Robert Fulford: Obama believes in Israel as a valuable long-time ally. He just gets angry when Israel doesn’t obey
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Robert Fulford
Friday, Feb. 13, 2015
For years he's been trying to set the policy of Israel and for years Netanyahu has been resisting. AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
For the sake of diplomacy and political reputations, the mutual irritation felt by President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has for years been muffled by the habitual gentility of international rhetoric. Recently, however, their conflict has exploded into a public row. The cause of their rift is, of all things, a speech.
John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress on March 3. Obama didn’t issue the invitation and isn’t happy about it. He won’t attend and won’t even send his vice-president. He’s suggested the speech might interfere with Israel’s election two weeks later, in which Netanyahu is favoured to win a fourth term as prime minister.
Obama’s critics have pointed out an inconsistency: In 2008, after being chosen as Democratic presidential nominee, he went on a tour to beef up his international credentials, visiting half a dozen countries — including Israel. Anyway, there’ll be no Netanyahu visit to the White House.
The core of the disagreement is Iran. Congress is considering a law to impose crippling sanctions on the Iranians unless they convince Congress that they are not building a nuclear weapon. Obama doesn’t want that law passed and has threatened to veto it. He believes his administration will soon reach an agreement with Iran that will satisfy the same demands.
The Republican-dominated Congress will consider Netanyahu’s views, which are predictable: He doesn’t trust Iranian promises. Years of diplomacy have not delayed nuclear development “one iota,” he says. The schedule for the current negotiations, the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) calls for the framework agreement on March 24 and a comprehensive deal by June 30.
“We will do everything and will take any action to foil this bad and dangerous agreement,” Netanyahu says. He doesn’t know exactly what the P5+1 will produce, since Israel wasn’t invited to the meetings. But he believes he knows roughly what it will be. He sees Iran as a threat to the life of Israel, “the gravest threat to our existence since the war of independence.” He’s discussed (and apparently still discusses) bombing as a way to eliminate it. The Obama administration, given its history of maladroit and erratic judgments in foreign affairs, can’t be trusted to carry off something so delicate as a binding agreement with Iran. On that point Israel’s views make good sense.
Obama’s supporters believe Netanyahu is violating protocol by going around the President to talk to Congress. Pro-Obama reporters are doing their best to collect anonymous quotes from various experts who expect the speech to cause harm. Some Israelis, and some leaders of American Jewish organizations, predict that it will sour U.S.-Israel relations if Netanyahu doesn’t cancel his visit.
On three successive days this week he felt called upon to confirm that he’s speaking, because it’s his duty. On both sides, for and against the speech, people are aggrieved, annoyed, miffed, indignant and angry. Republicans and Democrats, Americans and Israelis, are taking umbrage (to revive a word from yesteryear).
In this Dec. 3, 2014 file photo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a faction meeting at the Knesset, Israel's parliament in Jerusalem. AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner, File
This is a policy conflict but in a sense it’s also personal. David Axelrod, who was Obama’s senior advisor, provides an unrehearsed account of his former boss’s feelings in his new book, Believer: My Forty Years In Politics. Axelrod says that in the run-up to the 2012 election, Obama remarked that he had been “insufficiently forthright” in his first term. Since Axelrod wanted him to be “authentic,” he thought he might start expressing franker opinions. He especially wanted to be tougher on Netanyahu. When hopes for a two-state solution in Palestine ran aground, Obama blamed both sides but felt he had “pulled his punches with Netanyahu to avoid antagonizing elements of the American Jewish community.”
Obama, as he often says, believes in Israel as a valuable long-time ally of the U.S. He just gets angry when Israel doesn’t obey him. For years he’s been trying to set the policy of Israel and for years Netanyahu has been resisting. Obama seems not to get the point of the prime minister, a proud patriot who has fought and been wounded as a soldier in the Israeli special forces — and believes, after years spent in America, that he understands the U.S. far better than Obama understands Israel.
Worse, Obama seems unaware that Iran is building an empire through its terrorist proxies, most recently in Yemen. An Iranian empire would be enormously strengthened by its possession of the ultimate weapon.
National Post
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