'Never be the first one to stop clapping'
This posting has these items, plus Steve Bell cartoon between items 4 and 5. No reports of the opposition to Netanyahu expressed in US, so it’s left to the photographers to record it.
1) Haaretz: Netanyahu’s Congress speech was much ado about nothing, the experienced Amir Oren finds nothing new in Bibi’s urgent speech.;
2) Rolling Stone: After Netanyahu Speech, Congress Is Officially High School, lively writing of the ‘politics is tawdry’ variety;
3) Al Monitor: Bibi’s ‘House of Cards’ moment, Bibi’s domestic manoeuvres;
4) Al Jazeera: Netanyahu: He came, he delivered, he failed, useful analysis by Hamid Dabashi of the state of Iran;
5) Jewish Chronicle: Was Netanyahu’s speech worth it?, sceptical judgment from Anshel Pfeffer who points out that the more pressing questions for Israelis – Palestine and social justice – didn’t get a mention;
6) Salon: Jon Stewart destroys Netanyahu over speech to Congress succinct report of Stewart’s judgment on Bibi getting ‘the longest blowjob in history’;
7) Mondoweiss: Israeli voters not impressed by Netanyahu’s speech to Congress , Allison Deger finds no evidence that the speech boosted Likud.;
8) IBT: Netanyahu: Congress Speech ‘Well Worth’ Cost Of Confronting Obama; US-Israel Relations ‘Strong’, Bibi insists his speech essential to save Israel from annihilation;
Editorial Cartoon by Dan Wasserman, Boston Globe, March 03, 2015
Netanyahu’s Congress speech was much ado about nothing
Netanyahu seemed like he was making plans for the day after his defeat – not a ‘time-out’ from politics like the one that followed his 1999 loss, but a bid to become defense minister in Isaac Herzog’s government.
By Amir Oren, Haaretz
March 03, 2015
If this was supposed to be the peak moment of Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign, he’s in terminal condition. His speech to Congress was much ado about nothing, delivered with an attitude of resignation to his loss of the premiership.
Netanyahu seemed like he was making plans for the day after his defeat – not a “time-out” from politics like the one that followed his 1999 loss, but a bid to become defense minister in Isaac Herzog’s government. His argument is already prepared: The bad deal with Tehran only postpones the threat of Iran’s nuclearization until 2025. For the sake of the nation, for the sake of humanity, Netanyahu must stick around to thwart the danger waiting for us around the corner, in just another decade. He’s willing to give up the prime ministry and focus on defense.
Politically, the speech failed. It was existential boredom. His captive audience would have applauded even had he read it the Caesarea phone book, but he put it to sleep. His lesson in nuclear physics caused his pupils’ eyes to close. They, as usual, brought their applause, but the lecturer, unusually, spent too much time on boring details rather than soaring rhetoric. His Iranomania didn’t intoxicate the Americans. They too oppose Iranian nukes, but they also have other problems, and different cost-benefit calculations.
And what a pity it was that Netanyahu, having generated so much interest in what he would say, didn’t bother saying a word about an agreement with the Palestinians. “Peace” on its own, with no mention of the vision or the price, is an empty word.
The last foreign leader to occupy this platform – without clashing with President Barack Obama or being boycotted by senators and congressmen – was Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. They applauded him last fall against his rival, Russian President Vladimir Putin. And much good it did him.
Before him came two consecutive presidents of South Korea, which fears North Korea’s nukes. There have been Britons and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Iranians, Jordanians and Iraqis, prime ministers and kings and presidents; among them were Herzog’s father, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. They all came, conquered the Hill and went home. Even Winston Churchill was followed at this podium by the man who defeated him in the election, Clement Attlee.
Netanyahu was weakened by Obama’s counterattack. He has stopped demanding additional sanctions on Iran; Tuesday, he made do with demanding, almost pleading, that existing sanctions be left in place. But that’s unrealistic. Any deal will include lifting the sanctions.
Therefore, Netanyahu is trying to change the rules by expanding the negotiations from the nuclear issue alone to include missiles and terrorism. A worthy goal, but there’s no chance the countries negotiating with Iran will condition a nuclear agreement on achieving it. And the justified demand that Iran accepts Israel’s existence, as recommended by senior defense officials, he raised only after it was too late.
An hour before the speech, in another Congressional chamber, two senior Pentagon officials presented Obama’s military priorities in the Mideast. Gen. Lloyd Austin, commander of U.S. Central Command, listed them from top to bottom: defeating the Islamic State, bolstering Afghanistan’s security forces, fighting Al-Qaida, and only then, in fourth place, Iran – both its nuclear program and its support for terror. Under Secretary of Defense Christine Wormuth reduced the list to two: first Islamic State, then Iran.
The briefing was professional and detailed, devoid of flowery rhetoric and illusions – just what Netanyahu could have delivered had he cared about results rather than electioneering. Lofty words tend to collapse into practical compromises – as the man who invited him, Speaker of the House John Boehner, also knows, having capitulated over the homeland security budget just hours earlier.
Boehner’s standing among Republications was weakened, as was Netanyahu’s among Israelis. But who cares? What matters is that Elie Wiesel was sitting alongside Sara Netanyahu, so the cameras focused on him would capture her as well. And we can only guess what Netanyahu was thinking when he looked at them and said, “Never again.”
