President Obama’s proxies in the press are up in arms over the prospect that Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to be favoring the Republican, Governor Romney, in the election here. We’re not convinced that what Mr. Netanyahu has done is intervening, but if it is, the Sun says who can blame him? Mr. Netanyahu is from a right of center political party and rose to fame arguing the kinds of positions that Governor Romney has taken. He’s not going to sit for any lectures from the Democratic Party front men over speaking up in an American election. He no doubt remembers how his first term as prime minister was brought up short.

That was back in spring of 1999, when Mr. Netanyahu, who had been mocked and belittled by President Clinton and his state secretary, Madeleine Albright, was challenged by Ehud Barak. Practically the entire coterie of political operatives for President Clinton decamped for Israel to pitch in on Mr. Barak’s campaign. These included Mr. Clinton’s pollster, Stanley Greenberg, his campaign guru, James Carville, and his image-maker, Robert Shrum. Los Angeles Times, in a long piece issued in 1999, called it “the Americanization of Israeli politics, with the emphasis on the same formula that made the Clinton campaigns of 1992 and 1996 so effective.”

It would be inaccurate to say that President Clinton dispatched his erstwhile aides to Israel to topple the Likud premier. He wasn’t personally employing them to go to Israel. Nor was his administration. Los Angeles Times reported at the time that it was on the advice of the British premier, Tony Blair, that Mr. Greenberg was hired. No doubt all that struck Mr. Netanyahu as an awfully fine distinction. He came through a patch in which relations between the prime minister of Israel and the Democratic president of America were particularly fraught. The next thing he knew the entire Democratic team was over in Israel operating against him.

The outcome was particularly Clintonian, too, incidentally. Mr. Barak, one of the great heroes of the Jewish State and for good reason, ran for office on, among other planks in his platform, a vow not to divide the capital, Jerusalem, with the Palestinian Arabs. Once he defeated Mr. Netanyahu and took office, however, he turned around and proposed dividing Jerusalem. No politician is immune to changing circumstances, but the turnaround helped cut short Mr. Barak’s term as premier to less than two years. He was challenged by Ariel Sharon, who defeated him early 2001 in an election in which Mr. Barak’s willingness to dicker in respect of Jerusalem was one of the key issues.

History, as we like to point out around here, has its way of playing tricks, and today Messrs. Barak and Netanyahu are in the same coalition trying to win the backing of a Democratic American president for, should it come to that, an attack by Israel on the nuclear-bomb-making operation of Iran. We’ll lay aside for the moment what is the right move. It’s hard to say what details obtain in respect of Iran, because so many of the facts are national secrets in both Israel and America. It’s not hard to say that America and Israel intervening in each other’s politics has become something of a tradition in both countries. Somehow voters in democracies have their own ways of sorting it all out.