Here’s a wild story, courtesy of YNet. T is a gay Palestinian who for the past 10 years has been living in Israel with his partner, an Israeli Jew named Doron. A few days ago, he heard that his father was ill, and he ventured across the border into the West Bank to visit him. When he tried to return, however, the IDF told him his permit had been lost, maybe revoked. T was stuck: he couldn’t go back home to Israel, and he couldn’t return to his village, for fear of being murdered because he is openly gay.

T was offered shelter by an Orthodox Jewish family, living in one of the settlements in the West Bank. Thanks to a generous, humanitarian gesture by one of those evil, nasty, gun-toting, messiah-heralding, baby-producing, Bible-thumping settlers, T has hope and room to breathe.

What do we learn from this? On the one hand, there’s the plight of Palestinians desperately trying to make their way out of their homeland to something better, and the trouble they face by the authorities of democratic states like Israel, and especially a security bureaucracy as lethal as its weaponry, even when they think they have permission to stay. On the other hand, there’s the touching personal story of the anonymous family of religious settlers willing to take T into their home — certainly not for the publicity (they remain unknown), and also not because they necessarily support equality for gays in society — but just because it is a mitzva to save the guy’s life.

But the biggest story, I think, is that he needed shelter in the first place. For all our hopes pinned on Abbas and the rest of the Fatah-led PA crew, it’s still a fact that an openly gay person risks his life by entering a Palestinian village. And the same is true in many places across the Arab world, and in Iran as well. The fact is that for all our desire to understand the “other,” to sympathize with the plight of civilizations different from our own and, to embrace their struggle against oppression while denouncing our own “colonialism,” the fact remains that at least part of what makes them different from us is not merely quaint or alien but reprehensible. That we are in effect extending a hand of tolerance to those who expressly renounce tolerance, and who make little effort to hide their murderous side.

Here there are no excuses to be made for Abbas: the problem with the Palestinian Authority is not that it lacks proper mechanisms for the enforcement of gay rights, that it just can’t get its anti-gay groups under its rein. The problem, indeed, is not with the regime, so much as with an entire society that doesn’t believe in gay rights and has no intention of protecting them. And that for them, the rejection of gays extends far beyond denying them civil rights into denying them human ones. Until this changes, if it ever does, why would any self-respecting Westerner take such people’s side?

When you affirm one civilization in favor of another — whether it’s your own, or that of your adversary, or just taking sides in a faraway conflict — you are affirming not just the people in that civilization but the values they cherish as well. For better or worse.

Human Rights Watch really ought to lay low for a while. Over the past few months, the once-admired watchdog admitted to fundraising in Saudi Arabia as an anti-Israel organization and discovered that one of the writers of its anti-Israel reports is a big fan of Nazi memorabilia. Yesterday, the organization’s founder, Robert Bernstein, published a blistering op-ed in the New York Times accusing the organization of abandoning its mission and becoming obsessed with attacking Israel. (See Noah Pollak’s analysis of HRW’s rebuttal here.)

So what does HRW do? It tries to prove its even-handedness. It has announced that, in its opinion, Hamas — the universally reviled terror organization that has never found an anti-civilian tactic too crude to embrace, the jihadist group that made suicide bombing a form of martyrdom, that lobbed thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian centers and brought on the entire 2009 military operation in Gaza — that this Hamas ought to conduct a “credible investigation” into accusations that it, too, committed war crimes. In a letter penned by the organization’s Middle East and North Africa division head, Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW applauds Hamas’s recent acceptance of the Goldstone Report. ”In the past, Hamas tried to justify the unjustifiable by defending unlawful rocket attacks,” Whitson said. “Having now promised to follow the Goldstone Report’s recommendations, Hamas has no excuse for not carrying out serious war crimes investigations.”

Like it did before? Hamas has, of course, promised it will do so right away, and we’re all very glad to hear it. But of greater interest is what such a letter says about HRW. I remember that great scene in The Treasure of Sierra Madre when Walter Huston, the older prospector, yells at his younger and less stalwart fellows, “You’re so dumb, there’s nothing to compare you with!” It’s one of my favorite movie lines because it captures the fact that sometimes something is so outrageous that the mind gropes in vain for an effective metaphor. Asking Hamas, a recognized terrorist group, to conduct an investigation into its war crimes is like, like … what? Is it like asking a Mob family to investigate charges of racketeering in its ranks? Or like asking a congenital liar to go to confession? How about asking a convicted mass murderer to investigate reports about his violent tendencies? Around the free world, people are imprisoned just for membership in Hamas. What could such a letter mean?

Maybe we should let Human Rights Watch just keep opening its mouth.

Something has happened to American-Israeli relations in the past few months. On Iran, suddenly Israel is voicing clear support for American dialogue with Iran, and the U.S. is voicing increasing impatience with the Iranian regime. On the Goldstone report, we are hearing that the U.S. intends to do what it can to quash it and to make sure nothing in it becomes operative in forums like the International Criminal Court. We’re even hearing today that the Palestinians may withdraw their support of the report, under U.S. pressure. On negotiations with the Palestinians, we have heard that the U.S. has effectively dropped its demands that Israel freeze settlements as a precondition for negotiations and that Obama explicitly used the phrase “Jewish State,” accepting one of Israel’s key demands. What’s going on?

The simple answer is that the Obama administration has shifted course, backtracking from its now infamous declaration that there ought to be “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem. There are many reasons for this: Netanyahu has repeatedly outmaneuvered and out-speeched Obama, whether in the wake of the latter’s catastrophic Cairo address in May or in the UN last week.

But a more striking reason probably has to do with internal U.S. politics: Obama has discovered that Congress is not in his pocket, and that with midterm elections a year away, sitting senators and congressmen have no desire to ally themselves with an increasingly unpopular president perceived as hostile to Israel. Polls are showing growing alienation among American Jews from the administration’s Israel policies. In one poll, 51 percent oppose Obama’s insistence on a settlement freeze, while only 41 percent support it–a big surprise considering that U.S. Jews have traditionally opposed Israeli settlement policy.

One starts to wonder whether American Jews are voicing their feelings about Obama’s Israel policy, or even about Obama’s presidency, more than about settlements per se. If that’s the case, then Obama’s internal political troubles may be far more serious than he knows.

Quick question: How far does Hugo Chavez’s rhetoric have to go before Western leaders, above all those of the United States, stop dismissing it as “mere rhetoric”?

I’m just curious because, well, he sure sounds like a real, serious enemy in league with the West’s most dangerous foes. In a telephone interview with Venezuelan TV from Tehran on Friday, he declared that Iran is “a true strategic ally, a staunch ally” of Venezuela. Whom is this alliance directed against? In Chavez’s view, Tehran and Caracas are “facing the same enemy, which is the U.S. empire and its lackeys. And we will defeat the empire and its lackeys.”

And lest anyone think there’s no Israel angle in all this — there always is — Chavez has not hesitated in the past few days to brand Israel as a “genocidal” regime. ”The state of Israel has become a murderous lackey at the service of imperialism,” he said. “It’s a genocidal government. I condemn that Zionist government that persecutes the heroic Palestinian people.”

Convinced yet?

Three reports from the past two days suggest a renewed effort to shift the strategic arms balance in the Middle East in favor of Syria and Iran. In one, a Russian official admitted to having contracted to sell advanced fighter jets to Syria—a state that is one of the few countries still listed on the State Department’s list of terrorism sponsors.

