The Carrot and the Stick

At the moment, the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians carries out the media arena, and at least in America, at least this week, at least in public relations, Netanyahu has recorded an achievement.

Sunday morning, long lines of guests stretched past the metal detectors at the entrance to the Washington Convention Center. In one of the lines stood Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, noticeable from afar for her height and tight blue skirt suit. She waved to all of her acquaintance, a great many in each queue to her sides.

She heads The Israel Project and woke up this morning to drive to the convention center and make it in time for President Barack Obama’s speech. Like everyone else two days after the ’67 lines speech, she wanted to hear Obama’s remarks on whether and how he intends to iron out the difficulties.

Jennifer knew it was going to be a long day with no time to eat. Before leaving the house, she threw a few carrots into her purse to have something to snack on. But when she reached the security guards scanning personal belongings, she found out carrots were prohibited at the entrance to the meeting hall. The guard told her she could possibly hurl the carrots at the president, so he confiscated them.

Obama himself brought some carrots to the Sunday reconciliation speech: several updates defining his position regarding the ’67 lines and resolute promises that he will safeguard Israel’s qualitative edge and its security. After Obama’s having raised and struck a stick three days prior, this speech was a sort of placating address. An address a la “even if there are controversies, we are all friends.”

Obama gave his speech and departed to meet the Queen of England. He left behind him a clear field for the prime minister, who has a lot of friends in Washington. Netanyahu has used this field to the utmost. The lucky ones who got to enter the visitor’s gallery of the U.S. Congress on Tuesday received ornate invitations of green card stock with a gilded margin as a frame and the round seal of the House of Representatives in its upper left corner.

These were invitations to a political event that in retrospect proved to be a rock performance. The music was the content; the applause, the index of its success; new ideas for promoting the peace process, not to be had. The journalists who, in the past few months, had heard rumors and leaks about the bunny Netanyahu was going to pull out of his hat, discovered that the bunny was the magician himself.

The American administration was not terribly surprised. From the very beginning, the level of their trust in Netanyahu has not been high. When Netanyahu reacted decisively to Obama’s first speech on the Arab Spring last week, the administration thought he went too far. It thought Netanyahu was insolent when he waved his finger in front of the president’s face in the White House.

When they saw him delivering a speech in Congress, they shook their heads in a mix of appreciation and dislike — yes, he knows how to speak in public. Some were more vitriolic and remarked that his speech had not been political but a promotional attempt. This is an argument heard against Netanyahu in Israel, too, but there’s an implicit presumption in it that Netanyahu apparently does not accept: Israel has the capacity to effectively renew the peace process. If Netanyahu is positive that there is no such possibility, the important struggle between Israel and Palestine is indeed conducted at the moment in the publicity arena, and, at least in America, at least this week, at least in public relations, Netanyahu has recorded an accomplishment.

Who’s for the ’67 lines?

Two hours after the Netanyahu tornado had passed, after the prime minister and the entourage trailing behind him had already left the Capitol, and once the Israeli reporters had been seated for the post-Netanyahu speech briefing, the American legislators got back to their work. In the Rayburn Building, the Subcommittee on Terrorism, [Nonproliferation and Trade] of the House Foreign Affairs Committee gathered to discuss the future of al-Qaida.

At that time, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations assembled for a hearing to approve the nomination of William “Bill” Burns as Deputy Secretary of State. A past American ambassador to Jordan who will play a central role in the Obama administration’s upcoming political moves in the Middle East, Burns has a lot of acquaintances in Israel, in both the present government and the preceding ones. “Ambassador Burns’ deep base of experience in the Middle East,” said senior Republican Committee member, Richard “Dick” Lugar, “is critical as the United States forges new relationships with governments in the region and responds to transformational events.”

This experience will be helpful, of course, only on those occasions when the president is ready to hear good advice and also follow it. This seems not to have been the case in the 1967 lines speech, which includes several formulations re-written to the president’s taste after he disagreed with the [expert] opinions of which he was appraised.

