Is Israel playing American Jews for saps?

It’s not a dinner table question, I realize, but hear me out.

First, this Reuters story just came across the wire. It’s thinly sourced, but sounds credible to me, for reasons having to do with my picayune knowledge of who’s reliable and who’s less so among the Jerusalem press corps, but anyhow:

Seeking to deflect criticism of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may consider international help in enforcing an arms embargo on the Palestinian enclave, a political source said on Thursday.

Now, if this turns out to be true, it’s a major give, a HUGE concession. I expected an independent inquiry, I expected an end to the b-list of goods not allowed into Gaza (coriander, toys, etc.) — but this cedes sovereignty.

Second, there’s this graf from my story the other day on the different outlooks between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations:

There may yet be room for disagreements between the Obama and Netanyahu governments arising from the flotilla incident: The Obama administration has demanded of Israel a "full and credible" investigation. In a conference call Tuesday with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Yuli Edelstein, Israel’s information minister, scoffed at the idea, saying that Israel had done nothing wrong.

As an Israeli reporting from DC, I usually see American Jewish pro-Israel activism from a "How does this affect Israel?" perspective. An Israeli friend read what I wrote and had a different perspective: How does what Israeli governments do affect American Jews?

Specifically, per the PresCon phone call, how does what Israeli governments ask of American Jews play out? Here, government ministers are urging American Jewish groups to hang absolutely tough, not cede an inch, to maintain that Israel did nothing wrong, in the raid on the flotilla or in the blockade. (They’re heeding the advice.)

Yet, my friend said, Israel’s government knows full well it will eventually make a concession, it will acknowledge a degree of fashla — that it screwed up.

That leaves American Jews looking like saps, he said. It robs the organized Jewish community of credibility, he argued.

Since my phone call with my friend, the organized community has gone even further in its "no error" posture, demanding more pronounced declarations of support for Israel from the Obama administration, as I reported yesterday. And the Israeli nudging has not stopped: Danny Ayalon, the deputy foreign minister, made the same case today to Christian supporters of Israel.

Is the Jewish alphabet soup about to be left hanging out as dry as a John Edwards campaign staffer, as a Clinton cabinet secretary circa 1998, as a Committee to Reelect the President volunteer circa 1974?

I’m not endorsing this view, or any view for that matter, but it’s worth discussing.

It comes up, at least tangentially, in Leon Wieseltier’s stunned, outraged take on the operation in The New Republic:

The Israeli leadership simply does not care any longer about what anybody thinks. It does not seem to care about what even the United States—its only real friend, even in the choppy era of Obama—thinks. This is not defiance, it is despair. The Israeli leadership seems to have given up any expectation of fairness and sympathy from the world. It is behaving as if it believes, in the manner of the most perilous Jewish pessimism, that the whole world hates the Jews, and that is all there is to it. This is the very opposite of the measured and empirical attitude, the search for strategic opportunity, the enlistment of imagination in the service of ideals and interests, that is required for statecraft.

The complication—the one that deprives anybody who acknowledges it of membership in any of the gangs of commentary—is that there is a partial basis in the actually existing world for a degree of Israeli pessimism. There are leaders, states, organizations, and peoples whose hostility to the Jewish state is irrational and absolute and in some cases murderous. Things are said critically about Israel that wildly burst the bounds of thoughtful criticism. The language in which Israel is described by some governments and international organizations is lurid and grotesque and foul. Anti-Semitic tropes—the conspiracy theory about the Jews, most conspicuously—are regularly encountered in otherwise respectable places. The analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that absolves the Palestinians of any significant role in it is widespread. I do not see how any of this can be denied, or shunted aside, or explained entirely in terms of Israeli behavior. But it is emphatically not the whole picture, except for those Israelis and Jews whose political interests and ideological inclinations prefer it to be the whole picture. For there are forces in Israel, and in its government, that have a use for Jewish hopelessness.