“Grass’s poems fan the flames of hatred against Israel and the Israeli people, thus promoting the idea he was part of when he donned an SS uniform,” said Israel’s interior minister, Eli Yishai, according to the New York Times, apparently referring to the writer’s adolescence with the Hitler Youth, an admission Grass made in 2006.

But do words warrant instituting a ban on a person?

Grass’ controversial past could explain away Israel’s actions against that German writer in particular. But it isn’t just the poem. Israel has a free speech problem.

In 2010 renowned professor and linguist Noam Chomsky was banned from entry to Israel after an attempt to give a lecture at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. Norman Finkelstein, also a Jewish professor, was arrested, deported and banned from Israel for 10 years in 2008. [Here's a slide show of more controversial critics of Israel who have been banned from entering the country.]

“The decision to prevent someone from voicing their opinions by arresting and deporting them is typical of a totalitarian regime,” said Oded Peler, a lawyer for Israel’s Association for Civil Rights to the Guardian after Finkelstein’s deportation. “A democratic state, where freedom of expression is the highest principle, does not shut out criticism or ideas just because they are uncomfortable for its authorities to hear. It confronts those ideas in public debate.”

In Israel, there is no protection of freedom of speech, because there is no constitution. There is no specific legal accountability in regard to words or art, because no Israeli document exists that protects this inalienable human right, the way the U.S. Constitution does. The Knesset makes laws and the Supreme Court decides if they’re legal or not, but there is nothing equal to a universal free speech provision on the books in Israel.

In the past few years, it has become apparent that without a central document that protects freedoms, the Knesset has the ability to pass laws without being accountable to a higher idea of human rights. Besides a recent law against organizing boycotts of Israeli goods, which one Israeli journalist called “fascism at its worst,” there have been a flood of incidents that would never fly in the face of the American First Amendment — or even the most general understanding of the concept of free speech.

“Israelis accept limits on free expression that other democracies would reject,” explained Edmund Sanders in a July Los Angeles Times article. “… many of the controversial measures received solid public support, reflecting a growing ambivalence in Israel over free-speech rights.”

The Israeli government also insists that some news outlets submit their reports for approval before publication. A Palestinian TV station was recently shut down without cause or warning, and, according to Human Rights Watch, hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment was seized. Journalists are routinely detained and questioned, and a professor was recently arrested for launching a new website through Al Quds University.

“Unfortunately for Israelis, their country has anti-free speech policies that do not represent modern democracy. Israel is more open than countries it borders, yes, but this isn’t a liberating revelation,” wrote blogger Justin Martin at the Columbia Journalism Review. “If Israeli politicians wish to brag that their nation resembles western democracies, they must defend the freedoms those countries hold dear. Israel does not.”

The full text of “What Must Be Said” can be found at the Atlantic. 

The decision to evacuate the indisputably illegal Migron settlement, where about 50 families have installed caravans on Palestinian-owned land outside of Ramallah, did not initially seem significant. It was essentially a restatement of an order issued by the same Supreme Court last August, which demanded that Israelis leave Migron by March.

But instead of complying with the renewed demand, several weeks ago the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a deal — known as the Begin Compromise. It stated that in three-and-a-half years, the settlers of Migron would relocate to a nearby hilltop.

In a move characteristic of the wink-wink style right-wing politicians and pro-settlement activists have adopted, the Israeli cabinet — knowing the deal flouted a Supreme Court decision — approved it.

The court itself wasted little time slapping the compromise down.

“It was an obligation, not an option,” wrote Grunis, in one of his first decisions as chief justice, about the ruling.

Instead of rubber-stamping illegal settler actions as many thought he might, the chief justice coolly upheld the letter of the law, placing Netanyahu in an uncomfortable political position.

Yariv Oppenheimer, the director of Peace Now, a left-leaning Israeli nongovernmental organization, said that if Netanyahu hoped to delay a political reckoning with his right-wing supporters by postponing the question of Migron’s future until 2015 — that is no longer a possibility.

“Of course, in an ideal world, the fact that the government follows the law should not make any waves. Even the prime minister has to obey the law, and obeying the law is not a political matter. But I think that in our political system, the settlers may try to use the evacuation of Migron to gain points with the public.”

Depending on the outcome of the evacuation, Oppenheimer said, the decision could have severe repercussions for Netanyahu’s administration.

