Battlegrounds 
 
 His visit to Jerusalem could be a turning point for the GOP. Why a tide of super-PAC funds and Obama’s shaky diplomatic relations might loosen Democrats’ grip on Jewish voters. 
 
 On the eve of Mitt Romney’s trip to Israel, America’s Jewish vote may be in play in ways that it has not been in the past. Traditionally, most Jewish Americans have voted for Democrats. In 2008, President Obama got between 74 and 78 percent of the Jewish vote. But 2012 might be different. 
 
 “It would be difficult for Republicans to get 35 percent of the Jewish vote, but it’s not impossible,” said Mik Moore, the treasurer of the Jewish Council for Education and Research, the super PAC that produced and financed the Web video in which comedienne Sarah Silverman offers to allow billionaire casino-executive Sheldon Adelson an evening of lesbian-style sex known as “scissoring” if he pulls his support for Romney. 
 
 Adelson has promised to spend $100 million of his own fortune to defeat Obama. He will be with Romney in Israel and will help host a fundraiser for the candidate while he’s there. 
 
 Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said he thought more Jewish votes were in play this year. “I think there is probably 15 to 20 percent of the Jewish community that is realistically undecided and conflicted at this point and this is what we are all fighting for,” he said. A Gallup poll released Friday found Jewish registered voters favored Obama over Romney by 68 percent to 25 percent. 
 
 Mitt Romney will arrive in Israel on Saturday afternoon to make a bid for both undecided Jewish voters but also the evangelical Christians, who are a key Republican constituency and are strong supporters of Israel. 
 
 While in Israel, Romney will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as key members of his national-security cabinet on Sunday. He will also meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who is seen by Republicans and Democrats as a reformer, but not with the Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. Romney on Sunday evening will attend a dinner at Netanyahu’s home to mark the breaking of the Jewish fast of Tisha B’av, a holiday that commemorates the destruction of the first and second temples of the biblical Israelites. 
 
 Netanyahu is scheduled on Sunday also to deliver a speech on the U.S.-Israel relationship. Briefing reporters on a conference call Friday, Dan Senor, a senior adviser on the campaign, said the speech will highlight how “the challenges and threats to Israel are challenges and threats to America. And the opportunities awaiting Israel are opportunities awaiting America.” 
 
 The symbolism of the trip is important for Romney. To start, President Obama has not visited the Jewish state since coming into office despite multiple trips to the region, including Israel’s neighbor, Egypt, and Israel’s former ally, Turkey. But the trip is also important as a contrast between Obama’s relationship with Netanyahu and Romney’s relationship with Netanyahu. 
 
 Romney has known the Israeli leader since 1976, when both were corporate advisers for the Boston Consulting Group. Netanyahu’s chief of staff, Ron Dermer, is a protégé of Republican pollster Frank Luntz. 
 
 Obama has had a notoriously chilly relationship with Netanyahu. During a visit to Washington in May 2011, Netanyahu famously lectured Obama during a photo opportunity on how Israel could not withdraw to its borders before the 1967 war. A year before that, Obama was furious after an Israeli housing authority announced new settlement construction in an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem during a visit from Vice President Biden. More recently, Obama spokespeople have declined to acknowledge Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in press conferences. Since the 1990s, Democratic and Republican presidential candidates have promised to move the U.S. embassy from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. In office however, President Clinton, President Bush, and now President Obama have stuck by a policy that considers the status of Jerusalem to be something that must be negotiated in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. 
 
 These snubs and disagreements will be amplified in the 2012 election cycle because of a tide of unregulated and undisclosed money following the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which overturned independent expenditure limits in U.S. campaign-finance laws. 
 
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 Those independent expenditures include a new $6.5 million campaign from the Republican Jewish Coalition targeting Jewish voters. Adelson is one of the financial backers of the campaign. 
 
 A new group called the Emergency Committee for Israel has launched a series of ads in Jewish newspapers this week attacking Obama’s record on Israel, claiming that he has placed undue pressure on the Jewish state. A new Web and television ad from the group contrasts Obama’s 2008 speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, l where he said he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, with recent statements from White House spokesman Jay Carney declining to answer the question of where the administration believes Israel’s capital is. 
 
 “I don’t want to see Obama get 78 percent of the Jewish vote again and the RJC and the Emergency Committee are important parts of the conversation and they hold the president accountable for what has been a bad record on Israel,” said Mark Isakowitz, a member of the Romney finance committee and a board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition. 
 
 Alan Solow, a national co-chairman of the Obama-Biden reelection campaign, said he is expecting to be hit hard with these kinds of independent expenditures. 
 
 “We are anticipating that they will spend a lot of money to try to mischaracterize the president’s record on Israel,” Solow said. “The reason they have to spend so much money is that they don’t have a case. Rather than stick to the facts and look at what the president has accomplished, they will spend a lot of money to convince people of an alternative reality and we believe they will fail.” 
 
 The Obama campaign will highlight a series of moves the president has taken to strengthen support for Israel’s defenses, such as a special aid package to help finance the development of Iron Dome, a missile-defense system designed to shoot down portable short-range rockets. Under Obama, U.S. diplomats have helped defeat the Palestinian campaign for recognition by the U.N. On Friday, Obama signed into law the U.S.-Israel Enhanced Cooperation Act, a bill that extends loan guarantees for Israel and authorizes more spending on Israeli defense. 
 
