Nov 3rd 2014

More to the US-Israel Spat than Meets the Eye

by James J. Zogby

Dr. James J. Zogby is the President of Arab American Institute
In case you haven't noticed, the Obama Administration is in the midst of an on-going and very public spat with the Netanyahu government in Israel. The "tit for tat" exchanges have been noted in the press, with reporters and some analysts providing banal motives for the acrimony. Some have suggested "revenge”—pointing to Netanyahu's support for Obama's 2012 rival, Mitt Romney. Others have relied on the old Washington standard—"bad chemistry". I believe, however, that it would be wrong to attribute the bitter words and bad feelings to trite personal concerns since there may be a strategic political purpose being served by this unfolding drama.

First, a recap of the most recent events—to set the stage:

A few weeks back, following a Netanyahu-Obama meeting in Washington, the White House rebuked the Israeli leader's announcement of new settlement construction in occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank. The Israeli Prime Minister was quick to respond. He charged that the US criticism failed to reflect "American values", bizarrely claiming that since Palestinians have the right to live anywhere they wish in the "Land of Israel", that Jews should not be denied that same right. To their credit, Israeli commentators were quick to point out that this was sheer nonsense since it is well understood by Israelis that Palestinians cannot live anywhere they please. In fact, even Arab citizens of Israel are denied the right to live in most Jewish-only communities.

The White House quickly shot back at Netanyahu suggesting that his harsh words were both uncalled for and more than a little ungrateful, reminding him how the US had funded the "Iron Dome" and taken a host of other actions in Israel's defense.  

Round two came last week as Netanyahu's Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon came to Washington and left after failing to secure meetings with the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, and other top Administration foreign affairs officials. This slight might have passed unnoticed, but for an official leak that made the insult public. Once again, the Israeli press pounced making it clear that it was the minister's undiplomatic criticism of US Secretary of State John Kerry (Ya'alon had earlier charged that Kerry was driven by some sort of "messianic" complex in his efforts to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace) that had caused him to become "persona non grata" at the State Department and White House.  

The latest episode in this public spat came in the form of an interview given by an unnamed "senior Administration official" in which he was quoted saying

"The thing about Bibi is, he's a chickens**t...the good thing is he is scared to launch wars. The bad thing about him is that he won't do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arabs. The only thing he's interested in is protecting himself from political defeat...he's got no guts."

Tough words, to be sure, and what was most interesting was that the Administration let them stand for a full day, for maximum impact, before making any effort to diplomatically walk them back. The reaction in Israel was immediate and sustained. The Prime Minister acted like a wounded warrior claiming that he was being attacked solely because he was defending Israel.

While Netanyahu had some defenders, to be sure, many commentators were not buying his arguments. They charged that his behavior was not only putting the US-Israel relationship at risk; it was also isolating Israel in the world community. As evidence for their concern, they cited not only the above-noted repeated run-ins with Washington but also the decision of Sweden to recognize the State of Palestine and pro-Palestinian votes in Britain and Ireland, and new warnings from the EU over settlement plans in Jerusalem. 

With the recklessness of Netanyahu's own actions and those of his extremist allies fueling an ever-increasing volatile situation in Jerusalem and with the Palestinians launching an effort at the United Nations against settlements and for an end to the occupation, the Prime Minister's newly emboldened critics have become increasingly concerned that the last thing Israel needs in the face of these serious challenges is isolation from its friends in the West.

Netanyahu may have already written off the Obama White House and may be counting on a Republican Congress to save him from the Administration's pressure, but opinion in Israel appears not to share his confidence that the country can whether the storms created by his defiance. They are warning that regardless of which party wins the upcoming US election, Israel may be heading for two long and lonely years. 

This is what, I believe, is behind the Administration's gambit. The President has long been frustrated by the Israeli Prime Minister's wily and often dishonest maneuvering. But knowing that the opposition in Israel is too weak at present, to win control of the government, something needed to be done to shake up the internal Israeli debate.

