by Jonathan S. Tobin
The prime minister broke protocol by calling out the Biden administration for slow-walking arms shipments. Washington’s real goal, however, is appeasing Iran and toppling him.
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| Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a ceremony at Nachalat
Yitzhak cemetery in Tel Aviv for victims of the 1948 “Altalena” ship
incident on June 18, 2024. Photo by Shaul Golan/POOL. |
As far as the White House and Democrats
are concerned, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing it
again. Similar to multiple occasions during the presidency of Barack
Obama, Netanyahu is not playing by the rules Washington and the
foreign-policy establishment believe are laid down to govern the
behavior of client states.
Rather than assume the role of the loyal
and pliant vassal to his nation’s superpower ally, there have been
several times when Netanyahu has talked back in public to Obama and now
President Joe Biden. Washington’s angry response to the video the prime
minister released
this week in which he spoke of the way the administration has been
slow-walking arms deliveries made it clear that—assurances of goodwill
from both sides notwithstanding—U.S.-Israel relations have reached a
crisis point.
In the 49-second video posted on the YouTube page of the prime minister’s office on June 18, Netanyahu said the following:
“When Secretary Blinken was recently here
in Israel, we had a candid conversation. I said I deeply appreciated the
support the U.S. has given Israel from the beginning of the war. But I
also said something else. I said it’s inconceivable that in the past few
months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunition
to Israel. Israel, America’s closest ally, fighting for its life,
fighting against Iran and our other common enemies. Secretary Blinken
assured me that the administration is working day and night to remove
these bottlenecks. I certainly hope that’s the case. It should be the
case. During World War II, Churchill told the United States, ‘Give us
the tools, we’ll do the job.’ And I say, give us the tools and we’ll
finish the job a lot faster.”
Washington’s anger
In reaction, Washington expressed shock
and anger. According to U.S. officials, Netanyahu’s claims were both
fictional and a sign of ingratitude after all that Biden had done for
him and Israel since Oct. 7, and throughout the war against Hamas in the
Gaza Strip. Their story is that despite Biden’s talk
of potentially refusing to continue to send arms and ammunition to
Israel if it doesn’t obey him and not attack the last Hamas strongholds
in Rafah, there have been no such cutoffs. The only exception, they
assert, is a review of whether the United States should send a special
kind of 2,000-pound bomb that might cause too many civilian casualties
in urban areas.
Beyond the details of the dispute, in
which the administration claims it is guiltless, this has resurrected
the charge that Netanyahu doesn’t know his proper place.
That’s the line we’re hearing from the American foreign-policy establishment and its leading media spokesman, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman,
who has recently accused Netanyahu of being the moral equivalent to
Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar. He’s also called Netanyahu an
extremist who is trying to destroy the alliance as well as an open
supporter of former President Donald Trump (a point on which Trump
doesn’t concur because Netanyahu congratulated Biden for winning the
2020 presidential election). It’s also echoed by the Israeli opposition,
such as Haaretz columnist Alon Pinkas,
whose latest anti-Bibi diatribe in that far-left newspaper bluntly
described the prime minister as hostile to the United States.
Unlike other Israelis, like President Isaac Herzog,
who has stuck to continual praise of Biden’s post-Oct. 7 aid with no
mention of Washington’s unhelpful actions, Netanyahu differs. He has
come to believe that while it remains crucial for any Israeli premier to
stay as close to the Americans as possible, there are times when it’s
necessary to break protocol and state the truth. Given the enormous help
that the United States has given Israel over the past few decades,
those who characterize the relationship as one between a great power and
a client state aren’t wrong. That’s why the diplomats at the Israeli
foreign ministry and those who share its mindset think that there is
virtually no circumstance in which Jerusalem should openly challenge
Washington.
Given the power imbalance between these
two countries, there is a strong argument for this point of view.
There’s also the danger that open opposition to the last two Democratic
presidents is hastening the process by which support for Israel is
rapidly becoming a partisan dispute between America’s two major parties.
Although the Republicans have become a lockstep pro-Israel party and
the Democrats are now, at best, deeply divided on the issue, that’s not a
development any friend of the Jewish state should welcome.
Aid dies via the bureaucracy
As with Netanyahu’s past challenges to
Obama, the prime minister is right to believe that those concerns must
be set aside. Indeed, just as he was right to refuse to go along with
Obama’s commitment to pushing Israel back to the 1967 borders and the
appeasement of Iran, Biden’s arms shipment slowdown at a time when the
Jewish state is fighting an existential conflict with Hamas, as well as
facing the prospect of an even more frightful war with Hezbollah and its
Iranian allies on its northern border, constitutes a fundamental breach
in the alliance that cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.
The point here is that Washington is flatly lying about there being no slow-walking of arms to Israel or holdups.
As Michael Doran recently wrote in Tablet
magazine, the Israelis have been aware since January that something has
gone wrong in the pipeline by which arms and ammunition are sent to
Israel. While Biden, Blinken and others in the administration are
correct to claim that there has been no absolute cutoff, what they are
doing is using the federal bureaucracy to slow down the flow to a
standstill. Under normal circumstances, the bureaucratic logjam involved
with shipments can involve the departments of State and Defense, the
U.S. House and Senate, as well as arms manufacturers. However, when
Washington deems it necessary to send arms expeditiously, the
impediments can magically disappear just as quickly as they arise when
the powers that be want to send a message to those waiting for American
supplies.