An unnerving photo of a group of prosperous white, middle-aged men congratulating themselves on having a Jewish mascot.
After Netanyahu Speech, Congress Is Officially High School
Israeli Prime Minister’s visit inspires bitchy barbs and insults, and nobody came out of this week looking good
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
March 06, 2015
Years ago, when I was just starting in this business, I had the privilege to meet a well-known muckraker and columnist. I asked him the secret of his success.
“Two things,” he said. “One: when you’re hammered after a night out, drink an entire litre of water before you go to bed. An entire litre, do you understand? Otherwise the whole next work day is shot.”
“An entire litre,” I said. “Got it.”
“Second, never write about Israel. It just pisses people off. No matter what you say, you lose half your Rolodex.”
I frowned. How he could ignore such an important topic? Didn’t he care?
“Son,” he said, “we’re prostitutes. We don’t enjoy the sex.”
Mainly by accident, I sort of ended up following that advice, but I did watch the Benjamin Netanyahu speech and its aftermath this week. A few thoughts on one of the more unseemly scenes Congress has cooked up in a while:
First of all, the applause from members of the House and Senate was so over the top, it recalled the famous passage in the Gulag Archipelago about the apparatchik approach to a Stalin speech: “Never be the first one to stop clapping.”
Watching it, you’d almost have thought the members were experiencing a similar terror of being caught looking unenthusiastic. I say almost because in reality, it’s a silly thought, in a democracy: nobody’s getting taken out back and shot for showing boredom.
But then, no kidding at all, a gif apparently showing Rand Paul clapping with insufficient fervor rocketed around social media.
It got enough attention that the Washington Post wrote about it and Paul himself had to issue a statement on Fox and Friends denying he wasn’t clapping really, really hard. “I gave the Prime Minister 50 standing ovations. I co-sponsored bringing him here,” Paul pleaded. Is the Internet age beautiful or what?
But the telescreens weren’t just watching the Republicans. Cameras also captured Nancy Pelosi looking somewhat south of enraptured during the speech.
Those photos only circulated more after she said she was “near tears” because she was saddened by Netanyahu’s speech, which she termed an “insult to the intelligence of the United States.”
This in turn led to more social media avalanching and a cartoonish response from South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who told a donor at a fund-raiser: “Did you see Nancy Pelosi on the floor? Complete disgust. . .If you can get through all the surgeries, there’s disgust!”
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the U.S. Senate! If Kathy Griffin ever bombs out on Fashion Police, Graham will have a job waiting for him.
After Bloomberg traitorously reported on Graham’s locker-room joke about Pelosi’s face, a storm of criticism from Democrat members raged and the Senator was forced to walk his comments back (“I made a poor attempt at humour,” he said, in what is looking like the go-to lawyer-drafted apology line of our times).
All of this preening and adolescent defiance, all these bitchy homeroom-style barbs and insults: has the U.S. government ever seemed more like high school?
Indiana Republican Jackie Walorski apparently thinks school’s still in. This is her reacting after Netanyahu’s speech, according to Slate:
“Wooh, baby! That was awesome!”
Around the world, not everyone was so enthused. Several Israeli diplomats took to Twitter to voice their concerns over Netanyahu’s appearance. (Everybody tweeted about this speech. There were more Iranian officials on Twitter Tuesday than there were sportswriters at the Super Bowl).
Yigal Caspi, Israel’s ambassador to Switzerland, retweeted a line from an Israeli journalist: “Is it no longer possible to suffice in scaring us here in Hebrew? [Netanyahu] has to fly all the way to the US Congress and tell them in English how dangerous Iran’s nuclear program is?”
Caspi and two other diplomats got the ax for their social media responses to the speech. Meanwhile, British journalist Jeremy Bowen got caught in the Twitter Punji-trap when he made a comment about Elie Wiesel, the author and Holocaust survivor who sat in the Speaker’s box with Netanyahu’s wife, Sara.
A safe joke to make about Wiesel’s presence probably would have been something along the lines of, “I guess that book Elie was planning on co-writing with Barack Obama is on hold.” The BBC’s Bowen went in a different direction, bluntly declaring that Netanyahu was “playing the Holocaust card” by bringing the Nobel laureate and camp survivor.
Instantly accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, Bowen and the BBC insisted that he was just using “journalistic shorthand,” and that the wording was appropriate because Netanyahu was raising the “specter of another Holocaust.” As of this writing, Twitter warriors are still feasting on Bowen’s head and should have him skeletonized by nightfall.
Nobody came out of this week looking good. Regardless of where you stood on a possible nuclear deal with Iran, the whole episode this week made the American government look like what some in the Iranian press apparently called it: a clown show.
Once upon a time, the opposition party pursuing a second line of foreign policy for domestic political purposes was considered unseemly.
Think candidate Dick Nixon submarining the 1968 Vietnam Peace talks behind LBJ’s back, or the fabled October Surprise conspiracy theory. This was something one did in secret, preferably in trench coats instead of ties, with no press at all present, unless you count Sy Hersh’s future sources.
But this was like the October Surprise as a pay-per-view MMA event. That this sleazy scheme was cooked up mainly for the political gain of both the hosts and the speaker (who faces an election in two weeks) was obvious in about a hundred different ways, beginning with the fact that the speech was apparently timed so that Israeli audiences could watch it over dinner.
