The spectacle of the world’s only superpower looking on impassively while it is being abused, betrayed, cheated and frustrated by a so-called faithful little ally is quite extraordinary. Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu is supposed to have gone to Washington this week to mend fences with Barack Obama and his administration. The relationship between the two men has declined steadily over the last seven years. Obama was preparing to take office while the genocidal Israeli assault on the Gaza Ghetto, slaughtering 1,400 Palestinians. It appears that desperate attempts by the president-elect to intervene as the very public butchery continued were rejected sharply by the Israelis.
Obama’s 2008 Cairo speech, which ignited so much hope and excitement in the Arab world, absolutely infuriated Netanyahu. Though the Israel leader will undoubtedly have taken perverse pleasure in the president’s complete failure to deliver on the promised Palestinian peace, he never forgave him for straying off the time-honored Washington script of uncompromising support for poor, embattled little Israel. Obama’s presidency has little over a year to run. There are no votes to be lost in giving a very public slap-down to Netanyahu. His would-be Democratic successor, Hillary Clinton has written what amounts to an embarrassing political love letter to the Israelis, in the hope of securing the US Zionist vote. If she moves into the Oval Office in 2016, it will be business as usual, and then some, in US-Israeli relations. But Obama has been given the opportunity for America to demonstrate, albeit briefly, that it cannot be taken for a patsy without consequences.
The consequence could be the refusal to sanction a new ten-year aid deal, which would see Washington increase its military support for Israel from $3.1 to $5 billion a year. Nothing was due to be signed when the two men met but the arrangement was supposed to be agreed in principle.
Netanyahu once more arrived in Washington with the strong echo of anti-US invective behind him. In a bad-mouthing stunt that has been pulled before, this time Netanyahu’s newly-appointed spokesman Ran Baratz was found to have said that US Secretary of State John Kerry had a mental age of 12 and that the White House policy toward Israel was anti-Semitic. Netanyahu of course immediately protested that such comments were unacceptable and did not take Baratz to Washington with him. Instead he said he would deal with the matter when he got home.
Most sensible people would have thought that on the eve of key talks with the US president, Netanyahu would have recognized the seriousness of these statements and immediately fired Baratz. The fact that Netanyahu did no such thing is a strong indication that this was a set-up.
The Israeli premier wanted it clearly understood that he was not really going cap in hand to Obama. He was actually demanding Israel’s just entitlement from its big American brother. For Obama and his people to tolerate the insult would merely deepen the humiliation that Netanyahu wanted to inflict on the one US leader who has ever seriously, albeit pathetically, challenged Zionist ambitions to clear Palestinian lands of its people to build an Eretz Israel using US funds to construct it and US funds to protect it.
