Netanyahu alienates leaders round the world


February 22, 2015
Sarah Benton

In this posting: Netanyahu takes his show on the road, a cool appraisal of PM Netanyahu’s attempt to jump on the right band-wagon from the Financial Times; 2) Cameron, Merkel, other EU leaders vow to protect their Jews, the European leaders who feel Netanyahu is casting aspersions on their ability to protect their citizens, Times of Israel. 3) Bibi’s dilemma: Netanyahu can’t avoid critics as speech to Congress looms, for the first time, an article from Fox News which hitherto has never missed an opportunity to put the boot into Obama. Even they are offended at a foreign leader’s rudeness to their elected president.

French President François Hollande attends a ceremony at the vandalised Jewish cemetery in Sarree-Union, Alsace. Hollande, with Israeli ambassador Yossi Gal standing to his right, said it was an “odious and barbaric act” while Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who is Jewish, said on Twitter that it was “antisemitic and ignoble”. In his speech at the cemetery ceremony Pres. Hollande said:

I know some are asking if they can live in peace in their country, and ask who will protect them against those who wish them harm. One more time, I want to give the Republic’s response — that it will protect you with all its force.

Israel: Netanyahu takes his show on the road

Israeli PM’s foreign policy moves may be smart politics at home, but carry risks abroad

By Geoff Dyer and John Reed, Financial Times
February 20, 2015

With three weeks to go before a tight general election, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not missed an opportunity to demonstrate his dynamism on the international stage.

But Mr Netanyahu has not been focusing his attention on the chaos on Israel’s borders, with Syria in turmoil and Egypt’s politics seized by counter-revolutionary fervour. Instead, the Israeli leader has inserted himself into parallel political arguments in places considered the country’s strongest supporters — the US and western Europe.

The long-simmering tensions between Mr Netanyahu and the Obama administration burst into the open again this week when the White House publicly accused Israel of leaking misleading information about its nuclear talks with Iran — presumably to scupper any eventual deal. At the same time, Mr Netanyahu raised both cheers and hackles in Europe with his call for the continent’s Jews to move to Israel following the terrorist attack on a synagogue in Denmark last weekend.

Mr Netanyahu’s opponents claim he is picking these fights to boost his electoral chances at home, where the 65-year-old is running for a fourth term as prime minister. True or not, the two disputes involve central issues about the political future of Israel and its relationship with Jews around the world. Critics say that by waging public battle with the Obama administration, Mr Netanyahu is putting Israel’s close relationship with the US at risk. And for some European Jews, the prime minister’s call for them to move to Israel raises uncomfortable questions about their loyalty to their home countries.

The immediate cause of the bitter falling-out is with the US is Iran. Diplomats from the US and other major powers are making progress in talks with Tehran over its nuclear programme, which the White House believes will prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon — but Mr Netanyahu argues is a sham that Iran will exploit.

The first sign that the gloves were coming off was in January, when Mr Netanyahu accepted an invitation to speak about Iran to a joint session of Congress without consulting the White House. He will effectively be using the platform in Washington to lobby against a potential agreement that Mr Obama sees as his central foreign policy objective — an intervention that even some of Mr Netanyahu’s allies on the American right have seen as objectionable.

The mutual suspicion was even more evident this week when the White House publicly accused Israel of deceptive leaks about the nuclear talks aimed at undermining support for the administration’s position. In an unusually pointed accusation about a close ally, Josh Earnest, White House spokesman, said Israel had been “cherry-picking specific pieces of information and using them out of context to distort the negotiating position of the US”. The Israeli government insists that Mr Netanyahu is making the speech to Congress to ensure the US does not get pressured into a “bad deal” with Iran. “Without prime minister Netanyahu the world might be sleeping while the Iranians were building the bomb,” says Yuval Steinitz, strategic affairs minister.

While the distrust between Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu represents a new low in relations between leaders of the two countries, there have been several fierce arguments in the past — notably when George HW Bush threatened to withhold loan guarantees to Israel — only for the close ties to resume.

Yet there are two reasons to think that Mr Netanyahu’s tactics over Iran carry big risks for Israel’s relationship with the US. The first is the injection of partisan politics into the relationship between the countries. Israel’s substantial influence in Washington has been predicated on broad support among both parties.

But his planned speech to Congress is putting Israel’s bipartisan support to the test. Many Democrats find themselves forced to choose between their own president and their wish not to offend Israel. More than 20 Democrats — including vice-president Joe Biden — have said they will not attend the Netanyahu speech. Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat, described the invitation as a “tawdry and high-handed stunt”. Leaders of the Jewish community such as Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League have urged the prime minister to cancel the speech.

