Obama and Israel

Gershom Gorenberg makes the case that Barack Obama would be the best candidate for Israel, from the point of view of someone with different ideas about what would be best for Israel than what some of the "pro-Israel" dogma in the U.S. demands. That said, at this point in time I think you'd have to say that most Obama fans who care about U.S. policy toward Israel are basically seeing what they want to see and hearing what they want to hear.

I hope that folks like Gershom who have sound views on this matter are right about what they're hearing, but Marty Peretz likes what he's hearing, too and it's genuinely not clear to me what Obama's trying to say. In part, I do think that reflects the fact that the divide between the hawk and dove camps is, at this point, actually quite a bit narrower than it's historically been. But fundamentally it's a reflection of a political strategy of deliberate ambiguity so we'll just have to see what happens.