After six weeks of madness, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before
Congress and delivered a speech about the nuclear threat posed by Iran. It was
a terrific speech. It was not a remarkable speech, because nothing the Israeli
prime minister said came as news to anyone who has been paying attention to the
issue for the past decade.
What made his speech and its occasion of particular note
were the atmospherics. It has been years since an address by a politician in
the United States had been so hotly anticipated, and it wasn’t even to be
delivered by an American. The anticipation was due entirely to Barack Obama’s
incendiary response to the speaking invitation extended to Netanyahu in January
by the Republican House leader, John Boehner.
The president’s displeasure and rage continued to grow, to
the point that a few days before the speech, no less a personage than National
Security Adviser Susan Rice said it would be “destructive of the fabric of the
relationship” between the United States and Israel. On the day of the speech,
the Democratic Middle East operative Martin Indyk declared on CNN that it was
“the saddest and most tragic day” for the relationship in all his 35 years as a
water-carrier.
In this case, we fear, the wish is father to the threat.
Susan Rice and Martin Indyk see the relationship between Israel and the United
States on a downward spiral because they and their boss want it so. Obama does
not like the special status Israel seems to enjoy in the United States—not only
because its particularistic and nationalist claim offends him ideologically,
but because Israel’s popularity with the American people limits his freedom of
action.
The relationship between the United States and Israel is in
jeopardy because, from the moment his administration began, Barack Obama has
consciously, deliberately, and with malice aforethought sought to jeopardize
it. He did so in part because he is committed to the idea that Israel must
retreat to its 1967 borders, dismantle its settlements, and will a Palestinian
state into existence. He views Israel’s inability or unwillingness to do these
things as a moral stain.
But the depth of Obama’s anger toward Israel and Netanyahu
suggests that there is far more to it than that. Israel stands in the way of
what the president hopes might be his crowning foreign-policy achievement: a
new order in the Middle East represented by a new entente with Iran.
Netanyahu’s testimony on behalf of his country and his people is this: A
nuclear Iran will possess the means to visit a second Holocaust on the Jews in
a single day. His testimony on behalf of everyone else is this: A nuclear Iran
will set off an arms race in the Middle East that will threaten world order,
the world’s financial stability, and the lives of untold millions. Simply put,
Obama finds the witness Israel is bearing to the threat posed by Iran
unbearable.
Elliott Abrams has called the speech kerfuffle a
“manufactured crisis.” He is right, and the assembly line has been rolling
without letup for six years.
Barack Obama came into office determined to put daylight
between the United States and Israel. A few months after his inauguration, he
met with Jewish leaders to discuss growing concerns about the bilateral
relationship. One leader, Malcolm Hoenlein, told the president: “If you want
Israel to take risks, then its leaders must know that the United States is
right next to them.” Obama responded thus: “Look at the past eight years.
During those eight years, there was no space between us and Israel, and what
did we get from that? When there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the
sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states.”
Obama sought to make “daylight” almost immediately by
picking fights with the new government of Benjamin Netanyahu, who came into
office only weeks after Obama’s inauguration. The administration made no secret
of its hopes that Netanyahu’s government would fall and be replaced by the
supposedly more pliant opposition leader Tzipi Livni.
While the White House and the State Department have consistently
portrayed Netanyahu as a man bent on obstructing Obama’s policies, the record
shows otherwise. From the start, Netanyahu has sought to accommodate the Obama
administration’s wishes as much as possible without jeopardizing Israel’s
security.
In May 2009, Obama met with Netanyahu and told him bluntly
that “settlements [on the West Bank] have to be stopped in order for us to move
forward.” Israel complied; Netanyahu announced a 10-month settlement freeze,
which was supposed to trigger a new round of U.S.-led peace talks. But for nine
months Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas refused all invitations to
negotiate. In the 10th month, Abbas sat through exactly two talks before
abandoning negotiations once again. Yet Obama offered this assessment in a
January 2010 interview with Time: “Although the Israelis, I think, after a lot
of time showed a willingness to make some modifications in their policies, they
still found it very hard to move with any bold gestures.”
Like all its predecessors, the Obama administration is a
stern critic of Israel’s West Bank settlements and sees them as an obstacle to
peace. But the administration’s particular obsession was not Jews sitting on
remote hilltops or in areas many if not most Israelis saw as expendable—but rather
the Jewish presence throughout unified Jerusalem. Though no American government
had ever recognized Israeli sovereignty over the capital, the Obama
administration was the first to consider normal growth in Jerusalem’s
40-year-old Jewish neighborhoods (in parts of the city that had been illegally
occupied by Jordan, from 1949 to 1967) as a deliberate and outrageous
provocation.
