Strategic Assessment
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s visit to Washington in May 2011 provided renewed basis for speculation that President Barack Obama secretly hopes to unseat Netanyahu’s right wing government. This essay examines the historical record in an effort to assess how viable US efforts to shape domestic politics inside Israel today might be. It seeks to build a general theory of partisan intervention by the United States into Israeli politics, focusing on the role and beliefs of the president to assess whether such intervention is likely to occur. The article also explains why certain features of partisan intervention make it distinct from other areas of the US-Israel relationship in which American domestic forces – including Congress, lobbyists, and organizational interests of the bureaucracy – tend to wield more influence.