Will Clinton feel the Bern on Israel?

Very interesting little trial balloon-and-reaction reported in Haaretz (via Nathan Guttman Forward): 

“Hillary Clinton has been a very strong friend of Israel and that is something that should not be lost on the American Jewish community,” said Paul Hodes, a former New Hampshire congressman who came to rally for Clinton at her post-primary event. Hodes, who is Jewish and from New Hampshire, told the Forward: “Senator Sanders hasn’t showed himself to be the kind of friend of Israel that Secretary Clinton is.”

UPDATE: The Clinton campaign denied that it was considering this strategy. “We have no idea what this report is referring to. The notion that we’re planning to start attacking Sanders’ record on Israel is simply false,” Laura Rosenberger, foreign policy adviser, told the Forward.

Michael Oren v. Michael Oren on Israel-US relations

Suffering from a bit of dis-Oren-tation regarding the view of the U.S. from Israel.  From Friday's Jerusalem Post:

In a 90-minute conversation he conducted this week with the editorial board of The Jerusalem Post, one of the key messages Oren the diplomat tried to get across was that relations with the US are not as bad as most people like to think.



True, there was a huge dustup during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit here in March; the US acquiesced in signing off on a UN NPT document that singled out Israel in May; and Washington in June wasn’t as robust in its support of Israel at the UN during the Gaza flotilla episode as some would have liked. But, Oren insisted, the sky over the US-Israeli relationship is not falling.


In fact, he said, running against the grain of conventional wisdom, the Obama administration was “as good if not better” on Israel than “many previous administrations,” and Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, often portrayed in the Israeli media as the “bad guy” on Israel issues in the White House, was actually “a great asset.”



“There are disagreements, I’m not going to be Pollyannaish,” the personable and animated Oren said. “But there are two qualifiers you have to attach. One, we have had disagreements with other administrations in the past, and the litmus test with the relationship is not whether there are disagreements, but how you approach the disagreements.”

Now, today's hot tip in Haaretz (via Laura Rozen):

Turning the lightbulb on the Gaza blockade

The Israeli cabinet has acted on Netanyahu's agreement with Tony Blair last week to alter the terms of the Gaza blockade.  The key difference is that the blockade will be defined by what materials are banned, rather than by what materials are permitted. That is, if the arms blockade is a lightbulb, the Israelis have decided o turn the bulb rather than the stool on which the bulb-changer stands. From Haaretz:

The PMO said that Israel would release "as soon as possible" a detailed list of goods that would not be allowed into the Gaza Strip, which would include all weapons.

"Israel seeks to keep out of Gaza weapons and material that Hamas uses to prepare and carry out terror and rocket attacks toward Israel and its civilians," Netanyahu said. "All other goods will be allowed into Gaza."

Israel's new policy will allow an inflow of construction material into the Gaza Strip for projects approved by the Palestinian Authority or under the auspices of international supervision, including schools, health facilities, water treatment and sanitation, the statement said.

Beinert gestures toward "the liberal forces in Israel"

One of the most common criticisms of Peter Beinert's seismic essay taking the United States Jewish community to task for unconditional support of all Israeli government actions was that Beinert selectively surveyed recent Israeli history to present a portrait of the country that overemphasized its rightward swing and alleged growing rejection of liberal democratic values.  Jonathan Chait, for example, wrote:

In the same vein, Peter now paints Israel as falling almost inexorably into the grip of the far right. “The Netanyahu coalition,” he writes, “is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society.” There is certainly some truth to this – Russian immigration and the higher Orthodox birthrate have altered the face of the Israeli electorate. On the other hand, it was not that long ago that left-of-center parties governed Israel. Demography does not work that rapidly. Though he concedes that Israeli government can move in and out of power quickly, the tone of his essay has the same two-minutes-to-midnight urgency.

I myself wrote, "Beinert overemphasizes the repressive and aggressive elements in Israeli society," adding, "But the one-sidedness of Beinart's characterization of Israel does not negate his argument. His purpose is to warn; his argument is not that Israel is wholly given over to repression and oppression but that it is trending the wrong way, and that the American Jewish establishment is enabling its worst tendencies and so alienating young American Jews...In short, Beinert's is a family argument."

In an interview with Haaretz published today, Beinert seems to acknowledge the point -- that his purpose was, as Chait put it, "to grab the American Jewish leadership by the lapels and shake some sense into it," and that the seizure required a certain selectivity:

Never let a noncrisis go to waste

David Remnick has posed a fundamental question about Netanyahu that is resonating through the internets:

The essential question for Israel is not whether it has the friendship of the White House—it does—but whether Netanyahu remains the arrogant rejectionist that he was in the nineteen-nineties, the loyal son of a radical believer in Greater Israel, forever settling scores with the old Labor élites and making minimal concessions to ward off criticism from Washington and retain the affections of his far-right coalition partners. Is he capable of engaging with the moderate and constructive West Bank leadership of Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, and making history? Does there exist a Netanyahu 2.0, a Nixon Goes to China figure who will act with an awareness that demographic realities—the growth not only of the Palestinian population in the territories but also of the Arab and right-wing Jewish populations in Israel proper—make the status quo untenable as well as unjust?

Remnick is not alone in posing this question.  In Israel, on 3/17 Haaretz columnist Carlo Strenger framed the challenge at greater length, with greater intimacy, and with Israeli as opposed to an American model (also noting that Netanayu's  character "has been analyzed time and again"). I'm excerpting at length, because the  capsule political bio here is of a piece.

Netanyahu is coming toward the end of his midlife. Presumably he knows that his place in history will be carved in stone by the present term. He may not get another chance to be prime minister, even in Israel's unfortunately very static political landscape. Hence he faces the one big question: will he continue his pattern of basically stalling, or will he muster the courage for a bold move?