This came to a head in the spring of 2010 when a routine
announcement of a housing project in one of those Jerusalem neighborhoods
(which had specifically been exempted from the freeze) coincided with a visit
to Israel by Vice President Joe Biden. Netanyahu found himself on the receiving
end of a 43-minute telephone tirade from then-Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton. She accused Netanyahu of sending a “deeply negative signal” that had
“harmed the bilateral relationship.” Such condemnations were repeatedly echoed
in the press from multiple administration figures.
The administration clearly hoped its expressions of rage
could be leveraged to force Israel to agree to end such construction—and
encourage the Palestinians to realize that the United States would back them in
negotiations. But rather than isolate Netanyahu, the U.S. attack on Jewish
Jerusalem strengthened him, because defending the unity of the city remains one
of the few issues on which there is consensus in Israeli politics.
Even as relations continued to deteriorate—Israel’s
then-ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, told a group of Israeli
diplomats in 2010 that U.S.–Israel relations were at their lowest point since
1975—Netanyahu moderated construction in settlements. By the first half of
2014, Israel was building at its slowest rate since the 2010 freeze. (Indeed,
according to Israeli historian and archivist Yaacov Lozowick, no new
settlements have been built since 2003.)
In May 2011, President Obama gave a major address responding
to the Arab Spring protests, in which he chose to devote the last third to a
plan for a new round of Israeli–Palestinian talks—a non sequitur if ever there
has been one. The plan was to set the 1967 lines as the starting point for
future negotiations. The speech was timed to be delivered the day before
Netanyahu was to arrive in the United States for talks. Obama was attempting to
force a fait accompli.
Netanyahu earned applause at home and in the U.S. for
pushing back against Obama’s idea, which he rightly saw as an attempt to
undermine Israel’s negotiating position. Days later, Netanyahu spoke to a joint
session of Congress where both Republicans and Democrats cheered him as if he
were the second coming of Winston Churchill, a spectacle that was rightly seen
as a rebuke to Obama’s slap at the Israelis. (That episode is crucial to
understanding the White House’s bitterness about Netanyahu’s recent speech to
Congress.) And like the previous arguments with Israel, this one would yield no
benefits to the United States, since not even this tilting of the diplomatic playing
field toward the Palestinians would be enough to nudge them to make peace.
The general antipathy toward the Israeli prime minister
ledWashington Post columnist Jackson Diehl to ask, in November 2011, “Why do
Sarkozy and Obama hate Netanyahu?” Diehl was writing on the revelation that
Obama and then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy had made comments, picked up on
a live microphone, about their dislike of the Israeli leader. Diehl pointed out
that Obama’s problem with Netanyahu was obviously personal: “Netanyahu has been
an occasionally difficult but ultimately cooperative partner. He can be accused
of moving too slowly and offering too little, but not of failing to heed
American initiatives.”
After this incident, the administration put its campaign
against Israel on hold for the duration of the 2012 presidential election
campaign. It ceased sparring with Netanyahu and even moved toward Israel on the
subject of Iran.
Obama had always stated his opposition to an Iranian bomb,
but he had also consistently demonstrated his desire for a rapprochement with
Tehran. He was both slow and reluctant to embrace sanctions against the regime.
Throughout this period, the administration seemed more anxious about preventing
an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities than it was about the
nuclear threat itself. But in 2012, the president told the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee that he would never be willing to merely “contain” a
nuclear Iran. And during his foreign-policy debate with Mitt Romney, he pledged
that any possible deal with Iran would require it to give up its nuclear
program.
Once reelected, Obama reverted. He unleashed John Kerry, his
new secretary of state, to pursue yet another futile quest for peace with the
Palestinians. Despite
successful American pressure on Israel to agree to a
framework that accepted most of the Palestinians’ demands throughout 2013,
Abbas wouldn’t take yes for an answer. He eventually blew up the talks. The
Obama administration responded by placing the blame for Kerry’s failure on
Israel, arguing speciously that the problem was construction in Jerusalem and
in the settlement blocs that would be retained by Israel in any peace deal.
