President Obama greets AIPAC board members. Photo: Ruvi Leider.

The image of the AIPAC, as developed by its detractors (and secretly embraced by many gleeful Jews in US and Israel) is one of the sabre-toothed tiger, ready to pounce and devour any American politician even suspected of being disloyal to American-Israeli alliance. It takes such an event as the one that took place today with president Obama as the main performer, to remind us all what a pussycat this “militant” and scary organization really is.

So desperate were the delegates to embrace and love their president, that they applauded Obama’s every placeholder statement about “unbreakable bonds” and “ironclad commitments”, “unprecedented cooperation” and “unwavering support”, as if there was a real possibility that Obama will express equanimity with Iranian nuclear program or question Israel’s right to exist.  They didn’t pause to realize that in his speech Obama had insisted that Israel continue to negotiate with the Palestinians despite the agreement between Fatah and Hamas, or that he pointedly refused to mention any kind of sanctions against the PLO for embracing genocidal Islamofascists as partners in government.

Moreover, they happily went along as he treated them (t0 borrow Obama’s own metaphor) “like Special Olympics, or something”.  Having presented a few days ago such a brazen and unapologetic plan for the dismemberment of a small democracy to the benefit of her sworn enemies that hasn’t been seen since 1938 in Munich, Obama simply claimed to have been misunderstood, repeated the main points of this plan verbatim, practically accused his critics of lying – and got a standing ovation in return.

The chief argument deployed by Obama in his quest to present himself as a victim either of stupidity or malignancy was simple and completely misleading – that “1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps” is “a well-known formula to all who have worked on this issue for a generation”, and that he’s suffering the slings and arrows of his Likudnik detractors only because he said “publicly what has long been acknowledged privately”. At that, any true supporter of Israel who didn’t feel comfortable to boo his President should have left the room, rather then being treated like an ignoramus.

This “well-known formula”, which for Obama represents the only way forward, was invented by Bill Clinton in December 2000, just as the whole peacemaking edifice was crushing down around him on the heads of Jews and Arabs alike. Until then, the idea that Israel should agree to minuscule corrections of the “green line” and to compensate Palestinians even for that with the land it won in 1948, was completely foreign to Israeli peacemakers. One month before he was murdered, Yitzhak Rabin said: “The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines”.