No one in Israel was surprised by the quotes from US President Barack Obama that appeared in Bloomberg News this week (Jan. 15). Jeffrey Goldberg, whose credibility is impeccable, gave us the goods that were given to him, but those goods were too little, too late. If this is how Obama gets back at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for pouring his heart and soul into the Romney campaign, he would have been better off saying nothing. Netanyahu did what no Israeli prime minister before him ever dared, and now he can pat himself on the back. He gambled and lost, but it cost him little.

I’m not trying to create a crisis between Israel and the United States. First of all, one already exists, in terms of the personal relationship between the two countries’ leaders. Second of all, I don’t have the privilege to do that. Israel without the United States is like a fish without water. It will flop around frantically for a while until it finally gives up.

I am a fervent Zionist who believes that patriotism isn’t a word to avoid in polite company. At the same time, I also believe that Israel sometimes needs an assertive, determined US president to protect Israel from itself. When the top ten candidates for the Likud party include four hawkish backbenchers like Zeev Elkin, or when Naftali Bennett’s right-wing party, which is influenced by the most extreme rabbis, threatens to become the second-largest faction in the Knesset, it behooves such Knesset members to realize that they might wind up alone against the world. I deem Israel’s far left no less odious than the far right, for encouraging the “goyim” to impose sanctions and boycotts, and for calling on bands and artists to cancel their shows in Tel Aviv. But every so often America must impose reasonable boundaries so that Israel doesn’t run amok — just like responsible parents remind their hyperactive child what is allowed and what isn’t. 

Obama isn’t really doing this. That represents a missed opportunity of historic proportions. Over the past few decades, many American presidents have been forced to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty with all of our filth. The filth sometimes reached all the way up to their elbows. Former President George H.W. Bush did this with the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Former President George W. Bush almost did this with former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon — but Sharon beat him to the punch and straightened himself out on his own accord. Former President Bill Clinton did it with Benjamin Netanyahu in Netanyahu's first term.