In another, a Kuwaiti newspaper is quoted as reporting that the Hezbollah arms cache that recently blew up in southern Lebanon held chemical weapons—suggesting that Hezbollah’s next terror assault on Israeli civilians may be far deadlier than in the past.

But the most disturbing report comes from a Beirut newspaper, which says that the Lebanese government has accepted an Iranian offer to provide the Lebanese military with advanced anti-aircraft systems. This would mark a remarkable change in posture on the part of Lebanon, which until now has attempted to distance itself from Hezbollah’s overt ties with Iran. For years, Western governments have struggled to keep Lebanon neutral at worst, yet these efforts have been frustrated by Hezbollah’s growing influence.

If such a military deal goes through, it will signal a major shift in Iran’s influence in the Middle East.

I would guess there weren’t too many people online when Haaretz today had an open Q&A with Saeb Erekat, the eloquent senior Palestinian official. It was, after all, around lunchtime in Jerusalem, which is very early in the morning in the U.S. The lack of traffic was also suggested by the very small number of questions that ended up getting answered—just seven.

So it was a funny thing to discover that when I submitted a question I considered something of a softball, it was ignored or perhaps rejected. It was short. It went like this:

Do you unequivocally denounce the use of violent attacks against civilians, including attacks carried out by Palestinians against Israelis?

No answer. Funny, I thought the Palestinians had repudiated terrorism, at least officially.

Since the mid-1990s, the State Department has kept an official list of states that sponsor terror—a list that included, back then, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Libya, and Iraq. No new states have been added in some time; in fact, several have been taken off the list: Iraq, after the regime was changed; Libya, after Qaddafi cut a deal with the U.S. that included restitution for the victims of the terror attack over Lockerbie, Scotland; and most recently North Korea has been dropped, for no apparent reason. The list has teeth: in addition to various sanctions, states appearing on the list lose their sovereign immunity in American courts in terror cases, because a state engaging in terrorism, the reasoning goes, is no longer acting in its capacity as a state and should therefore be subject to the same criminal and civil proceedings as anyone else engaging in wanton violence.

One wonders whether it’s time for Venezuela to be added to the list. For many years, its neighbor and close American ally, Colombia, has suspected Venezuela of actively supporting the FARC rebels, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization. But according to at least one high-ranking Israeli military official, FARC is not the only such group enjoying the Venezuelan regime’s support: Hezbollah, it turns out, has established a major presence there as well, supported by the regime in “investing significant efforts to carry out terrorist attacks against Israeli targets and Jewish institutions in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru,” according to today’s YNet.

Obviously, the State Department should not take the Israelis’ or the Colombians’ word for it and must conduct a thorough inquiry before making any moves. Yet the failure to dig deeper suggests a dramatic shift in U.S. policy on international terror when compared with not only the Bush administration but the will of Congress as well. Since 9/11, U.S. policy and law have aimed at showing zero tolerance for terrorism, the centerpiece of which strategy has been to make sovereign states accountable for the terrorism they support—not just through the occasional military replacement of their regimes, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also through a wide range of legal and diplomatic sanctions.

So here’s a question someone should ask at Secretary of State Clinton’s next press conference: By ignoring the increasing accusations against Venezuela of actively helping multiple terrorist organizations, is the Obama administration signaling a change in policy toward terror-sponsoring states in general?

Two headlines today give us a sense that the Democratic-led Congress is looking to play a more significant role in countering the Obama administration’s heavy-handed approach to Israel. First, House majority leader Steny Hoyer gave an interview to the Jerusalem Post in which he praised Prime Minister Netanyahu, sharply criticized the Fatah conference, and declared that Congress had differentiated between East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank—nothing less than a slap in the face to the administration’s explicit refusal to make such distinctions.

Second, 71 U.S. senators sent a letter to President Obama calling on him to press Arab states to take major steps toward normalizing ties with Israel:

Such steps could include ending the Arab League boycott of Israel, meeting openly with Israeli officials, establishing open trade relations with Israel, issuing visas to Israeli citizens, and inviting Israelis to participate in academic and professional conferences and sporting events. We also believe that Arab states must immediately and permanently end official propaganda campaigns which demonize Israel and Jews.

These seem like pretty obvious requirements for any possible reconciliation between Israel and the Arab world. Yet it is the Senate, not the Obama administration, that has undertaken to enumerate them publicly. Combining this letter with the Hoyer interview, we get the sense that congressional leaders have decided that the change in U.S. policy on Israel has gone far enough.

Rightly or wrongly, many people around the world are breathing more easily today knowing that Avigdor Lieberman — Israel’s foreign minister, the head of its third-largest political party, and a man loathed by supporters and opponents of Israel alike — may soon be out of their hair. Several of us have offered intricate speculations as to why Lieberman had been relegated to the role of diplomatic ambassador to Russia and Latin America, while dealing with the U.S. and Europe appears to be left in the hands of Defense Minister Ehud Barak. But recent news supplies another possible explanation: if the foreign minister is about to be indicted on corruption charges, it’s better if his profile were as low as possible to begin with.

Yesterday Israeli police handed the case over to the state prosecutor’s office, which will decide whether to indict — a decision that should be forthcoming in the next couple of weeks. If radio news reports are to be believed, the indictment is highly likely. Lieberman, while denying the charges, has said that he will nonetheless resign his positions as foreign minister and head of his party if indicted. Then, of course, there would be the trial, which could stretch out.

The Lieberman case is yet another in a long string of police investigations, indictments, and trials of high-ranking public officials of the Jewish state. To list just a few: the multiple claims against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the indictment of President Moshe Katzav on sexual-assault charges, the conviction of Finance Minister Avraham Hirschson, and, of course, the endless criminal proceedings against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

What are supporters of Israel to make of all this? Two main narratives have emerged.

According to one, this is all one big politically motivated campaign to discredit and crush anyone on the Right who attains too much power. According to this theory, the justice system in Israel — judges and prosecutors alike — is dominated by supporters of the Left, who have no qualms about trying to achieve by criminal law what they fail to achieve at the ballot box. Supporters of this viewpoint point to the fact that it’s always people on the Right who have to face intensive investigation into their private lives, and even if they are technically guilty, there are plenty of left-wing politicians equally corrupt who yet seem immune from prosecution. Sharon’s criminal inquiries always seemed to move forward during the periods when he was being tough with the Palestinians; as soon as he announced his plan to withdraw from Gaza, the inquiries stalled.

For his part, Lieberman has been quick to point to the fact that the investigations against him have dragged on for more than a decade, and only when he finally rose to a position of power did they move into high gear. Even his planned resignation is not a matter of legislated law but the product of a Supreme Court ruling — again, part of the ruling elites — that requires senior officials to quit if indicted. Criminal justice, some argue, has become a tool for the Left to subvert democracy by negating electoral results through prosecution.

There is, of course, a second narrative. It goes like this: Since the founding of the country, Israeli politics have been deeply corrupt. For the past decade or more, however, the justice system has made a crusade of changing the norms of Israeli politics, seeking to uncover corruption wherever it is found. If a disproportionate number of dirty politicians is exposed on the Right, maybe that’s because those on the Right are less committed to universal norms and ethics or they’re not as good at covering their tracks.

According to this view, every successful prosecution is just another rotten apple out of the barrel, a step toward consistently applying ethical norms of conduct to Israeli public life. Even if mistakes are occasionally made, we should nonetheless applaud and support the efforts of the justice system.

