Rahm Emmanuel????

Submitted by John W. McGinley (United States), Mar 17, 2010 at 20:10

To the contrary, I suspect the Netanyahu government will be more hurt than will Obama. In any case whatever happened that day does not make Natanyahu look good. If he knew of the announcement and approved it;, his timing was lousy. If he didn't know he looks like a leader who has been successfully embarrassed by the right-wing of his coalition. In any case, the Labor Party is not the issue. What is probably happening is the Rahm Emmanuel (with some ancillary help from Axelrod) has been trying to engineer a crisis in the Netanayah government so that Natanyahu will have to turn to the leadership of Kadima and bring them into the Government. There are reports that he has been trying to do this all along.

Obama, hiding behind the support of his in-house Jews, figures he can pull this off without alienating Jewish support. Right now I don't see a good outcome for Israel in all of this. Unless: Netanyahu, when he comes here next week, throws down the gauntlet in no uncertain terms: An undivided Jerusalem is eternally the capital of Israel. Period. No compromise now or ever. There will be some howling. But when the dust settles, Israel will get respect, if not love, and the ball goes back to the Palestinian leadership. The fact of the matter is that a settelement at this time is desired by America and some of the Arab states. But a settlement now is not in the interest of Israel.

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