But the gambit only sort of worked for Netanyahu, whose Likud Party has experienced only a modest bounce since the speech, if it got one at all. American news outlets humorously had different takes on the same polls showing Likud gaining one or two seats (HuffPo: “Netanyahu’s Popularity Rises After Speech to U.S. Congress: Polls”; Washington Post: “Netanyahu’s Speech to Congress Fails to Jolt Electoral Needle At Home”).
Similarly, if the move had any benefit to the Republicans in congress, it was hard to perceive. Nobody in the media drew a link between Bibi’s speech and the Republicans’ surrender on the Homeland Security funding bill, but on some level there must have been one.
You can’t invite a foreign leader into the House Gallery to accuse a sitting president of being soft on terrorism in an event covered by 10 million journalists, and then turn around the same week and defund the president’s Homeland Security department over some loony immigration objective.
Even worse, the decision to try to conduct their own foreign policy in the shadow of the White House went over so badly with American voters, it actually gave Barack Obama a 5-point sympathy bump in his approval rating.
Put it all together, and the Republicans’ big rollout this week had to be the most self-defeating political pincer move since the Judean Peoples’ Front sent their Crack Suicide Squad to the rescue in Life of Brian.
This was a week that made everyone look bad: congress, the media, Netanyahu, the Tweeting Supreme Leader in Iran, everyone. Obama only came out looking OK because he mostly stayed off camera and kept his mouth shut.
Mostly, however, it was just a depressing, circus-like demonstration of how schizoid and dysfunctional Washington politics have become. The logical next step after a caper like this is the opening of Republican and Democratic embassies abroad. Let’s hope it’s a long time before anyone tries this again.
Activists with the organization CODEPINK block the doors of the Washington, DC, Convention Center. Photo by EPA
Bibi’s ‘House of Cards’ moment
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has manoeuvered himself into a win-win position: If an Iranian agreement isn’t reached, he’ll celebrate all the way to the ballot box; if not, he can say that at least he tried to avert the catastrophe.
By Ben Caspit, trans. Sandy Bloom, Al Monitor
March 04, 2015
All in all, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu succeeded in landing on “enemy territory” and then making it home safe and sound. Yes, there was “collateral damage” here and there, mainly the painful words of Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a devoted supporter of Israel. But the bottom line is that the commotion did not hurt him. Netanyahu surrounded himself with two Democratic assets, two famous Jews: Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel on one side and shrewd, top-level attorney Alan Dershowitz on the other. With this bullet-proof armour, he made his rounds in Congress, then made it home in one piece.
Netanyahu’s speech to Congress will be recorded as one of the most fascinating political performances of the era. The entire operation, which closely resembled an especially convoluted chapter of the “House of Cards” television series, was somewhere between political genius and cynical deceptiveness and contained a wealth of elements from both sides.
Netanyahu, inspired by his Republican casino-king patron Sheldon Adelson, succeeded in transforming a furious American president, a hostile American administration and fateful international negotiations into political assets, two weeks before the Israeli elections. At this point, these may well be the only political cards that remain up his sleeve. Netanyahu cornered his main opponent, Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog, into a Catch-22: if Herzog attacked the speech, he would be perceived as disloyal to a momentous mission by the nation’s leader. If he embraced the speech, he would make himself the call-girl of his hated rival only a few days before elections.
Netanyahu smiled broadly the night of March 3. In the coming days, we will see how broad this smile will really get — whether the effect of the speech on Israeli polls will be exceptional and can reverse their current momentum. In recent weeks, Netanyahu has been hemorrhaging seats; he lost control over the media’s agenda, absorbed harsh criticism on all sides and began to lag after Herzog with a gap of two or three seats. The objective of the congressional speech was to reverse this trend and improve Netanyahu’s chances of political survival.
By the way, the Israeli assessment is that if Netanyahu is not given the mandate to assemble a government after the elections, he will consider resigning from political life. Back-stabbers both inside and out the Likud are yearning for that moment.
Immediately after the speech, I spoke to an Israeli security official who had been very close to the nuclear negotiations and decision-making hubs on the highest levels. On condition of anonymity, this person said, “The prime minister is a seasoned politician. He reads intelligence reports, he is well-connected and he knows that the chances of an agreement being signed between Iran and the world powers in the current round of talks is very low, if not zero. He knows that out of the eight controversial issues, only two are anywhere near agreement. There is still great distance between the sides on the other six issues. He knows that the French won’t agree to sign under such circumstances, and apparently the Americans as well. What he’s done here with the speech is political genius. He timed it perfectly so that in another week, when the deadline is postponed yet again, he can say that it was his speech that halted the agreement between Iran and the world powers. In reality, this has no basis in fact, but the Israeli electorate will buy into this maneuver and Netanyahu could thus win the elections. We are talking about a cynical maneuver that sacrifices strategic relations with a US president for the medium and long term in favor of narrow, short-term political interests.”
Many other players in Israel’s political system share this theory. Netanyahu expertly manoeuvred himself into a win-win position. If in another week or 10 days the negotiations deadline is postponed, Netanyahu will celebrate all the way to the ballot box. And if an agreement is indeed reached, he can say that at least he tried to avert the catastrophe.
