Why Bibi Humiliated Biden

by Martin Indyk


Netanyahu sensed a political advantage, and he's pressing it. Martin Indyk, former American ambassador to Israel, explains Netanyahu's remarkable decision to taunt his country's most important ally. What happened to Vice President Biden this week in Jerusalem was egregious but hardly new. Right-wing governments in Israel have regularly embarrassed high-level U.S. officials by making announcements about new settlement activity during or just after their visits. But it usually happens to secretaries of state. It infuriated James Baker, confounded Condoleezza Rice, and appalled Madeleine Albright.

They know they can get away with it.

When I served as Albright's ambassador in Israel, during Bibi Netanyahu's first term as Prime Minister, he announced a major extension to an existing West Bank settlement as she departed Israel after one of her efforts to move the peace process forward. When she heard the news, she called me on an open line and shouted: "You tell Bibi that he needs to stop worrying about his right wing and start worrying about the United States." It was good advice, but it went unheeded. Antagonizing the Clinton administration eventually contributed to Netanyahu's downfall. Israeli voters punished him for mishandling the relationship with Israel's only true ally.


The second time around, one might have expected Netanyahu to be more circumspect about his relations with the Obama administration, especially because Israel is now so dependent on the United States to deal with the growing threat from Iran.

Has it ever not been dependent on the US?

But three developments seem to have emboldened Netanyahu. First, Obama lost the Israeli public by convincing them—through his Cairo speech and customary cool—that he wanted to distance the United States from Israel in order to curry favor with the Arab World. For the first time, Netanyahu found himself in the unusual position of being more popular at home than the U.S. president (Clinton and Bush enjoyed 70-80 percent public approval ratings in Israel).

Second, the Republicans have started making a comeback in Washington, raising the possibility of using Congress to constrain the president. That was something Netanyahu deployed to considerable advantage once Clinton lost control of the House to the Israelis' close friend Newt Gingrich. He probably savors the opportunity to do it again.

Third, Obama purposely delinked the peace process from Iran, making clear to Netanyahu that, despite their deep differences over settlement activity, they would be completely coordinated on the strategic issue of curbing Iran's nuclear program.

So Bibi won by losing, or, simply won another one. He lost nothing.

So my guess is this fortuitous combination generated sloppiness in the prime minister’s office. That's the only way I can explain the humiliation of the vice president of the United States on the very day that he came to Jerusalem to try to persuade the Israeli public, using Biden-esque hyperbole, that the Obama administration really does love them. The excuse that Netanyahu was blind-sided by settler gremlins in the Interior ministry strains credulity. That's because his aides have spent a good deal of time lately reassuring Washington that Israel would avoid provocative actions in Jerusalem that might sabotage the indirect Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that were launched this week.


Now that hard-won, nine-month American effort to get Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table is in serious jeopardy. If the indirect talks collapse before they even start, Netanyahu will inevitably be blamed. The Palestinians surely sense that they have an opportunity to turn the tables on Israel, so Netanyahu has very little time to get himself out of this self-generated mess.

There is one way to repair the damage to U.S.-Israel relations and to his own standing with the Israeli public. He could immediately declare that in order to boost the chances for negotiations, he is calling a halt to all provocative acts in Jerusalem—including announcements of new building activity in east Jerusalem, housing demolitions, and evictions. He should also establish a mechanism in the prime minister's office to ensure that his decision is implemented. Such actions would both demonstrate his commitment to the negotiations and to repairing the damage to his friendship with Joe Biden and the United States.

Having just explained why PM Netanyahu did not do what the writer is proposing, the writes proposes that the PM do what he has not done. Further: establish a mechanism to make sure his decision is implemented? Isn't that a matter of course, that the government implements the Prime Minister's decisions?

Can't do it because of his right wing? This time Netanyahu should listen to Albright’s counsel.

Why should this time be different than any other time? The Israel lobby in the US is already making noises about the US government ceasing to pressure Israel. Noise from that lobby and its Congressional allies will only get louder.


Martin Indyk is the vice president and director of foreign policy at The Brookings Institution and author of the recently published Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East (Simon & Schuster 2009).

Moderate Jewish lobbyist causes stir

Gen. James L. Jones, President Obama's national security adviser, was an important guest at a conference on Tuesday.

The tensions and sharp disagreements that have ripened among many American Jews over President Obama’s approach to Middle East issues were on public display here this week as a fledgling Jewish group held its first convention.

Mr. Obama sent his top national security aide to the convention of the group, known as J Street, but the Israeli ambassador pointedly stayed home. Some members of Congress agreed to be part of the event, only to withdraw their support in the face of criticism from their own political backers.