I sincerely wish I could report that the second narrative is the true explanation for our current state of affairs. I do believe that many of Israel’s leaders are corrupt, and the evidence — not just what’s a matter of public record but also my personal, firsthand account — suggests that many scandals are kindled by solid evidence of wrongdoing and a genuine desire to root out rampant corruption. Israeli public life should emerge from corruption, and the best way to achieve this goal is by sending a strong message that corruption does not pay — through investigating, trying, and convicting those guilty of it.

While I have no doubt that at least some of Lieberman’s accusations are based in fact, I maintain that justice should be served equally in order to be just. But it is far too easy for the justice system in Israel to control both the pace of investigations and their political distribution. And Israel is far too small and politically charged a country for me to believe that most people in positions of authority act fully independently of their political ideology.

The timing of Sharon’s investigations was uncanny. Every once in a while, members of the Israeli elites basically admit outright that Lieberman’s description of his own situation is in fact correct. For example, veteran journalist Amnon Abramovich infamously claimed that Sharon should be treated like an “Etrog,” a highly sensitive fruit to be protected from public criticism as long as he is pursuing the disengagement from Gaza — thus lending credence to the suspicion that investigations can be politically motivated.

Israel is a country founded on ideology; most Israelis have a tough time distinguishing between their opinions and the means they can legitimately employ in implementing them. A healthy democracy requires that people subordinate their most cherished beliefs to a political process that restrains arbitrary impulses. And while people in positions of power can be kept in check by a vigorous free market of ideas, Israel is a country too small for that market to always be efficient. Monopolies can emerge, which distort the debate. These are problems Israel struggles with every day.

J.E. Dyer makes an excellent point about Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s very real efforts to develop ties with countries outside the immediate American sphere. It should be pointed out that Israel enjoys deep and extensive relations with governments around the globe — from Latin America to Africa to southern Asia — mostly but not exclusively of a military nature. According to recent reports, Israel surpasses the U.K. as the fourth-largest military exporter in the world (after the U.S., Russia, and France).

But in most cases, these relations have remained under the radar, with one or both sides preferring it that way. The change under Lieberman, it seems, is an effort to gradually move these relationships out of the closet. There are two reasons this might be happening now.

1. The Obama administration is making every effort to convince the world not only that U.S. relations with Israel are changing for the worse but also that it may be steering the United States toward a more limited role in the world. There has been lots of talk online about Obama’s being seen (we may assume deliberately) reading Fareed Zakaria’s book The Post-American World. Although most of what is said about this is silly, at a minimum it does suggest that Obama wants to be thought of as understanding which way the global winds are blowing in terms of American reach and influence. Against that backdrop, it is natural for Israelis to consider the worst-case scenario of a friendship with the U.S. that is not only diminishing but also of diminishing value in a post-American world. Israel’s survival instincts naturally kick in, and an effort to raise the profile of its ties elsewhere makes a lot of sense.

2. The very feature that makes Lieberman distasteful to many Westerners — his power-affirming nationalism — may make him more respected and, frankly, understandable in other parts of the world, especially in places like Russia and Latin America, where strongmen are respected rather than reviled. There is something ingenious about Netanyahu’s deployment of his foreign policy assets, from his assignment of Lieberman to places where he is most likely to be respected and his positioning of Michael Oren (disclosure: friend, former Shalem Center colleague, and fellow Commentary contributor) as ambassador to the U.S., to his own rallying of Israeli public support against Obama’s firm stance on settlements.

It is indeed way too simplistic to look at Lieberman as having been swept under the rug for inner political reasons. That this narrative has carried the day is itself one of Netanyahu’s most impressive diplomatic achievements.

Michael Totten draws attention to the apparent decision by Hamas to take a brief hiatus from active terror attacks in order to engage themselves in a “culture war,” which includes the production of at least one movie. Now it seems that over in the West Bank, the terrorists have started a culture war of their own. Their prime target: Bruno, aka the Jew and occasional Hebrew-speaker Sacha Baron Cohen. A few days ago, we learned that one of Bruno’s interviewees, a former operative for the Al-Aksa Martyr’s Brigade who spent seven years in an Israeli prison, was suing Baron Cohen for playing a “dirty trick” to get the interview and for implicitly portraying the ex-con as a “homo.” (”If someone here calls you a homo, it’s a very serious insult,” his lawyer said.)

And so, for just a few days, we all got to enjoy the splendid irony of an organization dedicated to killing innocent people trying to claim its right to preserve its pristine reputation as being straight — that is, of a convicted terrorist suing somebody for defamation.

But then, reason set in. “Wait a minute,” the folks at Al-Aksa apparently said to themselves. “We’re terrorists. We don’t accept Western institutions of law. ‘Doh!”

Alas, all ironies must end, either by correction or by dissolution into cliché. And so we learn that Al-Aksa has chosen the former route, issuing an apparent death threat to Baron Cohen. The supreme satirist has been forced to add bodyguards to his list of liabilities. The rest of us, however, can breathe easier knowing that terrorists can only pretend civil legitimacy for brief spurts before revealing their nefarious nature. So much for the culture war.

And whatever you do, don’t call them gay. It really makes them mad.

Here’s an interesting epilogue on the Human Rights Watch funding scandal I mentioned earlier this week. Just a few weeks after it was first revealed that HRW has been raising funds from the Saudi regime and advertising itself as overtly anti-Israel, and just a few days after this burst into the public awareness, its biggest competitor, Amnesty International, has distanced itself from HRW by releasing a blistering 65-page report on the practice of torture and other severe human-rights abuses taking place in Saudi Arabia. According to Amnesty’s press release:

Thousands of people have been arrested and detained in virtual secrecy, while others have been killed in uncertain circumstances. Hundreds more people face secret and summary trials and possible execution. Many are reported to have been tortured in order to extract confessions or as punishment after conviction.

Every once in a while, the free market overtakes the internationalists: Amnesty and HRW are presumably in permanent and intense competition for donations, and Amnesty cannot be blamed for seizing the opportunity to pull away HRW donors who were duly shocked by the Saudi scam. Amnesty is commended for singling out abuse in Saudi Arabia. Yet we cannot help but notice Amnesty’s almost total silence on Saudi Arabia prior to May of this year — even though there is nothing at all new about the kingdom’s record, as Amnesty’s own report makes clear.

When I was a kid, there was a public-service ad on TV with an old man sitting on a pier with his grandson, fishing. The boy mentions one of his classmates as being “one of my Jewish friends.” His grandfather corrects him: “That is prejudice. He’s not one of your Jewish friends, but one of your friends.” The point was astute and sensitive: When you look at someone as being one of your “Jewish friends,” you withhold something of true, human friendship because of the label you’ve added.

Odd how the word prejudice today has shifted from noun to verb without losing any of its heavy moral connotations. Today we hear that State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley has called on Israel to stop building in Eastern Jerusalem, calling on Israel to refrain from “unilateral actions” that might prejudice “the outcome of negotiations.” (Crowley actually uses the word prejudge, but it basically means the same thing, and the much more common rendering of the same argument today is prejudice.)

Yet only a tiny amount of thought, really little more than a blink of the brain, reveals how mendacious the use of the word is in this context. What does it mean to refrain from any action that might prejudice the outcome? We can imagine two neighbors struggling over a bit of land, and finally they agree to stop the conflict and sit down and talk things through. It is as though everyone has agreed to put the entire struggle between Jews and Arabs on hold so that we can finally get down to negotiations.

