Washington – House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are playing a dangerous game. What they are doing runs the risk of turning Israel into a deeply divisive partisan issue.
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Boehner and Netanyahu are joining forces to undermine President Barack Obama. By inviting Netanyahu to address Congress without first consulting the White House, Boehner is retaliating for the president’s recent executive actions on immigration and other matters. By accepting the invitation, Netanyahu is putting himself in the anti-Obama camp. Republicans are thrilled, and Democrats are offended, by the show of disrespect for the president.
Nearly every issue in American politics has become partisan. Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on taxes, education, whether climate change is caused by human activity or even how the economy is doing.
Israel used to be a relatively nonpartisan issue. Americans have never shown much sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and they still don’t. During the Gaza war last summer, only 14 percent of Americans expressed more sympathy for the Palestinians than for Israel, according to a Pew Research Center poll. A bare majority — 51 percent — sympathized with Israel. More than one-third of Americans said they sympathized with both sides, neither side or had no opinion.
Public sympathy for Israel has been increasing since 2002, according to the Gallup poll, but that is largely because of growing pro-Israel sentiment among Republicans. A year ago, Republican support for Israel reached 81 percent. Support for Israel was significantly lower among Democrats (58 percent) and independents (56 percent).
Republicans have become uniformly pro-Israel, while Democrats are more divided. The division among Democrats is not pro-Israel versus pro-Palestinian. Very few Democrats are sympathetic to the Palestinians (17 percent in the Pew poll). It’s really a split over Israel’s occupation policies that critics believe violate human rights.
Democratic Party leaders have tried to hide that division. They did that at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. When the delegates voted on a platform amendment to restore language saying “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel,” support in the convention hall was clearly less than the required two-thirds. After some consultation, the chair called for a second vote. Same result. So the chair simply declared the amendment approved.
Only one place in U.S. politics has, so far, been immune from the growing partisan divide over Israel: Congress. Congressional Democrats have always been as staunchly supportive of Israel as their Republican colleagues. Criticism of Israel in Congress has been confined to the far-left and far-right fringes.
One could make the argument that without Congress, there would be no Israel. Since the 1967 Middle East war, every U.S. president, Republican and Democrat, has experienced run-ins with Israel. But Congress, whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans, has always been there to bail Israel out. Pro-Israel organizations such as Christians United for Israel and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee know that. That’s why they have always concentrated their lobbying influence on Congress.
Netanyahu is playing his own political card here. Israel is having a national election two weeks after Netanyahu addresses Congress in March. Israeli political commentator Nahum Barnea wrote that Republicans “are helping Netanyahu defeat his rivals here, and he is helping them humiliate their rivals there.” Barnea warned, “That is dangerous. That is toxic.”
On Israeli radio, Shelly Yachimovich, an opposition member of the Israeli parliament, called it “a brutal and unacceptable bypass of the president of the United States,” adding, “Such a thing simply damages us.”
Congressional Democrats will certainly be in the audience applauding Netanyahu’s address. They do not want to retaliate by showing disrespect for Israel. But they deeply resent what Boehner and Netanyahu are doing. That resentment is likely to break into the open if, under pressure from Israel, nuclear negotiations with Iran break down and the U.S. gets pulled into a new military engagement in the Middle East.
Rank-and-file Democrats are also likely to be offended by the insult to their president. The risk is that support for Israel among Democrats will erode and the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in the United States will collapse.
“Netanyahu is using the Republican Congress for a photo-op for his election campaign,” former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk told the New York Times, “and the Republicans are using [Netanyahu] for their campaign against Obama.”
Both Boehner and Netanyahu are meddling in another country’s politics. That is never a wise thing to do.
Bill Schneider is an American journalist. From 1990 to 2009 he served as CNN’s senior political analyst. He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow & Resident Scholar at Third Way, a Washington think tank. Schneider is also serving as the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor at George Mason University’s School of Public Policy.
