The “Defeat” of Obama and the “Victory” of Netanyahu

Will the results of America’s midterm elections — which returned control of the House of Representatives to the Republicans — be a new pretext for slowing down the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, or will they be, contrary to Israeli estimates, an incentive for American leadership to accelerate these negotiations?

In other words, to what extent is it right to adopt the theory held by the leaders of the Likud party that the “defeat” of President Obama’s party translates into a “victory” for the leader of their government, Benjamin Netanyahu? Does the presence of a “weak” president in the White House in the middle of his first term, as Likud believes, mean that his political priorities will turn from foreign affairs — specifically the application of pressure on Israel to freeze settlement construction — to an effort to improve his image at home, hoping to be elected for a second term?

It’s clear that the Likud government is relying on this as a way to buy time in the current race between the settlements and the negotiations, especially given that its leader, Netanyahu, considers himself to be more familiar with the United States’ domestic political game than the rest of Israel’s leaders, by virtue of the years he lived there while pursuing his university studies.

Here, it may be beneficial to remind Netanyahu that American electoral races have shown that a Democratic president’s loss of his Congressional majority does not necessarily mean that he will be prevented from guiding his country’s foreign policy. Neither does it mean, in Obama’s case, that he won’t pursue the foreign policy goals as he has defined and publicly declared them.

With regard to the setting of U.S. foreign policy, the American president’s decision, as he is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, enjoys clear operational predominance over Congress’ votes. Perhaps the best example of the predominance of presidential authority over rulings by a majority of the House and Senate is the Zionist lobby’s failure, even with the support of the overwhelming majority of Congress, to pass a 1995 bill.

At that time, Congress was controlled by a Republican majority during the administration of the Democratic president Bill Clinton. It adopted a bill calling for the American embassy in Israel to be moved to Jerusalem, thus consecrating it as Israel’s capital. And even though this bill was passed by a majority of 93 votes to five in the Senate, and a majority of 374 votes to 37 in the House of Representatives, President Clinton rejected it and informed the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, and the Senate Majority Leader, Bob Dole, that he would not take a step that would jeopardize American national security and at the same time impede the peace negotiations. He thus suspended the order to move the embassy to Jerusalem, a position taken by his successor, George Bush, and then by Barack Obama.

It may be easy for the Zionist lobby in Washington, in the event of Republicans gaining a majority in Congress, to support majority movements to block several of the Democratic administration’s domestic programs.

But American foreign affairs, specifically the Middle East conflict, have been and still are at the forefront of the personal concerns of every American president since Jimmy Carter. This invites the conclusion that even if President Obama wanted to separate himself from his role in settling the Middle East conflict, he would still be forced to be involved — either so as to avoid Palestine’s probable turn away from progressing with the negotiations, or so as to compete with the wave of Islamic and European countries (and Russia) moving to submit a proposal to the United Nations decreeing their acknowledgment of a Palestinian state within the June 4, 1967 borders.

Realistically, if Likud’s leaders thought that Obama’s “weakening” translated into a “victory” for Netanyahu, then the true “victor” of his weakness would be Iran and Hamas, and others like them.