There wasn’t very much nervous anticipation in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem while waiting to see whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would announce that she was a candidate for president of the United States on April 12. Everyone there had known for a long time that Clinton would toss her hat into the ring en route to the US presidential race. So much so, in fact, that the prime minister’s closest advisers had included her candidacy in their assessments of the situation. Every step that Clinton took had been recorded and filed in Jerusalem over the past year, with Clinton perceived as an inevitable fate, a bitter pill anticipated in advance, and an obstacle that must be traversed.

“Netanyahu has been prime minister for nine years already,” sighed one of Netanyahu’s people this week, “and he has yet to be lucky enough to serve for even 15 minutes with a Republican president in the White House. He keeps getting Democrats like [Bill] Clinton and [Barack] Obama, and now maybe another Clinton. Do people really say that Netanyahu is lucky? Well, as far as American presidents go, he’s been remarkably unlucky.”

No one in Jerusalem feels that this is an emergency. They have far more urgent things to worry about, in particular the Iranian nuclear threat. The prime minister is right in the middle of a “world war against the White House,” with both sides “going for broke” and using almost every weapon in their respective arsenals. The American side is actually trying to reduce tensions and placate the Israelis, who are charging full steam ahead anyway. This includes pushing for and backing a proposed sanctions bill by Sens. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and Bob Menendez, D-N.J., a new proposed bill by Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., for congressional oversight of any nuclear deal, the full-throttle deployment of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the ominous pressure now being exerted on Democratic senators. In this battle, Netanyahu has adopted a "take no prisoners" approach, with a special focus on President Barack Obama. The precise identity of Obama’s successor is hardly as important for the moment. As they say, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

For the moment, it is impossible to tell what kind of president Hillary Clinton would be, at least as far as Israel is concerned. While there is a tendency to regard Republican presidents as being more sympathetic to Israel and Democrats as more severe, history has shown that there is no real rule. If anything, the outcome is random. George H.W. Bush was very tough in his approach toward Israel. In fact, he is considered to be the person who brought down Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud government by refusing to provide Israel with loan guarantees in 1991. In contrast, Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was considered very supportive of Israel — some would say he was practically a Zionist — throughout Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s time in office. Then Netanyahu came to power and the whole relationship became intolerable.