Sad to say, he’s right. Mr. Netanyahu should have gracefully declined this invitation.
Usually, when a foreign leader is invited by the Speaker to address a joint session of congress it’s during an OFFICIAL visit to the president of the US in the White House. Circumventing this process and doing so outside of an official invite to Washington from the White House is unwise and foolish.
Israel can count on one hand the true friends she has around the globe, especially these days, the US (always) has Israel’s back and this is an unnecessary slap in the face of the current resident of the White House.
Frankly, from an intelligent individual like the prime minister of the State of Israel, this an 180 degree turn!
Finally someone standing up to Obama.
BS’D. We’re talking about Israel’s EXISTENCE here. Can’t the VIN editors find a source of editorial comment other than this forked tongue Reuters??
Boehner publicly stated that he had informed the White House about the invitation prior to extending it. The partisan politics begins with the President, not Boehner.
Poorly written article. So many silly points.
“Nearly every issue in American politics has become partisan. “
All politics is partisan–what’s the chidush?
“Both Boehner and Netanyahu are meddling in another country’s politics. “
How is Boehner meddling in Israeli politics? It may be so that Netanyahu is using this for political gain, but Boehner isn’t in it to help Netanyahu, he’s in it to help Boehner.
“Democrats are offended, by the show of disrespect for the president.”
Democrats are most offended by the disrespect that Obama showed to them, by antisemitically insinuating that Jews are bribing Congress to be more forceful on Iran, against Obama’s wishes.
Just days ago, British PM Cameron came to Washington and spoke to our lawmakers about delaying sanctions, giving “diplomacy” a chance. No big balagon there. But Netanyahu, whose country has the most to lose, is castigated alongside Boehner. This is the height (depth?) of hypocrisy.
Buchwalter,
“the grandiose Bibi wants to retain his position and the h’ll with the klal yisroel”
You, a Holocaust survivor, ought to be ASHAMED of yourself!
Bibi loses sleep every night over the Iranian threat while this joke of a President has already made peace with their acquiring nukes. Thank G-d that Bibi is using every opportunity available to warn the world about the danger before it’s too late.
You are such an Obama-lover that you’d rather criticize other yidden than tell the truth about this fool. I’ll bet Mah Yofis is your favorite song!
too many obamites
in 2016 President Hliary will get even with him.
While I respect his being a Holocaust survivor, it does NOT give him the right to say:
“the grandiose Bibi wants to retain his position and the h’ll with the klal yisroel”
This has nothing to do with partisan politics. The fact is that Bib is tirelessly concerned about the Iranian nuclear threat and Obama has made peace with it.
Obama started this Cold War with BiBi when he snubbed him time and again publicly, Obama can dish it out but can’t take it? He deserves no respect at all for who he is personally.
I read Israeli papers, both left-wing and right-wing, on a daily basis. Bibi is certainly a politician but the security needs of Israel’s six million Jews are first and foremost on his mind.
I realize that those of you who so stridently attack him deny this reality. However, he’s the person sitting in that chair and you’re not. It’s interesting to me how the very same commentators who constantly criticize Bibi always give Obama the benefit of the doubt. Mah Yofis…
In 1994 elections the Republicans wrestled control of the Congress from those days scoundrels Clinton, Tom Foley and George Mitchell. Unfortunately, Clinton himself was still at large. Shortly after that, the Republican Congress invited then newly elected Prime Minister, coincidentally, Netanyahu, to speak to the Joint Session. Clinton didn’t like it, everyone knew it, but he didn’t make a big deal over it, not like today’s much less manly crying babies.
The Congress gave Netanyahu many a standing ovation, especially for the platitudes such as “There are no terms in Hebrew language for ‘free enterprise’ and ‘free market’ but by the end of my term in office, there will be!” Didn’t work out that way, Israel is still not a free market economy now, 20 years later, but… the fun was had by all. Brack has a lot to learn about saving face… although his is probably beyond rescue.