One of the arguments that American pundits use when lobbying public opinion against Benjamin Netanyahu is that Bibi’s conception of Israel’s interests often conflicts with America’s own best interests.
You can see this argument on the left in some Democrats’ attempts to separate their harsh feelings toward Netanyahu from their overall opinion of Israel, and on the right in the form of complaints that Netanyahu’s approach to the conflict is incompatible with “America First.”
Thus, the argument goes, were Netanyahu to be replaced by a member of the Israeli opposition, the U.S.-Israel relationship would improve and Israel’s standing among the American public would rise.
Obviously the whole issue is more complicated than just that, with a number of factors and variables at play. One of those variables is the Iran conflict, which may have just thrown a wrench into everybody’s expectations for what will follow the upcoming Israeli parliamentary elections.
We still don’t know what was in the deal that President Trump’s team negotiated with its Iranian counterparts. We also don’t know if negotiations are falling apart or if they were illusive altogether and the two sides were never close to a deal. (It’s looking more like the latter.) But we do know the Israeli opposition’s reaction to the news that a deal was close. Bibi’s rivals immediately began attacking him from the right—even when they are, politically, to his left.
Moreover, they’re warning that should the general shape of affairs remain as they are now, the Israeli opposition intends to inaugurate a more hawkish foreign policy and one that is less compliant with American demands.
To i24 News, Yair Lapid, the left-most of Bibi’s main rivals, “insisted that Israel must preserve its freedom of military action, regardless of American decisions. ‘Israel is a sovereign state, not an American protectorate,’ he declared, calling on Netanyahu to make it clear to Donald Trump that Israel would not be bound by any agreement that jeopardizes its security.”
Regarding the idea that any cease-fire deal with Iran would also apply to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Avigdor Lieberman fretted that “our soldiers simply have their hands tied in Lebanon.” Even Benny Gantz, who was Netanyahu’s rival in past elections but has expressed openness to working with him again, said simply that until Hezbollah drones stop attacking Israel, “no plane should take off from Beirut.”
The lesson here isn’t that Bibi is really a dove or that Yair Lapid is really a hawk. It’s that those terms aren’t useful in this debate because Israeli public opinion maintains something close to a mainstream consensus on the country’s basic security needs. Netanyahu and his rivals may have different ways of dealing with their American would-be counterparts, but they all pledge to uphold that consensus.
Almost as if on cue, Netanyahu had the IDF hit Hezbollah positions in Lebanon hard. For his part, Trump seems to want to prevent the appearance of public discord with Israel. When initial reports of the deal’s outlines were coupled with stories of the Arab states’ influence over the timing and terms of the deal, Trump demanded that those Arab states also join the Abraham Accords and sign normalization agreements with Israel. The message: We’re all on the same team, aren’t we? If you really want peace in the Middle East, prove it.
We learn two things from this. One is that when politicians claim to have a problem only with Netanyahu and not the Israeli mainstream, such a claim is completely untenable, at least regarding the Iranian threat specifically. Two, that if Netanyahu’s rivals put more daylight between themselves and Trump, it won’t necessarily be due to the lobbying of Democrats or the weirdly pro-Iran “America First” crowd.
You can rearrange the pieces all you want, but in the end Israelis are going to support taking out the threats they face. That means resolution, not cease-fire, in both Lebanon and Iran. If you want to be seen as solving the problem, you’ll have to actually solve the problem. Israelis won’t be fooled by anything less, no matter who is president and who is prime minister.
Source:
www.commentary.org