Ukraine treated differently
Indeed, there is no better example of how
an administration can manipulate this process than the contrast between
the way Ukraine and Israel are currently being handled.
Ukraine has received more aid from the
United States in the last two years than Israel has in decades. Their
funding is less accountable, and unlike Israel, not all of it is spent
in the United States. But Kyiv continues to publicly complain about not
getting everything it wants from American taxpayers, who have sent them
hundreds of billions of dollars. They’re also unhappy that Washington
has placed some limits on their use. Biden is aware that it is madness
to allow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a blank check to fire
them into Russia since doing so could start a nuclear war.
In spite of that, Ukraine gets priority
over every other American ally, including Israel, and due to Biden’s
insistence, there have been no bureaucratic logjams to slow the
shipments down.
That’s not the case with Israel. Not only
have American officials done everything to slow down and second-guess
the effort to eradicate Hamas, but they are also openly pushing to end
the war before the terrorists are completely defeated. As Doran also
wrote, they’re equally concerned to prevent Israel from doing something
to silence the nonstop firing on northern Israel from Hezbollah in
Lebanon. Biden is determined at all costs to prevent a war that might
involve Iran coming to the defense of its Lebanese auxiliaries, even if
that means up to 200,000 Israelis continue to be refugees in their own
country because they were forced to flee their homes. In other words,
Biden is not only willing to let Hamas remain a genocidal threat to
Israel but seems perfectly willing to allow parts of the Jewish state to
be effectively depopulated in the north as well as the south.
Given the stakes of the current conflict,
Netanyahu is not only right to speak out in an effort to shame the
Americans to stop slow-walking arms deliveries. He is obligated to do
so.
Pushing back pays dividends
The claim that Netanyahu’s outspokenness
is damaging the alliance misses the point. Israel may be an American
client state, but given the existential nature of the conflict that was
reignited by the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, it simply cannot afford to
behave like a docile vassal.
Indeed, if there is anything that
Netanyahu has learned in his long tenure as prime minister it is that
those who always counsel caution and silence in the face of American
betrayal don’t succeed. It is only by speaking up and making Israel’s
case to the world, and most specifically, the American people, that it
can maintain the alliance.
Obama seethed when in 2011—with him
sitting right there—Netanyahu lectured him about the unacceptability of a
forced Israeli retreat to the 1967 borders at a public White House
media availability a day after that was the substance of a presidential
speech. Later, the Obama White House depicted Netanyahu’s 2015 address
to a joint meeting of Congress in which he urged Americans to reject the
Iran nuclear deal as an unprecedented insult to the United States, the
presidency and Obama personally. In both cases, Netanyahu’s behavior was
denounced as destructive to the relationship and beyond the pale.
But he was right to understand that
talking back to Obama strengthened dissent against policies aimed at
undermining Israel and strengthening Iran, both in the United States and
abroad.
By demonstrating a willingness to defend
Israel’s vital strategic interests, even at the cost of being depicted
as an extremist or the dispute being a function of his own partisan
interests and personal animus for Obama, Netanyahu achieved real
results. Given Obama’s determination to make it his signature
foreign-policy accomplishment, he couldn’t stop the Iran deal from being
adopted. But his speech emboldened the GOP to move further towards
Israel. It also showed the Arab world that while Obama was leaving them
to the tender mercies of the terror-funding Shi’ite tyrants of Tehran,
they could count on a strong Israel as an ally against it. In
retrospect, Netanyahu’s speech must be seen as the first step in
developing the 2020 Abraham Accords.
Who is playing politics?
Biden came into office claiming that he
would be different from Obama and keep disputes with Israel private.
That changed once Netanyahu won the November 2022 Israeli elections and
returned to the prime minister’s office. Since then, the hostility that
Biden and the rest of the Obama alumni running American foreign policy
have for Netanyahu has not been kept under wraps. The administration has
not merely undermined the Jewish state but has openly conspired with
the Israeli opposition, and even members of the military and
intelligence establishment, in an effort to topple Netanyahu’s
government both before and after Oct. 7.
At this point, Netanyahu has nothing to
lose by not allowing Biden to get away with slowing down the flow of
arms to pressure Israel to stand down at its borders on the north and
south.
There are plenty of cogent criticisms to
be made about Netanyahu, including those involving Oct. 7 happening on
his watch and the dysfunctional nature of his governmental coalition.
Regardless of how long Netanyahu lasts in office—and right now, it is
not the prime minister but Biden who, in appeasing the anti-Israel
intersectional left wing of the Democratic Party, is playing politics
over the war—or what you think of his character, policies or tactics, he
needs to use every form of leverage to counter U.S. pressure that could
ensure victories for Hamas and Iran. With so many lives at stake,
client-state etiquette should be the last of his concerns.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
Source: https://www.jns.org/netanyahu-is-right-to-reject-vassal-state-etiquette/
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