This administration’s willingness to blame the Jewish state
under virtually any circumstances was on display again, in the summer of 2014,
after rocket barrages on Israeli cities prompted Israel to launch a
counterattack on Hamas bases in Gaza. Though the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff would later cite Israeli efforts to avoid civilian casualties in the
fighting as a model for American troops, the White House and the State
Department criticized Israel for the deaths of Palestinians—who were being used
as human shields by Hamas. But far worse, and far more suggestive of Obama’s
true feelings, was the White House’s decision to try and use arms supplies as a
pressure point against Israel.
Throughout the Obama presidency, the president’s defenders
(and Netanyahu, in his 2015 address to Congress) have spoken of the
strengthening of the so-called strategic relationship with Israel as proof of
Obama’s sincere support for the alliance. It is true that Obama continued
funding for the Iron Dome missile-defense system initiated under the Bush
administration and did not obstruct the fostering of close ties between the two
countries’ defense and intelligence establishments. But the Gaza war revealed
the president’s discomfort with that closeness. When he realized that the
Pentagon, without his express permission, was resupplying Israel with ammunition
needed for fighting Hamas, he called a halt to it—supposedly to send a signal
he did not think Israel was being surgical enough with its surgical strikes. He
denied Israel bullets in the middle of a shooting war.
Meanwhile, the administration’s secret negotiating track
with Iran was making progress. And this brings us to the nub of the issue.
The true beating heart of the crisis between Israel and
Obama is Iran. The Islamic Republic does not merely harbor genocidal fantasies
about annihilating Israel; it boasts of them. The country was founded in 1979
on the theocratic vision of Ruhollah Khomeini, who made the destruction of
Israel a defining national objective. More than three decades later, Iran’s
leaders remain obsessed with the idea. It is, to their thinking, an unshakable
Islamic obligation. As recently as last November, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
publicly outlined a nine-point plan for eradicating the Jewish state.
More important than Tehran’s declarations are its actions.
In 2002, an Iranian dissident revealed two secret Iranian nuclear sites,
confirming—for those with eyes to see—the mullahs’ pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
In 2010, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declared that Iran had
worked on, or is working on, the construction of a nuclear warhead and has
experimented with detonation methods. IAEA inspectors have also found evidence
that the Iranians have clandestinely enriched uranium to levels that exceed
those needed for civilian energy and approach those required for a nuclear
bomb.
Iran’s religious hatred of the Jewish state combined with
its apparent pursuit of a nuclear weapon make it Israel’s chief security
concern. The overused term “existential threat” is the only one that applies.
As ISIS’s recent establishment of an Islamic caliphate shows, the nightmares of
committed Muslim radicals can come true.
Obama came to office declaring he would not permit Iran to
build a nuclear weapon and that “all options are on the table” for stopping it.
Repeating this assurance, he succeeded in getting Israel to refrain from
striking Iran on its own. Obama’s record, however, has discredited the
suggestion that he would take military action if necessary. He has demonstrated
an unyielding faith in diplomacy and seems to regard the use of force as almost
necessarily reckless. What’s more, he hoped—and hopes—to use diplomacy to make
the Shia theocracy “a responsible member of the international community,” in
Susan Rice’s words. This fanciful goal seems to have become Obama’s priority.
As his foreign-policy spokesman, Ben Rhodes, said: “This is probably the
biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy.
This is health care for us, just to put it in context.”
During his first term, Obama reached out to Tehran
repeatedly. He went through several third parties to offer Iran access to
civilian-grade nuclear energy. The mullahs rejected every overture. Despite
Iran’s obstinacy, Obama began his second term covertly imploring the Iranians
to sit down for direct talks with the United States. In 2013, Iran elected
President Hassan Rouhani, a regime hardliner who had enjoyed a public-relations
makeover as a “moderate.” The administration soon announced direct talks
between Washington and Tehran, talks that had been planned behind Israel’s
back. Netanyahu has been left to look on while the Obama administration chases
a dangerous nuclear deal with Iran.1
As Washington crafted its deal, Obama administration
officials took the opportunity to taunt Netanyahu for having complied with the
president’s request not to strike Iran. “The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,”
an administration official told the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. “The good
thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars. It’s too late for him
to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he
couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our
pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.”
Israel’s prospects for a strike on Iran’s nuclear program
have grown dim indeed. First, it’s a technically formidable undertaking. During
these past few years, Iran’s nuclear sites have become more diffuse and
entrenched. It may well be that the United States alone has the sufficient
resources and weaponry to disable Iran’s air defenses and do meaningful damage
to its various fortified facilities.
