By Henry Srebrnik, Shalom, Fall 2023
In July 2022 U.S. President Joe Biden visited Israel. He hailed their strategic partnership and pointed to “a bedrock of shared values, shared interests and true friendship.”
What a difference a year makes. The two countries are now barely on speaking terms. What happened? It’s called an election, and last November it brought former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu back in power.
He has formed the most right-wing government in Israeli history and is now at loggerheads with the country’s Supreme Court, accused of being an out-of-control body trying to block his political agenda. And this has greatly displeased the liberal Democrats in Washington.
President Biden and his foreign-policy team have strong opinions about who should be running the Jewish state that are echoed by most Democrats and the liberal mainstream media. So the formation of a government with a prominent role for such controversial politicians as Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) Party and Bezalel Smotrich of the HaZionut HaDatit (Religious Zionism) Party is enough to set their teeth on edge. It also has upended Washington’s policies towards both Iran and the Palestinians.
It’s not the first time American administrations have tried to play that game. The attacks on the outcome involve the longtime mistrust of Netanyahu that’s widely felt on the American left. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both sought to defeat Netanyahu and then aid his opponents in their quest to thwart his efforts to form governments in previous elections.
So Netanyahu’s return to power after some 18 months on the opposition benches was dismal news for the Biden administration. It’s also led to the sort of ominous rhetoric describing a crack-up of the relationship between American and Israeli Jews that goes beyond the usual rumblings about the growing distance between the two communities.
A mere three days after the vote, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who to all intents is the mouthpiece of the Democratic administration, penned a Nov. 4 opinion piece titled “The Israel We Knew is Gone.” He called the hard-right ultra-nationalist coalition Netanyahu was cobbling together a “nightmare.” It was “a rowdy alliance of ultra-Orthodox leaders and ultranationalist politicians, including some outright racist, anti-Arab Jewish extremists once deemed completely outside the norms and boundaries of Israeli politics.”
In a Jan. 17, 2023 follow-up piece, “Can Joe Biden Save Israel?” Friedman warned that “The Israel Joe Biden knew is vanishing and a new Israel is emerging. Many ministers in this government are hostile to American values, and nearly all are hostile to the Democratic Party.” He called on Biden to “wade right in” and “declare that these changes violate America’s interests and values and that we are not going to be Netanyahu’s useful idiots and just sit in silence.”
His more recent July 12 article, “The U.S. Reassessment of Netanyahu Has Begun,” warned that the Biden team sees the far-right Israeli government “engaged in unprecedented radical behavior -- under the cloak of judicial ‘reform’ -- that is undermining our shared interests with Israel, our shared values and the vitally important shared fiction about the status of the West Bank that has kept peace hopes there just barely alive.” Such a reassessment “based on U.S. interests and values would be some tough love for Israel but a real necessity before it truly does go off the rails.”
Indeed, so consequential has Friedman become that Biden invited the Times journalist to converse with him for over an hour in the Oval Office on July 18, just one day after the President had spoken by phone with Netanyahu.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer and former Middle East peace envoy Aaron David Miller on Nov. 29, 2022, published a column, “Biden Should Respond Boldly to a Radical Netanyahu Government,” in the Washington Post contending that the new Israeli government possessed “anti-democratic values unfriendly to U.S. interests,” and recommended that the Biden administration impose a partial arms embargo on Israel.
Post columnist Jennifer Rubin also weighed in. “The Biden administration and members of Congress must be clear and unequivocal about the damage to the U.S.-Israel relationship if Israel defies democratic norms,” she wrote in a March 1 oped called “Israel Has Angered its Closest Supporters.” If it remains defiant, “Netanyahu’s government will become an existential threat to the survival of the Jewish state,” she warned. This war of words isn’t ending anytime soon.
What the White House wants is a more pliable Israeli prime minister who will keep quiet about the nuclear threat from Iran and who can be intimidated into not acting to forestall that deadly threat to Israel’s existence. Biden regards Israel as a willful obstacle to his objectives: A Palestinian state and the empowerment of Iran.
The Israeli leader’s biggest problem has been in managing relations with his superpower patron. But the strained relationship is about more than just policy disagreements or specific politicians; it is an unavoidable ideological rift between U.S. Democrats and an increasingly conservative Israeli nation that will fundamentally alter the decades-long alliance.
Before long, the long-standing bipartisan support for Israel in the United States could be a thing of the past. The U.S. is rapidly shifting its sympathies away from Israel and beginning to view the Jewish state less favourably. Israel must prepare itself for that eventuality. Don’t be surprised if the United States eventually applies sanctions on Israel. Demography and “anti-racist woke intersectional” ideology may eventually prevail.
Israel is at a crossroads -- it will either remain, in whatever configuration, a national Jewish/Zionist state, or it will become a vassal of the American-ruled part of the globe, with its “post-national woke” ideology.
Given this emerging American zeitgeist, must Israel sooner or later look for friends elsewhere? Israel must remain open to countries that aren’t going to use means tests about “democracy” to interact with it.
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