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Conservative talkers and some in the non-monolithic Jewish community may be applauding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to take up House Speaker John Boehner’s offer to in effect give President Barack Obama and the State Department a fingered half a peace sign and speak to Congress anyway, but the decision is also now bringing increased condemnations — and warnings. Those who defend Netanyahu paint him as example of a profile in courage — going ahead with a speech to warn the U.S. Congress to avoid what could be bad deal with Iran that could threaten Israel’s existence.
But there are an increasing number of voices who consider him a politician blantantly trying to boost his election chances, by using President Barack Obama as a foil, willing to become a participant in the unprecedented insertion of a foreign leader directly into America’s 24/7 partisan wars — and taking the step of speaking to the U.S. Congress in a speech by a foreign leader that is also unprecedented because it was not cleared in advance and still is in fact opposed by the White House.
Here are some chunks of two of the most notable recent columns about the consequences of Netanyahu’s action and is transparent political meaning and significance for Israel and America’s political process.
Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in his monthly foreign affairs column for The Washington Post, in a column “At what price Netanyahu?”:
Do we really need the Israeli prime minister to appear before Congress to explain the dangers and pitfalls of certain prospective deals on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs? Would we not know otherwise? Have the U.S. critics of those prospective deals lost their voice? Are they shy about expressing their concerns? Are they inarticulate or incompetent? Do they lack the wherewithal to get their message out?
Not exactly. Every day a new report or analysis warns of the consequences of various concessions that the Obama administration may or may not be making. Some think tanks in Washington devote themselves almost entirely to the subject of Iran’s nuclear program. Congress has held numerous hearings on the subject. Every week, perhaps every day, high-ranking members of the House and Senate, from both parties, lay out the dangers they see. The Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and others publish countless stories on the talks in which experts weigh in to express their doubts. If all the articles, statements and analyses produced in the United States on this subject could be traded for centrifuges, the Iranian nuclear program would be eliminated in a week.
Nor can it be said that we are somehow unaware of Israel’s views on this deal. It is not as if our news media will not report Israeli concerns and complaints. The statements and opinions of the Israeli prime minister, of members of his government and of the military and intelligence services are amply covered in the United States. Israeli officials — including the prime minister — can and do travel to the United States to express their concerns, with or without presidential invitations…..
…..Given all this, can it really be the case that the American people will not know what to think about any prospective Iran deal until one man, and only one man, gets up to speak in one venue, and only one venue, and does so in the first week of March, and only in that week? That is what those who insist it is vital that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speak before a joint meeting of Congress next week would have us believe.
He details the arguments of those defending and championing the speech White House and State Department are making and notes there will be a price:
I will leave it to the Israeli government and people to worry about what damage the prime minister’s decision could have on U.S.-Israeli relations going forward, and not just under this administration. Those Americans who care most about that relationship will also have to weigh whether the short-term benefits of having Netanyahu speak will outweigh potential long-term costs. Looking back on it from years hence, will the spectacle of an Israeli prime minister coming to Washington to do battle with an American president wear well or poorly?
For the United States, however, there is no doubt that the precedent being set is a bad one. This is not the first time that a U.S. administration and an Israeli prime minister have been at loggerheads. President George H.W. Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, reportedly detested then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir and did their best to help him lose his next election. Baker even had a few choice words for the American Jews who tried to come to the Israeli government’s defense. Did anyone at the time think of inviting Shamir to address Congress? The very idea would have been regarded as laughable. Now, we’re supposed to believe that it’s perfectly reasonable.
Is anyone thinking about the future? From now on, whenever the opposition party happens to control Congress — a common enough occurrence — it may call in a foreign leader to speak to a joint meeting of Congress against a president and his policies. Think of how this might have played out in the past. A Democratic-controlled Congress in the 1980s might, for instance, have called the Nobel Prize-winning Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to denounce President Ronald Reagan’s policies in Central America. A Democratic-controlled Congress in 2003 might have called French President Jacques Chirac to oppose President George W. Bush’s impending war in Iraq.
I’ve made the same point in several forums and have given up leaving comments. Those who defend Netanyahu insist it’s not breaking precedent — since we’re now in the 21st century where people repeat a mantra over and over and feel that the repetition of a political or ideological mantra that may not become accurate makes it a fact. It’s like Lucy in Peanuts insisting to Charlie Brown that snow comes up from the ground. Or, they start talking about Barack Obama on a host of other issues: changing the subject is another tiresome, truly trite device done to death these days.
But Kagan nails it with his final comment:
Those who favor having Netanyahu speak may imagine this is an extraordinary situation requiring extraordinary measures, that one side is so clearly right, the other so clearly wrong. Yet that is often how people feel about the crisis of their time. We can be sure that in the future the urgency will seem just as great. The only difference between then and now is that today, bringing a foreign leader before Congress to challenge a U.S. president’s policies is unprecedented. After next week, it will be just another weapon in our bitter partisan struggle.