Not even three days have passed since Netanyahu’s address, and already the administration has split into a number of discernible camps. I identify three of them. The first claims that nothing important has occurred; the situation is no more than a malfunction, a local brawl. The policy has not changed, and the friendship has not been affected, so [we] should proceed as if nothing has happened. The second camp postulates that the administration is wrong, that Obama’s speech went too far, that it would have been possible and necessary to do it better. The third group is looking for an opportunity for revenge – a friendly revenge, of course. What is regrettable is that in the administration itself, as well as in the Israeli government, many assume that Obama himself belongs with the third camp.

I hope Burns will help convince him otherwise and come up with a more successful policy for Obama than that recommended to the president by the two senior journalists whom he summoned for talks in his office for that very purpose. Tom Friedman from the New York Times and Fareed Zakaria from Time Magazine had emerged as nasty critics of the Netanyahu government even before Obama called upon them to supply him with strategic advice, and the two have come across as even harsher this week.

“[I]t makes my heart warm that the president calls you for wisdom and advice,” Elliot Spitzer divulged to his fellow host Zakaria of CNN. For anyone who might have forgotten, Spitzer is a liberal Jewish Democrat and former New York State governor, compelled to resign when exposed to be a customer of an exclusive prostitution network. In his current career as a media personality, it turns out that he does not belong to Netanyahu’s fan club either. This week he published an article whose headline asserted that “The Israeli prime minister picks a stupid, unnecessary, and wrong fight with President Obama.” Among the press, both American and Israeli, fewer hands have applauded Netanyahu than those heard in Congress.

Who’s in favor of Obama’s speech?

In this week’s summary, you can also divide those responding to the round of strikes between Netanyahu and Obama into three groups. There are the Spitzers, who don’t understand what Netanyahu wants and support the president and his decision to base American policy on the 1967 lines. The members of this group are senior media people, a few Democratic lawmakers, some of the Obama administration, leftist groups and Arab lobbyists. Last Thursday, a few hours after the president’s speech, the White House held a conference call with Jewish leaders in order to clarify its moves.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of the Jewish left-wing lobby group J Street, asked the first question. He was satisfied with the president’s speech, but not completely content with the answer he got on the phone. Ben-Ami asked what the White House intended to do in order to realize the vision the president had specified in his speech. Obama’s officials answered that nothing would be done as now was not the time. This means even Obama’s associates understand that the negotiation is still far away and the president’s vision is, for the moment, no more than a declaration of intent.

Anyhow, the members of this group lined up on Obama’s right recently, though they’ll start howling soon, asking, “Why doesn’t he do more?” “Why is he not pressuring for change?” “Why did he not appoint a replacement for George Mitchell?” (One answer is that those in government have trouble imagining some crazy person taking such an impossible mission upon himself.)

The second group consists of those who do not accept Obama’s formula, but prefer to assume that this is about foolishness and not about wickedness; the policy is simply poorly planned and does not demonstrate hostility toward Israel on Obama’s part. “Events in the past several days isn’t [sic] about pro- or anti-Israel,” asserts Aaron David Miller, formerly of U.S. State Department and part of President Clinton’s peace team. “[I]t’s about whether the Obama administration is acting dumb or smart, and let’s just say events…suggest the president isn’t being real smart.”

Rob Satloff, head of the Washington Institute, where the president’s senior adviser Dennis Ross worked before joining the government, reasoned last Friday that the president made an “odd” decision, constituting “a major departure from long-standing U.S. policy” such that Obama “undermined the potency and effect of his own message by unveiling a new — and controversial — set of principles guiding U.S. efforts to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

Netanyahu’s people, who landed in Washington a few hours before the meeting with the president, liked Satloff’s interpretation. The current battle reminded him of Reagan’s 1982 plan that had also surprised Israelis. In response to that plan, the Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin responded firmly by famously stating, “We are not a banana republic.” Like the Reagan Plan, Obama’s new proposal is currently no more than words. The plan will go nowhere. It just does not have anywhere to go.

