Did you hear the one about the elephant who had a mouse cornered and trampled on that mouse from time to time, whenever he felt like it? The president of the United States stepped in to make peace between them. “We Americans have always been committed to peace and freedom and the rights of the underdog,” he explained.

So the president sent a message to the mouse: “I’ll arrange a plan so the elephant will leave you alone — but only under one condition: The plan must include ironclad guarantees for the elephant’s security. We can’t have you, mouse, threatening the elephant’s security any longer. We are pledged to protect the elephant, because we care so deeply about the rights of the underdog.”

Get it? No, it’s not funny like ha-ha. It’s funny like weird. But that’s precisely the weird, irrational message Barack Obama is sending to the Palestinians as they struggle for freedom from the Israeli elephant.

Take a look at Helene Cooper’s latest front page story in the New York Times. Bringing the Israel-Palestine conflict back into the limelight, she reports that Obama would like to put forth his own peace plan with four main “terms of reference.” Israel would accept a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital. The Palestinians would give up the right of return to land in Israel and “Israeli security would have to be protected.”

That last term — protecting Israeli security — has shown up in everything the president has ever said in public, or been reported to say in private, about the conflict. And it’s precisely the reason that Obama has not yet presented a peace plan and may not ever do so.

Let me explain: Cooper reports that Obama wants to present his plan but he’s being blocked by Dennis Ross, his senior advisor on the Middle East. How can an advisor block the president he serves? you may well ask.

Ross isn’t just any old advisor. He’s been an advisor on Mideast affairs in every presidential administration since Jimmy Carter (with the exception of George W.) And he has consistently been noted for his “pro-Israel” (actually pro-Israeli-government) bias, doing his best to keep the U.S. tilted in that direction. His appointment as Obama’s top man on the Mideast was seen as a major triumph for the right-wing pro-Israel lobby.

In effect, then, it’s the lobby preventing Obama from offering his peace plan — because that plan would call for major concessions that the Israelis don’t want to make. And the lobby can get what it wants because, with an election looming, Obama sees it as too politically dangerous to buck the lobby.

The problem is not American Jews, most of whom would favor a plan like Obama’s. The problem is the Republicans, who sympathize with Israel rather the Palestinians by an astounding 19 to 1 margin.

After last November’s elections, as Cooper notes, “Representative Eric Cantor told Mr. Netanyahu that the new G.O.P. majority in the House would ’serve as a check on the administration,’ in a statement that was rare for its blunt disagreement on American foreign policy as conveyed to a foreign leader … Brian Katulis, a national security expert with the Center for American Progress, said that Republicans were trying to ‘make Israel a partisan wedge issue.’”

The GOP is eager to cast Obama as a friend of the Palestinians because “everyone knows” (they’ll say) that those Palestinians are bloodthirsty terrorists who will destroy poor little Israel if they ever get the chance. And the ploy can work because the image of Israel as the underdog — the spunky David defending itself against the huge Arab Goliath — is so widely believed in the U.S., even though it’s absurd to the few who look at the facts.

Why do so many believe that it’s the elephant who is in danger and needs security guaranteed? Largely because every official voice, from the president on down, has been saying so repeatedly, for decades.

Which brings us back to the irony of Obama. Suppose he really does want to offer a peace plan. By saying that it must protect Israel’s security, he reinforces the most powerful political factor preventing him from offering the plan. Funny, huh? And sad.

However the Palestinians may have the last laugh. The final paragraph of Helene Cooper’s story explains why:

“Much of the debate is taking place under a pending deadline of the United Nations General Assembly meeting scheduled in September, when the Assembly is expected to broadly endorse Palestinian statehood in a vote that could prove deeply embarrassing to Israel and the United States, which are both expected to vote against it.” It looks like the Palestinians, come September, may be the mouse that roared.

That’s why they’ve already got the Israeli elephant — and, even more so, the American great white whale — over a barrel. Obama is not sure he can afford the embarrassment of voting against a freedom movement that all the rest of the world applauds. But he’s even less sure that he can afford the political damage at home of offering his own peace plan, which means demanding concessions from Israel that could bring down Israel’s right-wing government.

Obama and his administration may well remain paralyzed unless enough American voters come to realize that fears about Israel’s security are a tragicomic joke. It’s time to stop worrying about the elephant and pay attention to the real security threat, the threat that Israel poses to the Palestinians every day.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Read more of his writing on Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. on his blog.

There’s one crisis in the Middle East that Barack Obama can see coming a long way off. In September, the Palestinians are likely to declare an independent state, and it’s likely to be recognized by a vast majority of the international community, including close U.S. allies.  So far the administration has not figured out how to respond, because they know that the Palestinian move will leave the president trapped.

If he does not restrain the Israelis he will be damned in the court of international opinion, weakening any claim the U.S. has to be a champion of people seeking freedom. If he does restrain the Israelis he’ll be damned in the court of domestic opinion as “pro-Palestinian, an “enemy of Israel” — a potentially fatal blow just as his re-election campaign is getting underway.

The obvious solution is for Obama to get the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate an agreement before the September deadline arrives. Since the chance of the two sides doing it on their own is somewhere below zero, there’s http://jstreet.org/the-growing-consensus-for-bolder-american-moves/ growing talk about Obama going to Jerusalem and giving a speech that presents his own peace plan. He’s probably got enough leverage with both sides to force it on them, like it or not. So he won’t really care much what the Israeli public thinks.

His real concern will be his domestic problem. If he pressures Israel to accept his terms he’ll still be labeled “anti-Israel” not only by some big Jewish campaign donors but, more importantly, by the entire Republican party. Israel is a powerful symbol among the white voters the Republicans must bring out to the polls if they want any chance of victory in ’12. Most white Americans accept the myth of Israel’s insecurity — the claim that the Jewish state’s very existence is threatened, so all its actions are in self-defense — as justification for everything Israel does to the Palestinians, no matter how outrageous.

Obama’s Jerusalem speech would be aimed primarily at the U.S. public. He would have to stand up in Jerusalem, say “This is what Israel must do for peace,” and at the same time defuse the charge at home that he’s “undermining Israel’s security.” To do that he must change the terms of the debate in the U.S. about what “Israel’s security” actually means.

Here’s what he should say:

“The peace plan I am offering poses no threat to the existence of Israel. Israel has proven over and over that none of its neighbors can defeat it in war. Certainly a Palestinian state — brand new, physically divided, and struggling to heal its political divisions — would pose no threat.

“In recent years many Israelis have recognized that they are militarily secure. Now they worry that their nation might be destroyed by those who would ‘delegitimize’ it and make it a pariah in the international community. But the world is not questioning the legitimacy of Israel’s existence. It is only denying the legitimacy of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its economic strangulation of Gaza. Once the peace plan I offer is enacted, the threats of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel will fade as rapidly as the violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

“When we talk about the threat to Israel’s security, we are not talking about any threat to the state’s existence, for that is already assured — as long as Israel is willing to make peace as the international community desires. No, we are talking about threats to the physical security and safety of each individual Israeli. Tragically, as long as two peoples are ensnared in military conflict, innocent civilians on both sides will suffer.

“I reaffirm America’s commitment to the security of every citizen of Israel. But there is only one way to insure their security. That is to make peace. Otherwise even the United States, with its vast resources, will be powerless to protect them. Peace, the only way to bring security to the people of Israel, will also bring security to the people of Palestine.

“The alternative is continued bloodshed and suffering on both sides. That is not an acceptable alternative to the United States. It should not be acceptable to anyone. For those who are committed to security, the only possible option is the peace I propose here today.”

If Obama gave this speech in Jerusalem, he would open up sizeable media space at home for the many journalists, commentators, and talking heads who know the truth: Israel’s existence is indeed secure from military attack. The only threat to Israel is the international isolation its own policies are provoking. Individual citizens of Israel will be safe only when their government starts seriously negotiating for peace.