While Congressional Republicans are happy to use his visit to place Democrats in a difficult position, the Israeli leader has his own considerations. Embroiled in a neck-and-neck race with his main rival, Yitzhak Herzog of the opposition Labour party, Mr Netanyahu has tried to tout his foreign policies and security credentials ahead of the March 17 vote.

A recent poll taken by researchers at Tel Aviv University found that 67 per cent of those surveyed believed the timing of Mr Netanyahu’s speech — to be given on March 3, just two weeks before of the election — was linked to the campaign. The anticipated scenes of the prime minister acknowledging standing ovations from US lawmakers are described by commentators as a golden photo opportunity.

The second risk that Mr Netanyahu is taking concerns broader trends in the attitudes of Americans — and American Jews — towards Israel. Although it enjoys strong support, from the Democratic party to the evangelical wing of the Republicans, the winds could be starting to shift. On US university campuses, Israel has a major problem.

Opinion polls show that younger generations of Americans are much more sceptical about Israel’s actions. That wariness is reflected by many younger American Jews who are more willing to question central aspects of Zionism. During the Gaza conflict last summer, a group called If Not Now, set up by Jewish students, won swift popularity with social media-driven criticisms of the Israeli government.

Another group has founded Open Hillel, which seeks to challenge the organisation that oversees Jewish life on campuses.

Natan Sachs at the Brookings Institution says the danger for Israel is that it becomes a sort of cause-célèbre on American campuses in the way that South Africa did in the last decade of apartheid. “Israelis underestimate how uncool the issue is becoming in American universities,” he says.

Israeli officials also worry about the impact extensive intermarriage with non-Jews is going to have on the American Jewish community: Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, called it a “demographic catastrophe” last year.

None of this means American support for Israel is about to collapse. “Why is the pro-Israel lobby successful?” asks Shmuel Rosner, senior fellow at Israel’s Jewish People Policy Institute. “Because Israel is a country that gets very high marks from Americans in general.” But it does suggest there will be consequences if an Israeli leader seriously overplays his hand with a US president — let alone if he gets blamed by the American public for dragging them into an eventual conflict with Iran.

Mr Netanyahu has been equally unafraid to ruffle feathers in western Europe, where criticism of Israel has risen sharply. He first issued his call for Jews to move to Israel after the January attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris, where he showed up uninvited to the antiterrorism march a few days later. He repeated it this week after the Denmark killings. “We are preparing and calling for the absorption of mass immigration from Europe,” he said.

It is natural for an Israeli prime minister to present the country as a safe haven for Jews. But by promoting himself as leader of Jews everywhere, Mr Netanyahu has again encountered charges of electioneering. In a video posted on his Facebook page, Mr Netanyahu embellished his appeal with a personal story, telling how his grandfather was beaten senseless by anti-semitic thugs at a train station “in the heart of Europe” at the end of the 19th century. “He promised himself that if he survived the night he would bring his family to the land of Israel and help build a new future for the Jewish people in its land,” Mr Netanyahu said.

In Europe, his statements have elicited angry retorts from politicians who accused the Israeli leader of exaggerating the dangers that Jews face. “I will not let what was said in Israel pass, leading people to believe that Jews no longer have a place in Europe,” said French president François Hollande.

Among European Jews, some have welcomed the attention on rising antisemitism, while others worry that their allegiance could be questioned by the suggestion Israel is their natural home. Jair Melchior, the chief rabbi of Denmark, said he was “disappointed” with Mr Netanyahu’s comments. “Terror is not a reason to move to Israel,” he said.

Shimon Samuels, director for international relations at the European office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, says Mr Netanyahu has opened a welcome debate among France’s Jewish community. “He may have done it provocatively, but he was doing his job: he was extending its hand to Jews who either feel abandoned or under siege,” he said.

Mr Samuels said he knows French Jews who have packed their bags. His doctor is among them. But he does not think leaving is the solution. “It would be a tragedy that 2,000 years of Jewish presence in Europe would come to an end,” he says.

Additional reporting by Joel Greenberg, Adam Thomson and Sam Jones



Denmark’s chief rabbi, Jair Melchior, comforts a woman at a memorial site in Copenhagen. Rejecting the call to emigrate to Israel, the rabbi said “If the way we deal with terror is to run somewhere else, we should all run to a deserted island.” Photo by Reuters/Leonhard Foeger

Cameron, Merkel, other EU leaders vow to protect their Jews

Series of European heads take public positions against Netanyahu’s ‘emigrate to Israel’ call, pledge to clamp down on antisemitism

By Avi Lewis, Times of Israel
February 18, 2015

Amid a wave of antisemitic attacks, European leaders pledged this week to ensure the safety of their Jewish communities, rebuffing calls by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for massive Jewish emigration to Israel.

