Jeffrey Goldberg, with the sanest thing I've seen written about the current Israeli kerfuffle:
I'm not actually suggesting that the White House is directly meddling in internal Israeli politics, but it's clear to everyone -- at the White House, at the State Department, at Goldblog -- that no progress will be made on any front if Avigdor Lieberman's far-right party, Yisrael Beiteinu, and Eli Yishai's fundamentalist Shas Party, remain in Netanyahu's surpassingly fragile coalition.So what is the goal? The goal is force a rupture in the governing coalition that will make it necessary for Netanyahu to take on Livni's centrist Kadima Party (he has already tried to do this, but too much on his terms) and form a broad, 68-seat majority in Knesset that does not have to rely on gangsters, messianists and medievalists for votes.
It's a terrible thing to see the U.S. and Israel at odds. But it's not "Obama vs. Israel." It's "Obama vs. Bibi." If you're anti-Bibi you're not any more anti-Israel then you'd be anti-American if you were anti-Obama. Posted by Stephen Silver at March 16, 2010 01:29 PM