a direction that would enable a second-term President Obama to put America's own interests first and use the leverage he has to require Israel to be serious about peace was touched upon by Thomas Friedman in a recent article for the New York Times . His main point was that his president would be so busy with pressing domestic issues that he won't have time to address Israeli matters. But he, Friedman, had a message for Israelis. It was that they had to understand " that we're not your grandfather's America anymore ." His explanation of why included this: " To begin with, the rising political force in America is not the one with which Bibi has aligned Israel . As the Israeli columnist Ari Shavit noted in the newspaper Ha'aretz last week. 'In the past, both the Zionist movement and the Jewish state were careful to be identified with the progressive forces in the world. ... But in recent decades more and more Israelis took to leaning on the reactionary forces in American society. It was convenient to lean on them. The evangelists didn't ask difficult questions about the settlements, the Tea Party people didn't say a word about excluding women and minorities or about Jewish settlers' attacks and acts of vandalism against Palestinians and peace activists. The Republican Party's white, religious, conservative wing was not agitated when the Israeli Supreme Court was attacked and the rule of law in Israel was trampled.' Israel, Shavit added, assumed that 'under