The "conventional wisdom", as projected by some former US officials and pro-Israel groups in Washington, is that Israelis will only make peace when they are given everything they want and feel secure. In fact, the opposite is true. It is only external pressure—especially pressure from the US—that historically has forced Israelis to make the right choice. George H. W. Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker did just that when publicly rebuked and then denied loan guarantees to then Prime Minister Shamir in the early 1990's. Bill Clinton did much the same when he refused to meet with Netanyahu and sent clear signs of his displeasure with the Prime Minister's behavior in 1998. In both instances, Israelis got the message and unelected these Likud leaders in favor of governments that promised to restore the US-Israeli relationship and move toward peace.

This may very well be what the Obama Administration is up to right now. It is a gamble, to be sure. It may be too late to empower the Israeli peace camp and stop the right-ward drift in that country. But it is a risk that must be taken. Secretary Kerry was right to link the conflict against ISIS with the Israel-Palestine conflict. With delicate negotiations underway with Iran and in the midst of a war for the future of Iraq and Syria, the last thing the US needs is a pyromaniac in Jerusalem pouring gasoline on the fires that will inflame the entire region.   

Netanyahu must go, but for that to happen, the debate in Israel must change and that country's peace forces must be strengthened to the point where they will coalesce around a candidate that will move the country in a different direction. That process is beginning. But if it is to have any chance of succeeding, it must be sustained. If Washington were to become weak-kneed and back down: Netanyahu would win, peace would lose, and the US will not, any time soon, get another opportunity to restore its leadership in the region.

