Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted yesterday in an interview with PBS that he could be open to negotiating the status of Jerusalem, a perpetual sticking point in the currently stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Palestinians have long claimed East Jerusalem, which is rife with Arab neighborhoods, should be the capitol of their future state. Israeli hard-liners claim the ancient city, which was unified by Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem after the 1967 Six Day War, will forever be the unified capitol of Israel.

While Netanyahu has flirted with the idea before — particularly in instances such as now when he is putting the onus on Palestinians to come to the table without preconditions — his comments about Jerusalem often reject the possibility of ever dividing the city. Here’s Netanyahu’s exchange on the Charlie Rose’s interview show last night:

NETANYAHU: I want Jerusalem a united city for sure. But that’s the way I go — These are not preconditions for negotiations. They’re positions in the negotiations. The final positions come out after a negotiation. I don’t think it makes sense, and I think it’s just not wise, it’s even silly, to come forward and say well I’ll offer this percent, you know, with a decimal point –

CHARLIE ROSE: Of land.

NETANYAHU: Of land. That’s what the negotiations are for.

Watch the video:

In the speeches he mentions in the clip, Netanyahu indicates that he will not accept a divided Jerusalem in any peace deal. At Bar-Ilan University in June 2009, Netanyahu said in a “permanent agreement,” one of Israel’s “needs” was “Jerusalem remaining the united capital of Israel.” In the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, on May 16, 2011, Netanyahu said he was guided by the “principle” of a united Jerusalem. And a week later, speaking to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, Netanyahu said:

Jerusalem must never again be divided. Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel. I know that this is a difficult issue for Palestinians. But I believe with creativity and goodwill a solution can be found.

Netanyahu’s position, though, has wavered tremendously between the above softer-hard-line and the hard-hard-line. The closest he’s come to staking out the same position he did last night was in July 2010 before audiences of an American-Jewish organization conference and Fox News, saying that Jerusalem is “one of the issues that will have to be negotiated.”

But in both January and December of that year — six months on either side of his July comments — Netanyahu and his office explicitly rejected the notion of ever dividing Jerusalem. Two months before his July American appearences, Netanyahu appeared at a holiday called Jerusalem Day, celebrating the 1967 unification of the city. He told Israeli crowds that Israel “will never again allow Jerusalem to become a separated, bleak and divided city.”

On Jerusalem Day this year, Netanyahu again took the harder line, telling crowds that “nothing more holy to us than Jerusalem” and its “unity,” and pledging again that “Jerusalem will never be divided.”

With all the flip-flopping, assessing exactly where Netanyahu stands on Jerusalem — whether it will “never” be divided or is part of the final status issues for negotiations — remains to be seen. But his latest comments, to an American television audience, seem to indicate that he’s open to giving a future Palestinian state sovereignty over Arab parts of East Jerusalem. If that’s the case, his position matches up exactly with President Obama, raising questions about the attacks on the President by Netanyahu’s closest stateside allies for being a “divide(r)” of Jerusalem.

GOP presidential contender Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN) has a history of flubbing basic foreign policy facts, like when she claimed that Americans still live in fear of the Soviet Union. She made another whopper yesterday when she claimed that Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite Muslim political and military organization, is equipping communist Cuba with missiles. It would be “foolish” to normalize trade relations with Cuba, Bachmann told a crowd in Iowa, because Hezbollah could soon have “missile sites” there:

BACHMANN: Why would you normalize trading with a country that sponsors terror? There’s reports that have come out that Cuba has been working with another terrorist organization called Hezbollah. And Hezbollah is potentially looking at wanting to be part of missile sites in Iran and, of course, when you’re 90 miles offshore from Florida, you don’t want to entertain the prospect of hosting bases or sites where Hezbollah could have training camps or perhaps have missile sites or weapons sites in Cuba. This would be foolish.

Watch it:

There is absolutely no evidence to support her claim, which seems to be based on spurious reports in an Italian publication that did not even mention missiles.

Bachmann doesn’t appear to be too pleased that the United States has made significant strides toward normalizing relations with Cuba in the past few years.

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) released its annual poll of Jewish-American public opinion yesterday, which, as with all demographics, showed a dip in Jewish support for President Obama over various issues including his handling of Israel-related matters. All the usual neocon partisans, who would love to see Obama wounded because of the importance of Jewish Americans to the Democrats, seized on the some version of the news. But the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, in an article accurately headlined “Obama disappoints, but we’ll vote for him,” hit on a point of the survey the others missed:

On Iran, Jewish voters are much more hawkish than the president. If sanctions fail to halt Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, 56 percent favor the U.S. taking military action, and 88 percent favor Israel doing so.

Rubin initially got one of the numbers wrong (the post has since been corrected): In reality, only 68 percent of respondents said they would support Israeli military action. (Both figures are down slightly, within the margin of error, from last fall’s AJC poll.) But the questions themselves, which are typical of this issue, are tricky. Here are the relevant questions and (actual) numbers from the AJC poll:

While the survey asks about strikes “to prevent [Iran] developing nuclear weapons,” military analysts and non-proliferation experts from both the U.S. and Israel agree that attacking Iran’s nuclear installations would only delay — not stop — Iran’s nuclear progress.

At an event hosted by the Arms Control Association in Washington last week, senior fellow Greg Thielmann said, “[E]ven U.S. airstrikes would only delay, not prevent, an Iranian nuclear weapons capacity.”

That judgment corresponds with that of Jeffrey White, a military analyst at the pro-Israel Washington Institute, who said this summer:

You can’t destroy knowledge and you can’t destroy the basic technology. The setback to the program would be measured in years I think — two years maybe three years.

White thought an Israeli strike, because of Israel’s lesser military capabilities, would cause an even smaller delay of probably only a year.

Another skeptic of the efficacy of Israeli airstrikes against Iran is the former commander of the Israel Navy, retired Rear Admiral Avraham Botzer. In June, Botzer told Haaretz:

I’m afraid the air force has convinced the politicians that an attack on Iran is possible and will achieve results. If I’m right, then we’re dealing with a dangerous illusion.

Since an Israeli strike is less likely to significantly delay Iran’s nuclear progress, perhaps American Jews show greater support for that option because of the increased threat perception. The distinction might be moot anyway, since the U.S. could potentially be dragged into a very risky regional conflict because of an Israeli strike. Those kinds of consequences of an attack weren’t so much as hinted at in AJC’s poll.