There’s something else here: Those in Netanyahu’s environs really hoped that the American administration would “punish” Bibi with all the verbal means at its disposal in the course of his stay in the United States. The big hope was that the president would criticize Netanyahu in his own voice or express his reservations. When Obama gave an interview to Reuters on March 2, and after the speech addressed the damage it caused, one could almost hear the cheers from Netanyahu’s bureau. Obama has become a real strategic asset for the premier.
From Netanyahu’s vantage, when he appears on one side of the screen and Obama on the other during prime time, that is a true victory photo. Yes, Israel has a sizable electorate that still thinks that good relations with the White House are more important than all kinds of political considerations, but this electorate is to be found in the political left and centre. And at the moment, Netanyahu is fighting for votes from the right. He is fighting for his base against Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman and maybe even Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid. Netanyahu knows that if Herzog finishes with three or four more seats than him, President Reuven Rivlin will ask Herzog to form the next government. Therefore, he prefers to cannibalize the right in favor of his survival as head of the Likud.
When he left for the United States, Netanyahu tried to deflect the attacks on him with an interesting argument. I am not the only one, Netanyahu said, who did important things for the people of Israel in express opposition to the American position; three other great Israeli leaders did the same. The first was David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, who declared the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 against the judgment of the American administration. The second was Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, who embarked on the Six-Day War in 1967 to break the siege around Israel, also against American wishes. The third was Menachem Begin, who attacked the nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, contrary to the ideas of the Americans and the rest of the world.
The problem with Netanyahu’s equation is simple: All the other instances involved actions. In Netanyahu’s case, the choice was limited to talk, to mere words. The only thing that Netanyahu has done in the last six years was to make speeches, convene endless discussions, to threaten, warn and protest. With regard to action, his record yields a zero. Netanyahu built a terribly expensive (if creative) military option for attacking the Iranian nuclear infrastructure, but was afraid to use it.
In 2010 and 2011, several security/military chiefs opposed a strike in Iran. These included Yuval Diskin (Shin Bet), Meir Dagan (Mossad), Gabi Ashkenazi (Israel Defense Forces) and Amos Yadlin (military intelligence). Netanyahu was not able to get himself together and impose his authority on them. These four left in 2011 and were replaced by fresh-faced newbies lacking charisma and self-confidence. However, Netanyahu’s defence minister was still Ehud Barak. So why didn’t he attack Iran in 2012? Obama was facing re-election at the time and as far as he was concerned, Netanyahu could have allegedly (so to say) attacked the administration’s infrastructure in Washington. An American president does not confront Israel in election season, period. But Netanyahu was reluctant. He feared a national commission of inquiry on the heels of an operational catastrophe. He was more worried about himself than the fate of the State of Israel. What does he have left? To deliver speeches. And by the way, he is excellent at that.
Netanyahu: He came, he delivered, he failed
Netanyahu has been outmanoeuvred by Iran and this may mean he will fail to instigate yet another war in the region.
By Hamid Dabashi, Al Jazeera
March 04, 2015
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was still in the air between Tel Aviv and Washington when his propaganda machinery was set fully in motion. A senior Israeli official travelling with him told reporters: “The Israeli government had a good understanding of the agreement we can draw conclusions from… We know what we know. And believe me, we know a lot of information about this agreement… The prime minister is going to Congress to explain what they don’t know about this agreement that it is a bad agreement.”
This piece of disinformation was clearly meant to counter the earlier criticism by US Secretary of State John Kerry that Netanyahu had a record of misleading Americans by cherry-picking intelligence that served his purposes.
Netanyahu urges global unity against Iran’s ‘terror’
Hours before he was about to deliver his speech at the Congress, the White House warned Netanyahu not to spill the secret aspects of the negotiations with Iran. In equal measures and just as Netanyahu was about to address Congress, US President Barack Obama minced no words and categorically discredited Netanyahu from knowing what is best for the US or for Israel for that matter.
‘All sorts of claims’
“Netanyahu made all sorts of claims,” CNN quoted him as having said. “This was going to be a terrible deal. This was going to result in Iran getting $50bn worth of relief. Iran would not abide by the agreement. None of that has come true.”
Literally minutes before Netanyahu’s speech, the White House announced that as soon as the Israeli politician started his address to the Congress, the president would be “hosting a conference call with five world leaders to discuss the situation in Ukraine and other global security issues”.
Even before he gave his speech, the liberal Zionists of Haaretz were busy putting the right spin on it: “The drama over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint meeting of Congress seems, as the event approaches, to be shifting in Israel’s favour.”
Just before he addressed the US Congress, Netanyahu made the predictable stop at AIPAC, the Israeli Fifth Column in the US, repeating his mantra that “Iran is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism in the world,” with the same certainty and confidence he had deceived the US Congress back in 2002 encouraging the US to invade Iraq for precisely the same fearmongering reason that Saddam Hussein was about to launch a nuclear attack on Israel.
What was lost to no observer in the course of the whole drama was the fact that the US and Israel have now become like Siamese twins, joined at the hip.
“What is unprecedented,” as Joshua Keating put it for Slate, “is the extent to which Netanyahu has firmly allied himself with one American party over another – not just during an election but in the making of policy. At this point, US domestic politics are probably a better lens for analysing Netanyahu’s actions than foreign policy”.
He finally entered the chamber with his dark suit and light blue tie, which Boehner motioned to him to fix before he introduced him. Facing him among an almost packed chamber were Elie Wiesel sitting next to Mrs Netanyahu, and Newt Gingrich just a few seats away from Sheldon Adelson.