The problem is: The struggle is not on hold. At no point have the Palestinians, be it their official Palestinian Authority leaders or their no-less-powerful Hamas overlords, declared a suspension of the “struggle.” Every day, Palestinian terrorists plan and attempt to carry out attacks on Jews for the sole purpose of “prejudicing” the outcome of negotiations. Hezbollah continues to arm, Hamas continues to smuggle weapons in through tunnels, Syria and Iran make plans for the next war.

Not only this: The Palestinians in particular and the Arab world in general are constantly furthering this struggle, undertaking unilateral steps with no aim other than prejudicing the outcome of negotiations — a euphemism for pursing their struggle to maximize any outcome in their favor. Today we learn that Jordan has begun stripping its Palestinians of their Jordanian citizenship in order to minimize the likelihood that they will be asked to stay in Jordan as part of the final decisions on refugees. But the prejudicing runs far deeper: Palestinian schools continue to teach their children that Israel is their enemy, that their true homes are west of the Green Line, and that only through resistance, jihad, and martyrdom can their lives really acquire meaning.

Yet on all these fronts, the American government is silent.

So, in looking at the U.S. thoughts on prejudice as a verb, we are again led to wonder about its original meaning as a noun. Maybe the administration should look back at that old ad and ask themselves: Is Israel one of America’s Jewish friends, or one of its friends?

We knew it would come to this. Over the weekend, the Obama administration showed just how radical the shift in U.S. policy toward Israel has been. It has demanded that the Israeli government withdraw the municipal approval of a building project in the Eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. The land that houses the old, run-down Shepherd Hotel, which is to be replaced by an apartment building, was lawfully purchased by Jews. No matter: That part of town is seen by Washington as a “settlement.”

Today, U.S. officials made it even clearer when they reportedly told both sides that they see no difference between Eastern Jerusalem and rogue settler outposts in the middle of the West Bank. Understandably, the Israeli government has rejected the directive, and some reports suggest that the Israelis may have deliberately leaked the demand, for it plays to Netanyahu’s image as standing tall against American pressure.

Washington has a longstanding tradition of doublespeak when dealing with Jerusalem. On the one hand, Obama himself couldn’t help but declare his commitment (subsequently retracted) to a unified Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty while campaigning for office — and he even promised to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv, which is not the capital by any definition of the term, to Jerusalem.

At the same time, he is not the first presidential candidate to make that promise, nor the first one to forget about it when in office, in the process ignoring the express will of Congress. It’s those pesky State Department folks, you see, who keep advising successive presidents that now is not the right time. For 60 years, Israel’s executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government have found their seat in Jerusalem, and Israel’s “closest ally” still keeps its embassy by the beach. At least we Jerusalemites don’t have to worry about all those diplomat vehicles taking our precious parking spots.

It gets weirder. As I have pointed out before, the United States does not appear to recognize Israeli sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem — West or East. A federal-court ruling earlier this month underscores the simple fact that any American citizen born in Jerusalem, regardless of where he lives, gets a U.S. passport with the country listed as simply “Jerusalem.” U.S. citizens living in Jerusalem cannot get help at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv; they are directed to the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, which answers directly to Washington, rather than to the embassy.

Again, this stuff has been going on for a long time. It begins with a fundamental attitude on the part of successive American administrations, really dating back to the 1947 UN partition plan putting the city under “universal” governance. The point is, the reasoning goes, we don’t fully see the logic in giving Israel full sovereignty of Jerusalem. It’s not just about placating the Arabs, although that’s a big part of it; it is, after all, a city of international importance. Why should only Israel have it?

So in the interest of fostering a constructive dialogue with an American diplomatic universe that seems to have no interest whatever in Israel’s position on the subject, I’d like to toss out a few brief reminders.

1. Israel should have Jerusalem, first of all, because it already does. Jews have been a majority of the city consecutively since the middle of the 19th century. There is no issue here of occupation, of a Jewish minority displacing Palestinians in their land. Over the past century and a half, the city was divided for 19 years by an accident of war, split between Israel and Jordan, neither of which occupations having earned international recognition; and then it was reunited.

Thus was born the infamous and irrelevant “Green Line,” something that today exists on maps only. The Jordanians cleansed the eastern city of its Jews and burned down its synagogues. Then the Jews came back in 1967 and gave the city a greater degree of not only economic success but also religious, cultural, and political freedom than it has ever enjoyed under any of the different Muslim, Christian, and pagan regimes that preceded them. Consider, by contrast, the treatment of Jewish holy sites under Palestinian rule: Joseph’s Tomb, for example, was immediately set on fire, as were all the synagogues of the Gaza Strip. At the risk of “prejudicing” the outcome of negotiations through the employment of argument, why on earth should it not be Israel’s?

2. Israel should have Jerusalem because it is more important to Jews than it is to Muslims (or Christians, or anyone else). This may sound vaguely discriminatory or religionist or unpopularly theological or just unfunny, but the fact is that there is a difference between the “most important” holy city and the “third most important” city that is far more than quantitative. This is the geographical heart of biblical Israel, the focus of its golden age of David and Solomon, the political-messianic-metahistorical dream focus of three millennia of Jewish prayer. This is the heart of everything, and that heart beats not on Herzl Boulevard or Jaffa Road by the Central Bus Station but in Eastern Jerusalem, at the site where the First and Second Temples stood for about a thousand years before the glorious Romans burned them down.

3. Israel should have Jerusalem because there is no practical way to divide the city that would satisfy both sides. Never mind the bizarre MTA-subway-style map that would ensue, intertwining all the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods in the city. The real problem is that Israelis and Palestinians have totally irreconcilable views as to how such a division would work in practice — a difference so wide as to make the entire endeavor a pipe dream.

Israelis see any separation as similar to the one Israel has with Egypt and Jordan: a full border, with strict crossings and a fundamental divorce of economic life. This is essential to any deal — the entire idea of giving up land in exchange for peace comes with the heavy baggage of decades of terror attacks. But such a separation, we have been told repeatedly, is anathema to the Palestinians themselves, who rely heavily on Israeli jobs for their living and see any real separation a form of “siege” — turning their territory into a “prison.” (If you don’t believe this, ask yourself how the Gazans would react if Israel were to lift the sea and air restrictions on the Strip: Would they say “we are now free” or “we are still under siege”?) This problem is little discussed but will become a deal breaker the moment anyone starts talking seriously about borders or dividing the city.

Jerusalem is not just a consensus issue in Israel but also a deeply personal one. There is no erasing the thousands of years of yearning for Jerusalem in Jewish texts, nor the heart-wrenching failure of Jewish forces to capture East Jerusalem in 1948, nor the national catharsis of its reunification in the Six Day War, nor over four decades of astonishing development and construction and tourism and flourishing of religious life for all faiths since then. The idea that now, suddenly, a new American president, speaking of “settlements,” will change this reality is not simply offensive and alienating to Israelis only but also to Jews the world over. Rather than recognize his failure in the Middle East so far, Obama is exacerbating it. Israelis do not like to be bullied, and this is far more likely to steel the Israeli public’s resolve against American pressure than weaken it.

For years it has been clear to those who bear the brunt of criticism from human rights watchdogs like Amnesty and the UN Human Rights Council, that something is wrong with the international system aimed at exposing gross violations and war crimes. The overwhelmingly disproportionate criticism heaped on Israel and other democratic states, and the near blindness to the brutal oppression that takes place in dozens of other countries, especially Arab states, makes the entire pretense of international human rights law look like a sham.