That's showing backbone: back out on being criticized.

J Street has only a small fraction of the resources and membership of more established pro-Israel groups, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and it remains unclear how potent it will be in presenting itself as an alternative. Nonetheless, it has had great success in quickly becoming a major reference point in the complicated debate over President Obama’s Middle East policy as well as the more emotional issue of the appropriate role for American Jews in supporting Israel.

Well, it has already become a player, a major reference point; that's quite something.

While opinions in the Jewish community have never been uniform or monolithic, several analysts, elected officials and pollsters said the debate over Mr. Obama’s approach to Israel and its neighbors has sharpened boundaries between those who strongly support him and those who have grown more wary.

Not monolithic? C'mon.

J Street has tried to position itself as a counterweight to groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, which J Street supporters say require the United States to support the Israeli government too reflexively.

Too? No need for the qualifier: the lobby requires unquestioned support.

Many of its critics say that J Street, by presenting itself as an American Jewish pro-Israel group that believes that Mr. Obama should be free to disagree with the Israeli government, is harmful to Israel’s long-term interests and encourages obduracy in its Arab adversaries.

That's an old tactic: discourgae, even stifle, dissent by charging not simply disloyalty but encouragement of, even tacit support for, the enemy.

The Congressional members who reversed themselves asked that their names be withdrawn after some opponents of J Street asserted that supporting the group was not in Israel’s best interests.

And who determines what that is? American Jews? The Israeli government?

Some Israeli officials have said privately that they do not want to offend Aipac and its members who have loyally supported the Israeli government for years. Ambassador Oren said in an interview that he declined to attend because of concerns “about several of J Street’s policies that may impair Israeli interests.” He said that he was not ordered by the Israeli government to skip the conference but that the government shared those concerns.

Even Israeli officials are intimidated by Aipac. What would Aipac do? Stop supporting Israel? Support the opposition?

The issue of how much any American administration should press an Israeli government to make concessions for peace is at the heart of delicate and long-unresolved questions among American Jews. At the least, say the traditional supporters of Israel, any disagreements should not be aired publicly.

J Street officials have said one of their principal beliefs is that any administration, Mr. Obama’s included, should have some room to disagree with Israel’s government in order to become a more effective broker in the region.

A senior administration official said that the president and his advisers were aware of the restiveness caused by the summer’s dispute with Mr. Netanyahu over settlements. But the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Obama’s stance on settlements was not a drastic departure from longstanding policy and that relations with the Netanyahu government were now excellent.

Netanyahu’s Embrace of Mark Twain

A posting in the New York Times blog The Lede. Emphasis added.

May 20, 2009, 1:23 pm

By Robert Mackey

Earlier this week a two-paragraph article on the Web site of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, on how a book by Mark Twain might factor in the quest for Middle East peace, sparked a brush fire of commentary from bloggers and journalists. The Haaretz report suggested that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel planned to give President Barack Obama an excerpt from Twain’s travel memoir “The Innocents Abroad,” during their meeting in Washington. The fact that both the White House and the the prime minister’s spokesman told The Lede on Wednesday that Mr. Netanyahu’s gift to Mr. Obama was another book, a Bible, reminds us that blogging is a lot easier if you don’t have to base your posts on confirmed reports. A cartoon from American Publisher in 1872, showing Mark Twain on the trip to the Middle East described in his “Innocents Abroad.”

Still, our digging into the matter revealed that Mr. Netanyahu is just one of several people who have argued in recent years that the part of Twain’s book describing his visit to Ottoman-ruled Palestine in 1867 helps to prove that the Arab presence in what is today Israel was so insignificant before the arrival of Zionist pioneers that modern Palestinian claims on the land are unfounded.

As Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin wrote in a blog post suggesting that Mr. Obama should read Twain’s book:

Twain’s recollections of his post Civil War tour of the Mediterranean are an apt subject of reflection for Obama as he attempts to force Netanyahu to accept a Palestinian state. The Palestine Twain visited was a backwater of the Ottoman Empire whose inhabitants had no sense of a separate national identity. Though Palestinian nationalism is a reality that Israel must contend with today, it originated and gained traction solely as a reaction to the return of large numbers of Jews to the country.

In fact “Innocents Abroad” is so popular with Zionists that the chapters from Twain’s travelogue on the Middle East have been translated into Hebrew and published as a separate book, called “Pleasure Excursion to the Holy Land.”

