Obama on international stage, crowded out by local political theatre

JERUSALEM -- Hours before Barack Obama's expected arrival in Jerusalem, a group of religious leaders accused him of "flip-flops" over the status of the Israeli capital and demanded that he use his visit to the country to flop back to his previous position.

Obama should "reaffirm his positive remarks" that the capital "must remain undivided" and "disavow subsequent retractions" that indicated he saw the city’s borders as open to future negotiations, said Jeff Daube, director of the Israel office of the Zionist Organization of America, at a press conference.

Daube's was one of six groups whose representatives gathered under an Israeli and misshapen US flag taped to an air-conditioning duct in a hotel basement, repeatedly invoking the 250,000 American citizens living in Israel -- about half of whom are believed to be eligible to vote -- as implied leverage to push Obama on an issue they claimed was central to the integrity of a Jewish state.

"Washington, D.C., has many of the same ethnic problems we have in Jerusalem," said Toby Willig of the group Emunah Women. "I haven't heard anybody talk about a solution in Washington being divided."

The press conference was held just across the street from the King David Hotel, where Obama and his entourage will be staying, and down the block from the site of a terrorist bulldozer rampage just hours before Obama's scheduled arrival. Such attacks -- and those by Qassam rockets launched from Gaza into the town of Sderot, where Obama will visit tomorrow -- would become more likely if Jerusalem's sovereignty is challenged, one of the religious leaders charged.

"It is not rocket science to see that if Jerusalem becomes divided, it becomes a war zone,' said Rabbi Aaron S. Tirschwell of the Worldwide Young Israel Movement, a confederation of Orthodox synagogues primarily in North America.

This is one place on Obama's week-long foreign itinerary where he is not only likely to face an unromantic reception from locals based on his policy views, but may have to fight to earn coverage on the nightly news.

In addition to the terrorist incident -- a copycat bulldozer attack! -- the front pages of Tuesday’s papers in Israeli promised far more lively domestic political theatre than Obama is likely to deliver. A former president is going to be charged with two counts of rape. The prime minister, Ehud Olmert, facing his own criminal grand jury for alleged graft, is about to be pushed out of office from within his own party -- and reportedly called his own foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, a "backstabbing liar" for her role in engineering such a coup.

Livni’s reponse to such a charge from the prime minister: "So Olmert said it, so what?"