In its determination to prove it is not the Bush administration, the Obama administration has gone out of its way to curry favor with the Arabs and criticize Israel. Having succeeded in alienating most of the Israeli public, the administration sent Vice President Joseph Biden to Jerusalem to convince Israelis they have a friend in the White House, but Biden couldn’t stick to the script and managed to reinforce their fears rather than reassure them.

Biden was prepared to say all the right things, and did say many of them, but when he decided it was necessary to publicly blast Israel for announcing the construction of more homes in its capital, he frittered away any chance he had of accomplishing his objective. This is not to defend the Israeli decision, which substantively may have been justifiable, but could not have been publicized at a worse moment. Still, Biden could have just as easily told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu behind closed doors that this was an embarrassing and stupid announcement. Friends keep their disagreements private as much as possible, a lesson Obama could learn from Bill Clinton’s stewardship of U.S.-Israel ties.

Imagine if someone forbade you from seeing your loved ones or banned you from visiting the graves of your grandparents. Imagine they told you that you have no right to come to your family home and your identity was simply a figment of your imagination.

Israelis deal with claims like these as a nation each and every day — constant charges that the Jewish people have no right to their ancient homeland.

The warmth emanating from the conference room of the Conti Hotel in Vilnius stood in stark contrast to the damp weather outside. Just steps away from the site of the Vilnius Ghetto, remnants of which can still be found, more than 30 young Jewish activists from across Europe were miraculously networking, studying and sharing their dreams for the Jewish future.

Like swallows returning to Capistrano, Congress’s annual determination to debate the history of the Ottoman Empire is a sign of spring. The Turkish government’s approach to the American Jewish community to help sink the proposed Congressional resolution officially recognizing the horrific killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in the early 20th Century as genocide is a similar ritual. Unlike the swallows, however, both Congress and the Turks are out of their habitat.

During the flowering of Turkish-Israeli political and security relations, it was easy for representatives of the “organized” Jewish community to speak on behalf of its Turkish friends and against the resolution. As the Turkish government began to slide-and then rush-away from its relationship with Israel and slide- and then rush-toward new accommodations with Syria and Iran, the Jewish community has become less inclined to use its organizational skill on behalf of the agenda of a country that is less inclined toward the Western side of the great divide. It doesn’t help that the Turkish “request” for “help” has begun to sound more like a threat of damage yet to come.

The news out of Dubai has been rife with speculation about who assassinated Hamas terrorist commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a hotel there. Israeli agents and al-Mabhouh’s Palestinian rivals are high on the guess list. But amid the who-did-it debate, a happier Dubai event was taking place. A few weeks ago, Shahar Peer became the first Israeli woman to compete in a professional sporting event in the United Arab Emirates.

Peer, a superb tennis player, defeated several highly ranked competitors on her way to the semi-final round of the annual Dubai tennis championships. The 22-year-old then lost to American star Venus Williams, who went on to reclaim the title she had won the previous year. But no less significant was Peer’s stunning performance and how she got there in the first place.

The organized American Jewish community and our non-Jewish allies, with broad representation from across political and religious lines, are poised to launch a major initiative to counter the campaign to delegitimize Israel.

The sky is not falling. President Obama and the U.S. Congress remain firmly committed to Israel’s fundamental security and opinion polls consistently reflect broad American public support for the Jewish state. But there are clouds gathering on the horizon that must not be ignored.

Last August, dozens of women launched a protest against the practice of separate men’s and women’s seating on some Israeli public bus routes servicing haredi communities. They boarded the buses and sat down among the men, expecting to provoke some strong reaction.

The women, some of whom were dressed in decidedly non-haredi style, expected to be forced to the area where the women passengers were sitting, but passengers largely just ignored them. On one bus, a haredi passenger did ask the driver to tell the protesters to sit among the other women, but the driver refused and the passenger returned to his seat.

Last April, two Israeli newspapers doctored photographs of the new Israeli cabinet to remove the images of two female ministers, Limor Livnat and Sofa Landver. In one paper, the women’s faces were replaced with two male ministers; in the other they were blotted out.

The erasure of the women’s faces was in accordance with the ultra-Orthodox view that it is immodest to print images of women.