“It will have a political effect. If the evacuation is peaceful, the effect will be fairly minor. But if there will be violence, it could even lead to early elections,” he said.

Settlement activities, and in particular the case of Migron, have become one of the most fraught and unruly areas of Israeli jurisprudence. Israelis established Migron more than a decade ago on land privately owned by Palestinians who at one juncture considered selling it to them. Then, possibly under threats by Palestinian hard-liners, they retreated from the sale.

The Israeli settlers claimed the land is theirs by deed. The Palestinians countered successfully that the deal was never closed. Even former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a hard-liner in his own right, had planned on evicting the Israeli settlers. In Sharon’s view, the blatant illegality of Migron put at risk other settlements that might skirt the edge of the law.

But Netanyahu, wanting to avoid a confrontation with his conservative supporters before elections slated for next year, used the Begin Compromise to sidestep the court’s ruling. With no other apparent option, the prime minister said this week that he would respect the decision.

The whole affair has been something of a political earthquake in part because conservative circles assumed the political sympathies of Grunis, who has been a member of the Supreme Court since 2003, lay with them.

“I have no idea where that came from. Nobody who has followed Grunis could really think that,” said Israel Radio legal affairs analyst Moshe Negbi, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “In my view, the assumption came out of the ignorance and primitivity of some right-wingers, who supposed that he shared their points of view, and who don’t understand that being a judge is not like being a politician.”

“There really is no question of right or left here,” Negbi added. “Five years ago the Supreme Court issued an order, and for five years the government has flouted it. And after these five years, the government asked for a delay of another three and a half years. No judge would ever agree to such a thing.”

A wide range of issues, from paved roads to water pipes, bring together the Israeli government and West Bank settlements in what has become a gray area of legal practice, in which political necessities relating to settlements are often reframed as legal necessities.

Negbi described as “disgraceful and shocking” the fact that the attorney general’s office acceded to the government’s request to present the Begin-negotiated deal to the Supreme Court.

“They are all lawyers, and they know better,” he said.

Oppenheimer said the decision is a step away from lawlessness.

“This makes it very clear to the settlers and to the government that political and ideological aspirations cannot replace the rule of law, period. Even if ideologically they believe Migron should remain there — and if they do, I believe they are mistaken — in terms of the law, it cannot stay.”

“In addition, this decision says to the government and to the settler movement, you cannot close a deal between yourselves without even consulting the Palestinians who own the land if they are willing to accept three and a half years of additional settlement on their own property.”

When the Jewish community of Alexandria collapsed, everyone in the family except Isaac went south, to a corner of the Belgian Congo where Jews from Rhodes were congregating. A few years later, the Jews who still remained in Rhodes found themselves under Nazi rule. The Nazis rounded them up, stole their possessions, extracted their gold teeth, stripped them naked to search for hidden jewelry, starved them, and put them in cargo ships and sealed cars for the two-week trip to Auschwitz. Virtually the entire community — which dated from the second century B.C.E. — was murdered. Now there were no more Jews there either.

When the war ended, my grandmother moved again, this time to South Africa, where she met my grandfather. Fifteen years later, the Congo erupted in civil war, and the Jews there fled. Now, in her old age, racial violence was bloodying South Africa, too, and all around her, Jews were again packing their things. Only later did I realize: My grandmother had spent her life burying Jewish communities. So had her parents. She suspected I would do the same.

Yet she was at peace, because of Israel. She never joined Isaac, who ran a store in Haifa. But Israel’s existence calmed her, comforted her, rooted her. It made her feel that Jewish history was more than an endless cycle of estrangement and dislocation; it actually led somewhere. It made her feel that not all Jewish homes need be temporary, that all the running had not been in vain.

My life has been very different from my grandmother’s. But I have seen enough to understand how she feels. When I was thirteen, I watched footage of thousands of emaciated Ethiopian Jews, isolated from the rest of their people since the days when the First Temple stood, trekking through the Sahara to reach the planes that the Jewish state had sent to take them home. When I was fourteen, I saw a squat, bald Russian named Anatoly Sharansky — fresh from eight years in a Soviet jail — raise his hands in triumph as he descended the steps at Ben-Gurion Airport. In those soul-stirring scenes, I saw my grandmother’s Zionism — the Zionism of refuge — play out before my eyes. It became my Zionism, too. Like her, I sleep better knowing that the world contains a Jewish state.

