Why Netanyahu's speech matters

As for Netanyahu, he is called “chickens***” by anonymous sources, the national security adviser says his decision to address Congress is “destructive” of the U.S.–Israel alliance, Kerry tells Congress it shouldn’t listen to Bibi because he voiced wan support for regime change in Iraq (a war that Kerry voted to authorize), the congressional liaison rallies the Congressional Black Caucus to boycott the speech, and the administration leaks to the AP its strategy “to undercut” his speech and “blunt his message that a potential nuclear deal with Iran is bad for Israel and the world.” The strategy includes media appearances and the threat of a “pointed snub” of AIPAC, which has done everything it can over the last several years to ignore or acquiesce to President Obama’s anti-Israel foreign policy.

This sort of contempt for one’s opponents has become so commonplace in American politics since the 2010 “bipartisan health-care summit,” where the president snidely told John McCain “the election’s over,” that I suppose it was only a matter of time before it influenced the administration’s relationships with foreign powers. But it says something about this president that the only country in the world that he treats seriously as an opponent is the state of Israel — that he holds the Israeli government to a standard he applies to no other government, that he is openly hostile to the elected prime minister of Israel and not so secretly hopes for the prime minister to be replaced in the upcoming election, and that he threatens reprisal against a domestic interest group with predominantly Jewish leadership and membership for a disagreement he has with a foreign prime minister — as though Jews were interchangeable when they are not, as in the case of the “deli” where they were “randomly” gunned down, invisible.

Netanyahu’s speech on Tuesday matters precisely because it is a rebuke to the Obama mode of politics, to which America has become numb. Netanyahu’s refusal to back down in the face of political and media pressure, his insistence in making his case directly and emphatically, is as much a statement as any of the technical and strategic and moral claims he will make in his speech. And by going to war against Bibi, the White House has inadvertently raised the stature of his address from a diplomatic courtesy to a global event.