Faced with the threat of a country that has long pledged to wipe Israel off the face of the map gaining access to the weapon that would enable it to carry out its stated ambition, one might understand Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reluctance over the United States’ potential re-entry into the nuclear deal with Iran.
But in the eyes of eputy editorial page editor, Netanyahu’s attempts at preventing a devastating war erupting in the Middle East constitute a “militant stand” against one of President-elect Joe Biden’s core policy pledges.
In an opinion piece published December 6 entitled, “Netanyahu’s reaction to Biden’s victory is appalling”, Diehl accuses the Israeli PM of “scorched-earth tactics”, and describes his reaction to Biden’s victory as having “outstripped even that of Vladimir Putin in its malevolent audacity.”
Malevolent? For having the cheek to stand up for his country against an existential threat?!
Truly, a stunning inversion of reality.
The extent of the Iranian threat to Israel specifically, and the Middle East in general, is hard to overstate. Iran funds, trains, and provides weapons to Hezbollah, a large militia-cum-political party which has successfully embedded itself in the highest echelons of Lebanese government. In 2006, Hezbollah and Israel fought a month-long war that broke out after terrorists launched a cross-border raid into Israeli territory, in which two soldiers were kidnapped and three others killed. Hundreds of rockets were fired into Israel over the course of the war.
Since then, Hezbollah has repeatedly tested Israel’s alertness by digging cross-border tunnels and sporadic shooting attacks, serving as a reminder that it is likely only a matter of time until the next military confrontation.
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Further South, Iran has funded and sent rockets to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip. The two terror organizations have fought side-by-side in four major clashes against Israel since 2006, (2006, 2009-09, 2012, and 2014.)
Over the years, Iran has supplied Hamas in Gaza with advanced weaponry, including Iranian-produced 122mm Grad rockets that have significantly increased the range of Hamas’ arsenal, effectively covering almost all of Israel. By some estimates, in excess of 20,000 rockets and missiles have been fired from the coastal territory into Israel since 2001.
Related Reading — Iran: The Regional Threat Explained
Iran’s attempt to destabilize the region goes back decades. In 2002, the Israeli Navy intercepted “Karin A,” a ship carrying 50 tons of Iranian arms that was bound for Palestinian terrorist groups. Since then, Israel has carried out numerous covert airstrikes against Iranian weapons shipments passing through Syria and the Sinai Peninsula bound for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah.
The same regime funding and supplying these terror groups talks openly about destroying Israel, has been exposed as having cheated on the nuclear deal that was supposed to prevent it from developing dangerously high levels of enriched uranium, and has embedded its troops deep in Syria.
Related Reading: How Iran’s Land Bridge Threatens the Entire Middle East
And yet, when addressing this reality, the article denounces Netanyahu for having “publicly taken a militant stand against one of Biden’s principal foreign policy pledges: that he would return the United States to the nuclear accord with Iran.”
Militant stand? Netanyahu is defending his country against the possibility that the world’s leading state sponsors of terrorism becomes a nuclear power, and he is to blame? In this vein, Diehl calls the recent assassination of a leading Iranian scientist serving in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps a “provocative act.” In so doing, he fails to understand that the killing of the chief scientist involved in Iran’s nuclear weapons project is designed to actually prevent a war from erupting.
Has Israel moved away from the Democrats or have the Democrats moved away from Israel?
After taking aim at Netanyahu over Iran, Diehl fires another broadside at Netanyahu, alleging that his “pro-GOP alignment has slowly but steadily eroded support for Israel, as well as himself, among rank-and-file Democrats.”
There’s only one problem. None of the evidence cited by Diehl proves that such erosion has been caused by Netanyahu and his policies. There is a significant difference between correlation and causation; while the statistics themselves are relatively clear, Diehl’s analysis is very much open to debate. A reasonable argument can be made that the dynamic actually runs the other way. Indeed, with openly pro-BDS elements such as Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib gaining prominence in the Democratic party, a point could be made that the Democrat Party’s stance on Israel has shifted markedly over the last decade.