Browse articles by author

More Current Affairs

Dec 29th 2022
EXTRACTS: "On August 1, 1991, a little more than three weeks before Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union, US President George H.W. Bush arrived in Kyiv to discourage Ukrainians from doing it. In his notorious 'Chicken Kiev' speech in the Ukrainian parliament, Bush lectured the stunned MPs that independence was a recipe for 'suicidal nationalism', 'ethnic hatred', and 'Local despotism.' ----- ....the West’s reluctance to respect Ukraine’s desire for sovereignty was a bad omen, revealing a mindset among US and European leaders that paved the way to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. ----- .... Western observers, ranging from Noam Chomsky to Henry Kissinger, blame the West for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade, or have urged Western leaders to provide Putin a diplomatic off-ramp by compelling Ukraine to give up territory. Policymakers, too, seem to view Ukraine’s self-defense as a bigger problem than Russia’s genocidal aggression. ----- ..... despite the massive material and military support the West has provided to Ukraine, the fateful logic of appeasement lingers, because many Western leaders fear the consequences of Russia’s defeat more than the prospect of a defeated Ukraine. ----- This war is about the survival of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. In the words of the Israeli leader Golda Meir, born in Kyiv, 'They say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise.' "
Dec 29th 2022
EXTRACT: "China’s flexible, blended, increasingly dynamic private sector could do all that and more. ----- Then came Xi Jinping. "
Dec 29th 2022
EXTRACTS: "For a few years in the late 2010s, it seemed to be only a matter of time before China would replace the US as the world’s largest economy and overwhelmingly dominant technological superpower. Then came the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019. " ---- "How could China’s seemingly all-powerful autocrat understand so little about the social contract on which his power rests? For all its difficulties, liberal democracy – with its transparency and self-imposed limits – has once again proved more efficient and resilient than autocracy. Accountability to the people and the rule of law is not a weakness; it is a decisive source of strength. Where Xi sees a cacophony of clashing opinions and subversive free expression, the West sees a flexible and self-correcting form of collective intelligence. The results speak for themselves."
Dec 12th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Next time you’re in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, don’t bother looking for Dostoevsky Street. It’s been renamed: it’s now Andy Warhol Street. ..... because many Ukrainians regard Andy as Ukrainian. Was he? The evidence is mixed." ---- "Warhol remained a committed Greek Catholic all his life. He regularly prayed, both at home and in church, and frequently attended Sunday Mass. His bedside table contained a crucifix, a Christ statuette, and a prayer book. After he died on February 22, 1987, he was buried in St. John the Divine Byzantine Catholic Cemetery, some twenty miles south of Pittsburgh, in a simple grave next to his parents." ---- "When it comes to objective cultural affiliation or subjective ethnic identification, the United States—with its diverse Slavic heritages—has the greatest claim on Warhol and his art."
Dec 12th 2022
EXTRACT: "Cellular agriculture provides an alternative, and could be one of this century’s most promising technological advancements. Sometimes called “lab-grown food”, the process involves growing animal products from real animal cells, rather than growing actual animals. If growing meat or milk from animal cells sounds strange or icky to you, let’s put this into perspective. Imagine a brewery or cheese factory: a sterile facility filled with metal vats, producing large volumes of beer or cheese, and using a variety of technologies to mix, ferment, clean and monitor the process. Swap the barley or milk for animal cells and this same facility becomes a sustainable and efficient producer of dairy or meat products."
Dec 5th 2022
EXTRACT: "After a decade of unconstrained growth – when it seemed that a new billionaire was minted every day – the tech industry has finally hit a rough patch. Elon Musk’s erratic behavior following his takeover of Twitter has left the financially leveraged platform in a precarious state. The crypto exchange FTX’s sudden implosion has vaporized a business that was recently valued at $32 billion, taking many other crypto firms with it. Meta (Facebook) is laying off 11,000 people, 13% of its workforce, and Amazon is shedding 10,000. What are we supposed to make of these setbacks? Are they isolated incidents, or signs of structural change?"
Dec 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "Just looking at explicit debts, the figures are staggering. Globally, total private- and public-sector debt as a share of GDP rose from 200% in 1999 to 350% in 2021. The ratio is now 420% across advanced economies, and 330% in China. In the United States, it is 420%, which is higher than during the Great Depression and after World War II."
Dec 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "The Conservative leadership must stand up to the party’s extremists, and it must do so sooner rather than later. If moderates cannot defeat the hardliners by the next election, and the outcome turns out to be as bad for the Tories as recent polls suggest, they will find they have the same fight on their hands in opposition. --- Conservatives must never underestimate the importance of their moderate supporters. If the Party continues to disregard centrists whenever the Brexiteer right stamps its feet, it may find itself out of power for a long time to come."
Nov 24th 2022
EXTRACT: "....young voters did reach the polls they voted overwhelmingly for Democrat candidates across the country. According to reports, 63% of 18- to 29- year olds voted Democrat and 35% voted Republican in the House of Representatives elections. Voters between 30 and 44 split their vote between the two parties, while older voters tended to vote Republican."
Nov 24th 2022
Nouriel Roubini: "Central banks are in both a stagflation trap and a debt trap. Amid negative aggregate supply shocks that reduce growth and increase inflation, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they increase interest rates enough to bring inflation down to 2%, they will cause a severe economic hard landing. And if they don’t – attempting instead to protect growth and jobs – they will be left increasingly far behind the curve, leading to a de-anchoring of inflation expectations and a wage-price spiral. Very high debt ratios (both private and public) complicate the dilemma further. Raising interest rates enough to crush inflation causes not only an economic crash, but also a financial crash, with highly leveraged private and public debtors facing severe distress. The resulting financial turmoil that intensifies the recession, creating a vicious cycle of deepening recession and escalating financial pain and debt distress. In these circumstances, central banks will blink. They will wimp out in the fight against inflation, in an effort to avoid an economic and financial crash. But that will lead to a higher permanent inflation rate, while only postponing the arrival of stagflation and debt crises. In other words, central banks in the United States, Europe, and other advanced economies have only bad options."
