Netanyahu’s Israel is at Odds With Washington

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

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 is 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.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides, who leaves his post this summer, has been the main conduit for what are unwelcome messages to Netanyahu. He suggested that if the new Israeli government deviated from the positions of the Biden administration, the relationship between the United States and Israel could suffer. Nides did not shy away from publicly taking sides, and, tossing diplomatic protocol to the wind, called on Netanyahu to “pump the breaks on judicial overhaul.”

Nides on Feb. 16 hit back at Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, who had said that the envoy should mind his own business. “I really think that most Israelis do not want America to stay out of their business,” he said, referencing the support that Washington has provided Jerusalem for decades.

“The protests are an internal Israeli political issue, and any foreign ambassador commenting on this issue, but particularly an ambassador of a friendly nation like the United States, is crossing a line,” Chakli responded in a March 9 interview.

Chikli has called the Jewish progressive organization, J Street, a “hostile organization” and one of its funders, billionaire activist George Soros, “one of the greatest haters of Israel in our times.” On July 11 he also accused Biden of colluding with former prime ministers and current opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Ehud Barak. “Biden’s circle coordinates with them every time they want to inflame the protests in Israel.”

Revelations that the U.S. was funding some of the key left-wing NGOs instrumental in organizing the recent wave of protests didn’t help. One example was the Movement for Quality Government, a longtime leader in anti-Netanyahu efforts.

The administration was also reportedly furious after Netanyahu’s son Yair tweeted that the U.S. State Department was conspiring to topple his father’s government through CIA financing of mass anti-Netanyahu demonstrations. 

Biden himself telephoned Netanyahu on March 19, for what was described as a “candid and constructive” conversation. In private, administration officials said, the conversation was even more blunt, indicating that Israel’s image as the sole democracy in the Middle East was at stake. The president’s conversation left little doubt that the administration is no longer concealing its displeasure and concern over the processes spearheaded by the government.

“Like many strong supporters of Israel, I’m very concerned, and I’m concerned that they get this straight,” Biden indicated March 28 when asked by reporters about the health of Israel’s democracy. “They cannot continue down this road,” he said at a press conference. “And I’ve sort of made that clear. Hopefully the prime minister will act in a way that he can try to work out some genuine compromise.”

Biden answered with an emphatic “No” when he was asked if he would be inviting Netanyahu to the White House. “Not in the near term,” he said. He invited President Isaac Herzog, who holds a purely ceremonial office, to visit the White House instead. And even then, five Democrat representatives boycotted Herzog’s July 19 address to Congress, while nine others voted against a resolution stating Israel is not an apartheid state..

During an interview with CNN July 9, Biden slammed the Netanyahu coalition as “the most extreme” Israeli government that he’s ever seen. His unusually frank comments appear to have been directed at Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Both hold key roles in the Netanyahu government: Smotrich serves as finance minister, and Ben-Gvir is the national security minister. Ben-Gvir retorted that “Israel is no longer another star in the American flag.”

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.

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. A Gallup poll conducted Feb. 1-23 showed that more Democrats, at 49 per cent, sympathized with the Palestinians than with the Israelis, with 38 per cent.

Will the long-standing bipartisan support for Israel in the United States be a thing of the past? Don’t be shocked if the United States eventually applies sanctions on Israel. Must Israel sooner or later look for friends elsewhere?

 

American Media Criticize Israeli Government

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

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.

OMINOUS RHETORIC

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 BenGvir 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.

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.

SHARED INTERESTS

A mere three days after the vote, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, whose columns are sympathetic to the Democratic administration, penned a Nov. 4 opinion piece titled “The Israel we knew is gone.”

He called the 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 unprec

edented radical behaviour — 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.

WAR OF WORDS

Meanwhile, at the Washington Post, 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,” 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 op-ed entitled “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,” Rubin warned. This war of words isn’t ending anytime soon.

 

 

 

French Unrest Benefits the Political Right

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB]  Times & Transcript

In France, the violent protests against racism that erupted last month have wound down, but the political aftermath of the demonstrations has benefited politicians on the right of the political spectrum.

