek to remove Israel from the foreign operations budget. Cantor’s proposal is to move aid to Israel over to the Pentagon in order to protect it if the GOP seeks to attack the president’s foreign aid budget by cutting funds for states that they believe do not merit U.S. aid. The fact that New York Rep. Nita Lowey, a strong supporter of Israel, has slammed Cantor’s proposal as reckless indicates that this is not about Israel but a political instrument to tie down the executive’s prerogative in making foreign policy.

It’s unlikely the Republicans will push their agenda, or counter-agenda, too far, for in the end their options are quite limited. They can call hearings on Capitol Hill, and they can challenge the White House’s Syria policy by maintaining there a hold on the appointment of the ambassador to Damascus, but too many fights with the administration will stretch the time and resources of the majority. The GOP will need to muster its strength for more pressing concerns than a moribund peace process. Despite the relative quiet in Washington over the last few months about the Iranian nuclear program, this is still a major issue for the GOP as is the deadline for the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan looming in July. The reality is that even when Obama was at the height of his powers he couldn’t force the peace process—not because of a lack of will power and volume, but because there are other political energies at work, some of them far outside the Beltway.

That’s not to say Obama won’t keep pressing. Sources close to Netanyahu’s office say that Obama is already pressuring Israel to extend the freeze. In Washington, some believe that Netanyahu will have a very hard time justifying his refusal. If he could do it for 10 months, what is it about 60 more days that imperils his coalition? If he doesn’t, Israeli sources say, the White House has threatened that it will do nothing to block the Palestinians from unilaterally declaring statehood at the United Nations.

Yet apparently Washington was just showing Jerusalem the instruments of torture while it did the same to the PA—and Abbas, who has much weaker domestic support than Netanyahu, appears to have backed down first. Instead of seeking recognition for a state within the 1967 borders, the PA will present a resolution to the Security Council stating that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal and must be evacuated. The Palestinians recognized they would lose U.S. support if they stepped out on their own and maybe even understood that very few of the member nations that matter most were predisposed to recognize such a state; they would have had more support from, say, Norway than Jordan.

In other words, the PA is trying to force an error from the White House with empty threats of its own. “Unilaterally declaring a Palestinian state is one of those things that comes up often,” says Martin Kramer, the Wexler-Fromer fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. “The other is the prospect of impending violence, the next intifada.” However, as Kramer explains, were another intifada to erupt, Abbas and Salam Fayyad understand that the protection and the foreign cash that have created the West Bank’s economic boom would all go away, and they would be left alone to face Hamas.

The peace deal that Obama wants is already out of his hands. The real check on his ambitions is not a Republican majority in the House but the political forces that rule the Middle East. Fayyadism, or that combination of U.S.-sponsored transparency and accountability, is working on the West Bank—at least until Hamas decides to pull the plug on the PA, which is not going to happen so long as the IDF is sitting there. Insofar as Obama believes the status quo is unsustainable, the only other option is chaos—a chaos that he can bring about by forcing the issue yet again.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is in stasis, for the time being anyway, which presents a golden opportunity for a president faced with a hard-line opposition in control of one or both houses of Congress. Let Obama keep his peace process envoys on the run, going back and forth between Ramallah and Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, and Riyadh, and keep expectations low. Even the smallest concessions will be chalked up as groundbreaking—if, for example, the PA agrees to recognize Israel as a Jewish state or Netanyahu gives more time on the settlement freeze—and if nothing gets accomplished, he can blame it on the Republicans. In the political arena, at least, the end of Obama’s grand ambitions may make him the winner of the next few hands of the Middle East poker game.

Shahzad was not a “one-off,” a frustrated Muslim immigrant pushed over the edge by the sinful American way of life or radicalized by the treatment of Muslims in Chechnya or Israel’s wars in Lebanon and Gaza. Rather, as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder admitted this weekend, he was an emissary of the Pakistani Taliban, a group with which the United States is quietly—here, but not over there—at war. “We know that they helped facilitate it,” Holder said of Taliban support for Shahzad’s operation. “We know that they probably helped finance it. And that [Shahzad] was working at their direction.”

It is notable that the initial news coverage of Shahzad’s failed effort offered nearly a dozen psycho-religious explanations for his behavior—he lost his mortgage, he lost his wife, he is a madman, he is a religious fanatic, he is a crazy jihadi—all of which may or may not be true but pale next to the obvious fact: The United States is at war with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is not clear why the ancient historical principle of lex talonis—an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth—is lost on us, as if there is no price to pay for killing people in war, both militants and civilians. If one of the chief goals of the Obama Administration’s counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is to protect that country’s civilian population, it suggests that something is deeply wrong with a strategy that has now made U.S. civilians vulnerable to mass murder at home. The reason that American civilians are endangered here, and that U.S. troops are at risk in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that we have killed tens of thousands Muslims in those countries, which we continue to occupy.

