Among the most durable pieces of conventional wisdom circulating in Washington these days is that President Obama would never risk a confrontation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (when he comes to town in May) out of fear of angering Israel's supporters in America a year before the U.S. presidential election.
The notion that domestic politics and the pro-Israel community hold the president's Middle East policy hostage seems to bind Washington like a hard-and-fast political law of gravity. The only problem is it's 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.
In fact, if there's any lobby he should worry about, it's not the 5.5 million American Jews and their supporters in Congress. It is 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.
In the only three examples of American-orchestrated breakthroughs in Arab-Israeli diplomacy, U.S. presidents and secretaries of State wrestled with Israel and its supporters in the United States and won. In each case — the 1973-75 disengagement agreements; the 1978-79 Camp David accords and Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; and the 1991 Madrid Conference — the U.S. pressured, cajoled and reassured tough-minded Israeli prime ministers and resisted political pressures from lobbies at home.
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