We are ancient people, he said. Iran wants to destroy Israel, he went on. He referred to the Biblical story of Esther and mentioned Haman who wanted to destroy the Jewish people, and he identified Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as yet another Haman. He is an anti-Semite who tweets about the destruction of Israel. Just like the Nazis, Iran is a threat not just to Israel but also to the whole world.
“We must all stop Iran’s march of conquest, subjugation, and terror,” he said, as he even managed to work in a reference to the popular HBO series “Game of Thrones”. He then vehemently opposed the deal negotiated between the US and Iran, because he said it would (1) leave Iran with nuclear infrastructure, and (2) allow Iran to violate the terms because inspectors can only document violations but they cannot stop them.
Stealing the thunder
Stealing Netanyahu’s thunder just before he came to Washington, DC, Al Jazeera and the Guardian revealed that he was lying through his teeth and contradicting his own intelligence community when he stood in front of the world body at the UN in September 2012 with that Mickey Mouse diagram warning the globe about the Iranian nuclear project. This was precisely when Oxfam reported that rebuilding Gaza could take 100 years if Israel keeps its current blockade, making it impossible for tens of thousands of refugees to return to any semblance of normalcy. Just before Netanyahu headed to Washington, in Israel itself, ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan called his policies “destructive to the future and security of Israel”.
Netanyahu came to Washington to address the US Congress against all opposition, internal to Israel and widespread in the US, for a very simple reason. He, and with him the entire trajectory of the expansionist Zionist project, is in trouble. They are in trouble because in the Islamic Republic, the “Jewish State” has finally found its match.
Weeks of public debates both in Israel and in the US finally resulted in US National Security Adviser Susan Rice denouncing Netanyahu’s visit as “destructive”. She may have indeed meant it “destructive” to US-Israeli relations, if these two items are really two different entities. But the choice word of “destructive” has a wider range of implications that in the topography extended from Gaza to Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan means something far more eloquent.
Meanwhile Iranians just sat pretty in Geneva and Tehran, and Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif managed to produce a photo op walking with Kerry, biting the bullet of domestic criticism for the larger benefit of thumbing his nose at Netanyahu.
The desperation with which Netanyahu came to address the US Congress at the heavy cost of alienating at least segments of the US political establishment is only significant to the degree that it marks his spectacular failure to turn Iran into Afghanistan or Iraq and have the US invade and destroy the country for him.
But the despair speaks of wider domains. Iran has managed to juggle for itself soft and hard power in Iraq, in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Bahrain, and even among the Shia communities in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In none of these areas, Israel has any influence beyond its usual shenanigans of targeted assassinations and similar sorts of menace.
Enemies, friends, counterparts
The ruling regime in Iran has its own desperation to lift the crippling economic sanctions, but the Obama administration’s persistence in finding a closure to the nuclear issue is not just to hand Obama a victory before he leaves office. As I have suggested for a long time, the nuclear issue is the least aspect of the US-Iran issues. There is a larger package, a grand bargain as it were, which announces a major strategic shift in the region, in which both US and Iran acknowledge each other’s power and interest and wish to accommodate each other – and it is precisely this grand bargain that frightens Netanyahu.
Much hype has been made of the difference between the Obama administration and Netanyahu on the Iran nuclear issue. This rift is first and foremost strategic and only vaguely points to the emerging structural shifts in the geopolitics of the region. The symbiotic relationship between the Zionists’ militarism and US global warmongering is far deeper and remains far more structural than one US president or one Israeli warlord can alter. What Iran has successfully done is to bank on its expansive soft and hard power in the region to posit itself as equally – if not more – helpful to US policies in the region. This is what angers Netanyahu.
Netanyahu’s desperation and the fact that he has been outmanoeuvred by Iran may indeed mean he will fail to instigate yet another war in the region, and that is good news, but it does not mean a nuclear deal that is predicated on Iran’s increasing power in the region bodes well for the future of democracy in the region.
Just like Israel, Egypt and Syria, the ruling regime in Iran is categorically inimical to any democratic change in the region. So the more it spreads its power as a regional hegemon, the more damage it can do to those democratic aspirations, beginning with those aspirations inside Iran.
At issue in this public display of differences between Obama and Netanyahu is the rapidly changing geopolitics of the region in which Israel is no longer dealing just with the corrupt and crooked timber of ruling regimes in the Arab and Muslim world. The ruling regime in Iran has no interest more paramount than its own survival. A ruling regime that cannot tolerate a smidgen of liberty for its own people could not possibly care for the liberation of Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Bahrain, or Yemen from tyranny of one sort or another.
What matters for the democratic aspirations of people from one end of the Arab and Muslim world to another is not to get caught up in these power politics between an Islamic Republic, a “Jewish State”, and the Christian imperialism that embraces them both. From Azadi to Tahrir squares, an entirely different geography of liberation is at work that may be in hibernation now, but it breathes healthily and confidently awaiting the next Spring or Intifada to bloom.
Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.
Steve Bell, Guardian, March 4th, 2015
Was Netanyahu’s speech worth it?
By Anshel Pfeffer, Jewish Chronicle
March 04, 2015
What, if anything, did Benjamin Netanyahu achieve?