This is not, one must add, because of Israeli actions in the West Bank. Last week this column looked at the theory of linkage, or the idea that every problem in the Middle East is inextricably linked to the Arab-Israeli conflict. I detailed the concept’s history, identified some of its proponents, explained its strategic values for successive U.S. governments, and showed how it has tied our fate to that of our Arab allies. One Tablet reader contended that I had overstated the case, commenting that linkage is simply another way “to blame everything on Jews.” He wrote: “Judeophobia/anti-Semitism is a motivating factor for linkage.”

After some deliberation, I concluded that couldn’t be right. Sure, it’s true that 2,000 years of anti-Semitic narratives holding the Jews responsible for everything from the murder of Jesus to the black plague to Sept. 11 could easily pave the way for a theory attributing the myriad problems of the Middle East to the Jews. But it’s hard to believe that large segments of the foreign-policy establishment of a country that overwhelmingly supports the Jewish state could hold a conviction that is at its core anti-Semitic. That’s the stuff of medieval thinking, and the United States is the engine of historical, and moral, progress. After all, a country that once went to war over slavery has elected an African-American president, thanks in no small part to the energies of our intellectual classes in the press and the academy—many of whom also subscribe to the idea of linkage. So, the idea that people who are anti-racist could also promote narratives that are anti-Semitic is irrational.

Nonetheless, it’s true that over the last year linkage has seemed to figure much more prominently in U.S. Middle East policy than ever before. So, this week I wanted to explore some of the reasons why, with reference to the Shahzad case.

The first and most obvious reason linkage is in the news of late is that the concept will always be more of an issue under those U.S. administrations to whom the peace process is most vital. For the Democratic Party, the peace process is always important. As Steven Rosen, director of the Middle East Forum’s Washington Program, told me, “The peace process is a part of the Democrats’ DNA.” That is to say, when the Middle East is relatively calm, the peace process is important, but, as the apostles of linkage explain, it is never more urgent than when other issues in the region are heating up. Successful peace processing turns the temperature down across all the Middle East.

So, what are the major regional issues? As I discussed last week, our Arab allies and Israel agree that the threat of a nuclear-weapons-capable Iran is the chief concern in their region. However, Washington does not concur. Rather, U.S. officials from both this White House and its predecessor believe that the most pressing concern for the United States is its two theatres of combat in the Middle East: Iraq and Afghanistan. Where the Bush Administration was eager to win Iraq and, according to its critics, took its eye off the ball in Afghanistan, the Obama team just wants to get out of Iraq as quietly as possible while it devotes more resources to winning the war in Afghanistan, which the president has told the American public is not a war of choice but a war of necessity.

The robust war that we are now waging in Afghanistan includes a troop surge, firefights in towns and cities, and drone strikes—53 in 2009 alone, more than during Bush’s entire tenure. Indeed, drones have become such a part of the popular consciousness that the president made a drone joke at the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner. In some corners of the world, the president’s joke probably didn’t go over too well: A report from the New America Foundation argues that in the 123 drone strikes in northwest Pakistan between 2004 and 2010, as many as 1,285 people—about the same number of Lebanese nationals killed when Hezbollah and Israel went to war in July 2006—have been killed, one third of them civilians.

In the last nine months, U.S.-led coalition troops have also shot and killed 28 Afghan civilians at checkpoints—for no apparent reason, except that the soldiers who ask Afghan drivers for their papers appear to have itchy trigger fingers. No U.S. soldiers have been brought to trial for killing Afghans at checkpoints, and there has been no expression of international outrage at American cruelty and incompetence, which have been publicly admitted to by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan—in the apparent confidence that his admissions would have no legal consequences whatsoever for himself or for the nervous soldiers under his command. Had IDF troops been responsible, it would’ve been a war crime, but with U.S. forces in the lead it’s something else. “It’s really a challenge to the leadership,” says Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, the operational commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. “It’s a challenge to discipline.”

It is frightening to contemplate, within the framework of linkage theory, how much more radical Palestinians would be if Israeli troops killed an average of 40 Palestinians a year at checkpoints in the West Bank for no evident reason at all and the perpetrators were never charged with any crime. Checkpoints are a key part of the linkage lexicon—the sites where Palestinians are ostensibly humiliated on a daily basis and reportedly radicalized. It is hard to imagine how the kind of wanton bloodshed that the United States is currently inflicting on innocent Afghans would radicalize the Middle East if Israelis were responsible; but then again it’s equally hard to imagine an Israeli leader cracking jokes in public about targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants.

But Israel is not the United States. The former is led by a right-wing government that has shown little interest in making concessions in order to push the peace process forward. The latter is headed by a Democratic president who, in ostensibly stark contrast to his predecessor, has professed a desire for comity with the Muslim masses. The United States does nation-building in Muslim lands, while the Israelis are preventing the birth of a Palestinian state. Israel kills Muslims that it has radicalized through its own actions, while the United States fights in Muslim lands in order to secure its national interests. For example, since October 2002, American forces have killed thousands of Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan in an ongoing hunt for one man, Osama Bin Laden, who may very well be deceased. There is no oil in Afghanistan, and if we are fighting there just to avoid being labeled a paper tiger by our adversaries, then we empower our enemies to determine our strategy, by drawing lines in the sand anywhere in the world and daring us to cross them.

