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Obama and '"The Jewish Lobby of One"

(Los Angeles Times) Aaron David Miller - The notion that domestic politics and the pro-Israel community hold the president's Middle East policy hostage is dead wrong and dangerous. The pro-Israel community in America has a powerful voice, to be sure, but it doesn't have a veto. If Obama saw a chance to do something truly significant on the peace issue, he'd go for it. It's not his fear of the Jews that drives him; it's his fear of failure. If there's any lobby he should worry about, it's the Jewish lobby of one - an Israeli prime minister whose cooperation he needs for any agreement but whose views on negotiations and Palestinian statehood are far different from the president's. Having already wrestled with Netanyahu on settlements (and lost), Obama is no sentimentalist about Israel. Unlike Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, Obama isn't in love with the idea of Israel; he falls somewhere between Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush on the Israel sensitivity scale. If Obama fears anything, it's the reality that an ill-timed, wrong-footed approach to peacemaking will fail and represent another foreign policy stumble at a time when he can least afford it. The U.S. doesn't need a fight with the Israelis if it can't produce a real breakthrough. The writer, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, served as a Middle East negotiator.
2011-04-29 00:00:00
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