And, yes, this will be the new reality: After Netanyhu’s speech, foreign leaders can directly insert themselves into America’s political process and receive the backing of a built in network of one political party and its media infocomplex. Democrats will take note and it’ll be the new normal in this new century and going forward. As far as the speech, it is now such a partisan event that you can skip watching Fox News and just imagine the praise he’s likely to get and you can tell in advance what certain websites will write.
Meanwhile, in Israel, the newspaper Haaretz (I contributed to it’s op-ed page from Madrid when I wrote from Spain the mid to late 1970s) blasted Netanyahu in an editorial titled, “Netanyahu insists on wrecking Israel’s ties with United States” — yet another sign that Mr. Boehner’s invitation of Mr. Netanyahu coming here without first checking with the White House and then defying the executive branch on going ahead with the speech is not universally applauded in Israel. A chunk of that:
For three and a half decades, ever since the peace agreement with Egypt was signed, Israel has enjoyed strategic security as well as diplomatic and economic cooperation with the United States. But this important arrangement, which worked well as long as each side knew its role in the equation, is liable to be gravely impaired by Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions.
It seems the Israeli prime minister, due primarily to electoral considerations, is determined to act like a wrecking ball. On the eve of Israel’s election, Netanyahu is insisting on damaging Israel’s most important relationship. His grip on power is shaky, and he’s acting like someone who has nothing to lose.
Instead of respecting the American president and refraining from intervention in his domestic and foreign policy, Netanyahu is insisting on embarrassing Barack Obama in his home court. He will challenge Obama on Capitol Hill and urge the president’s political opponents to disrupt his diplomacy with Iran, just so that he can portray himself as the “savior of the nation” back home and please his master, American billionaire Sheldon Adelson, an avid supporter of both Netanyahu and the Republicans.Warnings were sounded from the moment Speaker of the House John Boehner, together with Netanyahu and his ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, concocted this anti-Obama address to a joint session of Congress, and these warnings are coming true every day.
So you can’t dismiss those critical of Netanyahu as merely being liberals, Democrats, secret Democrats who won’t admit it, or anti-Semitic or not concerned about Israel’s future. MORE:
If Netanyahu were a responsible leader, he would never have gone so low as to engage in a frontal confrontation with the U.S. president.
Instead, he would have made sure to forge an alliance of interests with Obama based on mutual understandings. Then, surely, he would have been able to exert significant influence over the negotiations with Iran, whereas his speech isn’t expected to have any influence at all, aside from destroying Israel’s relationship with the United States.
This flawed judgment, which betrays the trust the public reposed in him as a leader and a statesman, bolsters the need to elect a different prime minister. And one of that premier’s first tasks will be to fix what Netanyahu has destroyed.
Read the entire editorial.
In reality, Netanyahu is acting more like someone who is a Republican in the House of Representatives with the Department of Homeland Security funding bill in front of him, rather than the Prime Minister of a country and someone who operates under long-accepted diplomatic norms.
But it now seems like Netanyahu will get what many think he really wants: to use Obama as a device to win re-election. Haaretez’s Anshel Pfeffer calls Obama his “greatest asset.”
Israel relies on its alliance with the U.S. in ways that few other countries do, and the damage he is currently causing will outlive Obama’s last term. But for now Netanyahu is living in the short term.
It’s not just Obama’s singular inability to fight dirty that has enabled Netanyahu to take advantage. While the great majority of Israel’s political and diplomatic establishment is up in arms at his recklessness, the American president has no well of sympathy or respect to draw on to build an effective political counterattack.
As in so many countries, Obama has succeeded in dramatically letting down both sides of Israel’s political divide.
Netanyahu’s rivals, including Labor leader Isaac Herzog, are no fans of what they see as Obama’s foolhardy drive to sign a deal with the Iranians at all cost. And while the Israeli left wing yearns for a diplomatic settlement with the Palestinians, it is aghast at the ineptness of his administration’s efforts to move the peace process forward.
Unlike previous presidents, Obama made scant effort to court Israeli public opinion and is deeply unpopular here. On many levels U.S.-Israel security and diplomatic cooperation during the past six years has never been so close, but this fact has failed to register with the voters.
Likud figures privately are describing the furor surrounding the speech as a win-win situation. Now, no matter how the administration reacts, Netanyahu will score with his base, and all the criticism of his government’s social and financial policies and revelations about his personal affairs are being drowned out by the row with Washington.
At this point, a backlash may even work in Netanyahu’s favor. He has snookered the president into a position that no matter how he responds, he is likely to help Likud gain the right-wing votes it lacks to ensure it is the largest party on March 18.
Obama is currently Netanyahu’s greatest political asset.
And so the political interests of John Boehner, many conservative talkers and conservative writers and Netanyahu now converge.
It’s about whipping up the base.
If Netanyahu loses his PM race, he now has the partisan creds to join CPAC and get a job as a Fox News paid contributor.
Photo: By Benjamin Netanyahu on September 14, 2010.jpg: US State Dept. derivative work: TheCuriousGnome (Benjamin Netanyahu on September 14, 2010.jpg) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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.