But last week, one of these bodies was caught with its pants down. Two months ago, the Saudi-based newspaper Arab News described a fund-raising event for Human Rights Watch held in the Saudi kingdom, where high-level Saudi dignitaries were treated to a powerful presentation where the organization not only petitioned the brutal elites for funding, but paraded the fact that they were doing battle against pro-Israel pressure groups in the West — a clear repudiation of their purportedly objective status. Credit for exposing them goes to NGO Monitor’s Gerald Steinberg, who published a report on the dinner in May; but it only caught the attention of major Western media this past week, with a piece by David Bernstein in the Wall Street Journal, followed by another by Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic.

The last piece, by Goldberg, is the most damning, because for the first time Human Rights Watch goes on record admitting both the fundraising and the explicit anti-Israel appeal. Because it details the email exchange between Goldberg and the executive director of HRW, Ken Roth, it’s really worth reading the whole thing, first how he tries in vain to dodge the question, and then how he admits it (”That’s certainly part of the story. We report on Israel. Its supporters fight back with lies and deception.”)

All this is very damning for an organization that for years has tried rebuffing accusations of being blatantly anti-Israel. As one commentator writing at the (British) Spectator put it, “Whatever Israel’s faults, there is something deeply wrong about a human rights organisation trying to raise money in a religiously oppressive monarchical state out of criticising a liberal democracy. It does make one wonder how people committed to human rights can get it so wrong.”

It also makes one wonder how the world can continue to take such organizations so seriously.

One of the clearest indicators as to whether you are negotiating with someone who actually wants to reach a deal, or alternatively has no intention of closing but is negotiating for other reasons, is how your partner responds to concessions on your part. Let’s say you’re trying to buy a baseball card for five dollars, and the seller wants ten. If you up your offer to seven, and he really wants to cut a deal, then he might lower it to nine. If he insists on sticking to ten, it probably means that either he’s a tough negotiator, or he thinks he can get ten from someone else.

But what if he responds by raising the price? What if he, to quote a great movie, “goes to eleven”?

Crazy as it sounds, this is what often happens in negotiations between Israel and its neighbors. According to widely held rumors, the main reason Netanyahu did not succeed in cutting a deal with Syria on the Golan during his previous term of office was that each time the Israelis raised their offer, the Syrians raised their demands, with the definition of the “Golan” moving increasingly West until it hit the Sea of Galilee. With Jordan and Egypt, however, it was the opposite: An agreement could be reached because both sides wanted it.

So, what about the Palestinians? All too often it seems as though the more Israel gives, the greater the demands. Everyone seems to think that the final outcome of the deal will be somewhere between what Netanyahu is saying and what Obama is saying: A sovereign Palestinian state taking up between 97 and 100 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, maybe some part of Jerusalem, and some kind of formula invented to deal with the “right of return,” the unity of Jerusalem, and so on.

Now that Netanyahu has conceded the biggest part of this — the idea of statehood itself — we might have expected Abbas to show a little give on his position. Instead, the demands have suddenly increased. The Palestinian leader is now insisting on “territorial continuity between the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

Okay, now look at a map. Once Israelis toyed with the idea of bridges and tunnels, some way of moving safely between the two parts of Palestine. But something about the phrase “territorial continuity” suggests more than this. It means actual land. In other words: Slicing Israel in half.

This is not the first time the Palestinians have raised the issue of some kind of land bridge between the West Bank and Gaza, but it is the first time we’re hearing about it ever since a new American president purportedly breathed new life into the chances of “peace.” And it comes at a time when Palestinian land is currently held by two different regimes, one of which is not just opposed in principle to any peace agreement, but is not even willing to find a formula for Palestinian unity.

Why might Abbas have chosen such a time to go to eleven? We can suggest two possibilities.

1. Abbas is politically constrained by his own regime to thwart peace. The PLO was born out of a revolutionary ideology that maintained that all the Palestinians’ problems would be solved only with the destruction of Israel. Every peaceful step its leader, Yasser Arafat, took, was balanced with an explanation as to why this really would lead to the ultimate goal — the infamous “Phased Plan,” the redoubled commitment to terrorism and “resistance,” and the constant raising of demands that guaranteed the impossibility of any agreement, such as repatriating Palestinian refugees within Israel’s borders. This game came to a head in 2000, when Arafat responded to Ehud Barak’s very generous offers by launching the Second Intifada. The assumption that Abbas is not similarly constrained to continue the revolution is one born out of hope and convenience, but it’s far from clear that it is grounded in fact. Under this theory, there is no actual possibility of peace, not just because there is no single Palestinian body to talk to, but because even the more “moderate” one is moderate only in its rhetoric.

2. Abbas is taking advantage of the new American regime to jockey for a better bargaining position. Under this theory, Abbas is open to the possibility of a deal. But he has carefully been watching the changing winds in Washington and Europe and figured out that all anyone seems to care about is Israeli settlements. The focus and pressure are now on Israel. So why make the negotiations easy for Jerusalem or Washington? It is far from clear that West Bank Palestinians actually want Gazans freely entering their territory — but who cares? This is a demand that will never be met, so he might as well make it in order to have something to concede on later on. From a negotiating standpoint, this is precisely the moment to raise new demands that sound reasonable at first blush but have zero chance of acceptance — like the refugees-in-Tel-Aviv idea. He has nothing to lose.

The first theory seems to be out of the question as far as Western diplomacy is concerned. Doesn’t matter if it might be true; the entire diplomatic world feeds its young on its presumptive rejection. But the second doesn’t make things look much better: The result of putting pressure on Israel, it seems, has not been to bring the parties any closer together: Every time Bibi raises his bid for the baseball card, Abbas raises his price.

Abbas has played this game pretty well for now. For months, Israel has faced a level of international pressure not seen since the days of Jimmy Carter, or maybe George H.W. Bush. Dutifully, he has turned down the terror flames coming out of the West Bank for the time being. Objectively, however, Abbas should have absolutely no bargaining position: It is his government that has thwarted every opportunity for national revival the Israelis and the West have given him, has wasted hundreds of millions of Western dollars on corruption rather than development, has continued supporting terrorism, and now has lost any credibility on his ability to deliver on any agreement so long as Hamas reigns in the south. Yet despite all this, all Westerners seem to care about is whether it is “illegal” or a “war crime” for a family in Efrat or Ariel to build a house for their newlywed son. Yes, these people are truly the central obstacles to peace.

If Abbas were serious about peace, he would take Netanyahu up on his offer to meet with him directly to discuss economic development — the very thing that theoreticians of the new world-order insist is the key to the post-war future.

Jennifer, I suspect a lot of the commentary on Biden’s comments suffers from not reading the exchange closely enough. After all, there is always a third possibility — neither big news nor gaffe: Biden is offering a carefully articulated version of an unchanged policy, sending messages to both Israel and Iran. Let’s look, for example, at part of the exchange that in my mind set off some alarm bells in the other direction (thanks to Shmuel Rosner for providing the transcript):

STEPHANOPOULOS: But just to be clear here, if the Israelis decide Iran is an existential threat, they have to take out the nuclear program, militarily the United States will not stand in the way?