But not any Jewish state. Roughly eighteen months ago, an Israeli friend sent me a video. It was of a Palestinian man named Fadel Jaber, who was being arrested for stealing water. His family had repeatedly asked Israeli authorities for access to the pipes that service a nearby Jewish settlement. But the Jabers have little influence over the Israeli authorities: like all Palestinians in the West Bank, they are subjects, not citizens. Partly as a result, West Bank Palestinians use roughly one-fifth as much water per person as do Jewish settlers, which means that while settlements often boast swimming pools and intensive irrigation systems, Palestinians fall far below the World Health Organization’s recommended daily water consumption rate. In the video, Israeli police drag Fadel toward some kind of paddy wagon. And then the camera pans down, to a five-year-old boy with a striped shirt and short brown hair, Khaled, who is frantically trying to navigate the thicket of adults in order to reach his father. As his father is pulled away, he keeps screaming, “Baba, Baba.”

As soon as I began watching the video, I wished I had never turned it on. For most of my life, my reaction to accounts of Palestinian suffering has been rationalization, a search for reasons why the accounts are exaggerated or the suffering self-inflicted. In that respect, I suspect, I’m like many American Jews. But in recent years, for reasons I can’t fully explain, I had been lowering my defenses, and Khaled’s cries left me staring in mute horror at my computer screen.

Perhaps it is because my son is Khaled’s age. He attends a Jewish school, has an Israeli flag on his wall, and can recount Bible stories testifying to our ancient ties to the land. When he was younger, we thought he would call me Abba, the Hebrew word for father. But he couldn’t say Abba, so he calls me Baba, the same name Khaled calls his father.

One day, when they’re old enough to understand, I’ll tell his sister and him how my grandmother made me a Zionist. And one day, if they see a video like this, I’ll tell them that unless American Jews help end the occupation that desecrates Israel’s founding ideals, this is what Zionism will become, a movement that fails the test of Jewish power.

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The shift from Jewish powerlessness to Jewish power has been so profound, and in historical terms so rapid, that it has outpaced the way many Jews think about themselves. One hundred years ago, Jews in Palestine lived at the mercy of their Ottoman overlords; Jews in Europe endured crushing, often state-sponsored, anti-Semitism; Jews in the Muslim world were frequently consigned to second-class status; and Jews in the United States lived at the margins of American life. Even fifty years ago, none of Israel’s Arab neighbors recognized its right to exist, and some of those neighbors seemed to enjoy military parity with, if not superiority over, the Jewish state. Most of the Jews still in Europe lived under a tyrannical, anti-Semitic Soviet regime, and even in the United States, some Ivy League universities still limited the number of Jewish students who could attend.

Today, we inhabit a different world. Israel has made peace with two of its Arab neighbors, and all the Arab countries have offered to make peace if Israel ends its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, returns to the lines that prevailed before the 1967 Six-Day War, and reaches a “just” and “agreed upon” solution to the Palestinian refugee issue. Israel’s defense budget easily exceeds those of its four immediate neighbors combined; it is the world’s fifth-largest exporter of arms, and it is the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons.

In Europe, although anti-Semitism persists, the transformation of Jewish fortunes has been equally dramatic. Most Jews have left the former Soviet Union, and the vast majority of European Jews now live in democracies that ensure religious liberty. In Britain in recent years, Jews have run Oxford and Cambridge universities, the Conservative Party, the Labor Party, and The Times of London. In France, the president proudly proclaims his Jewish ancestry, as did his first foreign minister. The foreign minister of Poland — Poland! — has a Jewish wife.

But even that pales in comparison to the United States, where in the last two decades Jews have served as secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, national security adviser, House majority leader, and White House chief of staff, and have held the presidencies of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Of the last six editors of The New York Times, four have been Jews. On the Supreme Court, Jews currently outnumber Protestants three to zero. A Jew recently married the daughter of a former president while wearing a tallis. According to polling by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, Jews are now the most esteemed religious group in the United States.

