Exactly Why Is It that All American Presidents Dance to Bibi’s Tune?
https://newrepublic.com/article/197001/netanyahu-american-presidents-israel-war-iran
Trump is the most pliable. But Netanyahu plays them all like cheap violins, despite being wrong about every important matter of the last 25 years.
Despite the extremely stiff competition, it’s fair to say that Donald Trump may be about to win the historical contest to become the all-time “Bibi’s Lapdog” among American presidents.
After repeatedly rejecting the idea of joining with Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and distancing himself when it finally happened, then reversing himself again to take partial credit for it, Trump appears to be ready to go one massive step further and turn the Israeli attack into a full-fledged American war.
To be more than fair to two profoundly corrupt leaders who don’t remotely deserve it, this is alas nothing new: Israeli prime ministers who bend American presidents to their will have a long and distinguished pedigree. The last U.S. president to stand up to Israel and demand that it reverse itself in a matter of war was Dwight Eisenhower, who, after the 1956 Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt over the closing of the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping, insisted on an immediate withdrawal. (It did not endear Israel to Eisenhower that he was trying to focus the world on Moscow’s invasion of Hungary at the same time.) Even then, France and England immediately complied. Israel took its time and eventually extracted most of the concessions it wanted from the U.S.
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Now by far Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, despite a record of naked corruption, incompetence, and a willingness to cave in to extremist demands in order to cling to power, Netanyahu has always demonstrated a unique sort of audacity when it comes to the United States. Before Trump, the post-1956 de facto rule between the two nations was that the U.S. could not prevent Israel from attacking whomever it wished whenever it wished. But neither could the Israelis issue orders to the U.S. about its own foreign policy. Under Reagan, for instance, Menachem Begin could not stop the U.S. sale of sophisticated AWAC planes to the Saudis, but neither did Israel care what the president thought of its brazen attack on Iraq’s nuclear facilities, its siege of Beirut, its aid to the guilty parties in the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, and, of course, its relentless expansion of settlements on the West Bank.
In a secretly recorded 2001 discussion with West Bank settlers, Netanyahu explained this commonly held view. “I know what America is,” he told them. “America is a thing that can be easily moved, moved in the right direction.… They will not bother us.”
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Finally, what ought to be most unnerving about this episode is the notion that Bibi Netanyahu is someone whose strategic thinking ought to be followed. He is widely recognized as responsible for Israel’s catastrophic unreadiness for the Hamas attack of October 7 and was even in the business of helping to build up that organization at the expense of the Palestinian Authority in order to forestall what he saw as the “threat” of a credible partner for a peaceful solution to the conflict. His opposition to, and subsequent campaign to undermine, the JPCOA is largely responsible for the conundrum we face today. Needless to say, he was also gung ho for America’s disastrous invasion of Iraq before it took place.
If Trump decides to join Israel’s bombing campaign, historians will one day wonder how it was that someone so famously lacking in good judgment could have been the man to lead the world’s most powerful nation into a war with a proud nation 90-million strong that did not, in any meaningful way, threaten the lives of its people.
https://newrepublic.com/article/197001/netanyahu-american-presidents-israel-war-iran
