Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambled everything on his effort to derail President Obama’s Iran diplomacy. He openly supported his 2012 general election opponent. He even accepted a secret invitation to speak before a joint session of Congress for the express purpose of trying to sabotage a signature element of the Head of State’s foreign policy agenda. It’s widely agreed across the political spectrum that at the level of top leadership, US-Israel relations are at their lowest point in decades, despite the fact that the security relationship has actually grown closer and more robust since 2009. The only debate is whether confronting the dangers of the Iran deal merited the risk to the relationship. So Netanyahu bet everything and he lost. With those facts, you might be thinking that for most politicians this would be a terrible setback or even the end of their career. But, as Asher Schechter explains here, nothing could be further from the case.
To see this, you need only look at what has been happening in Israel since the deal was announced. Virtually across the political spectrum, party leaders have lined up to denounce the deal, often using Netanyahu’s own language to do so. Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog has even suggested that his Labor party may enter into the governing coalition, given the new political and security realities created by the deal. Indeed, the only attacks on Netanyahu have not been for his opposition to the deal but that he bungled the ability to stop it – opting for grandstanding, public attacks on the President rather than quieter, more effective persuasion. The key point is it’s not at all clear that the military establishment (which has always been highly skeptical of Netanyahu on this front) supports his rejectionist line. The far-ranging, obstreperous, disorganized and endlessly mutually backstabbing political establishment has disappeared almost entirely behind Netanyahu on this issue.
One might say, well, sure everyone agrees with him. But the deal he sees as a disaster went through. So how can that be a triumph?
I don’t doubt that Netanyahu believes what he says about the Iran deal, though I think the intensity of the reaction is about fears about the U.S. role in the Middle East more than a possible Iranian nuclear weapon. However that may be, Netanyahu is a fundamentally political animal. He’s a man of the Israeli political right certainly. But he’s a political survivor and defender of his own hold on power more than anything. And it’s not just his personal hold on power.
Netanyahu stumbled back into power bruised and brutalized this spring. Yes, his party had staged a massive come-from-behind victory. But when it came to forming a government, he had the narrowest of majorities with only a single center-right party to leaven the hard right coalition he formed. His standing was sullied internationally and even among some domestic supporters because of the nature of his victory. Now he has the entire political nation to the right of the MKs from the Arab Parties united behind him on this issue. That doesn’t just make his own personal longevity in office look longer, it also signals a continuing governing majority for the rejectionism that he has embodied and which has served Israel so poorly in recent years.
