Obama too, as his campaign speeches in carefully chosen quarters showed, is subject to the pressures of the powerful Israeli lobby in U.S. politics.
Mr Indyk himself, originally an Australian, once worked for the chief Israeli lobby in America, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, before becoming a diplomat and serving twice as America's ambassador to Israel.
ECONOMIST: America and the Middle East: How to learn from history | The
Arafat must clamp down on the Hamas militants, the Israeli peace lobby must be more vigorous in its condemnation, and the US must use its not inconsiderable influence on Israel to create a solid ceasefire for the time being.
Today the 1995 winner of the coveted "Horatius at the Bridge" award will go head-to-head with the combined forces of the U.S. State Department, the Israeli government, the American Jewish lobby and the barons of Congress determined to ensure that half-a-billion tax-dollars continues to flow to Yasser Arafat.
Remarkably, he became a successful one-man lobby in a pro-Israeli city.
By the Times' telling, Obama is a victim of the combined forces of an intransigent Israeli government and the pro-Israel lobby that holds sway in Congress.
The reasoning: The works, by Israeli artists, now hang in the center's lobby.
The lobby's critics often complain that it represents not Israel but the Israeli right wing.
Hagel has called for direct talks with the Islamic republic, which Western powers suspect is trying to develop a nuclear bomb, and he complained in 2007 that the "Jewish lobby" in Washington scared lawmakers away from supporting a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The so-called Israel lobby will be pummeled as pundits argue about whether Obama was right or wrong to succumb to Israeli pressure to support congressional sanctions.
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