Is Obama's defense of Israel too little, too late?

After years of frustrating Israel and its supporters, the U.S. president finally takes a firm stand — though his motives are suspect

President Obama's speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday marked a real turning point in this administration.For the first time since he began campaigning for the presidency back in 2007, Obama spoke about Israel with sensitivity and understanding — "from the inside out," as the saying goes.

Until now, Obama has often spoken of Israel with sympathy, but rarely with understanding. The president's speech in Cairo in 2009 hit the nadir. In that speech, the president explained the founding of Israel as a reaction to the European Holocaust — thus negating 2,000 years of Jewish exile and a half century of pre-Holocaust Zionism. The president referenced the Muslim religious claim to Jerusalem and the legend of Muhammad's "night journey" to the sacred Temple Mount — without any mention of whose Temple it was that sacralized the Mount in the first place.

Until now, Obama has often spoken of Israel with sympathy, but rarely with understanding.

Obama defenders pooh-pooh the importance of these verbal miscues. Repeating the old joke about Wagner's music, Obama backers argue that the president's Israel record is better than it sounds. That defense of the president's past actions misses the point. Obama's seeming indifference to Israel's story and his unmistakeable disdain for Israel's elected leaders has left Israel's friends in a state of desperate uncertainty about what the president might do in the future.

Those uncertainties and anxieties came to a head this spring and summer. The Palestinians had launched a new diplomatic initiative at the United Nations, a demand for a U.N. vote to recognize a Palestinian state, even in the absence of a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement. For a long time, the administration communicated indecision about how it might respond. Would it veto at the Security Council? Probably yes. Would it work to mobilize allies to defeat a symbolic vote in the General Assembly, where the U.S. has no veto? Maybe yes, maybe no. Would the Palestinians face consequences for defying U.S. objections and proceeding anyway? Probably no. And so on.

Meanwhile, as the Arab Spring threatened to freeze into a future Islamist winter, Israelis in the summer and fall of 2011 were gripped by a jittery mood that left them extra-sensitive to ambiguous messages from the United States.