Rather than the White House spoiling for a fight with Israel, the trouble may instead come from those American Jews who despise Netanyahu and are eager for a confrontation.
The left-wing J Street lobby is committed to pushing Israel hard to revive negotiations, even though anybody who’s paying attention to the facts on the ground knows that both Fatah and Hamas are uninterested in peace. But the lobby’s agenda has little to do with the realities of the Middle East and everything to do with American Jewish politics.
J Street’s real goal is to undercut AIPAC and, if possible, supplant it as the voice of American Jewry on Israel. J Street’s financial backers were strong supporters of Obama and hope to have a voice in the administration.
A Netanyahu victory in Israel will give them an opening, since they will seek to deprive a Likud government of the sort of U.S. support Israelis expect. Since AIPAC will have to stand up for Netanyahu – who has been routinely and wrongly depicted in the American press as an extremist – as it has for every past prime minister, J Street hopes to profit from the comparison.
The test for Obama may not be so much whether he and Bibi disagree on policy, but whether the president allows some of his Jewish supporters to maneuver him into a superfluous dispute that has nothing to do with the vital interests of either country.
The fate of the U.S.-Israel relationship in the next four years may rest on the question of whether Obama will let the gadflies of J Street start a battle that serves neither the cause of peace nor that of his administration’s political agenda.