Nov 13th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Today’s autocrats wear staid business suits and pretend to be democrats, and that has been sufficient to grant them access to high-level meetings in Davos or at the G20, where they actively recruit former Western politicians, lawyers, public-relations consultants, and think tanks to make their case in the West." ---- "....whatever the weaknesses of Western democracies, they still command a degree of soft power that their autocratic competitors could only dream of. Democracy remains popular around the world – among citizens of both democratic and nondemocratic countries. That is why modern dictators pretend to be democrats." ---- "....there is no shortage of criticism about how the US and Europe function. But that itself is a product of the press freedom and political opposition that one can find only in democracies. But actions speak louder than words: Immigrants from around the world are eager to come to Europe or America, whereas few are trying to get into Russia or China."
Nov 9th 2022
EXTRACT: "In conventional macroeconomics, an economy’s longer-term growth potential is determined by the sum of labor-force and productivity growth. If one of those factors slows, the other must accelerate. Otherwise, long-term growth suffers.  China is in serious trouble on both fronts. An unsustainable one-child family-planning policy –subsequently changed to a two- and now three-child policy – means that the working-age population is declining, and Xi’s speech at the 20th Party Congress suggested that already-strong productivity headwinds are likely to intensify. "
Nov 1st 2022
EXTRACTS: "First and most obvious – it has happened before. And in an historical sense, it has happened relatively recently, with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 rightly considered a seismic event in world politics. The rub is that nobody predicted the end of the USSR either. In fact, it was confidently assumed in the West that Mikhail Gorbachev would go on ruling the Soviet Union, until the hard-line coup that failed to topple him (but left him mortally wounded in a political sense) made that view obviously redundant." ---- "So is it speculative to talk about a future Russian collapse? Yes. Is there evidence it is imminent? No. But in many ways that’s the problem: when authoritarian regimes implode, they tend to do so very quickly, and with little warning."
Oct 25th 2022
EXTRACT: " But in celebrating the CPC centennial, he [XI left little doubt of what those challenges might portend: “Having the courage to fight and the fortitude to win is what has made our party invincible.” A modernized and expanded military puts teeth into that threat and underscores the risks posed by Xi’s conflict-prone China."
Oct 8th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Recent inflation news from the eurozone’s largest member, Germany, is particularly alarming. In August, producer prices – which measure what is happening at the preliminary stages of industrial production – were a whopping 46% higher than in the same month last year. Given the long-term correlation between the growth rate of producer and consumer prices, this suggests that the latter could soar to 14% in November. Price stability – which is supposed to be the ECB’s uncompromising goal, per the Maastricht Treaty – is no longer perceptible" ----- "Since the 2008 global economic crisis, the ECB has allowed the central-bank money supply to increase twice as fast, relative to economic output, as the US Federal Reserve has. Of that growth, 83% was the result of the ECB’s purchases of government bonds from eurozone countries. With those purchases – which totaled an estimated €4.4 trillion – the ECB pushed interest rates on government bonds to around zero. This spurred countries to disregard European debt rules and accumulate debt at a breakneck pace."
Oct 7th 2022
EXTRACTS: "While some Russians have opposed the attack on Ukraine from the outset and publicly protested against the mobilisation that has just been declared, others, on the far right, feel that Russia is holding back too much and are increasingly calling for total mobilisation, the carpet-bombing of Ukrainian cities, and even the use of nuclear weapons." ----- "Will the Kremlin be able to channel the growing warmongering zeal? In view of the intensity of the rhetoric of the various wings of the Russian far right, backed recently by several Putin allies including the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, it is doubtful: whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, nationalist pressure is likely to become a serious and lasting threat to Russia’s internal stability."
Oct 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "But US and global equities have not yet fully priced in even a mild and short hard landing. Equities will fall by about 30% in a mild recession, and by 40% or more in the severe stagflationary debt crisis that I have predicted for the global economy. Signs of strain in debt markets are mounting: sovereign spreads and long-term bond rates are rising, and high-yield spreads are increasing sharply; leveraged-loan and collateralized-loan-obligation markets are shutting down; highly indebted firms, shadow banks, households, governments, and countries are entering debt distress. The crisis is here."
Sep 29th 2022
EXTRACTS "Ever since she became a prominent political figure 12 years ago, Truss has been a shapeshifter. She started as a Liberal Democrat before becoming a Conservative, and she voted to remain in the European Union before championing Brexit. As a minister, it is hard to think of anything she accomplished. She signed a few EU trade deals as Secretary of State for International Trade, but most of those were rollovers." --- "But if until recently it seemed that Truss was driven solely by political ambition, her government’s 'mini-budget' proposal sheds light on her deeper ideological affinities."
Sep 20th 2022
EXTRACT: "Russia’s focus on Ukraine and Putin’s choice to frame this as a civilisational struggle with the west has created opportunities for China to enhance its influence elsewhere – at Russia’s expense."
Sep 20th 2022
EXTRACTS: ”The Ukrainian army is making spectacular advances,” --- “…the European Union has fully mobilized to confront the energy crisis.” ---- “we are helping our partners in the Global South to handle the fallout from Russia’s brutal aggression and cynical weaponization of energy and food.” ---- “In short: the overall strategy is working. We must continue to support Ukraine, pressure Russia with sanctions, and help our global partners in a spirit of solidarity.”