All eyes will be on Secretary of State Clinton next week, when she addresses the annual conference for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Will we see the Hillary Clinton who, when she represented New York in the senate, so often spoke in support the Jewish state? Or will we see the Hillary Clinton who was thrown off stride at the start of her first senatorial campaign when the Forward ran out on its front page a scoop saying she had been in a “secret sit-down” with big Arab-American campaign contributors hostile to Israel? At the time the Forward was accused of scandal-mongering, but the aftershocks ended up on the front page of the New York Times, when Mrs. Clinton announced she would return the anti-Israel lucre. She went on to win the race.

The question of which Hillary Clinton is the real one has hung over her ever since, and certainly there has never been a more shocking glimpse of the old Hillary Clinton than the tirade she directed Friday at Prime Minister Netanyahu. She was angry over the timing of Israel’s announcement of the 1,600 housing units being planned for Jews to live in the eastern part of the city. It is a city that the Congress of the United States has, by an overwhelming vote, declared should recognized as Israel’s capital and be an undivided city. The announcement came while Vice President Biden was visiting Israel in a trip that was intended to reverse the disillusionment with President Obama that has taken hold among Israel’s voters ever since the new president’s speech at Cairo.

“Jolting Joe” sabotaged his own trip, which is now being labeled by The Daily Beast as “disastrous.” By our lights, Mr. Biden did this by turning the announcement, by Israel’s interior ministry, of the planned housing into something a great deal more than it was. The right move would have been to welcome the prospect of new housing (one can bet that’s what Sarah Palin would have done), particularly since, when Mr. Netanyahu agreed to a settlement freeze on the West Bank, America accepted that he wouldn’t freeze construction in Jerusalem.* But Mr. Biden was about to decamp for Ramallah. At least he could have done is accept Prime Minister Netanyahu’s apologies for the timing. Instead, Mrs. Clinton has piled on, while the Europeans, the Russians, and the United Nations are being beckoned to pile on as well. Not to mention the Palestinian leadership threatening to bolt the peace process they don’t believe in to start with.

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Is there a partner for Messrs. Obama and Biden and Mrs. Clinton in Israel? They clearly despise Mr. Netanyahu and the political tradition he represents. But the Labor Party, once the dominant political institution in the country and the one that would in theory have the most in common with the Democrats here, has been reduced to little more than a cipher. It has been in decline, more or less, since Ehud Barak, himself a great hero in battle and now the defense minister, lost his premiership when he cast aside his own campaign promises and offered, during the Clinton presidency, to divide Jerusalem. He was promptly ousted from office through the use of that quaint contraption known as an election. The only American leader since then who seemed to respect Israel’s democratic decisions — and God’s covenant with Abraham — has been President George W. Bush. What a skilled operator he turns out to have been compared to the current administration. We will see whether Mrs. Clinton can reverse that impression when she goes before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in a few days time.

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*Ever since Olso this pattern has been a problem for Israel — Jerusalem arrives, after hard bargaining, at some purported agreement with the Americans, the Palestinians, or the Arabs, only to discover shortly afterward that this agreement no longer exists in the other party’s eyes. West Bank settlement construction itself — which the Oslo agreement, at Israel’s insistence, expressly did not ban — is an example.