BIDEN: Look, we cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do when they make a determination, if they make a determination that they’re existentially threatened and their survival is threatened by another country.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You say we can’t dictate, but we can, if we choose to, deny over-flight rights here in Iraq. We can stand in the way of a military strike.

BIDEN: I’m not going to speculate, George, on those issues, other than to say Israel has a right to determine what’s in its interests, and we have a right and we will determine what’s in our interests.

The focus of Stephanopoulos’s questions is on the forcible, “military” prevention by the U.S. of an Israeli strike. Technically, the question is whether the U.S. would allow Israeli planes to fly over Iraq — a path which, it should be stressed, is not the only way Israel can get to Iran. (Turkey is the most obvious way; another is Saudi Arabia.) To this, Biden is deliberately keeping the American cards close to the chest: The administration never ruled out an American or Israeli strike on Iran, and Biden is explicitly keeping open the possibility that the U.S. might, some day, give Israel such permission — or not. This is a clear signal to Iran, as everyone has already pointed out.

At the same time, we need to listen to Biden’s repeated use of the word “sovereign.” By speaking of sovereign rights, Biden is not emphasizing Israel’s right to attack, but limiting it. Like any sovereign state, Israel has a “right” to defend itself. That’s the definition of sovereignty. But this does not mean that the U.S. will see the move as right, or in American interests; nor will Washington necessarily let Israel off the hook if it attacks. There are many ways to pressure Israel on Iran; limiting access to Iraqi airspace is one of the least important of them. (By the way, the opposite is true as well: Washington can give Israel a green light on Iran without allowing access to Iraqi air space.)

It is always easy to assume that the vice president has little control over his mouth. In this case, however, it seems he has presented a carefully crafted warning to both Israel and Iran, without committing the administration to anything. Not bad for a loose cannon.

The whole point of law is to prevent humans from interacting in a world where only power dictates human affairs, and instead, to establish a system of rules grounded in justice. But for this to happen, a lot of power needs to be forcibly shifted away from the powerful, and into the hands of — well, that’s the problem, isn’t it?

In a democratic society, the power is shifted into the hands of the police and courts of justice. These, in turn, are held accountable to a whole apparatus of elections, approvals, and appointments, the bottom line of which is that if people charged with effecting justice abuse their power, everyone will know about it, and those responsible will be punished and deterred. Also, there are principles and rules of legislation to make sure that laws are just — such as, for example, the idea that laws should not be enforced selectively, or passed with a specific person as the target.

In the international arena, however, the whole process of “law” doesn’t have an effective system of accountability or of checks and balances. This is its Achilles’ heel, which proponents of international law are permanently trying to make us ignore. Instead of being created by elected legislatures, executed by appointed enforcement apparatuses, and applied by judicial officials, international law is defined in a series of treaties that are often themselves a reflection of power politics, and its enforcement lies in the hands of unaccountable bodies like the UN, and especially a swath of NGOs, many of which receive their budgets from interest groups. The lack of an effective system of accountability means that individual countries can bear the brunt of a power politics that is supercharged with the legitimacy and invasive tools of law. Nowhere is this felt more keenly than with regard to Israel.

In an important column today, Gerald Steinberg describes the increasing abuse of the institutions of international law against Israel. He focuses on a series of new reports published in the wake of “inquiries” regarding possible Israeli war crimes during Operation Cast Lead this past Winter. Steinberg’s conclusion:

The three reports published and publicized last week, like dozens that have come before, combine pseudo-legal rhetoric, technical allegations regarding Israel’s defense against terror attacks, automatic sympathy for Palestinian victims, and condemnation of Israel. The images and the titles reflect these biases – Amnesty’s is headlined: “Operation Cast Lead: 22 Days of Death and Destruction.”

Researchers led by Donatella Rovera claim they could not find evidence of the use of human shields by Hamas. In fact, the entire population of Gaza was one massive human shield, with weapons stored and fired from schools, mosques, hospitals and similar civilian structures (in one infamous case, during a live video broadcast widely viewed on Youtube.)

Similarly, the 10-page ICRC publication (”Gaza: 1.5 Million People Trapped in Despair”) consists largely of pictures of Palestinians and none of Israelis in Sderot – the rights of Israelis are irrelevant, as they are in the case of the UN and the Goldstone commission…

In addition to the moral facade, HRW’s report (”Precisely Wrong”) uses hi-tech language to attack the IDF’s use of advanced drones. Here, the “war crimes” charges are based on six carefully chosen cases. The “evidence” comes from Palestinian claims of having heard and seen the arrival of these tiny and soundless weapons – a superhuman feat.
HRW’s “military analyst” Marc Garlasco added dubious assumptions regarding the “impact mark of the missile and the fragmentation pattern” consistent with Spike missiles. Although a few reporters were professional enough to investigate the details, check with independent experts, and expose the dubious claims, most reports copied Garlasco’s mix of fact and fiction without question. (They also omit mention of HRW fund-raising in Saudi Arabia that cites their anti-Israel campaigns.)

These events, as well as the ongoing Goldstone inquiry, are part of the broader strategy of demonization adopted at the NGO Forum at the 2001 UN Durban Conference. The goal is to brand and isolate Israel as the new “apartheid” state.

Israel has been heavily criticized for refusing to cooperate with international inquiries into its tactics of war. But with so transparent an abuse of “international law” going on at Israel’s expense, the Jewish state seems to have little choice.

One of the most interesting things about hiking in a desert with two friends and a limited water supply is that at a certain point early on, one of the hikers becomes the Watcher of the Water, constantly warning the others about not drinking too much. At some point, however, that person gets sick of the role. Suddenly left without the constant warning and the confidence that somebody’s making sure the water lasts, inevitably one of the other hikers takes on the role as principal water griper. It’s an intuitive response to genuine danger.
Something similar may be happening between the U.S. and Europe.

Emanuele is clearly on to something, and the developments since his post have only made clearer the role-reversal. Today there are reports indicating that the U.S. is actively blocking tough financial sanctions against Iran in the upcoming G8 summit requested by the Europeans.
Americans are unaccustomed to the decline of empire, but we might be seeing signs of a broad-scale correction of a fairly radical distortion that dates to the Cold War — an abandonment of the U.S.’s long-held role as Watcher of the Water. Americans have long bristled at the fact that it is they who provided the muscle to deter the Soviets, while the Europeans benefited from American investment in the problem, and had the luxury to advocate more universalist, passive, and peace-seeking ideologies. But from an American perspective, there was no choice back then: The Soviet nukes where every bit as much a threat to the U.S. as to Europe.

Today, however, Iran is not aiming ICBMs at the U.S., and the Europeans are far more at risk from an Iranian bomb than are the Americans. What the new American administration calls “engagement” may be little more than a form of strategic disengagement, a way of saying that an Iranian bomb is simply not their problem. With the protective big brother nowhere to be seen, many Europeans realize that it may actually be up to them to stop the bomb.

Is this the beginning of a new era, a kind of strategic American isolationism under the guise of peacemaking, a fundamental shifting of the clash of civilizations? Here in Israel, we sure feel that way. (If today’s Israeli naval maneuvers are any indication, Israel may indeed be taking steps to “go it alone.”) Maybe Europeans are starting to sense it as well.

Call it a hunch. Tzipi Livni, former Foreign Minister and leader of the Kadima party, is on the ropes. Her days heading Israel’s opposition may be numbered.