Before and after his speech to Congress on Tuesday, the criticism flowed freely from the commentariat: nothing he could say would ever change the Obama administration’s mind about a nuclear agreement with Iran; the speech was aimed at an Israeli electorate that cares more about the cost of housing than the threat of the Islamic Republic; it was heavy on rhetoric and showmanship but light on deal-breaking facts; it further damaged US-Israel relations.
And yet among the Middle East’s Sunni leaders, who share Israel’s concern about Iran’s nuclear programme and its aspirations for regional hegemony, the speech was greeted with warmth.
Faisal J Abbas, editor-in-chief of Al Arabiya, the Saudi-owned news channel, penned an unprecedented editorial entitled: “President Obama, listen to Netanyahu on Iran.”
He wrote: “In just a few words, Mr Netanyahu managed to accurately summarise a clear and present danger, not just to Israel (which obviously is his concern), but to other US allies in the region.” Other newspapers in Saudi Arabia and across the Gulf echoed this line.
Many analysts have pointed out that Mr Netanyahu merely repeated arguments that he has made many times in the past — in particular, that a nuclear deal would “pave the way for a bomb”.
But the rapturous reception he received, with multiple standing ovations during his 55-minute speech, suggested that he went down well with a large section of his target audience — members of Congress who can restrict President Barack Obama’s ability to sign a nuclear deal with Iran. Certainly, the great majority of Republican members and a number of Democrats endorsed Mr Netanyahu’s call for a much harder bargain to be driven.
Sources close to Mr Netanyahu said that the effect of his reception in Congress would be felt in the negotiating room. “The Iranians were watching this very closely,” said one Likud minister on Wednesday. “It has created an additional source of pressure on them, now that they know that Congress will fight the current deal. This can change the dynamic beacause they will increase their demands. The administration will also have more leverage as they can say to the Iranians, we have to go back and sell this deal to Congress, who are against.”
Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzachi Hanegbi suggested that the speech might have moved Congress into actively opposing the prospective nuclear deal. Republican lawmakers, in their initial reactions, demanded that “Congress must assert its role and responsibility as a co-equal branch in the safety of America and Israel,” as Doug Lamborn of Colorado put it.
And yet there was a backlash from some of the Democrats who had initially backed — and still support in principle — imposing additional sanctions on the Iranians. Such a move would need Democratic support to have any chance of reaching a veto-proof majority. Senator Robert Menendez, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, who is co-sponsoring this legislation, reacted angrily to suggestions that it would be fast-tracked following Mr Netanyahu’s speech.
“There’s no reason to accelerate this process in this way,” he said on Tuesday. He was echoing the Obama administration’s reaction that the prime minister had presented no new alternative to the impending agreement in his speech.
Overall, the situation in Washington does not seem significantly different following the speech, with the administration still trying to reach an agreement and the Republicans aiming at blocking it but lacking the requisite majority.
In diplomatic circles, there are widely differing assessments on the viability of reaching an agreement this month. But for Mr Netanyahu, there are more immediate concerns back in Israel. There is an election to be won and political opponents trying to change the agenda and shift public attention away from the Iranian issue.
On Sunday evening, activists set up again in Rothschild Boulevard. Nearly four years after the “tent protest” which kicked off the biggest series of demonstrations in Israeli history, some are trying to reignite the social-justice movement.
Opinion polls have placed the Iranian nuclear threat at only fifth on the list of issues worrying Israeli voters — below the cost of living, housing shortages and renewed violence between Israel and the Palestinians.
While the diplomatic process with the Palestinian Authority is rarely mentioned at election events, Mr Netanyahu’s challengers from the centrist parties have sought to focus the campaign on financial issues, particularly the difficulty of purchasing a first home.
Last week’s report from the State Comptroller on the housing crisis, which followed a previous report on the expenses of the prime minister’s official residence, seem to have taken a toll on his standing, with Likud down by a couple of seats in the polls. However, these issues have so far failed rouse much passion in the campaign. Likudniks are speculating hopefully that the Congress speech will regain the votes that are necessary to close the small gap with Zionist Union and perhaps even reopen a small lead.
Labour leader Isaac Herzog has had to tread a wary path in response. “No Israeli leader can countenance a nuclear Iran” he said. “But Netanyahu’s speech will not affect the agreement, not its substance or its timetable.” His party’s candidate for finance minister, Professor Manuel Trajtenberg, said in a meeting with young voters in Jerusalem that he had had “enough of this fear-mongering. We have a real crisis of housing now which is affecting our real lives.”
Jon Stewart destroys Netanyahu over speech to Congress
By Sarah Gray, Salon
March 04, 2015
On Tuesday night, “The Daily Show” tackled Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to Congress – the one that House Speaker John Boehner invited Netanyahu to give without consulting the White House.
“Daily Show” host Jon Stewart took aim at all parties involved in this disrespectful spectacle of political showmanship: Boehner was ridiculed for poking the White House in the eye, Obama was mocked for his calm public reaction, Netanyahu was lampooned for getting Iran and Iraq wrong so many times before, and members of Congress were teased for their ridiculously long standing ovations.
“Whether Netanyahu achieved his goals of sabotaging a deal with Iran, or mistakenly opened up a rift in U.S.-Israeli relations, one thing is for certain,” Stewart concluded. “The in-chamber response to this speech was by far the longest blowjob a Jewish man has ever received.”