The spat over Europe’s Jews follows a series of fatal terror attacks — in Copenhagen Saturday, and Paris last month — that were directed at Jewish as well as other targets.

The Paris attacks left 17 people dead, including four Jewish men who were taken hostage by an Islamist gunman at a kosher supermarket, while in Copenhagen, a Jewish man was shot dead while guarding a synagogue — also perpetrated by a gunman with suspected links to jihadist organizations.

Netanyahu’s unequivocal remarks, voiced in the aftermaths of both attacks, piqued European leaders for suggesting that Jews living in Europe should move to the Jewish state in order to avoid antisemitism.

“Jews have been murdered on European soil, only because they were Jews,” Netanyahu said Sunday. “Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country, but we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron rejected his Israeli counterpart’s call, and insisted Tuesday that Jews are safe in the United Kingdom and that they are pleased to call the UK home.

“While I am prime minister I promise we will fight antisemitism with everything we have got,” Cameron said.

“Britain is proud to be a multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy,” he noted, responding also in part to a report released early February by a London-based anti-Semitism watchdog that claimed 2014 had seen the highest-ever number of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain.

In a similar vein, German Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged to ensure the security of Jewish sites and praised the seeming cultural renaissance sweeping the country’s Jewish community in the wake of the Holocaust.

“We would like to continue living well together with the Jews who are in Germany today,” Merkel said in Berlin Monday. “We are glad and thankful that there is Jewish life in Germany again.”

Speaking to reporters Monday, Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt also advised Jews not to emigrate, and voiced her support for the Jewish community in the wake of the attacks.

“The Jewish community has been in this country for centuries. They belong in Denmark, they are part of the Danish community, and we wouldn’t be the same without the Jewish community in Denmark,” she said.

In France, however, the calls were more forceful, with Prime Minister Manuel Valls openly criticizing Netanyahu for his remarks while simultaneously pleading with local Jews to stay.

“My message to French Jews is the following: France is wounded with you and France does not want you to leave,” Valls said Monday.

On Sunday several hundred tombs had been defaced at a Jewish cemetery in the east of the country, in what the French Interior Minister called “a despicable act.”

Speaking at a ceremony Tuesday at the cemetery, President Francois Hollande assured the Jewish community that they will be protected by the government “with all its force.”

France has emerged as a focal point in the battle over Europe’s Jews, in part because it has the largest Jewish population on the continent — numbering nearly 480,000 — and in part because in recent years the rate of aliyah, or Jewish emigration to Israel, from the country has spiked, ostensibly in reaction to intolerable levels of antisemitism.

Aliyah from France in 2014 stood at approximately 7,000 people — nearly four times the number of Jews who made aliyah in 2012, making Netanyahu’s call in the eyes of the French leadership all the more vociferous.

“I regret Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks. Being in the middle of an election campaign doesn’t mean you authorize yourself to make just any type of statement. The place for French Jews is France,” Valls said.

Israel is holding a general election on March 17.

On Thursday a leading figure in the French Jewish community labelled rampant antisemitism a major factor in rising aliyah levels.

“The atmosphere for Jews in France is pretty bad,” said Roger Cukierman, president of the CRIF federation of French Jewish communities.

The choice for parents, he added, “is either to send children to public schools, where they may be beaten and insulted [for being Jews] or to send them to Jewish schools, where they may be targets for fanatics and murderers. This is why we see more and more people deciding to go to Israel.”

Indeed, on Sunday the Israeli government approved an unparalleled NIS 180 million ($46 million) allocation to absorb thousands of new immigrants expected to arrive this year from Ukraine, France and Belgium.

“We are preparing and calling for the absorption of mass immigration from Europe,” Netanyahu said amid the bill’s finalization.

But calls from leading European Jewish figures were by no means unilateral, with Denmark’s Chief Rabbi Jair Melchoir intoning Sunday that “terror is not a reason to move to Israel.”

Denmark has prided itself for decades on being one of a tiny number of nations that were able to save the majority of its Jews during the Holocaust.

“People from Denmark move to Israel because they love Israel, because of Zionism. But not because of terrorism,” Melchior told reporters. “If the way we deal with terror is to run somewhere else, we should all run to a deserted island.”

