Netanyahu, President of the American Right?

Around 20 years ago, a former Republican candidate for the American presidential elections compared the United States Congress to an “occupied Israeli territory.” In 2015, it is inconceivable that a Republican leader could express himself with such perfidy. Indeed, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ideas effortlessly, and without encountering any resistance, dominate the inner sanctums of Washington [alongside] members of Congress. They encounter more opposition in the Israeli Knesset.

This cannot be explained only by [referring to the] Republican majority in the two houses of Congress, because the Democrats and President Barack Obama himself hardly ever say no to the Israeli right and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, its powerful lobby. Defending Obama’s cause before the lobby, United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Powers pointed out that over the last six years President Obama had contributed $20 billion to Israel’s security [1].

Nevertheless, partly for religious reasons linked to the resonance among the most conservative evangelists of woolly theories on the Apocalypse, and partly because the Republican Party — like the current Israeli prime minister — love to evoke a West surrounded by enemies (generally Muslim) in order to justify more armed interventions and even greater military spending, Prime Minister Netanyahu has become the hero of the American right. He is its very own Winston Churchill, a man they would rather have as their head of state than the current tenant of the White House, whom they loathe to the point of endlessly questioning his patriotism and even the American nationality written in his passport. [2]

During Israel’s latest deadly expedition in Gaza, and carried away by the resources deployed, Ann Coulter, one of the stars of Fox News, admitted: “I wish we could have Netanyahu as our president. I mean, yes, sometimes Palestinian kids get killed. That’s because they are associated with a terrorist organization that is harming Israel. And Netanyahu doesn’t care what the religious leaders say weeping about Palestinian children. He doesn’t care what the U.N. says. He doesn’t care what the media says. We are a country. We have borders. And Netanyahu enforces them. Why can’t we do that in America?”

And so, without informing President Obama, Republican leader of the House of Representatives John Boehner invited this “firm-handed man” so he could explain to the members of Congress that the White House’s Iranian policy is threatening the very existence of Israel. The Israeli prime minister — a specialist in communications and with a long experience of the United States, where he was his country’s ambassador to the United Nations and which earned him hundreds of media invites — made a point of gathering in front of the Wailing Wall, and several cameras, before leaving for Washington; and while he was there, he relentlessly compared the Iranian regime with that of the Third Reich.

Faced with the blunt, if not rude, nature of this approach, President Obama showed himself to be much bolder than usual: He immediately made it known that he would not receive the Israeli prime minister; and that neither Vice President Joseph Biden nor Secretary of State John Kerry would attend the formal address of the Likud leader, whose goal of lambasting their administration’s foreign policy was met with a round of thunderous applause from the members of Congress. About three years ago, to explain the unusually visible commitment of Mr. Netanyahu during Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign against Mr. Obama, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz was already highlighting the fact that the Israeli prime minister “doesn’t just speak English, or even American, he speaks fluent Republican.”*

Will Benjamin Netanyahu’s tedious diatribe in front of the United States Congress enable him to make any agreement between Washington and Tehran politically impossible by presenting it as a new Munich, and Mr. Obama as a new version of Chamberlain? Will it assure him of an electoral advantage, allowing him to once again be victorious at the elections on March 17? In any case, this time “Bibi the American” seems to have achieved the impossible in the United States: He has antagonized a part of public opinion that until [now] was largely on his side, irrespective of what he did or said.

Notes:

[1] Moreover, the Obama administration opposed its veto to all UN resolutions criticizing Israel, including when they just reprised American wording. The United States also quit UNESCO when Palestine was admitted in 2011.

[2] Last Feb. 18, Mr Rudolph Giuliani – former mayor of New York and former Republican candidate to the White House – declared: “ I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.