Netanyahu outlined impossible Iran deal, U.S. official says
Prime minister’s demands would be unacceptable not only to Iran, but also to other world powers involved in the nuclear negotiations, the senior official tells Haaretz.
By Barak Ravid
Marcb 4, 2015
WASHINGTON D.C. – U.S. President Barack Obama didn’t watch Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s televised speech to Congress on Tuesday, though he read the transcript and was briefed on it afterward by one of his aides. A senior U.S. official said the White House had no contact with Netanyahu or his staff during the prime minister’s visit to Washington.
Speaking before a joint session of Congress, Netanyahu warned of the against the deal being negotiated between world powers and Iran, saying it would not block Iran’s way to obtain nuclear weapons, but pave way to a nuclear bomb.
Contrary to the expectations raised in briefings by Netanyahu’s staff before the speech, he revealed no classified details about the emerging agreement with Iran. American officials had publicly warned him not to divulge such information, “but we don’t know if our public warnings are the reason” why he didn’t, the official said.
The White House believes Netanyahu not only failed to present an alternative to the emerging agreement, but also presented unrealistic demands for what he would deem a better agreement.
“In his speech, Netanyahu outlined a nuclear agreement that will never happen,” the senior official said. “We agree with what he said about Iranian involvement in terror and the other negative things Iran does, but the negotiations we’re conducting are meant to prevent them from getting a nuclear bomb, and we need to focus on that.”
Netanyahu’s demand that Iran’s nuclear infrastructure be completely dismantled, the official continued, would be unacceptable not only to Iran, but also to the other countries involved in the talks – Germany, Britain France, Russia and China.
Moreover, he said, Netanyahu’s demand for additional sanctions on Iran could backfire. “If we go with new sanctions, would the world support this? What’s liable to happen is that Iran will abandon the negotiations, begin installing thousands of new centrifuges, activate the reactor in Arak and quickly become a nuclear threshold state. We’re proposing an agreement that will halt Iran’s nuclear program for more than a decade.”
Even after the agreement lapses, Iran won’t be free to do whatever it pleases, he added, because if it races for the bomb, “we’ll still be able to impose new sanctions and we’ll still be able to launch a ground operation. We won’t lose any of our options.”
Under any agreement, Iran will have to sign the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which allows surprise inspections, he noted. This will remain in force even after the agreement ends, so “even in another decade, we’ll be able to continue seeing what’s happening in Iran’s nuclear program, and then we can decide what we’re willing to accept and what we aren’t. The agreement doesn’t give Iran a blank check to develop nuclear weapons capabilities in another 10-15 years.”
An Israeli worker hangs posters of Israeli Prime Minister and leader of the Likud party Benjamin Netanyahu under the slogan ‘It’s us or them’, in Jerusalem, Israel, 08 February 2015. Photo by Abir Sultan / EPA
Israeli voters not impressed by Netanyahu’s speech to Congress
By Allison Deger, Mondoweiss
March 05, 2015
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on Tuesday elicited strong opinions from U.S. elected officials with rave reviews from Republicans and condemnation from several Democrats. But back home Israelis were nonplussed over the talk—if they watched at all.
With Israeli elections now two weeks away, Netanyahu’s address was widely thought to have doubled as late campaign pitch. Yet even those who support him found the speech redundant, and noted the lack of a clear alternative to the current negotiations between the P5+1 with Iran (the P5+1 refers to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, United States, Russia, China, United Kingdom, and France, plus Germany). Moreover, Israelis understand that their country is not a party in the Iran deal and did not expect that Netanyahu would sway the State Department in its diplomatic path.
Of those that did listen the speech, 43% said Netanyahu was unable to change their vote, according to polls released Wednesday evening by Israel’s Channel 2. Apathy amongst Israelis was also confirmed by Netanyahu’s Likud party’s projected incremental gain in Knesset seats. He bumped up one spot to 23 seats after the talk in Washington, still trailing behind the center-left bloc, the Zionist Camp, which polled at 24 seats, again according to Channel 2. Throughout the election season Netanyahu and his opposition have each oscillated between 23 and 24 seats.
“I think it was a nice speech,” said Pinhas Karavasi, 59, a former electrician, while shopping in a convenience store Jerusalem’s Zion Square shopping corridor. Karavasi intends to vote for the right-wing, Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party. “I could vote for Likud, Likud is good too,” he said. But Karavasi was not convinced by the speech at Congress, “Netanyahu is good with his words, but not in reality.” For Karavasi, “The Palestinians, Hamas and the Palestinian territory, all of these problems are more important than Iran.”
Moreover, Karavasi does not believe Netanyahu can change the course of the P5+1 talks, nor does he think Netanyahu will conduct a military strike on Iran. While many Israelis backing Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc are opposed to world leaders striking any deal with Iran, for them, Iran is not a priority. In December over 50% of Israelis polled by Ma’ariv said that social or economic issues were the most important to them, opposed to 30% who said security. Still Israeli voters did regard Netanyahu’s talk with a generic source of pride, lauding his ability to grab headlines in America. Karavasi added, “I don’t think that he is going to do anything about Iran. I don’t think Obama is going to listen to him.”
David Mayer, 27, a cashier, agreed. On he Iran he said, “I think it is a bad country.” Still, out of apathy Mayer did not watch the speech. “I’m really avoiding this stuff,” he said.
