As you can see here, Prime Minister Netanyahu has doubled down on attacking President Obama and European leaders for allegedly ‘giving up’ on efforts to stop Iranian from acquiring nuclear warheads. But in the course of his scorched earth campaign for reelection, he’s done something as yet little noticed in the US. He’s run a campaign ad which not only hugely distorts history but also managed to libel the US.
In the ad Netanyahu explicitly places himself as a latter day ben Gurion, standing up to a United States betraying the embryonic Jewish state. Indeed, the ad claims that Israel might not even exist today if ben Gurion hadn’t defied the United States and declared Israeli Independence in May 1948. The precise chain of events is complicated. But this is at best a willful distortion of what happened. John Judis goes through the history in some detail here.
While the US did not move into its current level of alignment with Israel until after the Six Day War and especially in the 1980s, the United States was at least a critical force if not the critical force in providing the diplomatic basis and support for Israel’s birth.
But the ad is a falsehood on a deeper level. Nothing was more essential to ben Gurion’s theory of geopolitics than the belief that Israel, a small country among hostile neighbors, required the backing a Great Power, which he increasingly over the years identified as the United States. It also needed a powerful army which could not only defend the country but provide the deterrence to make life there possible. But the necessity of a great power alliance was never far from his mind and it recurs again and again in papers.
To the extent we can manage the anachronism of placing someone from the past in a future they never knew, ben Gurion would never have played the game Netanyahu is now playing. That’s not to say for a moment that he would have been indifferent to the Iran threat. Far from it. But I think most students of the man would agree he never would have approached the critical protective role of the US alliance in this way.
