At the height of anti-Bush hysteria, the president’s most vociferous critics were afflicted with a fair degree of cognitive dissonance: to them George W. Bush was somehow both a doltish junior partner to his vice president and a diabolical mastermind whose assault on the nation’s conscience could not be stopped. There are moments when the news coverage of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu evokes similar confusion.
Today, for example, if Netanyahu were to check in with the East Coast commentariat he would learn that the press has come to some very different conclusions about what drives him. Over at Foreign Policy, Dan Drezner says Netanyahu is “wigging out.” It’s a highly sophisticated term, but hey–Netanyahu went to MIT, so he’s probably familiar with such hefty terminology. Drezner’s post paints Netanyahu as an unruly ward of the West, who is acting out in lieu of being able to exercise real control over the Iranian nuclear negotiations, and doing so against his country’s interests.
But Netanyahu doesn’t have to accept this harsh judgment. Like the old joke about the Jewish man who reads the Soviet newspapers because they are filled only with good news–no pogroms, just exciting declarations of Jewish global influence–the prime minister can head over to National Journal, where he can read the ego-boosting revelation that he tells the president of the United States, the leader of the free world, what to do.
That’s the assessment of the situation from the paper’s Michael Hirsh, who claims Netanyahu has offered President Obama something of a diplomatic Sophie’s choice: “It’s either an Iranian deal or a Palestinian deal, he seems to be telling the president, but not both.”
It should be noted, in fairness to Drezner, that his post has a good handle on the facts from which his conclusion, however flawed, is drawn. Hirsh’s piece, on the other hand, appears to be describing an alternate universe with marginal resemblance to reality. But it’s to Planet Hirsh we go, because his thesis is constructed on some false conventional wisdom that helps explain why the media gets its coverage of the Middle East so wrong.
Hirsh writes that the fact that Netanyahu and Obama don’t trust each other “explains the Israeli prime minister’s fulminations last week in blasting, from afar, a temporary deal being negotiated in Geneva that would have frozen Iran’s uranium-enrichment program,” before constructing a sentence that really deserves to be set apart from the usual nonsense: “But if Netanyahu exacts revenge, it may not be on the Iranians. It may well be on the Palestinians.”
That is a museum-worthy relic of leftist Beltway opinionating. It’s not that the Israeli prime minister may feel cornered by the events that put his nation in danger, according to Hirsh; it’s that Netanyahu will simply take “revenge” on someone–Hirsh isn’t exactly sure who the victim will be–because the Americans signed a deal he didn’t like. Just before the brave Michael Hirsh takes a shot at Netanyahu’s recently-deceased father, he explains:
Ever since he first met then-candidate Obama in mid-2008, Netanyahu has lumped the Iran and Palestinian issues together and insisted they be solved sequentially—Iran first, peace and statehood second. “If Iran became nuclear it would mean the victory of the militants in Hamas and Hezbollah and undercut the moderates,” Uzi Arad, Netanyahu’s then-national security adviser, explained in an interview at the time. So now Netanyahu, in his umbrage, has an excuse to put off the issue of Palestinian statehood yet again—and, frankly, the Israeli-Palestinian talks are going so poorly that not too many Israelis would blame him.
The Netanyahu administration is not opposed to “solving” the Palestinian statehood issue; it is skeptical toward the prospects for peace with the Palestinians while the Iranian threat looms because of Iran’s ability to disrupt the negotiations, preventing the conflict from being solved all the while distracting the West from its nuclear program. Netanyahu is, of course, undeniably correct.
But if you’re an American commentator and you want to use Netanyahu’s opposition to the Iranian deal as proof of nefarious intent and not rational thinking, you have a problem: the deal was scuttled by the French, not the Israelis. But here too Hirsh is ready for you:
Paris gets piqued when it’s not fully consulted on major Middle East issues, especially since it has taken a muscular lead in addressing recent flash points from Libya to Mali. And French President François Hollande is still fuming over the way Obama suddenly spurned military action against Syria a day after Hollande endorsed it, making the latter look a little foolish at a time when he is already deeply unpopular at home. Gallic pride is sorely in need of a patch-up.
This sort of technique is very useful for the left, because they never have to actually tangle with the arguments of their opponents. But the fact of the matter remains that, like it or not, the Palestinian quest for statehood is not being thwarted by Netanyahu’s veto. The Palestinians have been offered a state several times, and they keep walking away completely. Secretary of State John Kerry’s major diplomatic breakthrough thus far was getting an agreement from the Palestinians–not to end negotiations, but to begin them.
They are now, quite predictably and having pocketed the twisted concessions they received, attempting to find an excuse to walk away from the talks yet again. If President Obama wants a deal with Iran, Netanyahu can’t stand in his way–though that doesn’t mean he’ll give up trying to prevent an Iranian bomb. And if Obama wants a deal on Palestinian statehood, he knows exactly who he has to convince: the Palestinian leadership.
