The final chapter of Barack Obama’s third memoir, A Promised Land, begins with an extensive review of the former president’s often-testy relationship with his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Claims that Obama was explicitly anti-Israel or anti-Semitic were always hyperbolic, but his assessment of his dealings with Netanyahu reveals the bristling disdain that fueled perceptions he was not a stalwart or reliable ally of the Jewish state.
Obama is a careful writer, and he would never risk something as incendiary as an argument that AIPAC controlled or exercised undue influence over U.S. politics, or that its members had “dual loyalty” toward both Israel and the United States. But in his description of the group and its sway, he doesn’t really keep a safe distance from those arguments, either:
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