from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 15 Jun 2009 07:53 PM PDT

Watching Obama and Netanyahu deliver their speeches is a good
deal like watching two poker players underplay their hand. The game has
just begun and both are being very careful in what they do.

Obama wants to
grind Israel under, while avoiding the public perception that he is
grinding Israel under. So after levering pressure on Israel, Barack
Hussein Obama headed off for a photo op at Buchenwald, in what even his
great-uncle called a political move.

Obama doesn't actually need
the Jewish vote to win in 2012, unless things get so bad that Florida
becomes as critical a deciding factor as it was in 2004. And while many
prominent ethnically Jewish liberals would stick by Obama, even if he
began delivering his speeches in German accompanied by torchlight parades,
high profile defections could quickly become inconvenient.

While LA
and Chicago have been enamored of Obama, New York has never been. When the
always moderate Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major
Jewish Organizations stated that even Obama's strongest
Jewish supporters are concerned about his positions on Israel in one
interview, and in
another stated "I can tell you this:
I don’t sleep at night because of some of these issues that have come to
the fore", it was a warning sign of just how tenuous support for
Obama is among the old line New York Jewish organizations.

New York's political leaders, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have never embraced
Obama. His victory came at their expense, by defeating Hillary Clinton. I
recall the local Democratic political club agitator handing me an election
leaflet with her thumb over Obama's name, telling me, "we don't like him."
This animosity only broadened with the sabotage of Obama's princess,
Carolyn Kennedy, shot at at New York's Senate seat. This was followed by a
backlash to Obama shutting down Rep. Steve Israel's bid to run against
Gildenbrand in the Democratic Senate primary election. That makes for
fertile political ground in which to cultivate grievances and gives
leaders like Hoenlein more boldness when questioning Obama.

On Israel, Obama would like to exceed Carter, without running into Carter's
image problems. That means lots of Jewish positive photo ops, and
minimizing the public conflicts. The dirty work gets shoveled off onto
Hillary, who has a longer history with Jewish groups from her time as a
Senator in New York. Above all else, Obama wants to be loved and adored.
His public image is all he has, and he has no intention of risking it in a
knock out drag down fight with Jewish activists.

Yet no matter how
he dressed up his opening round of attack on Israel, the backlash is
coming his way.

Netanyahu however faces a terrible dilemma. While
Obama can expect to sit in the Oval Office for four years, Netanyahu is
leading a coalition of opposites that can come apart at a moment's notice,
and leave him with nothing to hold on to. Keeping together a coalition
that covers the left wing Labor party, Netanyahu's own conservative
Zionist Likud party, the loudmouths at Yisrael Beiteinu and two religious
parties... would be no small task even in the best of times. And this is
not the best of times.

Virtually any decision Netanyahu makes will alienate a
sizable portion of his governing coalition. His only real advantage is
that his most troublesome coalition partners are busy squabbling with the
non-coalition parties they split with, as best exemplified by Labor's own
mini-civil war. Netanyahu's oversized cabinet of 30 ministers and a
coalition composed of people who can't stand each other and don't agree on
anything is a page taken from Sharon's playbook. Sharon though had a
friendly US administration. Netanyahu has the most hostile US
administration in history on his back.

Just to make things worse,
Israel is experiencing its own economic crisis, and while Netanyahu's
experience as a financial reformer should prove invaluable, fiscal reforms
mean alienating coalition partners. A coalition combining secular leftists
and religious parties contemplating economic reforms is a great deal like
a paranoid schizophrenic with multiple personalities trying to order from
a menu.

Yet Netanyahu has been doing better than expected. Getting
the majority of Israelis to back his stance on natural growth in
settlements represents a significant political setback for the Israeli
left and the Obama administration. Obama's minions had zeroed in on
settlements as the best bet for playing divide and conquer with American
and Israeli Jews. They failed badly in Israel, with only the far left
backing Obama.

Netanyahu's next step was to deliver a speech laying
out the Jewish right to Israel, debunking Obama's Cairo speech, and
accepting a two state solution on the same condition that Israel has
presented repeatedly, an end to the armed terrorist gangs and their war on
Israel.