Privately, American Jews revel in Jewish power. But publicly, we often avoid discussing it for fear of feeding anti-Semitic myths. The instinct is understandable but the consequences are grave. Because we don’t talk much about Jewish power, we rarely grapple with the potential for its abuse. Instead, we tell ourselves that we are still history’s victims, whose primary responsibility is merely to survive. Consider the language of prominent Jewish leaders. In 2009, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, declared that “global anti-Semitism [is] … reaching a peak this year that we haven’t seen since the tragic days of World War II.” In 2010, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor devoted his entire speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference to an extended analogy with the Nazi era. That December, Malcolm Hoenlein, the powerful executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, gave a speech entitled “Is It 1939?” (In a 2007 speech subtitled “Is It 1938 Again?” Hoenlein claimed, “There are no analogies that are perfect but there are similarities.”)

But the rhetoric of American Jewish leaders hints at a deeper problem. Consider the way American Jews discuss our holidays. We tell the story of Chanukah as the story of the Jewish return to sovereignty. The Syrian Greeks tried to outlaw Judaism; the Maccabees rose in rebellion; they liberated and rededicated the Temple; God made the menorah’s oil last for eight days. Then we eat our latkes. But what did Jews do after we gained power? What happened after we survived? The historical record tells us much about the Hasmonean dynasty — the last experiment in Jewish sovereignty before our time — much of it chilling. Yet we don’t talk about that.

It’s the same with Purim. Ask most American Jews how the Purim story ends and they will tell you that Haman tried to kill the Jews, but Esther and her uncle Mordechai foiled his wicked plan. But that isn’t how the Purim story ends. It ends with the king giving Persia’s Jews license to do to Haman’s people what Haman wanted to do with them — and the Jews slaughtering seventy-five thousand souls. We don’t talk about that either, because we begin our stories with victimhood and end them with survival. We talk about what the Egyptians did to us when we were slaves, but we rarely talk about what Joseph did to the Egyptians when Pharaoh put him in charge of the nation’s grain. We discuss the Exodus, but we rarely discuss what happened afterward, when the Jews struggled to rule themselves in the desert. Again and again, we silence our tradition just when it becomes most relevant to our age. And so, as the joke goes, many American Jews think the lesson of Jewish history is “They tried to kill us; we survived; let’s eat.”

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Given the fragility of Jewish life in the twentieth century, it is not surprising that American Jews — especially older ones — emphasize stories of persecution. But perpetual victimhood is not a narrative that can answer the two great Jewish challenges of our age: how to sustain Judaism in America, a country that makes it easy for Jews to stop being Jews, and how to sustain democracy in Israel, a country that for two-thirds of its existence has held the West Bank, a territory where its democratic ideals do not apply. Today, we are failing both challenges.

In city after city, American Jews have built Holocaust memorials. The Jewish schools in those cities are often decrepit, mediocre, and unaffordable, but there is no shortage of places to learn how Jews died. When a community builds better memorials than schools — when it raises children more familiar with Auschwitz than with Simchat Torah — the lesson of those memorials cannot be: Honor the dead by leading informed, committed Jewish lives. Nor is the lesson: Honor the dead by acting justly toward those non-Jews who live under Jewish rule, since mainstream Jewish organizations rarely grapple with the injustice inherent in occupying land in which Jews enjoy citizenship and non-Jews do not. Instead, the implicit lesson is: Honor the dead by preventing another Holocaust, this time in Israel. That lesson is reinforced by the vast sums that American Jewish groups spend on “Israel advocacy,” on teaching young American Jews to defend the Jewish state against the viciously anti-Semitic climate that supposedly pervades their college campuses and the world.

But the Israel advocacy generally fails. For one thing, it is difficult to teach Jewish students to defend the Jewish state when they have not been taught to care much about Judaism itself. Second, it is intellectually insulting to tell young Jews who have been raised to think for themselves that they should start with the assumption that Israeli policy is justified, and then work backward to figure out why. Third, since young American Jews—more than their elders—take Jewish power for granted, the victimhood narrative simply doesn’t conform to what they see in their own lives or in the Middle East.

For the most part, young American Jews don’t experience their campuses as hostile or anti-Semitic. In 2008, when researchers at Brandeis asked students at eight universities whether it was easy to be Jewish on campus, 84 percent said yes and only 7 percent said no. To the contrary, Jewish students frequently befriend Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinians—communities that were far less present on campus in their parents’ day—and thus develop an empathy that their elders often lack. They also realize that as a mostly white, native-born, upper-middle-class population, they occupy a position of privilege.

