While paying a condolence call in the West Bank settlement of Ofra following a terror attack in 2001, Benjamin Netanyahu bragged about his intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of US politics. “I know what America is,” he told the bereaved family. “America is something you can easily move. Move in the right direction,” Netanyahu added, unaware of the open Channel 10 television mike. “Let’s say they say something, so what. … I wasn’t afraid to clash with [President Bill] Clinton. … In any case I’m paying the price, so I prefer at least to get something out of it. Bang for the buck.” Netanyahu learned the hard way, however, that it is not so easy to move America.

Despite the goodwill of Netanyahu's Republican friends in Congress and the fortune of his good friend and casino owner Sheldon Adelson, US President Barack Obama was not budged from his position on the Iran nuclear issue. Obama hasn't even handed the baton to Donald Trump, but Netanyahu has already announced that at his first meeting with the new president, he will present him with a variety of options for revoking the nuclear deal with Iran. That, the prime minister may find easier than he thought.

Trump promised more than once that if he made it to the Oval Office, he would rip the agreement to shreds. In addition, Israel now has its own Queen Esther — the biblical bride of a powerful Persian king who saved the Jewish people from an evil adviser — among the presidential family in the person of Ivanka Trump-Kushner, a Jewish convert — and she's no lightweight convert of the Conservative or Reform variety, either. Ivanka’s Orthodox Jewish conversion, the only type accepted by Israel’s chief rabbinate, was even authorized by none other than Israel’s chief rabbi.

When Netanyahu says that he knows “how to move America in the right direction,” however, he is mostly referring to Congress. This is how it works: First he gets major Jewish political contributors and community leaders moving so that they, in turn, can light a fire under the pro-Israel lobby of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and send it to storm Capitol Hill to mobilize lawmakers for Israel’s mission of the day. The catch is that unlike in Israel’s mostly Orthodox synagogues, in the progressive Reform and Conservative synagogues attended by most American Jews, there is no separation between men and women, and women are allowed to don a prayer shawl and read from the Torah. According to a comprehensive 2013 Pew Research Center survey, 35% of American Jews are affiliated with the Reform community, 18% with the Conservative movement and only 1 in 10 worships in a synagogue of the Orthodox stream.