Bibi thinks he can push the U.S. around. Think again.
The
most generous explanation for Benjamin Netanyahu’s brazen,
election-season attack on the Obama administration is that it’s a
product of the prime minister’s desperate worries about Iran. And
clearly, Netanyahu is desperately worried—in a way that most of Israel’s
professional security experts are not. They’re mostly worried about
1949: an Iranian nuke that undermines Israel’s dominance in the Middle
East, just as the Soviet Union’s atomic test undermined American
dominance back then. Bibi, by contrast, is worried about 1942: he’s
worried that millions of Jews again face extermination and that, he
virtually alone among world leaders, sees the coming Holocaust, which
is, indeed, enough to make you lose your cool.
But
the problem with this more charitable analysis is that Netanyahu has
been brazenly intervening in American politics—often with an eye to
screwing Democratic presidents—since long before he became obsessed with
Iran. It’s just the way he rolls. In 1989, as Israel’s deputy foreign
minister, Netanyahu pushed Congress so hard to scuttle the nascent
dialogue between the United States and the PLO that James Baker briefly
had him banned from the State Department. In 1998, three days after the
Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Netanyahu, in a previous stint as
Israel’s prime minister, addressed a rally organized by Clinton
tormenter Jerry Falwell. Falwell later said, “It was all planned by
Netanyahu as an affront to Clinton,” who was pushing Netanyahu to
fulfill Israel’s obligations under the Oslo agreement by ceding
significant land in the West Bank to the Palestinians.
Perhaps
because of his deep ties to America—he attended high school, college,
and graduate school in the United States, and held U.S. citizenship
until he was in his 30s—Netanyahu has long exuded an extraordinary
confidence that he could make the American government bend to his will.
In his memoir, Dennis Ross recalls that after Netanyahu’s first meeting
with Bill Clinton as prime minister, Clinton remarked in bewilderment,
“He thinks he is the superpower and we are here to do what he requires.”
In
other words, Netanyahu’s decision to publicly call out Hillary Clinton
over Iran last week, soon after his tirade against U.S. Ambassador to
Israel Daniel Shapiro, is not only about Iran. It’s about Netanyahu’s
general belief that when push comes to shove, U.S. leaders can be moved
in the direction he wants them to go. And given the way the Obama
administration folded after Netanyahu publicly rebuked the president for
proposing negotiations based upon the 1967 lines plus land swaps last
May, there was no reason for Netanyahu to believe that he couldn’t act
the way he always had.
Which
makes the Obama team’s sharp-elbowed response all the more remarkable.
Not only has the White House not given Netanyahu the deadline for
military action that the P.M. reportedly wants, it also refused him a
meeting when he comes to the U.S. later this month. Rattled by the
administration’s anger, opposition leader Shaul Mofaz and Netanyahu’s
own defense minister, Ehud Barak, both reprimanded him for jeopardizing
relations with the United States.
Why,
this time, did Netanyahu’s intervention fail? First, because he hasn’t
closed the deal at home. Over the past 18 months, top security
professionals who served under Netanyahu have expressed discomfort—even
horror—at his push for a unilateral Israeli strike. Almost immediately
after Netanyahu demanded that the U.S. establish “red lines,” about
which Iranian behavior would prompt an American strike, Dan Halutz, who
led the Israel Defense Forces until 2007, said the U.S. should do no
such thing.
The
second reason Netanyahu’s efforts have failed is that Obama isn’t as
politically vulnerable on Iran as some assumed. Mitt Romney doesn’t talk
much about the subject, partly because it’s not a top concern for
voters, and partly because voters don’t particularly trust Romney on
foreign policy anyway. That’s largely true for Jews as well. According
to an American Jewish Committee poll early this year, only 4 percent of
American Jews cited Iran’s nuclear program as their No. 1 voting issue
(and most of them are likely in Romney’s camp already).
But
perhaps the most fundamental reason Netanyahu’s attacks have backfired
is the simplest: this is about war. It’s one thing to pressure an
American president into backing down on the peace process. It’s another
to pressure him into attacking another country. It’s offensive and
absurd to expect a president to commit himself to war by a date certain
before having taken his case to the American people. Americans do not
want Iran to go nuclear, but this is a country weary of war. And,
increasingly, it is a country weary of Netanyahu as well.
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