If Israel launches a strike that falls short of disabling
the Iranian nuclear program, Israelis would face the same Iranian threat along
with grave new problems. In addition to launching direct retaliatory strikes on
Israel, Iran might respond by blocking the straits of Hormuz and driving up oil
prices. Without the help of the United States, Israel would bear the global
outrage (and perhaps punishment) for the resulting destabilization. And
although Arab leaders would privately celebrate any blow dealt their Iranian
enemy, they too would publicly admonish the Jewish state. This would inevitably
further inflame the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel violence that now consumes the
Muslim world.
And if the United States has explicitly recognized Iran’s
right to enrich uranium, Israel would ostensibly be attacking a “legitimate”
nuclear-power state against America’s wishes. With the American–Israeli
alliance already at such a precarious point, this final act of Israeli
disobedience could tear open an almost unthinkable breach in the bilateral
relationship.
The fraying of the relationship has only served Obama’s
larger purpose vis-à-vis Iran. As his effort to get Democratic members of the
House and Senate to boycott Netanyahu’s speech demonstrates, Obama has spent
six years implicitly setting up a loyalty test: Democrats will be showing their
disloyalty to him if they show support for Israel as it does whatever it can to
prevent Iran from getting the bomb.
The breach with the Obama administration illustrates a basic
problem within the pro-Israel coalition inside the United States. During the
2012 campaign, Jewish Democrats were able to say that he had strengthened
security cooperation between the two countries. Their argument was shaken during
the Gaza war in 2014, when Obama cancelled the ammunition resupply.
Even so, the administration succeeded in the first months of
2015 in distracting many Jewish supporters of Israel from the looming bad deal
with Iran by focusing their attention on the supposed breach of protocol
represented by Netanyahu’s acceptance of Boehner’s invitation. Since most
liberal Jews view Boehner and the GOP Congressional majorities with almost as
much disdain as they do Israel’s enemies, and since many are not especially
supportive of Netanyahu, they were disinclined to back him against the
president.
Netanyahu was accused by the administration of injecting
partisanship into the U.S.–Israel relationship, but the true culprit here was
Obama. He was playing off the fact that his party’s members are far less
supportive of Israel than Republicans are.
According to Gallup, support for Israel among Democrats is
currently at almost exactly the same level it was in 1988. Now, as was true a
quarter century ago, 47 percent of Democrats sympathize with Israel. That was
before Israel signed the Oslo Accords, was subjected to an ongoing terror
campaign, withdrew from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank unilaterally,
publicly declared support for the establishment of a Palestinian state, and
made three separate final-status offers that would have given the Palestinians
a state with its capital in Jerusalem. And before Iran began developing the
bomb.
Republicans noticed. In 1988, their sympathy for Israel
vis-à-vis the Palestinians was at about the same level as the Democrats’; today
it’s at 83 percent. Independents noticed as well. In 1988, 42 percent of
independents sympathized with Israel; today that number has jumped 17 points to
59.
Israel’s good-faith negotiations and sacrifices for peace in
the face of unrelenting terror and incitement won over Republicans and
independents. Democrats remain unmoved. That consistency, and the partisan gap
it is creating in support for Israel, is far from reassuring.
During the war with Hamas last summer, the Israel Defense
Forces uncovered some 30-plus tunnels running from Gaza into population centers
in Israel to be used for mass terror attacks against Israeli civilians. The war
itself was touched off by steady rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel.
Israel’s goal was to stop the rocket fire and neutralize the tunnels, not to
overthrow Hamas or retake the Gaza Strip. When those objectives were reached,
Israel withdrew.
Yet a CNN poll found that only 45 percent of Democrats
considered Israel’s counteroffensive justified, compared with 56 percent of
independents and 73 percent of Republicans. According to Gallup, only 31
percent of Democrats considered Israel’s
actions justified. Astoundingly, a Pew poll recorded that
Democrats were evenly divided on whether Israel or Hamas was to blame for the
war.
Pro-Israel Democrats don’t simply have an ‘Obama
problem.’The president did not create Israel’s status as a wedge issue for his
party. He has only exploited it.
Certainly, the supportive voting record of Democratic
members of Congress acts as an important check on the rougher treatment Israel
would receive from an unfiltered expression of the party’s activist base. But
it also masks the anti-Zionist populism so prevalent on college campuses and
among leftist political pressure groups, and the anti-Israel sentiments
expressed by many black and Latino activists as well.
