A big cross-section of the American Jewish community’s leadership met with President Obama today at the White House, from J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami on the left to Abraham Foxman on the right. Obama talked about a lot more than Israel, Palestine and Iran, including domestic issues like health care as well. You can read all about it from Ben Smith. But one striking takeaway from the meetings that I’m hearing about is Obama’s forcefulness about not backing off of holding all parties to the Arab-Israeli peace process to their responsibilities — which, in this context, means Israel. Look at this Haaretz account, for instance:

One of the participants at the meeting asked the president to take a lower profile regarding the public differences between his administration and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the United States’ demand that Israel freeze all settlement construction activity in the West Bank. “This situation is not helpful,” he told the president, who rejected the request, saying that during the eight years of the Bush administration, such disagreements were never made public but that such an approach was not helpful in advancing the peace process.

No word yet on whether the swelling has gone down in the face and posterior of whomever made that point to Obama.

I’m also reliably informed that Obama conspicuously used the term “even-handed” to describe his approach to securing Mideast peace. Now, to anyone not steeped in the noxious brew known as the American debate over Israel, that term is a complete no-brainer. Who could be against being even-handed, after all? Well, for one, Abe Foxman, who’s made the term out to indicate some bias against Israel. Foxman raised a fit in 2003 when Howard Dean, then the 2003 frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said his Mideast policies would be “even-handed,” something that eventual nominee Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) was happy to exploit. And when Obama tapped George Mitchell to become his Arab-Israeli peace envoy, Foxman complained that Mitchell, a former Senate Majority Leader who worked tirelessly on British-Irish-Northern Irish peace, was “meticulously even-handed.” Yes, in the meshuggeneh parallel universe inhabited only by American Jewish anxiety over Israel — it’s actually not so bad; uncensored episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” are in constant syndication — being “meticulously even-handed” is a bad thing. Obama, however, lives in the real world.