The other day I was talking to a
senior Obama administration official about the foreign leader who seems to
frustrate the White House and the State Department the most. “The thing about
Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,” this official said, referring to the Israeli
prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, by his nickname.
This
comment is representative of the gloves-off manner in which American and
Israeli officials now talk about each other behind closed doors, and is yet
another sign that relations between the Obama and Netanyahu governments have
moved toward a full-blown crisis. The relationship between these two
administrations— dual guarantors of the putatively “unbreakable” bond between
the U.S. and Israel—is now the worst it's ever been, and it stands to get significantly
worse after the November midterm elections. By next year, the Obama
administration may actually withdraw diplomatic cover for Israel at the United
Nations, but even before that, both sides are expecting a showdown over Iran,
should an agreement be reached about the future of its nuclear program.
The fault
for this breakdown in relations can be assigned in good part to the junior
partner in the relationship, Netanyahu, and in particular, to the behavior of
his cabinet. Netanyahu has told several people I’ve spoken to in recent days
that he has “written off” the Obama administration, and plans to speak directly
to Congress and to the American people should an Iran nuclear deal be reached.
For their part, Obama administration officials express, in the words of one
official, a “red-hot anger” at Netanyahu for pursuing settlement policies on
the West Bank, and building policies in Jerusalem, that they believe have
fatally undermined Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace process.
Over the years, Obama administration
officials have described Netanyahu to me as recalcitrant, myopic, reactionary,
obtuse, blustering, pompous, and “Aspergery.” (These are verbatim descriptions;
I keep a running list.) But I had not previously heard Netanyahu
described as a “chickenshit.” I thought I appreciated the implication of this
description, but it turns out I didn’t have a full understanding. From time to
time, current and former administration officials have described Netanyahu as a
national leader who acts as though he is mayor of Jerusalem, which is to say, a
no-vision small-timer who worries mainly about pleasing the hardest core of his
political constituency. (President Obama, in interviews with me, has alluded to
Netanyahu’s lack of political courage.)
“The good
thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars,” the official said,
expanding the definition of what a chickenshit Israeli prime minister looks
like. “The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an
accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states. The only
thing he’s interested in is protecting himself from political defeat. He’s not
[Yitzhak] Rabin, he’s not [Ariel] Sharon, he’s certainly no [Menachem] Begin.
He’s got no guts.”
I ran this notion by another
senior official who deals with the Israel file regularly. This official agreed
that Netanyahu is a “chickenshit” on matters related to the comatose peace
process, but added that he’s also a “coward” on the issue of Iran’s nuclear
threat. The official said the Obama administration no longer believes that
Netanyahu would launch a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in
order to keep the regime in Tehran from building an atomic arsenal. “It’s too
late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But
ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination
of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too
late.”
This
assessment represents a momentous shift in the way the Obama administration
sees Netanyahu. In 2010, and again in 2012, administration officials were
convinced that Netanyahu and his then-defense minister, the cowboyish
ex-commando Ehud Barak, were readying a strike on Iran. To be sure, the Obama
administration used the threat of an Israeli strike in a calculated way to
convince its allies (and some of its adversaries) to line up behind what turned
out to be an effective sanctions regime. But the fear inside the White House of
a preemptive attack (or preventative attack, to put it more accurately) was
real and palpable—as was the fear of dissenters inside Netanyahu’s Cabinet, and
at Israel Defense Forces headquarters. At U.S. Central Command headquarters in
Tampa, analysts kept careful track of weather patterns and of the waxing and
waning moon over Iran, trying to predict the exact night of the coming Israeli
attack.
Today,
there are few such fears. “The feeling now is that Bibi’s bluffing,” this
second official said. “He’s not Begin at Osirak,” the official added, referring
to the successful 1981 Israeli Air Force raid ordered by the ex-prime minister
on Iraq’s nuclear reactor.
The belief
that Netanyahu’s threat to strike is now an empty one has given U.S. officials
room to breathe in their ongoing negotiations with Iran. You might think that
this new understanding of Netanyahu as a hyper-cautious leader would make the
administration somewhat grateful. Sober-minded Middle East leaders are not so
easy to come by these days, after all. But on a number of other issues, Netanyahu
does not seem sufficiently sober-minded.
Another
manifestation of his chicken-shittedness, in the view of Obama administration
officials, is his near-pathological desire for career-preservation. Netanyahu’s
government has in recent days gone out of its way to a) let the world know that
it will quicken the pace of apartment-building in disputed areas of East
Jerusalem; and b) let everyone know of its contempt for the Obama
administration and its understanding of the Middle East. Settlement expansion,
and the insertion of right-wing Jewish settlers into Arab areas of East
Jerusalem, are clear signals by Netanyahu to his political base, in advance of
possible elections next year, that he is still with them, despite his
rhetorical commitment to a two-state solution. The public criticism of Obama
policies is simultaneously heartfelt, and also designed to mobilize the base.
Just yesterday, Netanyahu
criticized those who condemn Israeli expansion plans in East Jerusalem as
“disconnected from reality.” This statement was clearly directed at the State
Department, whose spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, had earlier said that, “if Israel
wants to live in a peaceful society, they need to take steps that will reduce
tensions. Moving forward with this sort of action would be incompatible with
the pursuit of peace.”
It is the
Netanyahu government that appears to be disconnected from reality. Jerusalem is
on the verge of exploding into a third Palestinian uprising. It is true that
Jews have a moral right to live anywhere they want in Jerusalem, their holiest
city. It is also true that a mature government understands that not all rights
have to be exercised simultaneously. Palestinians believe, not without reason,
that the goal of planting Jewish residents in all-Arab neighborhoods is not
integration, but domination—to make it as difficult as possible for a
Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem to ever emerge.
