Jeff Goldberg walks through the Boehner/Netanyahu Pact on every conceivable path and can’t find one where it’s not a disaster. Too true. Painfully true. To be clear, he’s talking about a disaster for Israel and its security – not necessarily Netanyahu’s electoral fortunes. He doesn’t address that. Jeff also sees the move – or at least does so in this article – exclusively through the lens of Netanyahu’s Iran fixation. I tend to think domestic politics plays a very large role as well. I would find the nature of the Iranian threat to Israel more convincing if the leaders of Israel’s defense establishment saw it the way Netanyahu does. And they do not. Unlike Rabin, Barak or Sharon, he is no military man, though he served in one of the IDF’s elite units as a young man. But that question is almost secondary to the key point Jeff makes, which is that in a fight he almost certainly cannot win (coercing Obama into abandoning his Iran policy) he is directly and immediately threatening – and more than threatening, concretely damaging – a lynchpin of Israeli security: the US alliance. The damage is not just with this President, who after all will be out of office in less than two years, but with Democrats and even American Jewry.
There’s another point though that Jeff gets to toward the end of the piece. In that article last year most known for the “chickenshit” blind quote, Jeff reported that Netanyahu has told associates that he’s “written off” Obama.
This is frankly insane. The problem is not one of ingratitude or wrongheaded policies but a profound estrangement from reality.
For an Israeli leader to “write off” a sitting American president – almost whatever his disagreements with him – is akin to a cardiac patient ‘writing off’ his cardiologist when there is none other available. Maybe he’ll be replaced by another cardiologist in a couple years. Or maybe he won’t.
This is a topic that I’ve thought a lot about in the last few years. It is almost as if the US-Israel bond and alliance has become so strong, so all-encompassing and fulsome that Israeli leaders have simply lost touch with reality.
I told you earlier that there’s a core on the far-right in Israeli politics that genuinely thinks that Israel has put up with quite enough grief and hectoring from the United States. And it needs to tell the US to bugger off, find some new great power allies and get on with kicking ass unfettered. This is truly insane. As a Jew and a Zionist I would find this hilarious if it were not so insane and potentially tragic.
Obviously Netanyahu and his clique doesn’t believe this. But they do appear to see the relationship as entirely one of taking and have little sense that the relationship is one to be managed as a sheet anchor of state security as opposed to a relationship between equals in which the alliance is frequently subordinated to the momentary needs of coalition politics. No sense of limits or grounding in fundamental realities. It summons up an image of the man standing out on the branch who takes out his saw and imagines he’s sawing off the tree.
If Netanyahu truly believed that Iran was a singular and existential threat – and perhaps he does, which only makes him doubly a fool – he would not fritter away good will and trust on housing tenders, lectures to US officials, repeated refusals to accommodate even the most marginal US policy initiatives. Again, it is as though the relationship has become so fulsome that it’s left the likes of Netanyahu (and worrisomely the public who places him in office) in a sort of dream world in which there’s is no balancing of threats and advantages, no discernment between wants and needs.