The members of the third group are mostly Republicans. They believe that Obama is “An Anti-Israel President,” the title of hawkish columnist Bret Stephens’ article in Tuesday’s hawkish Wall Street Journal. The party’s presidential candidates (whose number has been shrinking over the last couple of weeks) compete among themselves throwing around condemning epithets about the president, who, as former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney expressed, “threw Israel under the bus,” the American version of throwing someone to the dogs.

The Republican candidates are trying to persuade voters that similar sentiment is wide-spread among Democrats, the president’s own party, as well and that the Democrats do not support Israel to a decent degree. The presidential GOP candidates intend to turn the discussion about Israel into a political field of fire, in spite of Netanyahu’s explicit announcement to Congress that Israel is supported by members of both parties and despite his categorical request not to make Israel a bone of contention.

Who truly supports Israel?

On Tuesday, Mathew Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, sent a letter to Jewish Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. Apparently they will never be friends. In Premier Netanyahu’s presence on Monday, a skirmish began between the two.

Republican and Democratic Jewish representatives were invited to meet with Netanyahu. The National Jewish Democratic Council showed up armed with Wasserman-Schultz, a vigorous senior legislator. Brooks’ coalition brought a different kind of cannon, the billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a friend of Netanyahu. The meeting was tense. The Democrats suggested both parties refrain from making Israel into a subject of political controversy; the Republicans considered the idea problematic but agreed it was not the right time for a dispute. According to Republicans, Democrats are aware that Israel is a sensitive point, yet they are less supportive toward it; as such, the party receives potentially harmful political criticism.

Therefore, Democrats want to avoid an argument that they can only lose. In contrast, Republicans actually want to argue. On Tuesday, Brooks sent a letter channeling this exact spirit, writing, “[I]n our meeting with the Prime Minister, you appealed to us, in front of the leader of a foreign nation, to pledge to refrain from any debate about these matters. I do not think that the timing or the venue you chose for raising this issue was appropriate.” The Democrats, he claimed, embarrassed the guest, the prime minister, and tried to stifle the debate.

It was not an easy week for the Democratic Party, which had a hard time producing a uniform tone in response to the president. Only a handful publicly sided with him, among them Jewish Rep. Howard Berman. The president’s stance, he appealed, “is fully consistent with Israel’s right to have defensible borders and to retain its settlement blocs.” Yet a few Democrats took a clear-cut antagonistic posture against their president.

On Wednesday, fashionably late, Washington Post editors picked up on the statements by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and a slew of others. The newspaper’s headline informed Obama, who was visiting Europe, of who had lost and who had won in the short and unnecessary fight with Netanyahu: “Democrats join Republicans in questioning Obama’s policy on Israel.” A very short notice the administration provided Netanyahu concerning what was to be in the speech reveals that the incident was not harmless or unimportant but a deliberate attempt to set a trap for Netanyahu.

Shelley Berkley, house representative from Nevada and, as of today, a candidate for a senate seat, was among the bitterest of Obama’s critics. “I am extremely troubled by President Obama’s call for Israel to ‘act boldly’ for peace,” she said. In her viewpoint, it is not Israel that should act.

Berkley’s mood was well reflected in the comments her colleague from Nevada Harry Reid made to the AIPAC delegates, reminding them he is “a senior Senator from the state of Nevada, the home to the fastest growing Jewish community in the country.” This is a common misconception, which Harry Reid is not the first to repeat. Most Jews in Nevada live in Las Vegas, the twenty-third largest Jewish community in the United States. Either way, many influential Jews live in Nevada, and Reid has enough reason to bolster Israel even at the price of confrontation with the president.

His state is fairly conservative, and Israel is not an issue that attracts attention solely from the Jewish community. It is one that numerous Americans regard as a litmus test for the right kind of foreign policy. On the morning of Netanyahu’s speech in Congress, USA Today published a small graph of the sort it presents every day. More than a half of Americans, the statistics determined, study the Bible on a regular basis. These are the Americans for whom the following passage was included in Netanyahu’s address: “In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers. We are not the British in India. We are not the Belgians in the Congo.” And exactly what is our status in America? This proves more complicated to explain.