Unlike the
U.S. secretary of state, John Kerry, I don’t have any hope for the immediate
creation of a Palestinian state (it could be dangerous, at this chaotic moment
in Middle East history, when the Arab-state system is in partial collapse, to
create an Arab state on the West Bank that could easily succumb to extremism),
but I would also like to see Israel foster conditions on the West Bank and in
East Jerusalem that would allow for the eventual birth of such a state. This is
what the Obama administration wants (and also what Europe wants, and also, by
the way, what many Israelis and American Jews want), and this issue sits at the
core of the disagreement between Washington and Jerusalem.
Israel and
the U.S., like all close allies, have disagreed from time to time on important
issues. But I don’t remember such a period of sustained and mutual contempt.
Much of the anger felt by Obama administration officials is rooted in the
Netanyahu government’s periodic explosions of anti-American condescension. The
Israeli defense minister, Moshe Ya’alon, in particular, has publicly castigated
the Obama administration as naive, or worse, on matters related to U.S. policy
in the Middle East. Last week, senior officials including Kerry (who was
labeled as “obsessive” and “messianic” by Ya’alon) and Susan Rice, the national
security advisor, refused to meet with Ya’alon on his trip to Washington, and
it’s hard to blame them. (Kerry, the U.S. official most often targeted for
criticism by right-wing Israeli politicians, is the only remaining figure of
importance in the Obama administration who still believes that Netanyahu is
capable of making bold compromises, which might explain why he’s been
targeted.)
One of the
more notable aspects of the current tension between Israel and the U.S. is the
unease felt by mainstream American Jewish leaders about recent Israeli
government behavior. “The Israelis do not show sufficient appreciation for
America’s role in backing Israel, economically, militarily and politically,”
Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me. (UPDATE:
Foxman just e-mailed me this statement: "The quote is accurate, but the
context is wrong. I was referring to what troubles this administration about
Israel, not what troubles leaders in the American Jewish community.")
What does
all this unhappiness mean for the near future? For one thing, it means that
Netanyahu—who has preemptively “written off” the Obama administration—will
almost certainly have a harder time than usual making his case against a
potentially weak Iran nuclear deal, once he realizes that writing off the
administration was an unwise thing to do.
This also
means that the post-November White House will be much less interested in
defending Israel from hostile resolutions at the United Nations, where Israel
is regularly scapegoated. The Obama administration may be looking to make
Israel pay direct costs for its settlement policies.
Next year,
the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, will quite possibly
seek full UN recognition for Palestine. I imagine that the U.S. will still try
to block such a move in the Security Council, but it might do so by helping to
craft a stridently anti-settlement resolution in its place. Such a resolution
would isolate Israel from the international community.
It would
also be unsurprising, post-November, to see the Obama administration take a
step Netanyahu is loath to see it take: a public, full lay-down of the
administration’s vision for a two-state solution, including maps delineating
Israel’s borders. These borders, to Netanyahu's horror, would be based on 1967
lines, with significant West Bank settlement blocs attached to Israel in
exchange for swapped land elsewhere. Such a lay-down would make explicit to
Israel what the U.S. expects of it.
Netanyahu,
and the even more hawkish ministers around him, seem to have decided that their
short-term political futures rest on a platform that can be boiled down to this
formula: “The whole world is against us. Only we can protect Israel from what’s
coming.” For an Israeli public traumatized by Hamas violence and anti-Semitism,
and by fear that the chaos and brutality of the Arab world will one day sweep
over them, this formula has its charms.
But for
Israel’s future as an ally of the United States, this formula is a disaster.
*****
The official said the Obama administration no longer believes that
Netanyahu would launch a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in
order to keep the regime in Tehran from building an atomic arsenal. “It’s too
late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But
ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination
of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too
late.”
This almost sounded like Neville Chamberlain at Heston Aerodrome, proud that he has brought back the piece of paper from Munich.
If
the Obama administration does not understand the gravity of the Iranian
threat it does not mean that Israel is just going to sit and wait until it gets
nuked. Pity that the Obama administration
is also out of sync with the Pentagon since according to Matthew Kroening’s book “A
Time to Attack” a general upon attending his 90 minute presentation on Iran said that the
decision for the US to attack Iran if
there was no diplomatic solution was a no-brainer.
One of the many reasons there is a
crisis is this:
A
New Strategy for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict - What Yaalon understands and
Obama does not
1chick·en·shit
adjective \ˈchi-kən-ˌshit\
Definition of CHICKENSHIT
1
2
usually vulgar : lacking courage,
manliness, or effectiveness
Examples of CHICKENSHIT
1.
That
guy likes to make threats but he's too chickenshit to act on them.
First Known Use of CHICKENSHIT
1945
2chickenshit
noun
Definition of CHICKENSHIT
1
usually vulgar : the petty details of a
duty or discipline
2
First Known Use of CHICKENSHIT
1947
As·per·ger's syndrome
noun \ˈäs-ˌpər-gərz-\
Definition of ASPERGER'S SYNDROME
: a developmental disorder resembling
autism that is characterized by impaired social interaction, by restricted and
repetitive behaviors and activities, and by normal language and cognitive
development —called also Asperger's disorder
Origin of ASPERGER'S SYNDROME
Hans Asperger †1980
Austrian pediatrician
First Known Use: 1989
As·per·ger's syndrome
noun \ˈäs-ˌpər-gərz-\ (Medical Dictionary)
Medical Definition of ASPERGER'S SYNDROME
: a developmental disorder resembling
autism that is characterized by impaired social interaction, by repetitive
patterns of behavior and restricted interests, by normal language and cognitive
development, and often by above average performance in a narrow field against a
general background of deficient functioning—called alsoAsperger's disorder
This graph is from Google Ngram Viewer
