Third Rail, Middle East

I know that not all of my fellow Jews are going to agree, but I'm impressed so far with the Obama Administration line on halting Israeli settlements in the West Bank. I've been against them ever since 1970's Prime Minister Menachem Begin started them up.

I understand that my Jewish homeland is small and needs all the land it can get to help grow its population by immigration, but I also feel that those settlers are the most intractable Israelis, the ones most likely to stand in the way of a peace settlement and, yes, I blame that movement for producing the assassin who killed courageous Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, snuffing out hopes for peace in 1995. And that this assassin is considered a hero by so many of these settlers is...unsettling.

It's not going to be easy. Netanyahu thinks he can manipulate the process and the U.S. to keep peace from happening, and possibly attack Iran in the process. This is dangerous stuff, dangerous to Israel itself, per Roger Cohen in The New York Times:

Netanyahu talks a lot about the “existential threat” from Iran. The United States faces a prosaic daily threat: Many more young American men and women will die in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next several years if no Iranian breakthrough is achieved.

Obama must remind Israel of that. He should also tell Bibi that the real existential threat to Israel is not Amalek but hubris: An attack on Iran that would put the Jewish state at war with Persians as well as Arabs, undermine its core U.S. alliance, and set Tehran on a full-throttle course to a nuclear bomb with the support of some 1.2 billion Muslims.

As everyone knows, the problem is complex, and there are a huge number of factors for Obama, Israel, whatever passes for the Palestinian leadership and the Arab powers in the region to consider. But if Israel can make a three decade-long peace with its once fiercest enemy, Egypt, can't more pieces of the problem be solved?