Here Netanyahu failed to take in the lessons of history,
which is that foreign diplomats listen for Israeli concessions while
discarding their context. Netanyahu may have been speaking conditionally,
but what the press and the Obama Administration heard was an opening
concession to a Palestinian Arab state run by Fatah and Hamas
terrorists.

The backlash from the right in Israel was inevitable.
They had never trusted Netanyahu, and with good cause. His readiness to
buckle to Bill Clinton had destroyed his credibility among conservative
Zionist activists. His return to power in a coalition with the likes of
Barak and Bayit Yehudi was not exactly a ringing endorsement of his bona
fides. The destruction of the outposts in response to the Obama
Administration, pro forma as it may be, was an ugly start. And his
concession to a two-state solution was the final nail in the
coffin.

Nevertheless Netanyahu is forced into a complicated
balancing act. While the right may favor a more public split with Obama,
it is a gamble that Netanyahu is unwilling to take. Such a bold step may
break his coalition and do unknown amounts of damage to Israel's economy.
Instead Netanyahu underplayed his hand by giving Obama next to nothing,
while using his initial refusal to make it seem like a great deal.
Netanyahu, as he sees it, has committed to the creation of a Palestinian
Arab state that will give up on terrorism. This is likely to happen around
the same time that pigs fly over Gaza.

Meanwhile Obama's pressure on Israel has resulted in his
growing unpopularity, an unpopularity which Netanyahu can then leverage to
resist Obama. With even Peres defending natural growth in settlements,
only the increasingly deranged Livni of the Kadima Party, is left to take
on Obama's position. And if there is any better way to poison your image
than to be associated with Kadima and Livni, it would have to be the
imbecilic Amir Peretz, currently claiming credit for Hezbollah's electoral
defeat in Lebanon.

Israeli politicians embracing Obama can't help
but marginalize themselves, which will allow Netanyahu to maintain a
coalition even in the face of pressure from the White House. Obama's
messianic style has always played badly in Israel, a country that likes
bottom line, rough and tumble politicians, war heroes and big men who roll
up their sleeves and get dirty. In Israel Obama has gone from a curiosity
to a hostile figure very quickly. And while the views of a bar of drunken
expats on a video circulated via an anti-Israel site are not
representative of Israelis as a whole, outside of a handful of yuppies and
Haaretz and Jerusalem Post columnists, the view of Obama from Israel
trends toward the negative.

Of course to keep it together,
Netanyahu has to keep playing for time. His best ally remains the
willingness of Hamas and Fatah to sabotage any peace plan by overplaying
their hand, and demanding too much. He knows no real American help can be
expected on Iran, but he still holds out hope that he can maintain a
positive relationship between America and Israel.

And so in the
opening match, neither Obama nor Netanyahu are prepared to let hostilities
between the two governments go public. Obama is determined to pressure
Netanyahu behind the scenes, a tactic that worked extremely well for Bill
Clinton. Netanyahu must now show that he is not simply older, but wiser.
That he has learned from his mistakes with the Clinton Administration, and
will avoid making any concessions on the ground.

If Netanyahu allows himself to be pressured into signing more
agreements and turning over land, he will be moving along a one way path
to legalizing the creation of a terrorist state in Israel. A state that
Israel will not be able to defend itself against without dismantling it. A
state that Iran will exploit to conduct its proxy war with Israel, to tie
Israel down until Iran's nuclear program leads to deployable nuclear
weapons.

That is the way the game has begun and will play out. With
Obama facing domestic economic turmoil, Israel becomes an appealing
distraction. Netanyahu has to make it clear that targeting Israel will
damage Obama's popularity at home, to make his country less of an
appealing target for the Prince of Chicago. Maintaining mini-conflicts can
drain the Obama Administration's focus and willingness to struggle with
Israel. If Netanyahu can do that, he can outplay and outwait Obama. If he
can't, he will be facing a much worse repeat of his first
administration.