To say the United States is extricating itself from a special status friendship with Israel may seem overblown, but president Obama’s recent dealings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does reflect shifting attitudes between the two countries, and disassembles the notion that our friendship is unchangable, regardless of who’s in power.
For many years that notion had seemed to be the case, with a right-leaning pro-Israeli lobby, AIPAC, brokering relations between the White House and Congress and coalition governments in Jerusalem. We were told American Jews, despite voting Democratic 2 to 1, supported the nation of Israel unconditionally. Dissenters to that viewpoint were called self-hating Jews, or, if goys, anti-semitic. During the Bush years especially, Washington gave its unquestioning support to Israel, always a solid backup vote in the United Nations, always an implicit (and sometimes explicit) protector of the nation’s interests.
But with the combination of the election of the aggressively hardline, pro-settlement Netanyahu, the emergance of a liberal Jewish lobby in the form of J Street, and an American leader who makes overtures to the Arab and Persian worlds regularly, and takes the two-state solution seriously, change has its price.
This month’s diplomatic drama, which was set off during Vice-President Biden’s visit by the announcement of sixteen hundred housing units planned for Ramat Shlomo, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, reached its sad nadir last week, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother-in-law, Hagai Ben-Artzi, declared on Israeli radio that Obama was an “anti-Semite.” No one, not even Netanyahu, should be denied his right to an idiot relation, but the remark is less readily dismissed when one recalls reports (later denied) that the Prime Minister himself has referred to David Axelrod (whose West Wing office featured an “Obama for President” sign in Hebrew) and Rahm Emanuel (a civilian volunteer in the Israeli Army during the first Gulf War) as “self-hating Jews.”
This reevaluation of our two nation’s relationship is necessary, but nonetheless painful. For a fuller picture of the new political landscape between America and the Hebrew homeland, one could do worse than read the David Remnick’s full comment for The New Yorker, Special Relationships.
