Writing in Haaretz yesterday Gideon Levy bemoans what he sees as the excessive indulgence shown to Israel by the Bush administration and expresses the hope that Obama will do things differently.

The following quote has the gist of his argument,

Let us now hope that Obama will […] reveal himself to be a true friend of Israel. That he will put his whole weight behind a deep American involvement in the Middle East,  that he will try to solve the Iranian issue through negotiation - the only effective means. That he will help end the siege on Gaza and the boycott of Hamas that he will push Israel and Syria to make peace, that he will spur Israel and the Palestinians to reach a settlement.  We should hope Obama will help Israel help itself, because that is how friendship is measured. That he will criticize its policy when he must, because that, too, is a test of true friendship.

Though I think that, as things now stand, talks with Hamas on substantive issues would be a waste of breath and negotiations with Iran will only bring results if accompanied by the convincing threat of the use of force if they fail, I agree with the broad thrust of Levy’s argument. It would be indeed be good if the next American administration did more to encourage negotiations between Israel and those of its enemies with whom negotiations make sense. It would be particularly good if it took a harder line on the colonization of the West Bank.

In spite of this there’s something that strikes me as wrong about the tone of Levy’s piece. In its own way it’s as dependent on the United States as the very Israeli politicians it criticizes. It sees no possibility of progress coming from within Israel itself and hopes the Obama administration will be a tough but fair parental figure for Israel, guiding it and chiding it towards what’s good for it, rewarding it and withholding privileges in an effort to make it see in which direction its real interests lie. To judge by this article, it would appear that Levy thinks his country is condemned to failure and catastrophe not by, or at least not primarily by, the failings of governments and politicians in Jerusalem but rather of those in Washington DC.

Whatever one might hope for from the new administration in the United States it seems plain to me that effective approaches to the problems from which Israel suffers, both internally and in terms of its relations with its neighbors, will only be implemented when sufficient political support for them has been built within Israel itself. The United States can play a useful role in this process, but it can’t do the hard political work on Israel’s behalf.

There are more worrying forms of dependency than those of recent Israeli governments on the administrations of George W. Bush. These include the anti-political yearnings of the well-intentioned and comfortable who hope that supposedly omnipotent outsiders will save them from what they see - sometimes correctly - as the political obtuseness of their fellow citizens.