White House and Israel on a conflict course

M. Serajul Islam | Published: March 01, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00

The White House and the Israeli Prime Minister are again set to clash. Benjamin Netyanhu would be addressing a joint session of the US Congress on March 03 over objections of the White House to encourage the Congress to impose more sanctions on Tehran to derail President Obama's efforts for a diplomatic solution to Iran's nuclear issue. Obama and Netanyahu have had differences in public - the worst in Paris in 2011. A microphone kept inadvertently left open, allowed journalists in a close-by room to listen to French President Sarkozy calling Netanyahu a 'liar' with President Obama concurring. Â
In 2011, Netanyahu came to Washington, addressed a joint session of the Congress and had ignored the White House. He also steadfastly refused to move with Washington on the Palestinian peace talks. There have been so many stories about what Obama and Netanyahu felt about each other that one wondered how Washington and Tel Aviv kept their bilateral relations going for the last six years with the two as the head of their respective countries. There are, of course, reasons why the bad personal relationship of Netanyahu and Obama did not affect US-Israel relations. The reasons are embedded in the fact that the US has special relations with Israel that it has with no other country.
No one really talks about why and how Israel, a country of eight million, with no natural resources or other visible assets that give a country power internationally, can have such a special relation with a country as powerful as the United States. The answer that western media considers a taboo for open discussion is the fact that the 5-8 million Jews in the United States consider Israel their country. If that was the end of the story, then the US Jews considering Israel their country would perhaps been the same as the 2.0 million Indians in the US loving India as their country of origin. But US Indians are different from US Jews. The US Jews, their small number notwithstanding, virtually control the media and the financial world in the United States together with unbelievably disproportionate presence and influence in many branches of cultural and social life in the US.
The Jews are also organised in unbelievably strong lobbies that control politics in the US. These Jewish lobbies ensure that the US not just willingly and happily takes Israel in its arms but also that it is not left with any alternative but to embrace Israel in a manner where it can only view Tel Aviv's interests as its own. Thus US politicians, both the Republicans and the Democrats, while tearing each apart on a host of national and international issues, have similar views when it comes to Israel's interests in international politics.
Thus in the Middle East, the US policy is often a reflection on how to achieve Israel's interests. In fact, the US invaded Iraq on false pretexts because Israel believed that Iraq had been secretly building weapons of mass destruction during the Iraq-Iraq war of the 1980s when the US was an active ally of Saddam Hussein.
Â Â At a Congressional hearing recently, Secretary of State John Kerry said that Netanyahu 'was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under President George W Bush, and we all know what happened with that decision." Likewise, the 'mother of all conflicts', namely the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, has remained unresolved for so many decades because of the US support of Israel at any cost as a result of which the Middle East has remained the main source of international conflicts from which it has now spread to the rest of the world.
The time-tested US-Israel special relationship is set to face a serious test in Washington next week. The Republican- dominated US Congress has invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address the joint session of Congress against the current White House-led diplomatic initiative to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue. The Republican-dominated Congress is opposed to the diplomatic initiative. It would like to impose stiffer sanctions to force Israel to give up its nuclear programme. Netanyahu who would be facing elections in his country on March 17, would like to make a strong appeal to the Congress for the sanctions, openly embarrassing and opposing the line taken by the White House.
The open conflict between Netanyahu and Obama has now taken a new dimension hitherto unheard of in US-Israel relations. It has divided the Congress. The Democrats have left it to individual members whether or not to attend Netanyahu's address deciding that it has been wrong for Speaker John Boehner to invite him and for him to accept it. Quite a good number of Democrat Congress members have already stated they would not attend the session. This time President Obama declined to meet the Israeli Prime Minister in the White House because of its policy not to invite any foreign head of state/government visiting the US who would be within two weeks on an election at home.
The White House had also asked Netanyahu not to come to the US and address the joint session of Congress against a policy that it considers crucial in its foreign policy, namely trying to resolve Iran's nuclear dilemma diplomatically. There has never been such an urging from the White House to a foreign head of government. Of course, such an urging was never necessary because there was never any need for it. It has happened for the first time for the White House to ask a foreign head of government because Netanyahu needed to visit the US for his domestic politics ahead of Israeli election and the Congress, recently upped by the White House on a number of domestic issues, wanted an opportunity to humiliate the President.
In deciding to visit Washington, however, Benjamin Netanyahu has not just upset the White House and President Obama. His decision has also upset and angered many of the Israeli Prime Minister's own supporters in US and in his own country. Five of six former Israeli ambassadors to Washington have 'urged the Prime minister to forgo the trip and address to Congress' because they believed 'the damage outweighs the benefits.' The gravest warning came from the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the most important Israeli lobbies in the US. It appealed to the Prime Minister to cancel the controversial invitation apprehending the 'negative repercussions' and 'cumulative damages' that would result from addressing the joint session of the Congress.
Israeli journalist Ben Caspit articulated the AIPAC's grave concerns in the following words: "All the things we warned him of, are materialising. We foresaw the domino effect that took place, the boycott by more and more Democratic Congress members, the significant deterioration in relations with Democratic legislators, the talks about boycotting the AIPAC convention (that is also being held at the beginning of March) by the administration".
Israel today is the largest recipient of US aid - US$ 3.0 billion annually. That is at the heart of US-Israel special relationship that has also benefitted from the special attention by each of the 10 US administrations since Israel emerged as an independent state in 1948 that has each assisted towards making US-Israel relations stronger. It has been only in the term of President Obama that relations have had deep strains. Today, Netanyahu-Obama dislikes have entered dangerous areas of politics and policies. The Israeli Prime Minister is now trying to push the US towards dangerous path, that of a military one to end Iran's nuclear ambitions and trying to use the US Congress to push the US on that path that, when grasped fully in the United States, has serious potential to upset most Americans against the special US-Israel relations.
The Republican-controlled Congress, desperate to harm President Obama, has walked into the trap of Benjamin Netanyahu. Fortunately, even Jews in the US and many Israelis themselves apart from die-hard anti-Obama people in the United States now are beginning to see that Netanyahu is encouraging the US to what could easily become the 'mother of all wars', one against Iran. Perhaps Benjamin Netanyahu's obsession with Iran's nuclear ambitions, while his country is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, could bring US-Israel relationship to be finally tested on rationality and objectivity.
The writer is a former Ambassador. serajul7@gmail.com