First, there was the election, where she managed to pull off the remarkable feat of gaining the largest number of seats in the Knesset, while at the same time failing not only to put together a governing coalition, but even to join the government at all. She blew it because her narrative of “we got the most seats, so we won,” didn’t hold a candle to Netanyahu’s narrative of “the right wing got way more seats than the left wing, so we won.”

But then Netanyahu’s narrative shifted, and Livni lost again. Ehud Barak’s Labor party, which should have been devastated by its historic electoral implosion, instead retook command of the Left, joining a “National Unity” government with Likud et al. Bibi became the great Unifier, and Livni was left without anything of substance to distance her party from the government.

The new government’s political pincer-move, led by two former members of the IDF’s most elite special forces unit, was bad enough. Then there came Bibi’s big speech, where he historically allowed for the possibility of a Palestinian State — removing Livni’s only remaining substantive policy disagreement with the Prime Minister — in exchange for the whole world’s agreeing to hear his eloquent discourse about the prophets and Jewish history. (A veteran TV commentator called his speech “a tiny ‘Yes’ and a huge ‘But.’”) Suddenly, Israelis love Bibi again, despise Obama, and Livni is simply left with nothing to say. The one issue that the Americans disagree with Israel on — the idea of zero-growth settlement policy — is something that neither Livni nor her party could agree to. So what is left for her to oppose?

Last week, Livni escaped the physical dismantling of her party, as she led a raucous boycott of the Knesset (including the spontaneous singing of Israeli folk songs in the plenum) in protest over attempts to pass a law that would allow 7 MKs of her party, led by Shaul Mofaz, to split off and join the coalition. Maybe Bibi played his hand too forcefully. A tactical error perhaps. But it only slowed the process.

Today Mofaz has launched a blistering assault on Livni. ”She’s a nice person, you can sit and have a drink with her,” Mofaz said, “but we’re not in a club; she just doesn’t have the ability to make tough decisions.” This is an explicit echo of the Likud’s campaign against Livni: That she is too indecisive to lead.

At the same time, Netanyahu is playing it cool, calling on Livni to join the coalition. If she does, her supporters will clearly see it as a capitulation. Her inability to stick to her guns will be confirmed. Mofaz will have all the momentum in her party. And she will be giving her nemesis, Netanyahu, premiership over an unprecedentedly unified country. But if she doesn’t, she will find herself increasingly irrelevant in opposing a government with which she has no discernible disagreements, left with little to say to Israelis on the Left or Right.

If the current reports are even remotely accurate, the violent suppression of the Green Revolution has taken a turn for the worse. One of the most prolific on-the-scene reporters via Twitter had the following reports in over the last two hours:

saw 7/8 militia beating one woman with baton on ground – -she had no defense nothing — #Iranelection sure that she is dead

so many ppl arrested — young & old — they take ppl away — #Iranelection — we lose our group

ppl run into alleys and militia standing there waiting — from 2 sides they attack ppl in middle of alleys #Iranelection

phone line was cut and we lost internet — #Iranelection — getting more difficult to log into net — #Iranelection

rumour they are tracking high use of phone lines to find internet users — must move from here now — #Iranelection

reports of street fighting in Vanak Sq, Tajrish sq, Azadi Sq — now – #Iranelection — Sea of Green — Allah Akbar

in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat — blood everywhere — like butcher — Allah Akbar – #Iranelection RT RT RT

they catch ppl with mobile — so many killed today — so many injured — Allah Akbar — they take one of us — #Iranelection

Lalezar Sq is same as Baharestan — unbelevable — ppls murdered everywhere – #Iranelection

they pull away the dead into trucks — like factory — no human can do this — we beg Allah for save us — #Iranelection

we must go — dont know when we can get internet — they take 1 of us, they will torture and get names — now we must move fast

thank you ppls 4 supporting Sea of Green — pls remember always our martyrs — Allah Akbar — Allah Akbar — Allah Akbar #Iranelection

Allah — you are the creator of all and all must return to you — Allah Akbar — #Iranelection Sea of Green

This report, of an apparent full-scale massacre being waged in Tehran, is repeated by another witness interviewed on CNN, via Andrew Sullivan:

I was going towards Baharestan with my friend. This was everyone, not just supporters of one candidate or another. All of my friends, they were going to Baharestan to express our opposition to these killings and demanding freedom. The black-clad police stopped everyone. They emptied the buses that were taking people there and let the private cars go on. We went on until Ferdowsi then all of a sudden some 500 people with clubs came out of [undecipherable] mosque and they started beating everyone. They tried to beat everyone on [undecipherable] bridge and throwing them off of the bridge. And everyone also on the sidewalks. They beat a woman so savagely that she was drenched in blood and her husband, he fainted. They were beating people like hell. It was a massacre. They were trying to beat people so they would die. they were cursing and saying very bad words to everyone. This was exactly a massacre… I don’t know how to describe it.

It was only a few days ago when the popular uprising was waxing, that I could say with a straight face that Western leaders might be doing the right thing in showing restraint. The concern was then about discrediting the revolution inside Iran by seeming to confirm the accusation that it was a U.S. conspiracy.
Well, it’s certainly starting to look like I was wrong. Convinced that the protesters did not have the world on their side, the Mullahs have now unleashed total violence and horror on their own people. Fewer and fewer reports are escaping the hell, and the silencing of our sources inside Iran, one by one, suggests something far worse than the few dozen dead and few hundred arrested that the official news agencies are reporting.

Is it too late for massive Western pressure to make a difference? Is there any chance of it now?

The White House is atwitter after a new poll revealed a dramatic shift among Israelis regarding the administration’s policies towards Israel. The poll, conducted by Smith Research and commissioned by the Jerusalem Post, shows that only 6% of Israelis consider Obama “pro-Israel,” while 50% see him as “pro-Palestinian.” Compare this with the same poll from a month earlier, in mid-May, which had 31% responding that the Obama Administration is pro-Israel, and just 14% saying pro-Palestinian. What has changed in the last month? Not much, other than Obama’s dramatic Cairo speech, which described Israel as the product of centuries of Jewish suffering and the Holocaust; and Netanyahu’s no less dramatic response, which described Israel as the product of thousands of years of Jewish attachment to their ancient homeland.

There is a political calculus for the President here: As much as American Jews may have supported Obama without caring too much about his record on Israel, at the end of the day, American Jews tend to care deeply about Israel, and their sense of what’s happening with Israel is highly informed by what Israelis think (or, at least, Israeli elites). In other words, so dramatically lopsided a view of American policy towards Israel will not be lost on American Jewish voters. Midterms are not that far off.

After posting my views the other day as to why we should be rooting for the Green Revolution in Iran (“A Neocon Breaks Ranks” was Andrew Sullivan’s baffling headline), I was finally asked, for the first time, what I thought about (a) the Obama Administration’s response to the situation in Iran, and (b) whether I thought the Bush Administration would have handled it differently. The examples of Georgia and the Ukraine were raised. I discovered my opinions to be somewhat heretical in certain circles, so I might as well share them.

People in positions of responsibility inevitably behave differently than they would have when they were on the outside, criticizing. The knowledge that what you say really can have an impact on the outcome of events makes you behave very carefully. Iran is not the Ukraine or Georgia, for the simple reason that the revolutionary movement is not only being accused of acting under the influence of the U.S. and the “Zionists,” but that accusation still carries a great deal of traction in Iranian society. I really do believe that if the Mousavi supporters succeed, there’s a decent chance the new Iranian government will shift its attitude to the West, at least by a notch or two, if not more. But it’s not something the revolutionary movement is willing to say publicly at this stage.