Nine years ago, in a book of his own, “A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations,” Mr. Netanyahu cited some of the observations in “Innocents Abroad,” about how sparsely populated certain parts of the land were at the time of Twain’s visit, as proof of “what every civilized and educated person knew at the close of the nineteenth century: that the land was indeed largely empty.” Mr. Netanyahu quoted several passages from Twain’s book to support his argument that, even decades after the American writer visited the Holy Land, “this wasteland of Palestine,” with “its miniscule Arab presence, making use of virtually none of the available land for the people’s own meager needs, could hardly be considered a serious counter to the claim of millions of Jews the world over to a state of their own.”

To help convince his readers that the British had indeed given “a people without a land a land without a people,” in his book Mr. Netanyahu leaned heavily on quotes from Twain’s book, beginning with this one (all ellipses and punctuation are Mr. Netanyahu’s own):

Stirring senses… occur in this [Jezreel] valley no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent — not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings.

Next, Mr. Netanyahu cited this Twain’s description of the Galilee in 1867:

These unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of bareness that never, never, never, do shake the glare from their harsh outlines…; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under six funereal palms. … A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. … We reached [Mount] Tabor safely. … We never saw a human being on the whole route.

Mr. Netanyahu also supported his contention that Twain found “more of the same” in what the American described as “the barren mountains of Judea,” by quoting this passage:

Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years ago. … [Bethlehem,] the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sand “Peace on earth, good will to men,” is untenanted by any living creature.

Whatever the merits of taking selected observations of a comic novelist as solid demographic evidence 130 years after the fact, Mr. Netanyahu might be faulted for constructing the paragraphs above by stitching together fragments of Twain’s account, with heavy use of ellipses. For instance, in the description of the Galilee quoted above, Mr. Netanyahu separated Mr. Twain’s thoughts about Tiberias and his description of a journey to Mount Tabor by ellipses and just one line of text, while in fact, as Frank J. Menetrez has pointed out in an analysis of how Twain’s text has been used by other Zionist authors, in “Innocents Abroad” there are “12 pages and numerous intervening paragraphs” between those two scenes.

Detail from the first cover of “The Innocents Abroad.”

Mr. Netanyahu was not the first person to embrace “Innocents Abroad” in support of the argument that 19th century Palestine was a “wasteland.” As John Kearney wrote on the blog Mondoweiss on Monday, Twain’s “portrayal of the Holy Land as a filthy, backwards, empty place,” was cited by Joan Peters in her book “From Time Immemorial,” in 1984. All three of the passages from Twain quoted above from Mr. Netanyahu’s book appeared first in Ms. Peters’ book.

In his post on Mondoweiss, Mr. Kearney argued that Twain’s book was “hardly a survey,” and noted that “Today there are still large, non-agricultural areas in the West Bank and Israel where you can drive and not see a soul.”

Apart from the demographic argument though, there is no doubt that Twain had a lot of unfavorable things to say about Arabs, and was not shy of saying them. In a column in Haaretz on Wednesday, the Israeli historian Tom Segev noted that:

Netanyahu took historian Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador-designate to Washington, with him on his trip. Oren wrote a fascinating book on American attitudes toward the Middle East, in which he says the Muslims disgusted Twain: “No number of negative adjectives, it seems, could express Twain’s disgust.”

That said, in Mr. Oren’s book, “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present,” he points out what some Israeli champions of Twain may have missed, that the writer was equally scathing about most of the world’s people, including Americans. According to Mr. Oren:

Twain indeed resembled earlier American visitors to the Middle East, yet one characteristic distinguished his writing from that of all other tourists. Whereas his predecessors looked at the region and saw in its brutality and backwardness an inverse image of their own tolerance and refinement, the mirror, for Twain, showed Americans to be equally small-minded and crude.

Mr. Oren also wrote that, in an essay against the anti-Semitism, which he wrote after being himself mistaken for a Jew, “Twain nearly defeated his purpose by mentioning the Jews’ alleged love of money and their reluctance to serve their country in war.” Such are the perils of embracing the criticism of your enemies by a comic happy to offend every member of his global audience.

Even if, as it seems, Mr. Netanyahu did not come to Washington bearing Twain’s book as a gift for Mr. Obama, the report in Haaretz did point a few American political reporters to the anti-Arab passages of “Innocents Abroad.” In a blog post on Monday, ABC’s Jake Tapper quoted this part of Twain’s description of Jerusalem under Muslim rule, which was far from flattering:

Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently—the eternal “bucksheesh.” To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here.