They have given Eric Zemmour a second wind. The leader of the right-wing Reconquête Party, who placed fourth with over seven per cent of the vote in the 2022 presidential election, in a July 9 interview with the Spanish newspaper El Debate, asserted that the country “is on the verge of civil war.”

He added that “most of the political class wants to believe that it is a social crisis when the root cause is obvious: immigration.”

But the main beneficiary of the recent events has been right-wing leader Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement National (RN). Her party has been strengthened by the riots, with many contending she would have handled the violence better.

A poll conducted for the French newspaper Le Figaro that was published June 24, just days before the disturbances began, found that 74 percent of French people believe there are too many migrants in the country. They want stricter immigration controls, more deportations, and even a referendum on immigration into France.

Le Pen has long railed against what she sees as France’s drift into permissiveness and lawlessness. She lambasted the government on Twitter on July 2 as “a power that abandons all constitutional principles for fear of riots, which contributes to aggravating them.”

She condemned the “anarchy” and called on authorities to declare a state of emergence or curfew. “Our country is getting worse and worse and the French are paying the terrible price for this cowardice and these compromises.”

For the RN, the moment had arrived for a recruitment drive. “Restore order to France!” said one email attempting to attract new members. The message was part of a push by Le Pen and her allies to capitalise on the crisis, attack President Emmanuel Macron’s government, and showcase their long-held hardline policies on crime and immigration.

As the unrest spread, RN party president Jordan Bardella unleashed a right-wing tirade, referring to the “growing savagery of society resulting from a completely insane immigration policy.” He promised to expel all “foreign criminals” from France if the RN wins the presidential election in 2027.

“We gave these neighborhoods everything,” Bardella insisted, saying the problem was “cultural, sometimes religious” rather than economic. He wants an end to “generous” subsidies for problem areas, which he described as “a bottomless pit.”

Author and political scientist Chloé Morin, a former advisor to two prime ministers between 2012 and 2016, thought the events were an “important political moment” for Le Pen. She “still has a lot of work to do to take the presidency but so far this week she has been canny and not made any mistakes,” Morin suggested.

Support for Le Pen’s agenda had already been increasing even before the riots. The party has gained traction in groups among whom it had previously been weak, such as retirees and the highly educated. It has even seen increased support from Jews.

The Muslim population in France, at about 10 per cent, is the highest in Europe and Islamism has gained ground in France, particularly in high schools.

Jewish symbols were targeted: Holocaust memorials in Paris and Nanterre were defaced. Antisemitic chants were heard during the riots and Jewish businesses were ransacked in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, dubbed “little Jerusalem” due to its large Jewish population.

In May 2022, after Le Pen lost to Macron in the presidential election, the RN delivered a surprisingly strong performance in legislative contests, winning an unprecedented 88 seats, up from only eight before. And she received 41.5 percent of the vote in the presidential election’s second round, up from 34 per cent in 2017.

That gave Le Pen’s party new legitimacy and furthered her push to “detoxify” the image of the movement started 50 years ago by her father Jean-Marie, who has denied the Holocaust and espoused xenophobic ideas.

A survey conducted by Ifop-Fiducial for the Journal du Dimanche in mid-June revealed that more than 41 per cent of French voters want to see Le Pen win the next election.

The riots also introduced a new element. While they at first seemed a retread of the banlieue uprising of 2005, it has displayed a new development -- a right-wing counter-mobilisation against the rioters.

In provincial cities like Lyon, Angers and Chambéry, groups of masked and hooded youths appeared, dressed in black and armed with batons and pepper spray, to confront the rioters and the left-wing demonstrators supporting them.

In Lyon, for three nights around 50 masked militants, some armed with batons, paraded through the city centre, chanting “French people wake up: you are at home” and “Blue, White, Red: France for the French.”

In Chambéry there were skirmishes between “Identitarian” militants and rioters following a series of right-wing marches through the city centre.

The former head of France’s Directorate General for External Security, Pierre Brochand, thinks France is developing into “separatist counter-communities” which will eventually challenge the democratic French nation-state with “alternative sovereignties.” 

While the violence has died down, the  riots will mark another grim milestone in France’s growing angst over its future. And Le Pen will continue to blame the authorities for the chaos.