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report


Bibi’s dilemma: Netanyahu can’t avoid critics as speech to Congress looms

By Paul Alster, Fox news
February 17, 2015

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a dilemma on his hands: Address Congress and infuriate President Obama or back down and alienate voters back home. And it may already be too late to avoid both results.

The situation has become much more delicate since Netanyahu accepted House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to address U.S. lawmakers March 3 on the perils of a nuclear deal between the Obama administration and Iran. Netanyahu, who is up for election on March 17, believes a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a threat to Israel’s existence. And while many in Israel agree, others believe provoking the leader of Israel’s No. 1 patron could backfire.

“As far as I see it, Netanyahu is determined to go and has put himself in a position that to give up now would be seen as great weakness from the point of view of the Israeli public,” Ronen Bergman, senior political and military analyst for Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot and author of “The Secret War with Iran,” told FoxNews.com. “One of the main reasons he got himself into this situation in the first place is to portray himself as two things; first, as the one who is at the forefront of fighting the Iranian nuclear project, and second, as not being afraid of confrontation with the U.S. administration and the president when it comes to Iran.”

“As far as I see it, Netanyahu is determined to go and has put himself in a position that to give up now would be seen as great weakness from the point of view of the Israeli public.”
– Ronen Bergman, Yediot Aharonot

Obama is reportedly furious that Netanyahu plans to come to Congress and has said he will not meet with the Israeli leader. Although Obama’s spokesman cited longstanding U.S. policy of not inviting foreign leaders to the White House when doing so could be perceived as an endorsement of their candidacy, Obama’s critics suggest his objection to the speech is out of fear Netanyahu will expose flaws in the international community’s ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran, in which the U.S. is a major player.

“I just returned from the Munich Security Conference where I met with some very senior U.S. officials,” Bergman said. “The way they describe it they are ballistic about Netanyahu. This mindset is common wall-to-wall in all corridors of the [U.S.] administration; the Armed Service Committee, the intelligence community, the State Department, the Defense Department. I heard only one thing, and that is that this shouldn’t happen.”

Complicating matters is the fact that it’s no secret that there is little love lost between Obama and Netanyahu. On Sunday, Boehner acknowledged on Fox News Channel that he had not informed the White House of his invitation to the Israeli leader.

“I wanted to make sure that there was no [White House] interference,” Boehner said. “I frankly didn’t want that getting in the way, quashing what I thought was a real opportunity.”

Later on Sunday, Israel’s Channel 2 News reported that the U.S. has stopped updating Israel on developments in the ongoing talks with Iran over its nuclear program out of dissatisfaction with Netanyahu’s travel plans. But at this point, it may be too late to cool things down, even if Netanyahu were willing to forgo the speech.

“Obama is preparing a bad agreement that would leave Iran as a threshold nuclear country,” Professor Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israel relations at Israel’s Bar Ilan University, told FoxNews.com. “His strategy is that he will leave Iran with the capability of having nuclear material, but will impose an inspection regime that will make it irrelevant. Obama also wants to elevate Iran to the position of regional policeman in the Middle East, responsible for regional stability. This policy is so far-fetched that any student of Middle East studies would understand it is like hallucinating!”

Gilboa said Netanyahu didn’t anticipate the strong reactions from the U.S. and from the many members of Congress, who will be absent from a speech that could be made before a half-empty House. He believes Netanyahu should consider other options, such as taking the politics out of the visit by inviting the leader of the Israeli opposition, Isaac Herzog, to go with him to Washington.

“Alternatively, he could postpone his speech until one day after the Israeli elections [March 18] and test the White House, who said their main objection to the speech was because of its possible influence on the Israeli election,” Gilboa suggests. “Another alternative is to deliver the speech at the AIPAC conference at the start of March – which would be widely reported – and then meet privately with groups of congressmen to discuss the Iranian situation.”

Among those supporting Netanyahu’s planned speech is Holocaust survivor and Noble Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel. In full-page advertisements in this weekend’s Washington Post and New York Times, Wiesel asks, “Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America?” Also supporting Netanyahu’s stance is Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, currently on a visit to Israel. Speaking in Jerusalem on Sunday the former Arkansas governor told journalists, “Americans need to know what [the] dangers are with Iran and that the Iranian threat is not unique to Israel, that it does, in fact, involve the United States and the rest of the world.”

Paul Alster is an Israel-based journalist. Follow him on Twitter @paul_alster and visit his website: www.paulalster.com.

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