Of course Obama wouldn’t change the minds of American right-wingers. They’d denounce him as “naïve” and “anti-Israel.” And that’s why, if he does give a speech in Jerusalem, it won’t be this one. He’s not likely to take such a risk, especially at the outset of his re-election campaign.

However the move by the international community to recognize an independent Palestinian state does open up new room for the millions of Americans who have already seen through the myth of “Israel’s insecurity,” those who know that it’s up to the Israeli government to decide whether its people will be secure. So we don’t have to wait for Obama to give that speech. We can give it every day, in every way, to anyone who will listen.

When most Americans no longer takes Israeli claims of “existential threat” and “self-defense” seriously, Obama will be politically free to say publicly what he recently told U.S. Jewish leaders – that “Israel is the stronger party here, militarily, culturally and politically. And Israel needs to create the context for [peace] to happen.”  Then the Palestinian people will have some real hope that their long years of suffering may soon come to an end.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  Read more of his writing on Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. on his blog.

Inside the beltway, there’s just one newspaper that everyone reads: the Washington Post. But these are busy people. Mostly they just scan the headlines and lead paragraphs. Few members of Congress or administration staffers take a special interest in. Let’s take a look at the recent flareup in the Israel-Palestine conflict, as told in WaPo headlines and leads, all written by the WaPo’s woman in Jerusalem, Janine Zacharia.

March 23:  “Eight Palestinians were killed Tuesday in two separate Israeli military strikes in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian spokesmen said. Israeli officials said the strikes were a response to the most serious escalation in rocket and mortar fire from the coastal territory since the 2009 Israeli offensive that sought to end such attacks.”

March 24: “A bomb detonated at a Jerusalem bus stop Wednesday, killing a 59-year-old woman, injuring 38 people and shattering the relative calm that had pervaded the city for several years. The attack came as tensions have escalated between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and it prompted vows of reprisals from Israeli politicians who warned that they would take the necessary steps to restore the country’s security.”

March 25: “Sirens sounded throughout southern Israel on Thursday, warning residents to take cover as at least 10 rockets, missiles and mortars were fired from the Gaza Strip and Israel launched an airstrike to destroy a rocket launcher. The Israeli response was relatively muted.”

March 28: “Israel deployed a still experimental anti-missile system to protect residents within striking distance of rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, a clear sign that Israeli leaders do not believe that rocket fire from the territory will abate soon, as increased Palestinian rocket fire sent Israelis scurrying into shelters.”

It all adds up to the mythic tale that Americans who pay attention to the Middle East know all too well: Palestinians attack Israel. Israel strikes back in self defense and looks for ever new ways to protect its security. End of story. What more is there to say?

Plenty, as it turns out. How about asking the obvious question, “Why have rockets started flying from Gaza in larger numbers lately?”  The answer was  documented by two leading Israeli security analysts:  “Hamas does not seem to want large-scale clashes yet. The organization actually has good reasons to believe that Israel is the one heating up the southern front. It began with a bombardment a few weeks ago that disrupted the transfer of a large amount of money from Egypt to the Gaza Strip, continued with the interrogation of engineer and Hamas member Dirar Abu Sisi in Israel, and ended with last week’s bombing of a Hamas training base in which two Hamas militants were killed.” All of this before the escalation in rocket fire from Gaza.

Though Zacharia ignored this context, she was quick to link the Jerusalem bus bombing — committed by a person or persons still unknown — to the conflict in Gaza that was started, she implied, by Palestinians. She treated it all as part of the same challenge to Israel “to restore the country’s security.” There was nothing worth reporting, apparently, about how desperate Palestinians are to protect their own security.

Zacharia did note, near the end of one article, that “Hamas has at times worked to prevent attacks into Israel.” But she wrote nothing about the ongoing Hamas calls for a cease-fire, nor for the same calls now coming from Islamic Jihad in Gaza. That wouldn’t fit her plot line. She just wants to make sure we know that Israel’s “relatively muted” response is only temporary, while Israel is “still weighing” new (and presumably more violent) ways to stop those “Hamas rockets” (which are mostly, in fact, fired by factions opposed by Hamas).

Israelis get a more sophisticated view. They can read this, for example, in an editorial in Haaretz:  “In this testosterone-rich competition, there will always be more checkmarks on the Israeli side. But Israel is clever enough to act like the threatened party and to hide its deadly performances.” If you read only Zacharia’s reporting in the WaPo, you would never imagine that the editors of Israel’s most prestigious newspaper could see it that way.

Zacharia’s version of the Israel-Palestine conflict carries a special weight because it has so much influence inside the beltway. But there’s nothing unusual about it. You can find much the same mythic tale in any of the most prestigious U.S. newspapers, on their editorial pages as well as their news pages.

We can’t expect them to change their ways voluntarily in the foreseeable future.  The myth of Israel’s insecurity will continue to be the official story in the U.S. mass media and thus the foundation of U.S. discourse and policy about Israel — unless proponents of peace and Palestinian independence, who are such persuasive critics of Israel’s actions, start training their verbal guns directly on that myth.

Otherwise most Americans, no matter how much they know about Israeli violence and oppression, will forgive most of it as unfortunate but necessary measures for national security. If we protect our national security at all costs, by any means necessary, they’ll think, why shouldn’t the Israelis do the same?

We can take one big step toward a more sane and humane U.S. policy on the Israel-Palestine conflict — a policy that might some day actually lead toward peace — by reading the mass media carefully and demanding that they give us real journalism, not just the old familiar myth disguised as news.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Read more of his writing on Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. on his blog.

For us opinion poll junkies, it’s the logical gaps and inconsistencies that are most revealing.  In a CNN poll released today, 70% of Americans favor imposing a no-fly zone in Libya. When CNN last polled, on March 11 – 13, only 56% approved. How to explain that jump in just one week?

Here’s my guess: A week ago fully 14% of respondents said they had “never heard of Libyan leader Muamar Ghadafi”! By now, you can bet nearly all of them have heard of Ghadafi. And what they’ve heard is hardly complimentary. Add those 14% to last week’s 56% who wanted a no-fly zone, and you’ve got exactly this week’s 70%.

If the Pew Research Center finds anything like 70% support for the no-fly zone in its next poll, that will be a much bigger change in public opinion than what CNN found. In Pew’s poll taken March 10 – 13, only 44 % supported a no-fly zone.  But speaking of logical inconsistencies, in that same poll a paltry 16% approved of “bombing Libyan air defenses.” So nearly two-thirds of those who supported a “no-fly zone” had no idea what the term means. They wanted to do the impossible: impose a no-fly zone without bombing air defenses. There’s no reason to think the CNN sampling, which gave higher support for the no-fly zone, was any better informed.

It’s not news to discover that the public is ill-informed and illogical. It would be something new, though, to understand what does shape public opinion. As a historian of religions, my answer is summed up in a single word: myth.

In the last week, the mass media have restored Ghadafi to the role of the evil maniac we love to hate — a role he had played until 2003, when he temporarily became a good guy for helping us wage our war against terrorism. Which goes to show that mythic consciousness is like a mental theater: We don’t see the actor but only the character he plays.

The only permanent good guy in the U.S. mass media is the U.S. itself, represented on the mythic stage by “the nation’s finest,” our military forces. Precisely because they are portrayed as our “finest,” their very blood takes on a mythic aura of purity and sanctity. To shed it is a sin, unthinkable except in the most extreme circumstances. Libya obviously doesn’t qualify. Hence the nearly universal consensus against using ground forces.

So the good guy must prevail with no loss of life. Enter the magical “no-fly zone”: a war that’s imagined as totally painless and risk-free (at least for us) because it’s fought wholly — and for many, it seems, holy — from the air. It’s a magic victory akin to the sacred thunderbolts thrown by Zeus, Ba’al, and all the other mythic gods of the air.

Now, though, by the magic of television, we get to watch it in real time, with all the thrills that any video game could provide. And as in a video game, we get to participate vicariously in the daring deeds and ultimate victory of the ethereal good guys.