 Solow said the Obama campaign is just getting started to make this case to Jewish voters in swing states and to donors. At the same time, he acknowledged that Obama’s initial efforts at making peace between Israel and the Palestinians have not been successful. 
 
 “We have been trying to solve this problem since 1948—no president has been 100 percent successful in achieving peace between Israel and its neighbors,” he said. “I give President Obama lots of credit in trying to untie this knot. He tried some things that didn’t work, and in response to things that didn’t work, he made adjustments to his policy.” ||||| Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney sits down with "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelly. 
 
 President Obama and his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, tangled over their varying approaches to foreign policy in dueling “60 Minutes” interviews that aired Sunday, with the president brushing off Romney’s charge that he has been weak on national defense and charging that if Romney “is suggesting that we should start another war — he should say so.” 
 
 
 
 The debate on the campaign trail is likely to turn to foreign policy once again this week with Obama slated to address the United Nations on Tuesday in New York at the organization’s annual gathering. 
 
 
 
 In an interview with the CBS program taped on Sept. 12, he defended his efforts to bring the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to a conclusion and touted his order to kill Osama bin Laden. And he pushed back against recent pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pinpoint what conditions he would require before launching a military attack on Iran to prevent that country from obtaining a nuclear weapon. 
 
 PHOTOS: Mitt Romney’s campaign gaffes 
 
 “When it comes to our national security decisions, any pressure that I feel is simply to do what's right for the American people. And I am going to block out any noise that's out there,” Obama said. At the same time, he said he feels an obligation — “not pressure, but obligation, to make sure that we're in close consultation with the Israelis on these issues. Because it affects them deeply.” 
 
 
 
 Obama also tried to deflect criticism from Romney for his decision not to meet with Netanyahu this week at the U.N. The White House said the meeting was impossible because of scheduling conflicts. As he has on the trail, Romney said in the "60 Minutes" interview that the decision “sends a message throughout the Middle East that somehow we distance ourselves from our friends and I think the exact opposite approach is what’s necessary.” 
 
 
 
 The two men were pressed on their chief vulnerabilities in 2012. In the face of criticism from Romney, who has portrayed him as a hapless commander in chief who is ill-equipped to tackle the nation’s economic challenges, Obama pointed to 30 months of job growth and his tax cuts for middle-income Americans. His opponent’s agenda, he said, would amount to going “backwards to the very policies that got us into this mess.” 
 
 
 
 “The problem that Gov. Romney has is that he seems to only have one note: tax cuts for the wealthy and rolling back regulations as a recipe for success,” Obama said. “Well, we tried that vigorously between 2001 and 2008. And it didn't work out so well.” 
 
 
 
 Romney’s campaign has been foundering since the end of the two party conventions — he has slipped behind Obama in a number of key swing state polls, and he was criticized by even some leading Republicans for criticizing the president’s handling of an attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that led to the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. And the Republican presidential nominee has spent the last week trying to explain his secretly-taped comments at a spring fundraiser that his job “is not to worry about” the 47% of Americans who pay no federal income tax. 
 
 PHOTOS: Obama on the campaign trail 
 
 CBS Anchor Scott Pelley noted that a number of donors and Republican voters were watching to see how he would turn his campaign around. 
 
 
 
 “It doesn’t need a turnaround,” replied the former Massachusetts governor, who insisted that he would win in November. “We’ve got a campaign which is tied with an incumbent president.” 
 
 
 
 Romney was pressed by Pelley about whether his shifts on key issues like abortion should lead voters to question his fidelity to his beliefs. Romney charged in response that Obama has changed positions on a number of issues, such as the closure of the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, his decision to allow military tribunals to continue there, and his shift to support same-sex marriage. 
 
 
 
 “The principles I have are the principles I've had from the beginning of my political life,” Romney said when pressed about his own evolution by Pelley. “But have I learned? Have I found that some things I thought would be effective turned out not to be effective? Absolutely. If you don't learn from experience, you don't learn from your mistakes—why you know, you ought to be fired.” 
 
 
 
 Romney also touted his tax plan to reduce current income tax rates by 20%, but he said Americans should not expect “a huge reduction in the taxes they owe,” because he said his plan would also limit deductions and exemptions. Though Democrats have skewered his plan as favoring the rich, Romney said he would maintain the progressivity of the tax code—“there should be no tax reduction for high income people.” 
 
 PHOTOS: Paul Ryan's past 
 
 
 
 His aim, he said, is a tax reduction for middle class families by cutting taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains. But the Republican candidate again refused to name the specific tax deductions and exemptions he would phase out, insisting that he and his running mate Paul Ryan would work out those details with Congress. 
 
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 maeve.reston@latimes.com 
 
 Twitter: @maevereston
– Benjamin Netanyahu hasn't done such a great job concealing that he'd prefer a President Romney to President Obama, and as it happens, his donors feel the same way. Nineteen of Netanyahu's wealthiest US donors also contribute to the Romney campaign, the Republican Party, and/or other GOP candidates, a Haaretz investigation has learned. What's more, not one Democrat has donated to Netanyahu's campaign. Romney has repeatedly criticized Obama for his often contentious relationship with Netanyahu, and that continued today in an op-ed on foreign policy in the Wall Street Journal in which he accused Obama of dismissing Israel's concerns about Iran. "At a time when Israel needs America to stand with it, he declined to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu," Romney wrote. He also accused Obama more broadly of allowing "our leadership to atrophy" in the Middle East, complaining that he had no "strategy for success" during the Arab Spring. Click for Romney's full op-ed.