When they look at the Middle East, they see Israel as powerful, too. American Jewish leaders often call Israel a democracy threatened with destruction by its neighbors, and that story line feels authentic to many older Jews who remember an Israel that did not hold the West Bank and Gaza, and faced Arab armies that seemed to enjoy military parity with the Jewish state. But younger American Jews have never known Israel as a full democracy. For forty-four years, twice a college student’s life span, they have seen Israel control territory in which millions of Palestinians lack citizenship. And since the 1980s, they have seen Israel fight wars not against Arab armies but against terrorists nestled amid a stateless and thus largely defenseless Palestinian population. Thus, they are more conscious than their parents of the degree to which Israeli behavior violates democratic ideals, and less willing to grant Israel an exemption because it stands on the brink of destruction. The more the American Jewish establishment forces today’s realities onto the procrustean bed of 1939 or 1967, the more young liberal-minded American Jews turn away.

——————-

We need a new American Jewish story, built around this basic truth: We are not history’s permanent victims. In a dizzying shift of fortune, many of our greatest challenges today stem not from weakness but from power. If non-Orthodox American Jewish life withers in the coming generations, it will be less because gentiles persecute Jews than because they marry them. And if Israel ceases being a democratic Jewish state, it is less likely to be because Arab armies invade the West Bank than because Israel permanently occupies it.

The fact that Israel wields power does not mean it faces no external threats. But it does mean that Israel plays a larger role in shaping those threats than American Jewish leaders generally admit. Yes, the Islamist groups Hamas and Hezbollah traffic in anti-Semitism and murder Jews, but they gain strength when Israel—by subsidizing West Bank settlement and meeting nonviolent protesters with tear gas, rubber bullets, and military courts—discredits those Palestinians willing to live in peace. Yes, the populism sweeping the Middle East has unleashed frightening hostility against the Jewish state. But this hostility feeds off Israeli policy. As recently as 2005, the same government that rules Turkey today was signing military deals with Israel. In 2008, it tried to broker an Israeli-Syrian peace. Turkey only began shunning the Jewish state after Israel’s 2009 war in Gaza, and after Israeli troops killed eight Turkish militants who tried to break Israel’s blockade of the strip in 2010.

Similarly, the Egyptian leaders who have emerged in Hosni Mubarak’s wake are not generally calling for Israel’s destruction, let alone promising to take up arms in that cause. But they are exploiting widespread anger that more than thirty years after the Camp David Accords, which called for Israel to grant Palestinians full autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel still directly controls most of the West Bank and has subsidized hundreds of thousands of its people to move there. There is, of course, real anti-Semitism in today’s Middle East. But by too often ascribing criticism of Israel to a primordial hatred of Jews, American Jewish leaders fail to grapple with Israel’s own role in its mounting isolation. And by ignoring the fact that Jews today enjoy far more power to define their relationships with their neighbors than did Jews in the past, they imply that the Jewish condition has not fundamentally changed.

Accepting that the Jewish condition has fundamentally changed requires looking to our tradition for guidance about how Jews should treat the people we rule, not just how we should endure treatment from the people who rule us. That guidance will not always be comfortable: Jewish tradition offers no simple lessons for how to wield power, and the lessons it does teach can sometimes be hard for modern liberals to stomach. But it is striking that when describing the previous two times that Jewish sovereignty failed — the Kingdom of Judah’s destruction by the Babylonian empire around 586 B.C.E. and the Hasmonean dynasty’s destruction by the Romans more than five hundred years later — our tradition insists that physical collapse was preceded by ethical collapse. Again and again, Jewish texts connect the Jewish right to sovereignty in the land of Israel to Jewish behavior in the land of Israel. In the words of Jeremiah, “If ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods to your hurt: Then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever.”

Today, too, Israel’s physical survival is bound up with its ethical survival. Whether or not Israel’s nuclear weapons and antimissile shields can protect it from Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, they will be of no use on the day that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians march, nonviolently, to demand the very “equality of social and political rights” that Israel promises in its declaration of independence. And if American Jewish leaders continue to defend the Israeli government at the expense of Israeli democracy, they may find their own children and grandchildren cheering those protesters on.