Control the air and you control everything; that’s a very old fantasy. In the United States, it goes back at least to Benjamin Franklin’s vision of winning wars by dropping bombs from hot air balloons. We have a rich history of science fiction images of aerial bombardment exterminating the enemy with no loss of American life.

Fantasy first turned into actual policy planning in the late 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt directed his administration to prepare for a European war fought on the ground solely by European troops, with the U.S. offering only naval and air power. Even though the U.S. eventually used massive ground troops, the fascination with aerial bombing only grew during the war. The military’s postwar research, proving the limited effectiveness of bombing from the air, made little public impression against growing visions of a U.S. nuclear arsenal ruling the skies just as absolutely as any Zeus or Ba’al.

The cold war solidified the myth that victory comes from the skies and the skies alone. This was the blueprint that Richard Nixon used during his Vietnamization campaign: As the number of U.S. ground troops fell, B-52s roamed the skies all across Southeast Asia — but to no avail, of course, in the end.

Just a few days before the Obama administration opted for a no-fly zone in Libya, Hillary Clinton was still cautioning about its pitfalls. The no-fly zone over Iraq “did not prevent Saddam Hussein from slaughtering people on the ground and it did not get him out of office,” she recalled. Though the White House soon ordered her to change her tune, her point remains true: A no-fly zone won’t be a magic cure-all in Libya either. The myth of victory from the air has never been enacted with empirical success.

But myths are not tested by empirical standards. Invulnerable to falsification, they are notoriously difficult to shoot down. And myths hold sway over elite leaders just as much as the masses. All are entranced by the media spectacle and the fantasy of omnipotence. Every day the spectacle continues, we can expect the percentage who support the no-fly zone to rise. It’s not easy to resist the temptation of vicariously playing God.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.

This column was first posted on Truthout.org.

There’s a media drumbeat growing for Barack Obama to treat the Israeli leadership like addicts: stop waiting for them to help themselves, recognize that they are powerless to do it on their own, and start telling them what they must do if they want to save their nation.  It’s a faint drumbeat now, but you can hear it if you try, and you can count on it to grow.

Robert Wright, a blogger on New York Times.com, urges Obama to support a UN move to “create a Palestinian state now … define the borders, set the timetable.”  Wright knows that a UN plan will be, in effect, a U.S. plan, since the Security Council can act only with U.S. approval. So he recommends a column by Daniel Levy, who sees the breakdown of direct negotiations as an opportunity for a more constructive approach:  “Wiser heads in Israel, in America, and in the pro-Israel community inside America [are] advocating an assertive U.S. push for peace … a U.S. plan … deploying U.S. leverage.”

In Israel, prominent peace educator Gershon Baskin wants the administration to bring Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to the U.S. “for intensive negotiations for as long as it takes, with the US mediator setting the agenda, assigning tasks and drafting the agreement.”  Israeli analyst Avi Isacharoff sees it coming:  “If Netanyahu does not show willingness for a historic compromise, then he is expected to receive Obama’s framework for a solution, which the sides will have to accept or refuse.”

An Israeli “senior government official” sees it coming too: When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says that the U.S. will “offer our own ideas and bridging proposals when appropriate,” he’s convinced that “the bridging plan is in fact a peace plan.”

But few progressives seem to expect a U.S. plan. Most agree with Josh Ruebner of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, who argues that since Obama was “unable to get Israel to bite on a temporary freeze on settlements,” he is now “further than ever from his goal of Israeli-Palestinian peace during his first term, and bereft of a coherent strategy to achieve it.”

Both sides in this debate are right. Obama could and should present his own plan; his administration is edging slowly and cautiously in that direction — but so slowly and cautiously that it looks like no movement at all. Why should Obama resist using his power — and he does have power over Israel — to get the peace deal that he says is his number one foreign policy goal?

The obvious answer is his fear of the much-dreaded “Israel lobby” — which should actually be called the “Israel can do no wrong lobby,” to distinguish it from the rising pro-Israel, pro-peace lobby. J Street, the most prominent pro-Israel, pro-peace group, is now calling for pressure on the administration to focus on mapping the borders of the new Palestinian state. And “if the sides are not able to reach agreement on borders within a specified time period,” says J Street, the U.S. should present a proposal of its own. There’s that faint drumbeat again.

But still so faint, still leaving the question, Why does the “Israel can do no wrong lobby” strenuously resist the very idea of a U.S. peace plan? The answer they give is that the parties should be left to work out their own peace, with no foreign interference. Translation: Let Israel go on dominating Palestinians forever, because “the Palestinians” (or, some still say, “the Arabs”) pose such a grave “existential” threat of destroying the Jewish state.

Israel, with infinitely greater military power than any of its neighbors, afraid it will be destroyed by the powerless Palestinians?  That’s about as reasonable as an NFL linebacker worrying that the little girl next door will beat him up.  Too many Jews “have moved into the realm of paranoia,” as Israeli historian Daniel Gavron writes in Newsweek.

What a sign of change in the U.S. mass media that Newsweek would publish Gavron’s column.  It’s as startling as the New York Times publishing, a year ago, an op-ed by Henry Siegman, former head of the American Jewish Congress, labeling fear of another Holocaust as “pathological.”

Zionist theologian Emil Fackenheim once praised what he called the Israelis’ “Holocaust psychosis,” their penchant for seeing all opposition to Israel as Nazi-like anti-semitism. He called on Jews everywhere to adopt that view because, he claimed, they would then fulfill God’s command to support Israeli military violence in order to prevent another Holocaust.

If these writers have it right, then many U.S. Jews, especially political powerful Jews, are afflicted by a psychiatric malady, and that’s why Obama is not offering his own plan and map for peace.

Yet while many Jews do stress fear of another Holocaust, many (sometimes the very same people) insist that they have other, more powerful motives for supporting Israel’s right-wing policies.

Indeed they do — though not, I suspect, the motives that they claim. When we are dealing with fear, the layers go deeper and deeper, and it’s often the outsider who can see them most clearly. (Why else would we pay psychotherapists all that money?)

But who would ever have thought that we’d be guided into those deeper layers by a famous anti-semite like Richard Nixon? Well, truth does turn up in unexpected places, like the recently released tape on which Nixon says, “It’s the latent insecurity. Most Jewish people are insecure. And that’s why they have to prove things.”

I would have dismissed such a sweeping generalization as mere bigotry if I had not come across the quote in an article by a popular writer on Jewish moral values, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, with the revealing title, “On Nixon’s Allegation That the Jews Have No Pride.” For Boteach, apparently, being insecure and having to prove things equals having no pride. He went on to explain:  “It’s simply not news that Jews often seek non-Jewish legitimacy.”

In other words, his argument goes, Jews are often insecure about how gentiles view them. That’s why they feel they have to prove their legitimacy. That feeling is proof that these Jews lack pride.  And lack of pride, this expert on Jewish values claims, is a grave sin:  “Which is why, even as an Orthodox Jew, I believe passionately that Jewish pride is more important than Jewish observance. Jewish self-esteem is the body within which the soul of Jewish observance must reside.”

Boteach finds what he thinks is a happy ending, though:  “A prouder, less insecure generation of Jews is replacing us. … They fight for Israel on campus, even when marginalized for doing so.”

Which just goes to show — and I never thought I would ever write these words — Nixon was right, sort of. Some Jews (emphasis on “some”), like Shmuley Boteach and the fighting students he admires, do feel they have to prove things. Their obsession with Jewish pride and self-esteem shows that they are actually just as insecure as their ancestors — perhaps even more so, because what they fear is not physical harm but the psychological pain of doubting their own worth.

On the very day Boteach’s gloss on Nixon was published, two columns appeared in Israel’s most popular newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, dealing with the same issue. Both urged the Israeli government not to apologize to Turkey for killing nine Turks on a ship headed toward Gaza last May. And both gave the same reason: national honor.

