A well-known American bureau chief in Israel of a major US newspaper always prided himself with knowing the key to getting Israel to politically move in the peace process. You must use invisible hands to hurt them, he told me shortly after the first intifada broke out. The Israelis must feel the pain without being able to clearly identify or expose the source of the pain, he said.
A look at the workings of the Obama administration in the last few weeks clearly points to the fact that they seem to have adopted this advice. Speaking during her confirmation hearing at the US Congress, the next US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, reversed a statement she had made years earlier. In 2002, Power proposed imposing a peace deal on Israelis and Palestinians militarily, even if such a policy alienated wealthy pro-Israel American Jews. Power totally recanted her statement. “I gave a long, rambling and remarkably incoherent response to a hypothetical question that I should never have answered," she said.