That filter can’t catch everything, even in this age of scripted
politics. During the 2012 Democratic National Convention, it was revealed that
references to God and to Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel had been
removed from the Democratic Party’s platform. Party officials moved to add the
language back in, which required a voice vote from the Democratic Party
delegates in the hall. The motion to restore the references was soundly
defeated.
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who was emceeing the
proceedings, was visibly shocked. He asked for a re-vote. The motion lost
again, with the crowd growing more agitated. Villaraigosa looked off stage for
direction. He turned back to the audience, held one more vote, and, amid a hail
of boos, declared the motion passed—despite its obvious and raucous defeat for
the third time in a row.
The incident was important not only because it showed that
the party’s delegates were opposed to traditional pro-Israel language in the
party’s platform, but also because that language had been removed in the first
place either at the behest or approval of the Obama campaign. Obama’s two
presidential campaigns have been notable for their ability to tap into the
zeitgeist of the party’s core supporters.
“Obviously, this is much bigger than two men,” CNN’s Dana
Bash said on March 1, two days before Netanyahu’s address to Congress. Indeed
it is. And it puts American Jews in a bind. American Jews still care deeply
about Israel—and still vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Recent polls show a
subtle rightward shift, but it is far too early to tell if that shift will stay
in place in 2016 and beyond. (Jimmy Carter hemorrhaged Jewish votes in 1980; in
1984, Walter Mondale won most of them back.) Nonetheless, the Democrats are
expected to nominate Hillary Clinton, who served as Obama’s secretary of state
and has had her own share of dustups with Netanyahu. And veterans of the Obama
administration will no doubt staff future Democratic White Houses. Is this,
then, the shape of things to come? If the answer is to be no, Jewish Democrats
are going to have to do more than find presidential nominees who paper over
this internal divide with platitudes.
They will have to address the growing conflict between
American Zionism and American liberalism. They will need not happy talk but
confrontation of hard truths. That will require recognizing that the momentum
is with the Occupy Wall Street protesters’ adopting the Palestinian cause as
their own, with the American professoriate shaping higher-education curricula
along with the minds and worldviews of their students, and with the progressive
activists who fill the arena at presidential nominating conventions and seek to
remake the Democratic Party platform in their image.
It means American Jewish organizations are going to have to
recognize that it will become more and more difficult to square the circle.
AIPAC tried just that in 2014, when it acquiesced to Democratic pressure and
did not send out its 10,000-strong team of citizen activists to lobby members
of Congress to support new sanctions.
AIPAC was caught between a rock and a hard place, but its
leaders surely know they made a terrible error in 2014—and have changed their
tune this year. Seen from one perspective, the failure to push sanctions
decreased the administration’s leverage at the negotiating table; from the
other, it gave Obama the freedom to acquiesce to Iran’s own demands.
On Capitol Hill, opposition to a nuclear Iran has always
been as bipartisan as support for Israel. Obama is making every effort to turn
it into a partisan issue so that he can peel off enough Democrats to sustain a
veto of legislation that would block a bad deal. Netanyahu’s triumph before
Congress made his job harder. Israel’s prime minister did what he set out to
do—to lay before Congress and the American people the nature of the threat and
the danger of such a deal.
Americans who care about Israel, and American Jews who care
not only about the Jewish state but also the condition of the Jewish soul in
the United States, must now follow his example. We cannot relent in our efforts
to fight against those who seek to drive a wedge between Israel and America—on
campuses, in the media, within elite institutions, and within both the
Democratic and Republican parties. The impending end of Obama’s political
career should make it easier for Israel’s government to make its case against
appeasement in both 2015 and 2016 as well as shore up wavering American Jewish
support. The manufactured crisis Barack Obama began in 2009 is not yet a
full-bore crisis either within the Democratic Party or within the American body
politic. But it will become one—if this existential threat, this spiritual
existential threat to American Jewry, is not dismantled.
Footnotes
1 The salient facts are these: First, the Obama
administration agreed to Tehran’s demand that the United States ease sanctions
on Iran in advance of any confirmed nuclear agreement. Second, the
administration recognized Iran’s right to enrich uranium to 5 percent despite
the fact that all Iranian enrichment is prohibited by the United Nations
Security Council. Third, Iran has ignored negotiation deadlines to win reported
concessions that would render the deal pointless. These include the right to
5,000–6,000 working centrifuges, enough to fuel a nuclear bomb within a year.
The administration has also reportedly included a “sunset clause,” which could
free the Iranians from the strictures of a deal within 10 years.
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