“The notion of ‘honor’ characterizes backward cultures, and believe me that talking about ‘Jewish honor’ makes me feel unwell. It smells of primitivism and even of fascism,” Assaf Wohl admitted. However, he concluded, there’s something more important than such moral sensitivity:  “If we wish to survive here, we need to conduct ourselves this way vis-à-vis some states and societies. They must internalize that Jews too have respect.”

At the very birth of Zionism, the first great Zionist writer, Leo Pinsker, based his argument for Zionism on the need for Jews to have respect — not from the gentiles (who would always despise Jews, he assumed) but from themselves.  “You are despicable,” he told his fellows Jews, “because you have no real self-esteem and no national self-respect.”

The lack of self-esteem, the fear of being weak and thus unworthy, is what now haunts Israeli right-wingers.  “For some years now, Israel had been conducting itself in the world like a typical weakling at school who conveys a sense of desperation, pleading with others: ‘Love me, even though I’m not worth it.’ Uri Elitzur wrote, explaining why Israel should not apologize. “And just like a typical weakling, Israel is subjected to growing disparagement and sustains one slap in the face after another. … When it comes to the global political jungle, as is the case among prisoners at a violent jailhouse, honor is a substantive, top-priority interest.”

The same fear of weakness, leading to the same obsession with pride and self-esteem, drives the “Israel can do no wrong” lobby in the U.S. too. I know, because I grew up with these people. It’s impressive how many Jews have escaped from this psychological trap and can support Israel out of emotional strength — which means supporting rapid moves toward a two-state solution, by any agency that can make it happen, including the U.S. government.

It’s depressing, though, to see that the Jews who remain trapped in insecurity, having to prove their self-worth by showing their strength, still have the president of the United States politically trapped too. Sure, I’d like to see Obama break out of that trap on his own, just because he wants to do the right thing. But his profession his politics. He and the world measure his professional success by his ability to win elections.

It’s really we, the people of the United States, who let ourselves remained trapped by the fears and insecurities of a small but powerful group of Jews in our midst. As long as we go on this way, we have reason to doubt our own self-esteem. When enough of us demand that our own government assert itself to end the long-standing injustice in the Middle East, we will make it politically safe for the president to do just that, and we can feel proud.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  Read more of his writing on Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. on his blog.

The great brass ring of Barack Obama’s foreign policy — an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement — seems to be rapidly slipping from his grasp. His demand for a moratorium on West Bank settlement expansion is now dead and buried, with scarcely an obituary in the U.S. mass media to mark its passing.

There’s a general consensus in the progressive media that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spurned Obama by refusing to extend the moratorium and the U.S. president meekly backed down, leaving his administration to nurse a humiliating defeat. That’s what most commentators would have us believe.

But not Akiva Eldar, whom Noam Chomsky has called Israel’s most perceptive foreign policy analyst. In a column titled “Obama’s show of strength against Netanyahu,” Eldar offered quite a different view of the U.S. decision to stop pushing for a moratorium: “Obama is refusing to give Netanyahu a seal of approval to build in Jerusalem. … Obama doesn’t intend to passively watch the earthmoving equipment at West Bank settlement construction sites.” Far from caving in to the Israelis, “the Americans acceded to the entreaties of the Palestinians and their friends in the Arab states, who demanded that Obama finally announce who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.”

Another prominent Israeli analyst, Avi Isacharoff, agreed:  “The Palestinians have realized that the American announcement is playing into their hands. … It appears that the Palestinians have the White House sympathy market cornered and returning to the indirect talks will help them get even more. … If Netanyahu does not show willingness for a historic compromise, then he is expected to receive Obama’s framework for a solution, which the sides will have to accept or refuse.”

The Palestinians’ Arab friends don’t want Obama to wait for Netanyahu at all. The day after the U.S. gave up on the building moratorium, Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit publicly declared that discussions should shift to an “end-game for a Palestinian settlement.” He called for “two or three pages of a grand understanding to be offered by the international community to both parties,” with a specific time for a deal to be reached.

Two days later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hinted at just that possibility. She committed the U.S. to “push the parties to lay out their positions on the core issues without delay and with real specificity.” Though she said that the U.S. could not and would not “impose a solution,” she put the two sides on notice that the U.S. would privately “offer our own ideas and bridging proposals when appropriate.”

Then she sketched out what those idea would involve. Both sides “must agree to a single line drawn on a map that divides Israel from Palestine … The parties should mutually agree on an outcome that realizes the aspirations of both parties for Jerusalem and safeguards its status for people around the world,” because without agreement on sharing Jerusalem “there surely will be no peace.”

Read Clinton’s speech through Akiva Eldar’s eyes and it looks like Obama used his secretary of state, commonly known as a pro-Israel hawk, to send a dovish message to right-wing Israelis: If you won’t give us a settlement building moratorium, including East Jerusalem, and negotiate for peace, we are ready to insist on a grand understanding, telling you how you must make peace. In fact Eldar reports that Clinton has already “insisted that the Israeli government put forth a map with permanent borders as soon as possible.”

That’s also that’s the way one Israeli “senior government official” read it: “Clinton’s remarks on an American bridging plan are a very bad thing. Israel has been trying to avoid an American plan for years, and the bridging plan is in fact a peace plan.”

Israeli right-wingers were further shocked when their defense minister and former prime minister Ehud Barak followed Clinton at the very same podium and announced that he agreed with her on the need to divide and share Jerusalem:  “The western part of the capital and the Jewish neighborhoods belong to Israel, while neighborhoods with dense Arab populations should be under Palestinian control.” Barak, who has always emphasized Israel’s dependence on the U.S., was clearly signaling that Akiva Eldar is right: The U.S. is now just taking a different route to asserting its power over Israel, and it’s time for the Israelis to submit.

Netanyahu was quick to say that Barak was not speaking for the government. So it seems there’s a new struggle brewing inside the Israeli political elite between those who recognize U.S. dominance and those who would resist it. Jerusalem will always be a huge bone of contention. But the reaction to Clinton’s speech from Netanyahu and several of his Likud party cabinet members suggests that another issue is more crucial right now.

Dan Meridor found “some good things in the speech. … She said there would be a simultaneous discussion on five issues, and that puts an end to the ’security borders first’ story.”  Yisrael Katz insisted that “no one will agree to predetermine the borders. We have an interest in other things first, not necessarily regarding the borders.” Vice premier Silvan Shalom agreed that “the negotiations must not focus on the borders.” And when Netanyahu himself identified the “core issues,” borders did not make the list.

Why not talk about borders? Once borders are decided, Israel will be compelled to face excruciating questions: What happens to the Jewish settlers (perhaps as many as 200,000) who live inside the borders of the new Palestinian state?  And how much of Jerusalem will Israel have to give up? Israeli right-wingers desperately want to avoid those dilemmas. So they’re eager to have as many issues as possible on the table at once, to help them string out the negotiations endlessly without having to face the border question. For the Israeli right, as Eldar says, “the focus on the final-status talks offers an alibi for deepening the occupation.”

Barak’s Labor Party seems to be taking a different approach. On the heels of Barak’s endorsement of sharing Jerusalem, another Labor cabinet minister, Isaac Herzog, “called on Netanyahu to form a political outline which would include the permanent borders, based on the 2000 [Bill] Clinton plan,” which includes a shared Jerusalem.

Labor is apparently betting that a borders-first and share Jerusalem approach will enhance its appeal among Israeli voters.  In a recent poll of Israeli Jews, nearly two-thirds said that “Israel should do more to promote comprehensive peace with the Arabs based on the 1967 borders, with agreed modifications, and the establishment of a peaceful Palestinian state.”

Labor is also betting that Washington wants borders — including the borders within Jerusalem — to be the first item on the table. Labor’s bet looks better now that U.S. negotiator George Mitchell has returned to Jerusalem with a simple message for Netanyahu:  “The Obama administration wants him to take a position in the coming weeks on the core issues, with an emphasis on borders.”

Labor’s leaders know that most Israeli voters want their government to recognize the reality of political power: Ultimately the U.S. calls the shots. As Israeli columnist Shmuel Rosner, a very centrist but perceptive observer of U.S. – Israeli relations, put it, if Obama “signaled that Israel could no longer take unconditional US support for granted, Mr. Netanyahu’s domestic support would quickly evaporate.”

