Why American Jews are backing Obama

It seemed a classic diplomatic faux pas — the sort that begins in mutual embarrassment and soon descends into ominous bristling and then open recrimination. On 9 March, Vice President Joseph Biden, in Jerusalem on a mission to revive peace talks between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinians, made the expected pledge of ongoing American commitment to Israel’s security, only to be upstaged hours later when Israel’s interior minister, Eli Yishai, announced the construction of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem, an ancestrally contentious zone. Netanyahu, pleading innocence, insisted he had no idea the announcement was coming. But he did not countermand Yishai, who is also the leader of the right-wing Shas party, an integral player in Netanyahu’s shaky governing coalition.

These demarches left the White House unmoved. The rebukes came in quick succession, and with escalating intensity — first Biden’s condemnation (‘precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now’); next a testy phone call in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton scolded Netanyahu for the ‘deeply negative signal’ Israel had sent; then, on This Week, a familiar stop on the Washington carousel of the Sunday morning news programmes, Obama’s trusted adviser David Axelrod, normally a sleepy-eyed study in low-key deflection, unleashed his inner Chicago hardball player: ‘What happened there was an affront. It was an insult.’ Netanyahu didn’t budge. On Monday, he insisted that new Jewish settlements in and around Jerusalem would not be stopped; Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, spoke of a diplomatic crisis of ‘historic’ proportions. In less than a week, relations between the Obama administration and Israel, lukewarm in the best of times, had turned hyperborean.

Yet for all the tension in high places, there was little indication it would injure Obama’s standing with American Jews.