It’s also possible the Obama Administration is just waging war in Afghanistan for the same reason that James Jones—a Marine general who, lacking the tact to refrain from telling Jewish jokes to a Jewish audience, has the president’s ear on sensitive issues—is the national security adviser. Lacking hawkish credentials, the Obama White House is vulnerable to attacks from the GOP, who apparently are also apt to confuse U.S. national security with domestic politics. In any case, the president is ambivalent about owning his war of necessity, and the proof is not just that he set a date for troop withdrawal at the same time he announced his surge.

While it is impossible to know what percentage of Muslim deaths are directly attributable to U.S. force in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact is that over the last three decades American wars in the Middle East entailed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, fighters as well as civilians, and Obama’s cosmetic speeches about respecting Islam’s contribution to the world will do little to hide casualty figures that would make all but the most vicious Middle Eastern regimes blush. It’s hardly surprising then that we are now taking a page out of the Arab regime playbook. Don’t blame us, the linkage theorists say: Look at what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians.

The Obama Administration is obsessed with linkage because it wants to have it both ways. They want to wage war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the strategic value of which is hard to ascertain, without taking moral or political responsibility for that war. The upshot of this cowardice is a form of magical thinking in which the United States evades responsibility for its own actions by shining the spotlight on the Jewish state instead. But it’s not Israel’s checkpoints on the occupied West Bank that compelled the Taliban to dispatch one of its foot soldiers to Times Square last week to kill American civilians. It’s our own war.

General James Jones, President Obama’s national security adviser, told a joke—video and transcription after the jump—that is easily recognizable as one of those jokes about Jews, making fun of stereotypical Jewish traits, that Jews tend to tell affectionately about each other. However, there’s an unwritten rule about these jokes that states that these aren’t really offensive … so long as it is a Jew telling them. Which is arguably fair, arguably unfair. But pretty clearly the reigning rule.

So anyway, Jones told the joke over the weekend last week at the 25th anniversary party for the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs. This is a generally pro-Israel think tank with many Jewish donors. And you can hear lots of laughter on the tape. (It’s a pretty funny joke!) But a think-tanker who was present said it “demonstrated a lack of sensitivity.” Then Abraham Foxman called it “inappropriate.” And, yup, Jones just apologized (“It also distracted from the larger message I carried that day: that the United States commitment to Israel’s security is sacrosanct”).

For what it’s worth, Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg doesn’t think it’s a big deal. I don’t feel offended, either, though I certainly also don’t see the point, and it was clearly a dumb thing to do. And you?

A Taliban militant gets lost and is wandering around the desert looking for water. He finally arrives at a store run by a Jew and asks for water.

The Taliban keeps cursing and finally leaves toward the hill. An hour later he’s back at the tie store. He walks in and tells the merchant: “Your brother tells me I need a tie to get into the restaurant.”

James Jones’s Jewish Joke—Funny or Inappropriate? [Forward/Haaretz]

Unfortunately for J Street, the blogosphere was alive with chatter about another issue altogether: the apparent desire among leaders of its student arm, J Street U, to shorten J Street’s ubiquitous “pro-peace, pro-Israel” slogan to just “pro-peace.” “We don’t want to isolate people because they don’t feel quite so comfortable with ‘pro-Israel,’ so we say ‘pro-peace,’” Lauren Barr, an American University junior and J Street intern who sits on J Street U’s board, told Jerusalem Post reporter Hilary Krieger. (On Sunday, at the opening session of the conference, Barr warned older people in the audience that people her age were being “driven away” from a vibrant relationship with Israel because of their doubts over the country’s handling of the Palestinian issue.) J Street’s executive director, Jeremy Ben Ami, told U.S. News and World Report’s religion blogger that he wanted to “honor” the questions some Jews have and didn’t seem to mind the change of mottos: “We can’t force them to use language that makes them uncomfortable.” But by this afternoon, J Street publicists were insisting that the original story was wrong, dismissing it as college students mouthing off, and referring reporters to a statement from J Street U director Tammy Shapiro, who reiterated the requirement that all work “be done in a context that always embraces the right of a state for Jewish people in the land of Israel to exist beside a state for Palestinian people in the land of Palestine.”

As it happens, Shapiro was also behind J Street’s decision to cancel a poetry session planned for the conference,after it emerged that some of the poets had made potentially offensive links between the Holocaust and Israel’s actions in Gaza. But, here’s the ironic part: the louder the bloggers gloat over every perceived stumble, the more enthusiastic, and righteous, the true believers at the Grand Hyatt seem to get. That’s politics, folks.

J Street’s Campus Branch Drops Pro-Israel Slogan [JPost]
J Street’s College Arm Drops ‘Pro-Israel’ From Its Slogan [USNews]
Top Obama Aide: U.S. Commitment to Israel is Not a Slogan [Haaretz]

Netanyahu, Mideast Security Advisor Meet on Iran, Israel Peace [Haaretz]
It’s Crunch Time for Israel on Iran [WSJ]
Previously: Gates in Jerusalem Today