We Won! Sorry, Obama!

The morning after, all that was heard from the White House was silence. Instead of the usual congratulations to the winner and praise for the “democratic process,” the comment was merely a statement that President Obama would work closely with the representatives the Israeli people had chosen.

In the House of Representatives, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who had struggled to control her tears during Netanyahu’s campaign speech before Congress two weeks earlier, said Tuesday evening that relations with Israel would remain strong intellectually, emotionally and from a national security standpoint. She did not, however, mention Netanyahu by name.

The neocons in the United States, on the other hand, were jubilant, from those Republicans who didn’t want a two-state Palestinian solution to those who wanted no nuclear agreement with Iran. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz called Netanyahu’s victory all the more impressive because it came despite “the powerful forces that tried to undermine him, including, sadly, the full weight of the Obama political team.” Cruz is one of 47 senators who sent a letter to the Iranian mullahs in order to tell them there — instead of in the United States — that they would sabotage any international agreement with Tehran. One-time Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain triumphantly tweeted, “Sorry, Obama! Netanyahu declares victory in Israeli election!”

Liberal Jewish organizations in the U.S., among them Jewish Voice for Peace, J Street and the student group Hillel, have opposed Israeli government policies since the Gaza war and have noted that neither Netanyahu’s Likud Party nor Herzog’s Zionist Union offered any alternative path toward peace. Herzog ran on an economic equality platform, while liberal Jewish organizations in the United States ran in vain, stressing themes of a Palestinian peace and a halt to illegal settlement construction.

Conservative Jewish groups in America supported Netanyahu. Two weeks earlier, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby group, offered Herzog the usual forum of speaking to thousands of people, but he hardly received any support from American liberals. The sympathy of the Jewish peace movement in the U.S. lay with the Zionist Union which finished third in the election.

Smoldering Conflict Ignites

The morning after the elections, as many organizations went public with their reactions, Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine, released a sobering list of the real winners in the Israeli elections: Netanyahu, AIPAC, the Republicans, Sheldon Adelson — the casino magnate and major donor to Republican causes — Hamas, the Islamic State and Iran’s conservative mullahs.

Netanyahu has brought about the deepest divide between the United States and Israel to date, not only within the Jewish community but also in Washington politics where both parties have traditionally sided with their “closest ally” in the Middle East to whom they also give some $3 billion of taxpayer monies annually in support. The long-simmering conflict came to a head when Republicans invited Netanyahu to address the U.S. Congress at the beginning of March when he was in full campaign mode in Israel. More than 50 Democrats boycotted his address before Congress as Netanyahu used the House of Representatives as a stage from which to attack President Obama’s Middle East and Iran policies in order to score electoral points back home. With his racist warning on election day that the liberals would bring hordes of Arabs into the polling stations, the divide grew even wider. Jewish voters in America, themselves a minority, traditionally vote Democrat, prompting former Obama adviser David Axelrod to call Netanyahu’s election day demagoguery “shameful.”

After Netanyahu’s election victory, President Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry are now represented in the region by only a single contact, David Makovsky, who took part in last year’s failed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. His perspective on Netanyahu is that he is “bound to create further friction with Washington.”