Mr. Netanyahu goes to Washington

All the KVM switches in the world can’t protect US President Barack Obama from differing with Israel’s newly-elected conservative president, Binyamin Netanyahu, a Middle East Reaganite if ever there was one. Yet despite espousing policies up and down the line at odds with Netanyahu’s agenda, Netanyahu is displaying uncommon political courage by traveling to the US this week to meet with Obama.

The collision course of values was set early in Obama’s White House campaign, when Barack claimed he would sit down with terrorists “without preconditions” and when he was praised in a European interview by Jessie Jackson, who claimed that if Obama won, “the era of Israel-first foreign policy will come to an end.”

Since Netanyahu is coming to Washington with an agenda that is topped by stopping Iran’s march toward becoming a nuclear power, rather than peace with the Palestinians, it will be interesting to see which man blinks first.