ISRAEL : NETANYAHU TAKES HIS SHOW ON THE ROAD / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENT & ANALYSIS

February 20, 2015 7:47 pm

Israel: Netanyahu takes his show on the road

By Geoff Dyer and John Reed

Israeli PM’s foreign policy moves may be smart politics at home, but carry risks abroad

©AFP

Full house: Mr Netanyahu, gives a speech at the Grand Synagogue in Paris on January 11, after terrorist attacks in the French capital claimed 17 lives

 

 

With three weeks to go before a tight general election, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not missed an opportunity to demonstrate his dynamism on the international stage.

 

But Mr Netanyahu has not been focusing his attention on the chaos on Israel’s borders, with Syria in turmoil and Egypt’s politics seized by counter-revolutionary fervour. Instead, the Israeli leader has inserted himself into parallel political arguments in places considered the country’s strongest supporters — the US and western Europe.

The long-simmering tensions between Mr Netanyahu and the Obama administration burst into the open again this week when the White House publicly accused Israel of leaking misleading information about its nuclear talks with Iran — presumably to scupper any eventual deal. At the same time, Mr Netanyahu raised both cheers and hackles in Europe with his call for the continent’s Jews to move to Israel following the terrorist attack on a synagogue in Denmark last weekend.

 

Mr Netanyahu’s opponents claim he is picking these fights to boost his electoral chances at home, where the 65-year-old is running for a fourth term as prime minister. True or not, the two disputes involve central issues about the political future of Israel and its relationship with Jews around the world. Critics say that by waging public battle with the Obama administration, Mr Netanyahu is putting Israel’s close relationship with the US at risk. And for some European Jews, the prime minister’s call for them to move to Israel raises uncomfortable questions about their loyalty to their home countries.

 

The immediate cause of the bitter falling-out is with the US is Iran. Diplomats from the US and other major powers are making progress in talks with Tehran over its nuclear programme, which the White House believes will prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon — but Mr Netanyahu argues is a sham that Iran will exploit.

 

The first sign that the gloves were coming off was in January, when Mr Netanyahu accepted an invitation to speak about Iran to a joint session of Congress without consulting the White House. He will effectively be using the platform in Washington to lobby against a potential agreement that Mr Obama sees as his central foreign policy objective — an intervention that even some of Mr Netanyahu’s allies on the American right have seen as objectionable.

The mutual suspicion was even more evident this week when the White House publicly accused Israel of deceptive leaks about the nuclear talks aimed at undermining support for the administration’s position. In an unusually pointed accusation about a close ally, Josh Earnest, White House spokesman, said Israel had been “cherry-picking specific pieces of information and using them out of context to distort the negotiating position of the US”. The Israeli government insists that Mr Netanyahu is making the speech to Congress to ensure the US does not get pressured into a “bad deal” with Iran. “Without prime minister Netanyahu the world might be sleeping while the Iranians were building the bomb,” says Yuval Steinitz, strategic affairs minister.

 

While the distrust between Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu represents a new low in relations between leaders of the two countries, there have been several fierce arguments in the past — notably when George HW Bush threatened to withhold loan guarantees to Israel — only for the close ties to resume.

 

Yet there are two reasons to think that Mr Netanyahu’s tactics over Iran carry big risks for Israel’s relationship with the US. The first is the injection of partisan politics into the relationship between the countries. Israel’s substantial influence in Washington has been predicated on broad support among both parties.
 
But his planned speech to Congress is putting Israel’s bipartisan support to the test. Many Democrats find themselves forced to choose between their own president and their wish not to offend Israel.

More than 20 Democrats — including vice-president Joe Biden — have said they will not attend the Netanyahu speech. Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat, described the invitation as a “tawdry and high-handed stunt”. Leaders of the Jewish community such as Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League have urged the prime minister to cancel the speech.

