Jews go to the back of the bus

President Obama held a one-hour meeting with more than a dozen U.S. Jewish leaders on July 13 -- a session the White House tried to keep secret and off-the-record. The White House also was careful to exclude Jewish leaders it deemed too inimical to the president's Mideast agenda.

While the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations approached the White House to set up Obama's first formal meeting in the Executive Mansion with a constituency that overwhelming voted for him in November, it turned out to be a belated, carefully orchestrated damage-control exercise.

The encounter of Jewish leaders with Obama came well after his far higher-priority outreach to the Muslim world during previous trips to Turkey and Egypt, when in each instance he avoided stopovers in Israel.

In the meantime, by ratcheting up pressures on Israel to make unilateral concessions on settlements without getting any peace overtures in return from Palestinians and Arab leaders, Obama sent shock waves through the ranks of a growing number of Israel's supporters in the U.S.

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