For decades, it has been a cardinal principle of Israeli security and foreign-policy doctrine that its leaders must cultivate bipartisan support in the United States, and therefore avoid even the appearance of favoritism. This is the official position of the leading pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, AIPAC, as well, which is why its leaders are privately fuming about Netanyahu’s end-run around the White House. Even though AIPAC’s leadership leans right, the organization knows that support for Israel in America must be bipartisan in order for it to be stable. “Dermer and Netanyahu don’t believe that Democrats are capable of being pro-Israel, which is crazy for a lot of reasons, but one of the main reasons is that most Jews are Democrats,” one veteran AIPAC leader told me.
In Israel, cynicism about Netanyahu’s intentions is spreading. “Netanyahu, who purports to be the big expert on everything American, subordinated Israel’s most crucial strategic interests to election considerations, and the repercussions will endure for some time,” Chuck Freilich, a former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council, wrote last week. Another Netanyahu critic, Martin Indyk, the former Obama administration peace envoy, told me that he believes the Israeli prime minister is motivated by a combination of factors, including a belief that he is best equipped to defend the Jewish people against eliminationist threats, and a “genuine concern about the nature of the deal,” which Indyk said he shares.
Indyk went on to say, however, that “in the process, Bibi has generated a suspicion that there’s another motivation, which is that he’s in a neck-and-neck race for prime minister, and this appearance before Congress looks like an attempt to show the Israeli voter two weeks before the election that Congress has his back even though he’s in a confrontation with the president of the United States. And because of that suspicion, he has managed to achieve the opposite of his intention.”
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