In general, there is significant evidence that the US political sphere is fractured, and thus there is a wide divergence of opinion on a great range of topics, including on Israel. Framing this shift alone in terms of being in response to Netanyahu’s policies is simplistic, misleading and damaging to constructive conversation.
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Diehl conveniently omits the fact that, as far back as the Clinton administration, and particularly during the Obama years, tensions have existed between Washington and Jerusalem.
From his very first days in office, then-president Barack Obama pushed for a nuclear deal with Iran and prioritized the Palestinian cause. For any Israeli leader, these policies would have been hard to stomach. But in other ways, too, Obama changed the very fabric of the US-Israel relationship. For years, it was clear that the two states had their disagreements — but never openly, or in ‘daylight’. Doing so would encourage common enemies and render Israel vulnerable.
Nevertheless, immediately after his inauguration, Obama used that term daylight, and intimated a difference of opinion between his country and Israel: “When there is no daylight,” he said to American Jewish leaders, “Israel just sits on the sidelines and that erodes our credibility with the Arabs.”
As Israel’s former ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, subsequently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The explanation ignored Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and its two previous offers of Palestinian statehood in Gaza, almost the entire West Bank and half of Jerusalem—both offers rejected by the Palestinians.”
Renewed Settlement Building as “Preparations for a Biden Administration”
Diehl’s tirade doesn’t end there. After years of stalled negotiations with the Palestinians about the possibility of a peace deal and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, many in Israel and abroad view the possibility of such a solution as increasingly less likely.
As such, Israeli governments have continued to build essential housing across the Green Line, even as Netanyahu has proved himself willing to curb the settlement program — most notably notably when Obama demanded an unprecedented 10-month construction moratorium in 2009. Yet Diehl describes Israel’s reluctance to unilaterally cease construction in shocking terms:
Remarkably, 600 of the new units were designated for Jewish settlements that were prohibited from expanding even under Trump’s grotesquely one-sided Mideast peace plan, which Netanyahu endorsed.”
Newsflash: While Netanyahu endorsed the Trump Administration’s proposal, the Palestinians rejected it out-of-hand and have been boycotting the White House since 2017. That plan has come and gone. Moreover, for decades successive Israeli governments have regarded building settlements as both acceptable and important to upholding national security. In the absence of a comprehensive and viable plan to guarantee peace, it’s hyperbole to depict the building of a few hundred buildings in disputed territory as something exceptional.
Finally, as Oren noted in his WSJ column, years ago Obama changed the dynamic by adopting the position that all settlements would have to be abandoned under any peace deal — even those that the vast majority of diplomats accept will in perpetuity remain under Israeli control:
Mr. Obama also voided President George W. Bush’s commitment to include the major settlement blocs and Jewish Jerusalem within Israel’s borders in any peace agreement. Instead, he insisted on a total freeze of Israeli construction in those areas—’not a single brick,’ I later heard he ordered Mr. Netanyahu—while making no substantive demands of the Palestinians.”
The effects of this sudden shift cannot and must not be ignored. The lop-sided and unprecedented demand startled the Israeli public and leadership alike, and goes a long way to explaining the move now to approve the building of homes ahead of the beginning of Biden’s term, who is expected to adopt policies closely aligned with his former boss in Washington.
From start to finish, this op-ed suggests that Biden, and those who view Israel in a similar perspective, are passive bystanders being attacked by Israeli officialdom. While journalists have a right to criticize the Jewish state as much as any other country, framing the relationship as one in which Israel alone is capable of acting, and in which only Israel can do wrong, is risible and demonstrably false.
Instead of characterizing Israel’s prime minister as malevolent, Diehl and others should attempt to dispense with their pre-conceived notions and begin considering why the Iran nuclear deal is not really a partisan American issue, but, rather, a much more important and dangerous concern for Israel.
