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Forget what you’re hearing on some conservative talk shows or reading on some conservative websites or in comments sections on Facebook or blogs. The fact is most Americans do NOT think Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should have been invited by Republican leaders without first checking with the White House.
And in fact, neither do most Israelis these days.
All the other claims that there’s nothing wrong with it, that it isn’t unprecedented is that lunch meat that goes very well with mustard. And I don’t mean salami. A new CNN/ORC poll:
A large majority of Americans believe that Republican congressional leaders should not have invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to Congress without consulting the White House, according to a new CNN/ORC survey.
The nationwide poll, released Tuesday, shows 63% of Americans say it was a bad move for congressional leadership to extend the invitation without giving President Barack Obama a heads up that it was coming. Only 33% say it was the right thing to do.
And as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to simmer in the Middle East, the survey found that a similar majority thinks the U.S. should stay out of that fight altogether.
In case you’ve missed the furor basically engineered by House Speaker John Boehner:
House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Netanyahu sparked a minor international incident and further strained already tense relations between the U.S. and Israeli leaders. Netanyahu is expected to make the case to Congress next month for increased sanctions on Iran, a key point of contention between the Israeli leader and Obama, who has been urging Congress to hold off on further sanctions for fear of jeopardizing nuclear talks with the nation.
Obama has said he will not meet with Netanyahu during his visit because the trip comes too close to Israel’s elections. A growing number of Democrats in both chambers have announced over the past two weeks that they won’t be attending the speech, prompting some to question whether the Israeli leader should cancel or move his speech.
Many GOPERs also feel Boehner was wrong:
Though the speech has become a partisan issue on Capitol Hill, even Republicans are split on whether it was a good idea for leadership to invite Netanyahu without alerting the White House, with a slight majority — 52% — backing the move. Just 14% of Democrats say it was the right thing to do, and just over a third of independents support the move.
Add that together: it’s one more instance of the party’s farthest right, talk show political culture faction being on the wrong side of the majority of the American public.
Couple this with an Israeli poll:
A poll published Saturday night found a majority of Israelis are against a planned speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the US Congress that has been opposed by the White House as well as many within the US Jewish community
The survey, conducted for Channel 2, sampled 405 Israeli Jews, and had a margin of error of 4.8%. Its results suggested most do not believe the address will succeed in preventing an emerging US-brokered deal between world powers and Iran over the latter’s nuclear program.
In response to the question, “Do you think Prime Minister Netanyahu should travel to speak before the US Congress?” a majority of 52% said no, compared to 36% in favor. A further 12% said that they didn’t know whether Netanyahu should go.
An even higher number, 62%, said a Netanyahu speech would not be able to stop the expected deal, which Israel has said will not go far enough in dismantling Iran’s nuclear program.
Netanyahu intends to argue before Congress that international pressure should be increased on Iran, rather than the proposed easing of sanctions under the terms of the deal.
While 43% said they doubted Netanyahu’s speech would prevent the deal and a further 19% said they were sure it won’t prevent it, 23% said it might block the agreement. Just 7% said they were sure it could. A further 8% said they didn’t know.
Meanwhile, a new report has come out in Israel blasting Netanyahu for his lavish personal spending, the Los Angeles Times reports:
In a scathing report with potential political and criminal repercussions, Israel’s state comptroller sharply criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday for excessive spending of public funds in his official and private residences.
The highly anticipated report, which came just four weeks before Israeli elections, faulted Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, for using public funds to spend lavishly on a variety of personal goods and services, including cleaning, clothing, water and grooming, between 2009 and 2012. The spending dropped after that.
Netanyahu defended his behavior, but political opponents seized on the report. Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog said he found the findings infuriating.
“But it is not because of how you conduct yourself in your homes that the public wants to replace you, but because you have destroyed our home,” Herzog wrote on Facebook. “We will replace you because on your shift, Hamas grows stronger … young couples cannot buy a house … because you eat a $5000 breakfast when every third child in Israel goes to bed hungry.”
The Netanyahus live and work in the official prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem and keep a private home in Caesarea, one of the country’s priciest spots. According to the report by Comptroller Joseph Shapira, spending on both often far exceeded necessity, formal budgets and good taste. In addition, the report pointed to improprieties in management of finances, human resources and external contractors.
When Netanyahu took office in 2009, expenses at both residences totaled roughly a half-million dollars a year. By 2011, that had roughly doubled before dropping to about $600,000 in 2013. Food and hosting expenses alone started out at about $55,000 and more than doubled to about $125,000 in 2011. After a modest cut in expenses the following year, expenses for 2013 dropped to near the 2009 level.
leaning both residences came with a particularly high price tag: an monthly average of about $20,000 between 2009 and 2013, including more than $2,000 a month for the Caesarea house, which was usually empty. Shapira found this spending “significantly exaggerated.”