I will try to give my son and daughter a sense of the immensity of what they have been given, of the agony that prior generations endured so that Jews could have a state. And I will tell them that their duty is to help ensure that this time, Jewish sovereignty does not fail. I will tell them, if they see that video of Khaled Jaber calling for his father, that I learned of his story because brave young Israelis chronicled it, Israelis who believe in the promise of Israel’s independence declaration, which envisions a nation that pursues “freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the Hebrew Prophets.” I will tell them that that pledge, made when the stench of Jewish death still hung over Europe, and amid a war for Israel’s very existence, is their patrimony. If Israel betrays that promise, it will be a stain upon their lives. I will tell them about their great-grandmother, who spent her life fleeing sinking ships. And tell them that today Israel—democratic Israel—is the ship that must not sink. The birthright they must not squander. The dream that must not die.

Excerpted from “The Crisis of Zionism” by Peter Beinart, published by Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright © 2012 by Peter Beinart. All rights reserved.

Much of the J Street Conference — indeed, much of J Street, which touts itself as the liberal alternative to AIPAC — is based around this premise. In his recent book, “A New Voice for Israel,” J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami writes that “Israel finds itself at a critical fork in the road, facing a choice of existential proportion: Either end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict now through a two-state solution or cling to an untenable status quo that leads to the decline of its Jewish character, its democratic values and its international standing.” As Olmert told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2007, “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.” California Rep. Barbara Lee fretted on one panel at J Street that settlements are making the two-state solution problematic.

From this perspective, the main solution is for the Obama administration to put firmer pressure on Israel to make concessions for peace, and to renew the peace process that ends with a signed agreement creating  two states. Ben-Ami said he was hoping for a more proactive approach from Obama representatives Valerie Jarrett and Antony Blinken toward renewing the push for peace.

But another strain of thinking was present at the J Street Conference, one much more ominous for those hoping to see the Jewish state last another 64 years: It is already too late to salvage the two-state solution. That perspective was on display at a panel featuring Palestinian leader Mustafa Barghouti and Israeli academic and policy advisor Menachem Klein. Barghouti repeatedly used the word “apartheid” to describe Israel’s current reality. He would prefer, he said, another word to use, but apartheid is simply the most applicable. Israelis are hoping the Palestinians will be so miserable under perpetual occupation that they will simply emigrate, he said. But the growth rate will compensate for any emigration, and in any case, “Palestinians have nowhere else to go.” Barghouti has no hope that the U.S. will pressure Israel to forge a comprehensive peace. Instead, he said, the Palestinians and Israeli will simply go through the South African options before arriving at a one-state solution. “We will struggle until apartheid ends,” he said.

It was not only Palestinians who were sounding the death knell for the two-state solution. Menachem Klein focused the audience’s attention on a factor often overlooked: A civil war could erupt in Israel if the government did indeed agree to hand over the occupied territories to the Palestinians. “Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated during an interim agreement when he had not evacuated a single settlement,” he said. “Israelis will use arms to resist an agreement even if there were a referendum supporting it.”

But even as Barghouti and Klein were saying that the sun may have set on the two-state solution, fellow panelist Gershom Gorenberg, author of numerous books on Israeli struggles, was urging hope. “If you had said in 1977 that there would be gay marriage and a black president, you would have been told to up your medication,” he said. “Quit saying what you can’t do, and go ahead and do it!” The crowd erupted in furious applause. Even as they doubted the future of peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians, the audience clearly hoped that America may yet play the decisive role in forging a Middle East peace.

But by alienating Obama, mainly with that Holocaust horror show he put on at the AIPAC conference, Netanyahu has probably damaged his ability to go to war against the Islamic republic. The administration doesn’t trust him, doesn’t like him, doesn’t agree with him and doesn’t support him on a war that the president described publicly and pointedly as one that could cost American lives.

Veteran Israeli peace activist and writer Uri Avnery noted: “Not since Eisenhower was president has Israel ever gone to war without explicit, prior American approval.” Pissing off America while preparing for war is terrible statesmanship for an Israeli prime minister; it’s also lousy politics. Israelis, for all their grumbling about Obama, consider U.S. support second only to their country’s own military power as a vital national security asset. Furthermore, poll after poll shows they much prefer America’s air force, not Israel’s lesser one, to try to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Netanyahu came home to charges of fear-mongering from the media and center-left opposition. “Netanyahu and his government have to stop these hysterical analogies with Iran,” said Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni, adding that they were making Israel, not Iran, the focus of the world’s worries. Channel Two political correspondent Rina Matzliach said that while harping on the Holocaust was a sure winner with AIPAC, it “didn’t help the prime minister overseas, and caused a certain discomfort among the public here.”