It is far from clear that overt and flamboyant cheer-leading from the U.S. government will not do more harm than good. And not only is this probably one of the big concerns guiding the current administration, but I will go out on a very long limb and suggest that perhaps President Bush, too, would have understood how carefully this needs to be played. (Of course, Bush would likely have been accused of secretly supporting Ahmadinejad.)

Call me crazy. Political leaders are just like that sometimes. Their sense of responsibility trumps our vivid sense of justice.

This is, of course, Obama’s call to make, and he will be judged far more harshly for it if the revolution fails than if it succeeds. But those of us who are absolutely sure that he is going about this the wrong way should be given pause by the surprising support he has received from a certain Mr. Netanyahu. Bibi has often been cast as the neocon’s neocon, a supporter of democratic freedom and intervention everywhere, especially in the Muslim world — one who, by the way, has no problem going loggerheads with the current president on other issues. And yet, he has chosen not to second-guess Obama. He has wisely let Shimon Peres do the talking instead.

I do not believe it likely that the people of Iran will overthrow the Revolutionary regime in the next few weeks. This is not one of the goals of the Green revolution. Its explicit demands, however, do include not only the resignation of Ahmedinejad in favor of the popular reformist Mousavi, but also the resignation of the Supreme Leader, Khameni, who has supported Ahmedinejad. Contrary to what some overly intelligent analysts think, it seems clear that we should all be rooting for them to get what they want.

Westerners, including many Israelis, often find the Middle East to be a baffling place, and as a result they find themselves saying things that in any other context would sound absurd. One of my favorites is the argument that goes: “It’s better if something really bad happens, because then people will understand how bad it really is.”I heard this in defense of the Israeli disengagement from Gaza.

The obvious flaw in the argument is that less actual terror, with ambiguous world support, is still better than more actual terror with worldwide sympathy. Sympathy evaporates eventually; lives lost can never be returned. Predictably, what happened with Gaza was that Israel ended up losing on both counts. On the one hand, Hamas took over and built a massive terror infrastructure that enabled it to start taking the fight into Israel’s urban centers in the South. On the other hand, international support was short-lived. When Israel dared fight back, it was subjected to a brutal international outcry.

The same arguments are surfacing today with regard to the Iranian demonstrations since the election. For several days we’ve been hearing both Israeli and American officials saying we’re better off having Ahmedinejad win rather than the reformer Mousavi. (Today it comes from the head of the Mossad.) True, it’s unlikely that an explicit supporter of the Islamic revolution in Iran will suddenly become pro-Israel. It’s not even clear that he’ll stop Iran’s nuclear program. And it’s also true that there’s a limit to how much change a reformer can affect when he’s under the thumb of the Mullahs setting foreign policy. And yet, I still cannot imagine that having Ahmedinejad remain as president is somehow a desirable outcome.

This, for a few reasons.

1. The logic according to which it is “better have an extreme leader than a reformist one” is flawed. It is always better for things to be better than for them to be worse. The actual reality of life in Iran is the most salient reason — there is something perverse about wishing for the continued oppression of Iranians because of its possible PR advantages for us Westerners. But there are other reasons as well:

2. A Mousavi victory sends a stunning rebuke to the most extreme anti-democratic, pro-fascistic forces in the region. It puts a sudden stop to the momentum of extremism, which until now was threatening not only the citizens of Israel and the West, but pro-Western Arab regimes like Egypt. It is easy for us to say that we’d rather wait for the “real” revolution, i.e., a pro-West democratic one. What’s more likely to happen if Mousavi fails is that Iranians will conclude that they’re better off just accepting their rulers than trying to overthrow them.

3. A Mousavi victory creates a dynamic of reform — a dynamic which, once begun, may go much further than Mousavi himself may have intended. The image of Mikhail Gorbachev comes to mind, who was brought in to save the Soviet system by allowing a measure of reforms known as Glasnost and Perestroika. This opened the door for a popular revolt by a population that had long ago stopped believing in Communism as an ideology. We may not know who will play the role of Yeltsin, but looking back, it seems silly to prefer Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko over Gorbachev, just because it made Cold Warriors more comfortable to have a more unambiguously despicable enemy.

For days now, Mousavi’s revolt is gaining steam. It is being handled wisely, minimizing violence from the side of the protesters, garnering the quiet support of major Iranian figures like Khatami and Rafsanjani. According to journalists on the ground, yesterday’s rally brought together over a million people, and they are just getting angrier with every killing by the pro-government militias. The military has stepped in — to protect the demonstrators, rather than stop them. Iranians had come to expect a certain measure of self-rule by being able to choose their own leaders, at least to a point. Today they feel they were robbed. If they get to have their freedom, even in limited amounts, they may well end up wanting more.

Sometimes you cannot understand the greatness of a speech until you hear the spectrum of reactions to it. Netanyahu’s speech was heavy on style and light on new content: He made a shift from refusing to recognize the possibility of a Palestinian state toward allowing for one under very specific conditions: (i) It must be demilitarized; (ii) No refugees will be moved into Israel; (iii) it must recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and (iv) Jerusalem will remain unified. Other than that, at first glance the speech provided mostly historical perspective, a few subtle retorts to Obama (as Jennifer pointed out), and an explicit announcement of his intention to stop building new settlements or expanding old ones beyond their current boundaries, but allowing for natural growth.

Yet the impact of the speech on Israel has been stunning. Most of it I’m picking up on radio and television (sorry no links), consisting of almost uniform praise; from settlers in Ofra who were pleased that he not only promised to allow them to live “normal” lives, but also praised their strength and Zionist values, all the way to Yael Tamir, a Labor-party rebel who has refused to participate in the coalition because it is too far right, but who nonetheless declared the speech to be a “very important step in the right direction” because of its recognition of a Palestinian state — a sentiment echoed by the opposition Kadima party as well.

The responses to Netanayahu’s speech reflect a consensus in Israel that is only growing stronger by the day: Nobody wants to rule over the Palestinians, nobody wants to see the West Bank become another Hamastan like Gaza, nobody wants to be told that their country exists at the expense of their suffering, and nobody thinks peace is around the corner. But everybody agrees that if the Palestinians would drop the violence and just try to live – to build an economy and a demilitarized civilian life alongside Israel, then Israelis would have a much easier time talking about statehood.

The greatness of his speech, in other words, was not in its eloquence or its boldness. It was in its unique ability to express the unified thinking of an entire nation.

This is what both the Americans and the Palestinians will now have to contend with. Bibi has made life fairly easy for Obama. By extracting a concession on the idea of a Palestinian state, the administration can declare victory and turn down the fire on the natural-growth issue. American and world attention will now be focused on what it should have been focused all along: The Palestinians. It is they, after all, who have utterly failed to meet any of the preconditions of the “road map” regarding a cessation of both preaching and practicing violence. It is they who harbor Hamas, Fatah-Tanzim, Islamic Jihad, and other armed groups to the point of having no capacity to rule or speak with a single, reliable voice. It is they who will have to radically change in order for peace to have a chance. If there’s no one to talk to, there’s nothing to talk about.

Small wonder, then, that the Palestinian reaction to the speech was so harsh. “A liar and a thief” is what their initial response called Netanyahu. Why indeed? Because he may have just burst their bubble of American coziness? Because he is openly willing to give them everything they should want, and refuses to give them everything they shouldn’t?