Though words are powerful weapons in politics, “the important thing is not what the Americans say, but what they do,” as “a source close to Netanyahu” said. “We must watch their next moves in the near future.”

What the Obama administration does won’t be decided in Jerusalem. It will be decided by the political winds swirling around Washington. Likud and Labor both have ardent backers inside the beltway and across the country. Clinton’s careful wording shows her deference to the right-leaning “pro-Israel” lobby, which still wields plenty of power.

But not as much power as it used to. Now there’s J Street, the increasingly influential American-Jewish lobby group that promotes a new definition of “pro-Israel” as pro-peace and pro- an urgent push to negotiate a two-state solution.

J Street has recently upped the ante, unveiling a new strategic campaign that’s very much in line with the Israeli Labor Party approach. Rather than merely backing Obama, as it has in the past, J Street now says it will actively push the president and his administration to “focus on delineating an agreed-upon border between the state of Israel and the state-to-be of Palestine, and on establishing security arrangements.”  J Street has long supported a border that would run right through Jerusalem, giving the Palestinians the eastern half of the city as their capital.

“If the sides are not able to reach agreement on borders within the specified time period,” says J Street, “the United States should present a proposal to both sides that adheres to the parameters presented above for a yes or no decision.” There’s little doubt that the Palestinians will say yes, as long as the U.S. – proposed map includes virtually all of the land occupied by Israel in 1967. J Street, like the Labor Party, is betting that most Israeli Jews will say yes, too.

J Street knows that most U.S. Jews are inclined to support more vigorous U.S. action. In an Election Day poll of Jewish voters, three-quarters said they want the U.S. to lead Israelis and Palestinians toward a two-state solution, and nearly two-thirds would accept more administration pressure on Israel to reach that goal.

There’s plenty of support for a concrete U.S. plan within the foreign policy elite.  Two pillars of the establishment, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, have publicly urged Barack Obama to “outline the basic parameters for a Palestinian state,” with Scowcroft urging Obama to “specify the terms of a U.S. peace plan.”

Knowing that a concrete U.S. proposal focused on borders first would have plenty of support in the U.S. and in Israel, Hillary Clinton used diplomatic words that left plenty of room for the administration to take that route.  The key question is whether the U.S. public will heed J Street’s call and give the administration enough political protection to adopt a vigorous borders-first approach, despite the inevitable blowback from the right.

This is no abstract exercise in diplomacy or politics. The lives of some 2.5 million Palestinians who have suffered under decades of military occupation of are at stake. Once borders are fixed the settlements will begin to be dismantled and the road to an independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, will be clear.

U.S. progressives may be tempted to give up on the peace process and on the Obama administration, viewing it as mere putty in the hands of the Israelis, as many of their pundits suggest. But the administration is still the world’s most powerful political actor. As prominent Israeli columnist Eitan Haber wrote, it’s “the eight-ton elephant that can sit down anywhere it wishes” and squash Israel whenever it wants. Obama has done it before and may well be preparing to do it again. It makes no sense to treat the elephant in the room as if it were irrelevant.

As in any political struggle, it makes more sense to pursue a variety of strategies simultaneously. Pressing the administration to offer a concrete peace plan, starting with a map of the new Palestinian state’s borders, is one useful strategy among many that can lead to a just peace.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Read more of his writing on Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. on his blog.

From the ashes of Mt. Carmel, the largest forest fire in Israel’s history, a strange phoenix is rising: a clash of civilizations. It’s not between Israelis and Arabs, nor between Jews and Muslims. It’s a clash between two worldviews. Let’s oversimplify, for convenience, and call them “ancient” and “modern.”

The clash has flared up around the question of why the fire started. The moderns blame people and a drought-parched landscape. A couple of negligent kids playing with fire is the most popular theory (though their father insists they’re innocent).  Then there’s a theory of multiple fires, some accidental and others arson. However the fires started, there’s a widespread view in Israel that the humans in charge of extinguishing it bear lots of blame for letting it go on too long.

The ancients have a more complex interpretation. Ultimately, they say, God is responsible for everything that happens in this world. So He must be the One who set Carmel ablaze. But He acted only in response to the behavior of Israelis who defied His will.

The fires were a “strike from Allah,” Gaza’s prime minister Ismael Haniyeh declared, “divine strikes for what [the Israelis] did. … Allah is punishing them from a place they did not expect it.” The sketchy news reports in English did not explain what Israeli actions Haniyeh thinks Allah was punishing.

He was probably referring to Operation Cast Lead, the devastating attack on Gaza in late 2008 that left well over 1,000 Palestinians dead. He may well have been thinking, too, of Israel’s ongoing strangulation of the Gazan economy, preventing rebuilding from that war. And perhaps he was recalling the Israeli role in provoking the Palestinian civil war of 2007 (with U.S. help), which deprived Hamas of the political control of the West Bank that it had won in democratic elections.

The Israeli daily Ha’aretz noted that “the Hamas strongman made the statements as he joined emergency prayers in Gaza City to ask for rain. He expressed hope rain would fall in the Palestinian territories, which like Israel, have been struck by an unprecedented dry season.”

But before Jews take too much offense at Haniyeh’s remarks, they should reckon with ancients of their own. Orthodox rabbis in Israel have been praying for rain, too, even before the dry-as-tinder forest was engulfed in flames. (A couple of PR-savvy rabbis took a beauty queen with them as they rose up in a hot air balloon to say their prayers, perhaps thinking that entreaties offered closer to heaven are more effective).

And the drought has led some ancients to demonstrate the shared worldview that binds them together cross religious lines. In mid-November “Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious leaders conducted a joint prayer for rain in the Muslim village of Wallaja,” since all assume that God must be responsible for the drought.

By the same logic, ancients among Jews as well as Muslims hold God responsible for the forest fire. Numerous ultra-orthodox newspapers editorialized, all agreeing that (as Mevaser put it) “The Heavens [i.e., God] caused the events and led them to such disastrous levels. … The warning sign sent from above joins the previous warning sign, when we are already in the midst of drought. These warning signs are sent to wake us, to prod the sleeping from their sleep… Each one must come to conclusions and drive crookedness from his heart.”

Israel’s most prominent ultra-orthodox rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, had a more specific explanation:  “Fire exists only in a place where the Sabbath is desecrated,” he read from the Talmud in his weekly sermon. “It is all divine providence,” he explained. “We must repent, keep Shabbat appropriately … and thanks to this God will apply a full recovery.” (The point was not lost on Israelis, who know that Haifa, the only city threatened by the fire, is also the only city where buses have run on Sabbath for many years.)

So in this case it’s religion, not politics, that makes strange bedfellows. Ismael Haniyeh and Ovadia Yosef are snuggling under a similar theological blanket.  But in the Middle East religion is never severed from politics. The meaning of theological words depends upon their political context, and vice versa.

It may be tempting to see the two leaders as political foes who are mirror opposites, much like George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden after 9/11, when each assured his people that God was on their side and demanded war against the enemy.

When religion meets politics, though, every situation is unique. Bush and bin Laden largely agreed on the nature of the sin, but they cast each other as the sinner. Haniyeh and Ovadia find themselves in the opposite situation: They agree that it’s the Israeli people who are the sinners, but they disagree profoundly on the nature of the sin. The Palestinian politician finds the sin squarely in the realm of his enemy’s political behavior. The Israeli rabbi finds it in his own people’s religious behavior.

Nevertheless, Ovadia Yosef is among the most powerful political leaders in Israel. In fact an Israeli columnist recently labeled him “Israel’s No. 1 Politician … a religious dictator who divides the world to good guys and bad guys in line with conservative, religious worldviews, and who within Israel’s democracy holds greater decision-making power than any minister elected by the public.”

