Aluf Benn Netanyahu’s Message to the World: Accept Israel as It Is, Occupier and Settler
Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s "Budapest speech," in which he urged
Europe to stop supporting the Palestinians, was the clearest expression
yet of his worldview. He arrived as an international rock star and crony
of U.S. President Donald Trump; the leaders of Poland, Slovakia and the
Czech Republic flew in to meet him alongside his Hungarian host.
In a semi-closed forum, Netanyahu dispensed with the restraints and niceties
that characterize his official speeches, abandoned political
correctness and let loose. At least in the section broadcast to
journalists (apparently by mistake), he didn’t speak about “peace” or
the “two-state solution,” but about Israel’s growing power to help form
alliances with other countries, a message repeated in all his speeches
of the last year.
In Paris en route to
Budapest, Netanyahu surprisingly harshly criticized the Trump
administration. He accused his friend in the White House of endangering
Israel’s security interests via the Russian-American cease-fire deal in
southern Syria. Netanyahu often spoke that way about Trump’s
predecessor, Barack Obama, and his nuclear deal with Iran, but is that
any way to speak about his friend Trump
After
eight years of spats with Obama, one would have expected Netanyahu and
Trump to resolve their differences quietly and not reveal the cracks in
their relationship. But Netanyahu had no qualms: On top of criticizing
Trump’s Syria deal, he also publicly scorned the president’s peace
initiative.
What
happened? Netanyahu apparently feels Trump is weak and isolated, is
having trouble functioning and, most importantly, has no control over
Congress, Netanyahu’s bastion of support. This week, a few Republican
rebels in the Senate foiled Trump’s health insurance bill, thereby
leaving Obamacare in place.
Netanyahu understands
politics and knows that in this situation, he has nothing to fear from
the new administration, just as he didn’t fear confronting the last one.
He assumes the Republican majority in both houses of Congress will
thwart any attempt by Trump to impose “the ultimate deal” with the
Palestinians on Israel. A few more empty talks with U.S. envoys Jared
Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, a few more videos of Palestinian
incitement, and Trump’s initiative will join those of his predecessors
on the scrap heap.
The basis for
Netanyahu’s diplomatic activism is his assessment that America is
growing weaker and gradually withdrawing from the Middle East. The visit
to Haifa Port by the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush, the first such
visit since the beginning of the second intifada, doesn’t change the
overall trend.
Oil is cheaper, and
America no longer depends on the Middle East for its supply. Public
opinion is isolationist, opposed to wars far from home. America’s
internal rifts are deep and getting wider, and Netanyahu has taken the
conservative side without even a pretense of bipartisanism. Perhaps
bipartisan support is no longer even possible when Americans are so
divided over everything. It’s better to have the Republicans’ support,
since their control of Congress seems unassailable.
Netanyahu sees the
Christian community as Israel’s most important bastion of support in
America, alongside Orthodox Jews. His recent decisions against the
Reform and Conservative movements – canceling the Western Wall deal and advancing the conversion bill – reflect a strategic disengagement from liberal American Jews.
This wasn’t a caprice
caused by momentary pressure from Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties, but a
calculated decision that won almost wall-to-wall support in the
cabinet. Netanyahu’s circle sees liberal Jewry as a transient phenomenon
that will disappear on its own in another generation due to
intermarriage and disinterest in Jewish tradition or Israel.
Beat them to the punch
For years, liberal
Jews have threatened to break with Israel if it continues discriminating
against their denominations, and some have also vocally opposed the
unending occupation of the territories. They didn’t expect a right-wing
Israeli government to break with them first.
This is Netanyahu’s
message: Anyone who wants to support Israel must accept it as it is,
with the occupation and the settlements. Anyone who accepts Israel only
in the pre-1967 lines, like the European Union, is “crazy” and not
wanted here. Reform Jews can keep praying at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth
Avenue and see the Western Wall in pictures.
Liberal Europe,
devoted to human rights and moral preaching, is sinking under the weight
of waves of Middle Eastern refugees. Netanyahu doesn’t need it; he
believes he has found alternatives in Russia, China and Narendra Modi’s
India, and less openly, in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab
Emirates. Those countries admire only power, not justice.
The main thing is for
Germany to keep giving Israel the submarines that lend force to
Netanyahu’s intensifying threats against Iran (“anyone who threatens our
existence puts his own existence at risk,” “threaten destruction to
anyone who threatens to destroy us”). And Germany’s support can always
be bolstered with more Holocaust memorial ceremonies, as Netanyahu did
this week in France and Hungary.
Now he just needs to find a similar solution to make police investigators’ annoying questions go away.
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