Netanyahu overplayed his hand in Washington last week, and now, having likened the Iranian threat to the Nazi threat and having vowed before AIPAC, America and the world to stop it, he finds himself more isolated internationally than ever.

Why did he do it? Because as much as American liberals are put off by Netanyahu, he’s got American neoconservatives, evangelicals, Israel lobbyists and other nationalist hawks eating out of his hand. If he’d had two Muslim-bashing Republicans instead of two Democrats in the White House during his tenure as prime minister, by now Netanyahu might be building settlements on the moon.

“My friends, 2012 is not 1944. The American government is different. You heard it in President Obama’s speech yesterday,” he told 13,000 AIPAC delegates, including what he described as “over half of the Congress.” He’d just held up photocopies of two letters the American Jewish Congress had sent to the U.S. War Department in 1944, imploring it to bomb Auschwitz, and then he quoted the War Department’s refusal, stressing the department’s point that bombing Auschwitz “might even provoke more vindictive action by the Germans.” Even on television, there seemed a shocked hush in the convention hall.

The Israeli prime minister goes to the White House to try to get Obama on his side for a war on Iran, and a few hours later he gives a speech to half the world about how Israel can’t trust anybody but itself, and pulls out two extraordinarily embarrassing U.S. letters from 1944 to illustrate.

“Everyone understood that he didn’t bring in two letters from 70 years ago to make the point that they’re irrelevant,” wrote Nahum Barnea, the country’s most prominent journalist, in the Yediot Aharonot daily. “The message went over loud and clear: Iran is Nazi Germany, Bushehr is Auschwitz, Israel is on its way to the Holocaust, and the U.S. administration continues to stand by and watch.”

Amazing.  But was it any more amazing than Netanyahu’s reproachful, televised lecture to a silently suffering Obama in the White House last May, when he sought to foil a move to restart peace talks with the Palestinians, meanwhile misrepresenting the president’s plan to his face?

Bibi’s hazing of presidents didn’t begin with Obama; after his first White House meeting with Bill Clinton in 1996, the president was later quoted by his Mideast envoy Aaron David Miller as having said about his visitor from Jerusalem: “Who the fuck does he think he is?” Clinton asked. “Who’s the fucking superpower here?”

In another spat with Clinton during a visit to Washington, the Israeli newspapers bannered the prime minister’s private boast of his ability to use Congress as leverage: “I’ll set this town on fire!”

At the start of another trip to talk with Clinton, Netanyahu made it a point to pay his first respects to Jerry Falwell, who at the time was distributing a video accusing Clinton of selling drugs and being an accomplice to murder. “Benjamin Netanyahu is the Ronald Reagan of Israel!” Falwell told a Washington ballroom crowd of pro-Israel hawks when the prime minister made his entrance.

Netanyahu’s American roots run deep. In the late 1930s, his father, Benzion, was secretary in the U.S. to Vladimir Jabotinsky, the ideologue of maximalist Zionism, then gathering American support for the movement in Palestine. Convincing the United States that it has the same interests and enemies as Israel was Benzion Netanyahu’s approach 75 years ago, and it’s still his son’s approach today. With post-9/11 Republicans and AIPAC-trained Democrats, he can be frank; with more liberal interlocutors, he uses other methods.

Netanyahu tipped his hand in 2001 when, during a condolence visit to a family of West Bank settlers hit by terror attacks, he held forth on how he’d manipulated the Clinton administration, not knowing that the TV camera was on.

“I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move in the right direction … They won’t get in our way,” he said. While maintaining that “80 percent of Americans support us,” he said Clinton had been “radically pro-Palestinian,” so he had to marshal all his will and cunning to gain what seemed to the Americans an innocuous guarantee regarding the peace talks with the Palestinians. But with that guarantee, he told the family, “I actually put an end to the Oslo Accord.”

He didn’t actually end it, but he certainly slowed it to a virtual halt; the end came later. Now he’s marshaling all his will and cunning to get a Democratic president with views very similar to Clinton’s to either stay out of his way on Iran, or, better yet, do his bidding. This Israeli prime minister still thinks he’s the superpower when talking to the man in the White House, and he evidently figures that that’s going to bring him closer to getting rid of Iran’s nuclear installations.

What can explain Benjamin Netanyahu’s behavior? Only a hubris that knows no bounds.