Ovadia wields his political power through the Shas party, which now holds the deciding vote in the Israeli cabinet debate about extending the moratorium on settlement expansion. “We will either oppose it or abstain from voting, depending upon the decision of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef,” a Shas cabinet minister acknowledged. The entire peace process is stalled because Ovadia has apparently not yet made up his mind.

Over the years he has played both sides of the anti-Arab political fence. He has said of Arabs in general: “You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.” More recently, when he called for “all the nasty people who hate Israel” to “vanish from our world,” he singled out the relatively moderate Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and added, “May God strike them down with the plague along with all the nasty Palestinians who persecute Israel.”

Yet the rabbi later apologized for or tried to explain away these remarks. And over the years he has endorsed the Israeli military withdrawal from Lebanon and some moves toward a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Which way he will go now remains unclear. Mideast policymakers in the Obama administration must be spending much of their time these days trying to figure out how to satisfy the 90-year-old rabbi.

Ovadia is delaying because he’s stymied by his own political conundrum. Over the years his movement has moved religiously to the right, bringing it closer to ultra-orthodox right-wing nationalism and reaping the political benefits. But if Shas rejects Netanyahu’s bid for a moratorium extension, there’s a real chance that the government could fall. Netanyahu would reorganize it by bringing in centrists, and Shas would find itself with no cabinet portfolios at all.

If the peace train ever does leave the station with Netanyahu as the Israeli engineer, Ovadia wants to be sure Shas is along for the ride. Shas needs to be part of the governing coalition to achieve its ultimate goal: turning as much rabbinical law as possible into the Israeli law of the land.

Walking this fine line, Ovadia used the fire to assert his spiritual leadership and rally his religious troops to his banner while keeping his pronouncements studiously apolitical. He aimed his attack not at Palestinians but at his true enemy: secular Israeli Jews and the secular modern value system they live by.

Gaza’s Prime Minister Haniyeh faces a political thicket no less challenging. Unlike Ovadia, he plays a very small role in whatever remains of the peace process. And that’s a big part of his problem. If there were ever any real movement toward a two-state agreement that most Palestinians approve, and if all the Palestinian leaders riding the peace and independence train were from the Fatah party, Hamas would be politically doomed. So Hamas doesn’t want to be cut out of the action. That’s why Haniyeh recently repeated the publicly-declared Hamas commitment to “accept a Palestinian state on the borders of 1967” and to accept any peace deal that a majority of Palestinians endorse.

On the other hand, as the AP’s Karin Laub recently reported, “a new homegrown crop of zealots … is increasingly turning into a problem” for the Hamas government in Gaza.  “Dismissing Hamas as too tame, Muslim firebrands have challenged the group’s informal truce with Israel. … Jihadi Salafis, as they are known, have organized into small, shadowy armed groups that have clashed with Hamas forces. … The jihadi group claims a growing appeal among Gazans who live in a pressure cooker of isolation and poverty.”

That appeal is both political and religious. Indeed for theocratically-inclined jihadi movements there can be no difference between the two modes of appeal. Hamas, though often described as Islamist, is actually quite secular in its style and in its increasingly accomodationist stance toward Israel. Its leader, Khaled Meshaal, is a physicist by training and a long-time, full-time politician — not in any sense a spiritual leader like Ovadia Yosef.

When Hamas leaders sound like theocrats they are shoring up their right flank, trying to keep support among Palestinians who are tempted by more genuinely theocratic politics. The fire in Israel clearly sparked that temptation. Arab newspapers and websites carried comments like “O Allah, burn them before the Day of Judgment,” “O Allah, destroy them and all the enemies of Islam,” and, condemning Arab governments that helped Israeli firefighters, “May Allah take revenge against them and displace them together with our corrupt  governments.” Hamas occasionally echoes such ancient voices as it tries to make itself the party of the center for the new Palestinian state, appealing to both peace-minded and God-minded voters.

Thus the rabbi and the prime minister are responding to the same clash of civilizations that runs right through their own populations. But they respond from different sides of the cultural front.

Haniyeh is more modern than ancient — a politician using God talk to protect his political power as he moves his party toward the center, ultimately hoping for a peace agreement that will give Palestinians independence on terms they can live with.

Ovadia is more ancient than modern — an ultra-orthodox rabbi using God talk to try to protect his followers from the 21^st century culture that they find alien and often inimical, playing politics to give his movement the leverage it needs to promote that religious project.

All this might seem quite foreign to Americans. Public outrage here forced prominent religious leaders to recant when they blamed Hurricane Katrina on the immorality of New Orleanians. And it’s hard to imagine George W. Bush praising the dreadful earthquake that shook Iran in 2003 as divine vengeance on the ayatollahs, even though it hit on the day after Christmas.

Yet like it or not we are deeply involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which both our president and our top military leaders insist must be ended because it threatens our own national security.  But ended how?

It’s ironic to see President Obama ignoring Haniyeh, a modern political leader who is trying to moderate his people’s stance so they can move toward peace, while the president lets his foreign policy be held hostage by a rabbi who aims, above all, to preserve an ancient worldview against the onslaught of modernity. Though perhaps ironic is not the right word. Try embarrassing, degrading, or downright humiliating.

Rather than kowtow to an ancient who treats natural disaster in much the same way as Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell and makes outrageous anti-Palestinian remarks, Obama could use the power that he possesses, even over Israel, to set forth a peace plan of his own and say, “Take it or leave it.” As Ismail Haniyeh knows, most Palestinians would take it. As Ovadia Yosef knows, most Israelis would take it too.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  Read more of his writing  on Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. on his blog.

Reposted from Huffington Post

As Israeli Jews were preparing to light their first Hanukkah candle, the Prime Minister of Gaza, Ismael Haniyeh, told a press conference: “We accept a Palestinian state on the borders of 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital, the release of Palestinian prisoners, and the resolution of the issue of refugees.”  Speaking for his Hamas party, he added that if a referendum of all Palestinians — in Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora — agreed to a peace deal with Israel, “Hamas will respect the results, regardless of whether it differs with [Hamas] ideology and principles.” Haniyeh also said that “a priority of his government was to avoid a military escalation with Israel by persuading other militant factions to preserve a de facto ceasefire.”

Was it just coincidence that Haniyeh, who rarely holds press conferences, chose the eve of Hanukkah to repeat what Hamas political chief Khaled Meshal has already said several times?  Perhaps Haniyeh has studied history and knows that the common story of Hannukah — brave Jewish warriors, led by the Maccabees, defeating a foreign tyrant — is a vast oversimplification. Perhaps he knows that the Jews of the Maccabeean era were caught up in a bitter cultural civil war, one that is mirrored in the Israeli Jewish cultural split today.

Many ancient Jews did resist the Hellenistic king Antiochus Epiphanes, not merely because he was a foreigner, but because he represented new and discomforting ideas: national borders didn’t mean so much any more, people and goods and ideas should move freely around the world, what the people of the world share in common is more valuable than what divides them. Other Jews embraced these ideas, and so they embraced the foreign ruler, or at least found his entry into Jerusalem acceptable.

Even if Ismael Haniyeh does not know this history, he knows that he faces an Israeli Jewish public divided by similar differences in values today.

Many Jews keep alive the spirit of the Maccabees. They see the Jews as a group set apart from all others. They prize that separation as a mark of their distinctiveness. At the same time, though, they complain that they are forced to be set apart because they’re unjustly besieged, victims of undeserved enmity. So they respond by separating themselves even more. They build an what they call an “Iron Dome” anti-missile system, even though it will do little to protect them from missiles.

They build an enormous wall between themselves and their neighbors, the West Bank Palestinians, for the sake of security, they say. Israeli columnist Bradley Burston calls them “the Jews of the Wall.”  Yet the longer the wall grows, the more they feel like victims. Indeed, “they want to be told that they are eternal victims,” as Israeli pundit and peace activist Uri Avnery has written. “People here are so eager for words and images that tell them … that they’re still one step from Auschwitz, that their backs are to the wall.”