About $20,000 a year was spent to order meal deliveries, despite employing an in-house cook. These and other expenses, Shapira wrote, were “not compatible with the basic principles of proportionality, reasonability, economy and efficiency.”
Personal grooming expenses for the prime minister and his wife totaled well over $100 a day, which Sharpira found to be more than double the budgeted amount.
Some of the findings could lead to criminal proceedings.
Go the link to read it in its entirety.
In Europe, Netanyahu has now angered many leaders there including Jewish leaders by saying that due to recent attacks and an increase in antisemitism in Europe, Jews should migrate en mass to Israel. The Guardian:
European leaders have rejected calls by the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, for Jews to migrate en masse to Israel, pledging to ensure their safety at home.
Following shootings in Copenhagen at the weekend, Netanyahu echoed remarks he made after the Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January, saying on Sunday: “This wave of terror attacks can be expected to continue, including antisemitic and murderous attacks. We say to the Jews, to our brothers and sisters, Israel is your home and that of every Jew. Israel is waiting for you with open arms.”
But the French prime minister, Manuel Valls – who was speaking after several hundred Jewish headstones were vandalised at a cemetery in eastern France – said that he regretted Netanyahu’s call, noting that the Israeli prime minister was “in the midst of a general election campaign”.
The French president, François Hollande, insisted on Monday that he would not allow people to believe that “Jews no longer have a place in Europe” . “Jews have their place in Europe and, in particular, in France,” he said.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said her government would do everything possible to make sure Jewish sites were secure. “We are glad and thankful that there is Jewish life in Germany again,” Merkel said in Berlin. “And we would like to continue living well together with the Jews who are in Germany today.”
Denmark’s chief rabbi, Jair Melchior, said he was disappointed by Netanyahu’s remarks. He said on Sunday: “Terror is not a reason to move to Israel.
“People from Denmark move to Israel because they love Israel, because of Zionism but not because of terrorism. If the way we deal with terror is to run somewhere else, we should all run to a deserted island.”
His comments were echoed on Monday by Denmark’s ambassador to Israel, Jesper Vahr….Rabbi Menachem Margolin, head of the European Jewish Association, also condemned Netanyahu’s call for mass migration of European Jews to Israel as unacceptable, while calling on Europe’s governments to improve security for Jewish schools, synagogues and other establishments.
After initially insisting he had given the White House warning, on Sunday Boehner switched his story and admitted that he didn’t want the White House to know in advance because he didn’t want any “interference” from Obama — truly unprecedented behavior for a Speaker of the House.
UPDATE: Doug Mataconis writes:
Historically, support for Israel has been a bipartisan affair from which there was very little dissent. It was a Democratic President, Harry Truman, who was among the most important supporters of the establishment of the State of Israel, for example, and while the relationship between the U.S. and Israel during the 1950s and 60s was quite different than it it today, the two nations have maintained a close relationship over what nearly amounts to 70 years at this point regardless of which party controlled the White House. Additionally, at the Congressional level Israel has always enjoyed strong support from Republicans and Democrats alike. There have been moments of tension, of course, such as during the Suez Crisis in the 1950s, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s, and intermittently over the entire Israeli-Palestinian issue. For the most part, though, critics of Israel in both parties have been in the minority. In recent years, though, and especially since Barack Obama became President, the issue of the U.S. relationship with Israel has taken on a decidedly partisan tone in the sense that it has often seemed as though the President’s critics in the Republican Party have become stronger supporters of the current Prime Minister of Israel than of the President of the United States. Speaker Boehner’s decision to go over the President’s head and invite Netanyahu to speak is arguably just the latest manifestation of that trend.
Viewed in that context, these poll numbers are likely more a reflection of the fact that the public does not approve of Congress undercutting the President on foreign policy in such an open and direct manner. In that sense, it’s arguably consistent with other polling that has shown the public’s dislike of how the Republican Congress has acted in its interactions with the President such as during the debt ceiling showdown in the summer of 2011 or the government shutdown fiasco of 2013. For that reason, I tend to doubt that this one incident will have much of a long-term impact on the American public’s perception of Israel. However, these numbers should stand as a warning to Prime Minister Netanyahu that it isn’t necessarily in his country’s interests to get involved in an internal American partisan dispute in the manner that he has let himself be this time.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.