“He didn’t say anything new, or how to make a better deal or agreement. He just repeated himself, that’s all,” said David Katz, 32, a worker in a paper store in near Mayer’s shop. Katz agrees with Netanyahu, that the U.S. should not move forward on making an agreement with Iran, and prefers harsher sanctions, “No one thinks differently than Netanyahu on Iran. The only differences when it comes to Iran are between Netanyahu and Obama, that is the only conflict in this issue.” Katz also saw Netanyahu’s speech as an example of bipartisan support for Israel, thought that the row over Netanyahu’s talk was more of a rift between the administration and Israel, rather than Democrats as a whole.
“In the relationship between Israel and the U.S., the one problem is Obama. Congress, from both sides, Democrats and Republicans, they don’t have a problem with Israel—not security, not economics, not anything at all. Only Obama has a problem with Israel,” continued Katz.
Katz is unsure who he will vote for, but Netanyahu will not be his selection. He wants a candidate from the hard right with a platform for the economy and the Palestinian conflict, both of which Netanyahu has remained quiet on throughout election season. “I think I will decide only when I sit in the ballot hallway.”
For those opposed to Netanyahu, the address to Congress changed nothing. Like their right-wing counterparts, issues of the economy and conflict with the Palestinians remain key concerns, two subjects Netanyahu did not touch upon when in Washington.
I heard it was a good speech,” said Tal Nachman, 23, a college student studying photography who did not watch the Netanyahu speech, “I’m not sure if it was,” she added. Nachman said she will not vote. In the last election she supported the center candidate Yair Lapid who vowed to reduce the cost of living in Israel. Following two years of his tenure as economic minister and prices rising in Israel, Nachman is disillusioned, “He promised a lot of things and never did anything,” she said.
“No one in the government is doing or planning to do anything for the students or for people that rent apartments—thousands of Shekels—nothing is really going on so it doesn’t really matter,” said Nachman.
Even though Nachman is not backing Netanyahu in this election, she had a blasé attitude towards him and the speech at Congress. “I think he is doing what is the best for Israel and what he thinks is the best.”
Others had harsher words for Netanyahu.
Protest in New York City, March 2015. Photo from NY Daily News
“It is abundantly clear that Netanyahu hopes his speech will cause western civil society to ignore the brutal occupation of the West Bank, the strangling siege of Gaza, and the unprecedented assault on the Palestinian people last summer, whose only achievement is that it claimed the lives of over 2,000 people,” said Itamar Haritan, 28, a graduate student at Tel Aviv University. Haritan is voting for the United Arab List, making him one of an estimated 10,000 Jewish-Israelis who will back Palestinian citizens of Israel in the next election. He is deeply opposed to Netanyahu and the speech to Congress only reaffirmed his beliefs. “His use of the threat of a ‘Second Holocaust’ with reference to Iran is so blatantly cynical that he has even used this strategy to deflect criticism regarding his government’s systematic dismantling of health care and public housing within Israel, making the Iran gambit a focal point of ridicule even in ‘mainstream’ Israeli-Jewish society.”
Following Netanyahu’s speech, the Arab List polled at an expected 13 seats, making it the third largest political party in Israel. The Arab List had been tied with the rightist Jewish Home and centrist Yesh Atid parties, however, they only polled at 12 seats, according to Channel 2.
Netanyahu: Congress Speech ‘Well Worth’ Cost Of Confronting Obama; US-Israel Relations ‘Strong’
By Lora Moftah, International Business Times
March 06 2015
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in comments to Israel Hayom on Friday that his controversial address to the U.S. Congress on Tuesday was “well worth the cost of confrontation” with President Barack Obama. Despite the White House’s criticisms of the speech, which warned the U.S. of a “bad” nuclear deal with Iran, Netanyahu maintained the lasting effects of the address would be positive.
“A prime minister in Israel must be able to stand up even to our closest ally and tell the truth. Otherwise, history will not be kind to us,” Netanyahu said. “If Iran arms itself with a nuclear bomb, with the explicit intent of annihilating Israel, it would jeopardize our very existence. If I hadn’t done what I did, in the future other could criticize us and wonder, ‘Why didn’t you speak up? Why didn’t you issue warnings? Why didn’t you act in time? I, of course, am acting in time.”
Netanyahu also challenged the idea that his speech had put a strain on ties between the two governments. “Contrary to what people may say, the relations between Israel and the U.S. are strong, and they will overcome this disagreement. If the [emerging Iran deal] is brought to Congress for approval — and there is a real possibility that it will — I have no doubt that my speech served to shore up support for Israel’s stance,” he said.
The Israeli prime minister’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday had been criticized as a breach of protocol by the White House and Democratic leaders, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who later issued a statement saying that the address had been an “insult to the intelligence of the United States,” according to the BBC. Netanyahu argued during the address that ongoing negotiations between Iran and international powers about the country’s nuclear program could pave the way for an Iranian nuclear weapon.
The controversial address came less than two weeks before the upcoming nationwide election in Israel, a fact that has prompted many to suggest Netanyahu’s move was motivated more by domestic political considerations than anything else. Regardless of his motives, it does not appear that the speech has helped the leader’s Likud party gain a competitive edge ahead of the March 17 contest. A poll by the Jerusalem Post on Friday found that the Zionist Union, Likud’s main political rival, continues to hold a lead for seats in the country’s Knesset. If the election were held today, the Zionist Union would beat Likud, 24 seats to 22.