These Jews must have a threatening enemy on the other side of the wall. Their worldview requires it. Once that enemy was “the Arabs.” Then it was “the Palestinians.” Now that their leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has declared his commitment to a two-state solution, it can no longer be all Palestinians who are framed as the great threat. So Hamas must play that role.

Hence the Jews of the Wall in Israel — and their many allies in the U.S. and around the world — must simply refuse to listen to Ismael Haniyeh’s words of reconciliation. So they perpetuate the fiction, so eagerly swallowed by most of the U.S. mass media, that Hamas is adamantly committed to destroying the Jewish state. Only occasionally do those media allow Hamas leader Meshaal to speak for himself, holding out the very same peace offer that Haniyeh gave the Israelis as a Hanukkah gift.

Nevertheless, when Meshaal and Haniyeh reach a hand of peace across the border to deliver such a gift there are Jews in Israel and around the world willing to receive it. These are the moral descendants of those other Jews of ancient times, the ones who looked for what they shared in common with others and prized what they found, their common humanity, above anything that set them apart.

Burston calls them “the Jews of the Gate,” because they insist on finding ways to reach across borders and make connections with values, cultures, and lives of their neighbors in other lands. And they ready to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors, even if those neighbors democratically elect a parliament with a Hamas majority.

Touring the United States, Burston found that “the voices of young American Jews of the Gate have never been stronger.” Like all Israelis, though, he knows that in his own land the Jews of the Wall are in the ascendant.

To show their strength, they responded to the conciliatory Hamas gesture with yet another show of aggression in the place that Palestinians as well as Jews hold most sacred: Jerusalem. Within hours of Haniyeh’s press conference, Haaretz reported that “the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee announced Wednesday its plan to build 625 new housing units in the Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood of East Jerusalem. The move comes despite wide international opposition to Israel’s construction in East Jerusalem, with U.S. President Barack Obama calling it ‘unhelpful’ to peace efforts.”

“Unhelpful” is, of course, a massive understatement. The Israelis know full well that the more they build in East Jerusalem the harder it will be for the Palestinians ever to use their side of the city as their capital. And no Palestinian leader will ever sign a peace agreement that denies his people a capital in Jerusalem. It would be political suicide. Jewish building in East Jerusalem is thus a way of bringing even the most distant possibility of a negotiated peace to a screeching halt. That was the Israeli government’s Hanukkah gift to the Palestinians — and to the Obama administration.

It was surely a most unwelcome gift in Washington. According to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, “continued construction in Jerusalem is a central issue in Israel‘s negotiations with the US. … Sources close to the negotiations said the two nations have reached an impasse on the deal.”

This leaves a looming question: What Hanukkah gift will Barack Obama deliver to the Israelis and Palestinians? If he wants to, he can deliver an insistence that the Israelis cease new construction in East Jerusalem. He’s done it before with significant success. For most of the past spring and summer Israel observed what The Independent called “an undeclared freeze on Jewish construction in East Jerusalem.” Bowing to U.S. pressure, “Netanyahu had restrained settlement building,” with only a few exceptions.

Even when Netanyahu OK’d some new building in East Jerusalem, in October, Yedioth Aharanoth confirmed that he “was apparently forced to give up plans to market another 600 apartments after the US Administration made it clear that this would put an immediate end to peace talks with the Palestinians.” Construction of another 1,300 homes in Jerusalem were “frozen in practice,” the paper added.

As the Israeli government allows the latest building projects to begin, no one knows how many they may be refusing. Netanyahu scores no political points at home for refusing. He scores points only in Washington and around the diplomatic world.

The Obama administration has lots of carrots and sticks it can hold out in front of the Israelis during this Hanukkah season. It might even announce that, if the negotiations remain stalled, the U.S. will present its own plan for borders that will “create the new Palestinian state on the equivalent of 100 percent of the land beyond the 1967 Green Line with one-to-one land swaps” and demand that Israelis as well as Palestinians simply give that plan a yes or no — an idea now being promoted by J Street, the biggest and most moderate group representing American “Jews of the Gate.” Though J Street may hesitate to come out and say it, everyone knows that any American plan will include East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital.

This is an idea that strikes fear into the hearts of the “Jews of the Wall,” because they know that when the U.S. speaks firmly even right-wing Israeli politicians must listen. And they suspect that, when forced to say yea or nay to a concrete plan for peace, most Israelis will choose the Gate over the Wall.

As Israeli Jews light the rest of their Hanukkah candles, they should keep in mind that the plan they may one day receive from Washington and be forced to decide on is very much the same plan Hamas has offered to them as a Hanukkah gift. What do they gain by waiting? Why shouldn’t they accept the gift of peace now?

This column first appeared on Huffington Post.

Israel can do whatever it damn pleases, and the Obama administration will never say no — or so the common wisdom goes. But it ain’t so. Obama has backed down far too often. But there’s also a long history of Israel giving in to U.S. pressure in the last 18 months. Here are just some of the highlights:

On June 4, 2009, Obama went to Cairo and called on the Israelis to agree to an independent Palestinian state. That same day Netanyahu met with his cabinet. “Ministers split over Obama’s Cairo speech,” one Israeli headline declared.

Just ten days later, Netanyahu spoke words that he’d never said publicly before: “two states for two people.” Had Obama not made his own speech, it’s doubtful anyone would ever have heard those words from Netanyahu.

Later that summer, “a senior source in Jerusalem” told an Israeli reporter that  American envoy George Mitchell had asked Netanyahu to promise a one-year freeze on settlement construction. “Netanyahu and Barak did not reject the request”; they merely “disagreed over some of the details.” The Israelis agreed to ten months, which “came about as a result of extensive bilateral discussions” between Israel and the U.S., according to the Washington Post.

By the end of the summer of ’09, Netanyahu and Barak had stopped authorizing public money for any new settlement construction in the West Bank. Ha’aretz headlined that the ballyhooed “‘New’ settlement projects aren’t really new.” Most were bureaucratic re-approvals of projects already initiated.

Israeli political scientist Jonathan Rynhold explained that Netanyahu cut back construction because he did “not want to lose his credibility with the Americans,” and he wanted U.S. backing for opposing Iran.

But on Iran, too, Israel was timid.  A senior Israeli official said that Israel did not ask for U.S. permission to attack Iran because the Netanyahu government didn’t want to risk being told “no,” making it clear who holds the reins on that issue.

By late summer the Israelis had also stopped building the wall in the West Bank because “the Obama administration is trying to curb Israeli activity as a prelude to restarting peace talks,” the Washington Post said.

In September ’09 Obama forced Netanyahu to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in New York.  Jonathan Freedland, writing in The Guardian, said “Obama deployed the one weapon no Israeli or Palestinian leader can resist: a direct invitation from the American president.”  “Obama’s achievement was modest,” as Freedland wrote, “but it was not nothing. In the end, both Netanyahu and Abbas had to bend to his will.”  Prominent Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea summed up a common view at the time: “Everyone depends on America, its money, its military aid, and its moves vis-à-vis Iran.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. continued to oppose Jewish construction in East Jerusalem. The State Department summoned Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Michael Oren, twice for reprimands on the issue.

In the spring of 2010 right-wingers in the Israeli government challenged the U.S. on that point by authorizing a big Jewish building project in East Jerusalem, just when Vice-President Joe Biden was visiting Israel. Biden condemned it and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave Netanyahu a long tongue-lashing. The New York Times reported that “a crucial American demand is that Israel neither promote nor permit ‘provocative’ acts … That would include new building projects.”

Netanyahu then demanded from his own bureaucrats a list of all plans for large projects in Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods. For the next seven months, there was what The Independent called “an undeclared freeze on Jewish construction in East Jerusalem. … Netanyahu had restrained settlement building,” with only a few exceptions.

No less a figure than Israel’s President Peres bluntly explained why: “Israel must forge good relations with other countries, primarily the United States, so as to guarantee political support in a time of need.” The popular Israeli columnist Eitan Haber wrote: “How many times this week did you hear and read that joke about the eight-ton elephant that can sit down anywhere it wishes? Well, Obama sat down on us this week.”