An illustration from the first edition of “The Innocents Abroad.”

Falling off the Right

These two guys are so extreme right, it is a wonder they tolerate living with this President. And they make it crystal clear: they dislike and distrust Barack Obama, and think he is wrong in everything he does. This is almost four months after the inauguration; then again, they've been savaging Barack Obama since before he became president.

William McGurn has the unmitigated gall to call his column Main Street. If it is Main, it is certainly on the right side of the street.

Brett Stephens seems a little more, what's the term I'm looking for? Smug? Pretentious? But, let his own words speak.

First, Mr. Main Street. Then, Mr. Global.

Seldom does dawn rise on an America where the morning's New York Times displays a more intuitive grasp of a story than the New York Post. The coverage of Barack Obama's commencement address at Notre Dame, however, was such a day. Where the Post headlined an inside spread with "Obama In the Lions' Den," the Times front page was dominated by a color photograph of a beaming president, resplendent in his blue-and-gold Notre Dame academic gown, reaching out to graduates eager to shake his hand or just touch his robe.

Blasted students. Don't ehy realize they're siding with a Liberal?

It was precisely the message President Obama wanted to send: How bad can he be on abortion if Notre Dame is willing to honor him?

Precisely? Too bad Mr. Main Street isn't available to spin the Democratic message. And, how about Notre Dame?

In a letter to Notre Dame's Class of 2009, the university's president, the Rev. John Jenkins, stated that the honors for Mr. Obama do not indicate any "ambiguity" about Notre Dame's commitment to Catholic teaching on the sanctity of human life. The reality is that it was this ambiguity that the White House was counting on; this ambiguity that was furthered by the adoring reaction to Mr. Obama's visit; and this ambiguity that disheartens those working for an America that respects the dignity of life inside the womb.

There is no consideration given to the preposition that, although Catholic, Notre Dame is also a university, and thus the principle of freedom of speech rears its ugly head into the debate of which Mr. Main Street is intolerant. Of course not, for Mr. Main Street is pursuing an agenda, and there is no room for any opinion other than his.

Pro-lifers are used to this [being ignored, shunned]. They know their stand makes them unglamorous. They find themselves a stumbling block to Democratic progressives – and unwelcome at the Republican country club. And they are especially desperate for the support of institutions willing to engage in the clear, thoughtful and unembarrassed way that even Mr. Obama says we should.

So there are the Democratic progressives and country club Republicans on the one side, and the anti-abortionists (o, but do let us call an interest group by its rightful name) on the other. And Democrats that aren't progressives, as well as Republican snot of the country club set? Well, why clutter the argument with unwanted factors?

Mr. Global doesn't allow for such unwanted clutter. He addresses his comments directly to Bibi. He calls it A Strategy for Netanyahu.

Imagine yourself as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, returning to Jerusalem from your first White House parley with Barack Obama.

Both in public and in private, the young president (he's a dozen years your junior, and worryingly free of normal human anxieties) assures you that, when it comes to Iran and the existential threat it poses Israel, he gets it. It's an expression he uses too often, and too easily, to satisfy you that he actually does.

Worryingly free of normal human anxieties? Oy vay, Mr. Global. Stephens simply does not understand Barack Obama, perhaps, in part, because he doesn't want to bother.

What's more, unlike Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter, an Arab-Israeli peace deal isn't the Holy Grail of the Obama presidency. (Thank God, you think, for socialized medicine.) What the president mainly wants is better mood music. At least half your job is to show you can carry a tune.

Thank God, you think, for socialized medicine? Isn't that some kind of metaphor mixing? What does God have to do with it? Aren't socialists God-less?

Of course, there's always the possibility that this president will wind up not only doing nothing to stop Iran, but actively seeking to prevent you from doing something. In that case, you will stand truly alone.

One wonders why Mr. Global even bothers to use the word possibility, and not simply go with what is in his heart: probability.

Oy.

Bibi borrows from Obama

If imitation is the best form of flattery, Bibi is complimenting President-elect Obama. Yeah, right. What Bibi's doing is shamelessly riuding a wave. Just like Bibi: do anything to get elected, and forget shame. Shameless? One of his middle names. Never in modern times has there been a politician who so nakedly pursues power for the sake of having power and getting attention. If Nixon lived in cyber-times, Tricki Dickie and Bibi would be in hot competition for the title of the most unprincipled politician -- and that's saying something.

Israeli Candidate Borrows a (Web) Page From Obama
The campaign Web site of Benjamin Netanyahu, right, looks a lot like Barack Obama's, and it's no coincidence.