While Congressional Republicans are happy to use his visit to place Democrats in a difficult position, the Israeli leader has his own considerations. Embroiled in a neck-and-neck race with his main rival, Yitzhak Herzog of the opposition Labour party, Mr Netanyahu has tried to tout his foreign policies and security credentials ahead of the March 17 vote.

A recent poll taken by researchers at Tel Aviv University found that 67 per cent of those surveyed believed the timing of Mr Netanyahu’s speech — to be given on March 3, just two weeks before of the election — was linked to the campaign. The anticipated scenes of the prime minister acknowledging standing ovations from US lawmakers are described by commentators as a golden photo opportunity.
 
The second risk that Mr Netanyahu is taking concerns broader trends in the attitudes of Americans — and American Jews — towards Israel. Although it enjoys strong support, from the Democratic party to the evangelical wing of the Republicans, the winds could be starting to shift. On US university campuses, Israel has a major problem.

Opinion polls show that younger generations of Americans are much more sceptical about Israel’s actions. That wariness is reflected by many younger American Jews who are more willing to question central aspects of Zionism. During the Gaza conflict last summer, a group called If Not Now, set up by Jewish students, won swift popularity with social media-driven criticisms of the Israeli government.

 

Another group has founded Open Hillel, which seeks to challenge the organisation that oversees Jewish life on campuses.

Natan Sachs at the Brookings Institution says the danger for Israel is that it becomes a sort of cause-célèbre on American campuses in the way that South Africa did in the last decade of apartheid.

 “Israelis underestimate how uncool the issue is becoming in American universities,” he says.

Israeli officials also worry about the impact extensive intermarriage with non-Jews is going to have on the American Jewish community: Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, called it a “demographic catastrophe” last year.

None of this means American support for Israel is about to collapse. “Why is the pro-Israel lobby successful?” asks Shmuel Rosner, senior fellow at Israel’s Jewish People Policy Institute. “Because Israel is a country that gets very high marks from Americans in general.” But it does suggest there will be consequences if an Israeli leader seriously overplays his hand with a US president — let alone if he gets blamed by the American public for dragging them into an eventual conflict with Iran.

Mr Netanyahu has been equally unafraid to ruffle feathers in western Europe, where criticism of Israel has risen sharply. He first issued his call for Jews to move to Israel after the January attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris, where he showed up uninvited to the antiterrorism march a few days later. He repeated it this week after the Denmark killings. “We are preparing and calling for the absorption of mass immigration from Europe,” he said.

It is natural for an Israeli prime minister to present the country as a safe haven for Jews. But by promoting himself as leader of Jews everywhere, Mr Netanyahu has again encountered charges of electioneering. In a video posted on his Facebook page, Mr Netanyahu embellished his appeal with a personal story, telling how his grandfather was beaten senseless by anti-semitic thugs at a train station “in the heart of Europe” at the end of the 19th century. “He promised himself that if he survived the night he would bring his family to the land of Israel and help build a new future for the Jewish people in its land,” Mr Netanyahu said.

In Europe, his statements have elicited angry retorts from politicians who accused the Israeli leader of exaggerating the dangers that Jews face. “I will not let what was said in Israel pass, leading people to believe that Jews no longer have a place in Europe,” said French president François Hollande.

Among European Jews, some have welcomed the attention on rising anti-semitism, while others worry that their allegiance could be questioned by the suggestion Israel is their natural home. Jair Melchior, the chief rabbi of Denmark, said he was “disappointed” with Mr Netanyahu’s comments.

“Terror is not a reason to move to Israel,” he said.

Shimon Samuels, director for international relations at the European office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, says Mr Netanyahu has opened a welcome debate among France’s Jewish community. “He may have done it provocatively, but he was doing his job: he was extending its hand to Jews who either feel abandoned or under siege,” he said.

Mr Samuels said he knows French Jews who have packed their bags. His doctor is among them. But he does not think leaving is the solution. “It would be a tragedy that 2,000 years of Jewish presence in Europe would come to an end,” he says.


Additional reporting by Joel Greenberg, Adam Thomson and Sam Jones