As Glenn Kessler wrote in the Washington Post, “in Israel … what is controversial is doing things that affect the relationship with the United States.  And [for] that Netanyahu is facing a lot of criticism.” Israeli commentator Shmuel Rosner noted that if Obama “signaled that Israel could no longer take unconditional US support for granted, Mr. Netanyahu’s domestic support would quickly evaporate.”

Israelis now worry less about U.S. military support (which is always forthcoming) than U.S. diplomatic support for Israel’s legitimacy; Israelis increasingly worry about “delegitimization” as the biggest danger they face. As if to signal that U.S. diplomatic support could not be taken for granted, Obama gave Netanyahu a rather rude welcome when he visited the White House a week later, bringing him in through a side door and denying him the customary photo ops.

In April the world learned that top U.S. military leaders were leaning on Obama to lean harder on Israel. And Obama seemed to be listening. When he told a press conference, “It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts … he effectively adopted the argument of Gen. David H. Petraeus, his Middle East commander, who recently warned that the region’s troubles created a dangerous environment for American troops stationed in nearby Iraq and elsewhere in the area,” the New York Times reported.

Perhaps with those words ringing in his ears, Netanyahu agreed in May to the so-called proximity talks with the Palestinians, rather than the direct face-to-face talks he kept saying he wanted. At about the same time, the U.S. gave the Israelis another shock by signing the final document the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference, even though it urged Israel to sign the treaty — wording that the U.S. had always blocked in the past.

In early September 2010, the beginning of direct talks between the Israelis and Palestinians saw a tragic but expected outbreak of violence on the West Bank, apparently with the aim of derailing the talks. What was unexpected was Netanyahu’s tepid response: “I will not let the terrorists block our path to peace.” That “sounded nothing like the Bibi of old” who would have broken off the talks, the prominent Israeli pundit Aluf Benn wrote.  But Netanyahu, like other Israeli leaders before him, had “succumbed to American pressure.”

The negotiations broke down when the ten-month moratorium on settlement expansion expired. A “senior political source” told Ha’aretz that the Obama administration was putting “heavy pressure” on Netanyahu, as well as making generous offers, to find a compromise so talks could continue.  Netanyahu soon agreed to the two-month moratorium, with a condition that he surely thought the Palestinians would reject: recognition of Israel as “the state of the Jewish people.” But they surprised him by giving clear hints that they might agree to that condition, if they got a map with definite borders in return.

To stave off compromise, Netanyahu broke the de facto moratorium on new Jewish housing in East Jerusalem. But Yedioth Aharanoth confirmed that Netanyahu “was apparently forced to give up plans to market another 600 apartments [in East Jerusalem] after the US Administration made it clear that this would put an immediate end to peace talks with the Palestinians.” “Construction of thousands of planned homes” including some 1300 in Jerusalem, “are frozen in practice,” the paper added.

As for the U.S. promise to let Israeli soldiers remain on Palestine’s eastern edge, Netanyahu’s spokesman Mark Regev soon said that Israel’s insistence on it “could be reviewed over time.”  Apparently pressure from the White House succeeded on that point, too.

Though the U.S. – Israel relationship, like all tense diplomatic relationships, is bound to be a matter of give and take, when the U.S. truly insists on anything, Israel as the weaker partner is likely to yield. Obama’s early insistence on a total freeze on settlement expansion, his many statements that angered the Israelis, and his administration’s steady efforts to push the Israelis to compromise all suggest that the president and his advisors would like to do more — if they felt politically safe.  If “the question of how much the United States is offering, and what it is asking for in return, is being fiercely debated within the White House and the State Department,” as the New York Times reported, that’s due mainly to the domestic politics of the issue.

Soon the administration may face a new dilemma: How to respond to Palestinian moves to gain legitimacy as an independent nation in the U.N. and other international institutions. The administration’s response, like every aspect of its Middle East policy, will not be decided by Israelis. It will be decided by Americans who shape the political climate here at home.  The White House is full of weathermen, waiting to see which way the wind blows.

This column was first posted on ReligionDispatches.org

Denver claims that its Columbus Day parade is the nation’s largest. It surely has been the most controversial, as Colorado’s large Native American rights movement often confronts the paraders. When I watched the proceedings a few years ago, though my sympathies were certainly with the protesters, I was surprised to find a different kind of sympathy for the paraders, too.

They were all white folks, mostly Italian-Americans, riding in cars and on cheaply-made floats, trying to create an air of excitement. But there was something sad, hollow, and strangely touching about it — as if they were trying too hard to whip up enthusiasm and regain a proud sense of identity.

Many looked like they had just stepped out of the pages of a 1950s-era issue of Life magazine. I got a strong impression of people longing for the secure identity that our culture has taught us to associate (both rightly and wrongly) with the white adults of the ‘50s, before their children heard the Jefferson Airplane’s call to “tear down the wall, motherfucker.” For the white paraders celebrating Columbus the Native American protesters were, I suspected, a disturbing throwback to the counterculture that ended the (largely imagined) tranquility of American life.  That made Columbus himself a symbol of all that the paraders seemed to be so desperately seeking: identity, security, pride, tranquility.

But how could Columbus give all, or any, of that any more? The simple, inspiring story of Columbus “discovering America,” which was the only story I ever heard as a child in the ‘50s, has long been torn to shreds along with so much else from that era. We now know: plenty of Europeans before Columbus knew the earth was round; Europeans had reached these shores long before 1492; Columbus and his crew treated the indigenous Carib people with incredible cruelty. We know, too, that Columbus’ motives were a disturbing compound of crass greed for gold and apocalyptic quest for a heavenly paradise here on earth.

Perhaps that Columbus Day parade struck me as so hollow because it was a vain quest to revive an American foundation myth that is now dead and buried, beyond all hope of resurrection. Perhaps the paraders’ strained enthusiasm was the most vivid evidence that they had come to celebrate an absent mythic center.

When we go looking for white America’s foundation myth now, we go back no further than the “Founding Fathers,” whose real and purported deeds fill whole shelves in the local bookstore. What they discovered, the books generally agree, was a new set of political and social ideas, as if they anticipated the advice of Thoreau:  “Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.”

But the traditional myth of Columbus (RIP) said nothing about new ideas or worlds within. It was all about a new land, a new world defined strictly geographically. As long as the myth was vibrant, it assured Americans that they needed no sophisticated concepts. The land of the United States itself (which became, in the U.S. version of the myth, synonymous with the “America” Columbus “discovered”) would be the paradise Columbus sought. It would exude all of his mythic qualities: courage, initiative, intelligence, skill, and the freedom always to be making a new beginning.

Simply by living on the land, the myth promised, each of us and our nation as a whole would always embody those qualities. They would permanently define America, celebrated in song as “Columbia, the gem of the ocean.”

The demise of that mythic America and its foundation story has powerful political effects that stretch from Columbus Day to Election Day and beyond. “Voter Disgust Isn’t Only About Issues,” as the headline of a recent article by New York Times reporter Matt Bai rightly declared. Bai is a rare mass media journalist who recognizes that politics is largely a matter of cultural symbolism.

Independent voters are much less concerned about jobs and the economy than about what they see as “the larger breakdown of civil society,” he reported. And they are quick to blame the party in power for that breakdown, to assume that the only way to save society is to throw the rascals out — only to find, Bai concluded, that the other party, once in power, quickly becomes the rascals who must be thrown out.

If the fear of a broken society is, at its deepest level, the fear of a broken foundation myth — a loss of the sense of secure identity that once came from simply living on American soil — then no party is to blame for it and no party can fix it. The parade of candidates on our TV sets promising to make it all better is as hollow as the Columbus Day parade I saw.

The parades continue, though, because saying goodbye to the mythic Columbus and greeting a truly new world, one in which we exercise political responsibility without mythic foundations, is no easy task. Those who find it too much to bear will probably always be my political opponents. But I’ll always have sympathy for them, too.