Word and Deed

What's going on?

Gaza at the turn of the 20th century, via Palestine Remembered.

Jonathan Capehart was on my radio yesterday morning, talking about his NBC interview last week of President Biden, and they came to this exceptionally fraught moment:

Jonathan Capehart (06:22):

Some have suggested you should go back to Israel and address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Is that something you would do?

President Joe Biden (06:31):

Yes.

Jonathan Capehart (06:35):

Would that have to be at the invitation of the Prime Minister or could that be at the invitation of the President?

President Joe Biden (06:42 [after a pretty substantial pause]):

I’d rather not discuss it more.

Biden didn't mind saying he might address the Knesset, but he didn't want to say who might be inviting him. Or rather, since you wouldn't expect it to happen other than by an invitation from Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is by definition the head of the government in the Knesset, and runs the things that happen there, he didn't want to say that it might be from somebody else, such as President Herzog, the head of state (whose only direct interaction with the Knesset is when he's accepting the resignation of a prime minister, or inviting a politician to try to form a new government). Or he couldn't or at least didn't want to deny that he might have an invitation from President Herzog, let's say, so he preferred to drop the subject and let Capehart make of it what he would.

Brian Lehrer, the host of the radio show, was suitably gobsmacked, and expressed himself, as people so often do, with a "can you imagine" scenario, like "Can you imagine if some foreign leader came to Washington and addressed Congress over the head of President Biden?"

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I was screaming at the radio, but Capehart remembered perfectly what I was remembering: "You don't have to imagine it, because it happened," and retold the story of how Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on March 3, 2015, without any authorization from President Obama (who was, as Biden is, both head of government and head of state, in the American system), to lobby against the deal Obama was then finalizing, in which Iran would agree not to develop a nuclear weapon in return for relief from some sanctions, and I guess Brian remembered at that point and they moved on to another topic. 

But how fitting it would be, given that history of Netanyahu going to Congress (with an invitation from Speaker John Boehner) with the express purpose of undermining a keystone of Obama's foreign policy, to turn the tables and do the same thing to him!

That's not exactly what I think is going on, though. For one thing, the White House has already done something very like that turnabout, a little over a week ago, when they summoned Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz to Washington for meetings with national security adviser Jake Sullivan, vice president Kamala Harris, and White House Middle East adviser Brett McGurk, without asking his boss, Prime Minister Netanyahu. Followed by a meeting in London with the UK's new foreign secretary, David Cameron. Netanyahu was reported to be "furious" and to have ordered the Israeli embassy in Washington not to provide Gantz with any of the usual assistance. We know a good deal about what the Americans said (involving the need for Israel to act with more restraint, help relieve the suffering and starvation in Gaza, and get the hostages home), but not so much about what Gantz was there to accomplish.

And then there are other voices, like the US intelligence community, reporting on Monday:

The US intelligence community assesses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “viability as a leader” to be “in jeopardy,” according to its annual report on the national security threats facing the United States that was presented to Congress on Monday.

“Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections,” according to the report. “A different, more moderate government is a possibility.”

And finally, at the same time as my radio program, came the news of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, planning to call, in the extraordinary Senate speech he delivered that afternoon, for elections in Israel to replace the deeply unpopular and corrupt government:

I have known Prime Minister Netanyahu for a long time. While we have vehemently disagreed on many occasions, I will always respect his extraordinary bravery for Israel on the battlefield as a younger man. I believe in his heart his highest priority is the security of Israel.

However, I also believe Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.

He has put himself in coalition with far-right extremists like Ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir, and as a result, he has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has also weakened Israel’s political and moral fabric through his attempts to co-opt the judiciary. And he has shown zero interest in doing the courageous and visionary work required to pave the way for peace, even before this present conflict.

As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me:

The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7. The world has changed — radically — since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.

Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the US government, as he pointed out, is known for his protective attitude toward Israeli governments left and right; he was one of the very few congressional Democrats who declined to denounce Netanyahu for his attempt to undermine Obama and manipulate Congress in 2015. That he should be the one to come out now with this message signals enormous changes in the US political establishment and the American Jewish community, brought on by Israel's frantically disproportionate response to the horrors of October 7—in turn to shut down criticism of its own military and intelligence failures which made those horrors possible, like the large-scale movement of IDF troops from the southwest to the West Bank, to "protect" the violent and heavily armed residents of the illegal Jewish settlements there:

Civilians in kibbutzes and towns across southern Israel waited upwards of eight hours – and in some cases nearly a full day – for rescue following Hamas’ surprise attack on the morning of Oct. 7. The long delay highlighted the vulnerabilities in Israel’s current security posture, which requires it to not only defend against hostile state and non-state armed groups in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria but also to protect an ever-increasing sprawl of settlements across the West Bank. Military bases in southern Israel were operating below full strength in the leadup to the attack, with many soldiers redeployed to the West Bank. As one anonymous IDF official told a reporter following the attack, “Soldiers that were supposed to be outside Gaza were in the West Bank protecting settlements and chasing rock-throwing kids in Jenin.”

It's an enormous change, anyhow. I haven't changed my mind about anything, but I keep waking up to find Thomas L. Friedman kind of agrees with me now. And Aaron David Miller ("Words Over Deeds: Why Biden Isn't Pressuring Israel") complaining that Biden isn't radical enough:

The president has been reportedly privately disparaging of the prime minister. It may well be that Mr. Biden now understands that Mr. Netanyahu is desperate to cling to power and, if necessary, will do so at the expense of American interests, regardless of Mr. Biden’s extraordinary support and an ever climbing casualty count. Still, by many accounts, Mr. Biden is not yet ready to stop or condition military assistance to Israel or vote for a United Nations Security Council Resolution critical of Israel, let alone call for a permanent cease-fire unless it is linked to the return of the hostages.

To me this is another confusion between what constitutes words and what constitutes deeds, talk vs. action, as I was saying the other day. Conditioning military assistance might have sent a clearer message than Biden's original warnings in November, but it wouldn't have saved a single life in the first weeks after October 7: IDF has plenty of munitions and would have used them to kill the same number of people and destroy the same number of buildings, and Netanyahu had announced that he'd ignore any unfavorable Security Council resolutions, just as he's ignored the admonitions of the International Court of Justice. Instead of "calling for a permanent cease-fire", which would have made exactly nothing happen, Biden decided to work to bring one about, which would require a lot of activity outside the public view, and a peace settlement on the grandest possible scale, which he had already been working on long before October 7 (it's widely thought that Hamas moved out of fear of an imminent deal bringing Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority in and leaving Hamas out), centered on the establishment of the long-desired Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. 

But the necessary precondition (necessary though not sufficient) is, as should now be completely clear, getting rid of Netanyahu and his repulsive allies, who are unalterably opposed to a Palestinian state. Which is obviously not for the US to do, it's for Israeli politicians, such as Benny Gantz (most recently the choice of 48% of poll respondents as opposed to 15% for Netanyahu). That's where the significance of Gantz's visit to the US and of Schumer's speech lies, in the plans for an election—I assume Gantz has been counting votes for a confidence measure in the Knesset to dissolve the government and call for a general election, and telling Sullivan and Harris and McGurk that he's there, or almost there. Schumer's speech would be preparing the US public, and the Jewish community worldwide, for the event, and promising US support for a new government, and the US intelligence committee as well. Biden's readiness to address the Knesset (whether with an invitation from Herzog or perhaps a new prime minister) would be part of it too. (It's been a central part of his own maneuvers, as I've been saying, that he must retain his own popularity among Israelis even as he detaches himself from Netanyahu.)

It's coming, if it's coming, at an unspeakable cost of suffering for the people of Gaza, and, let's face it, for the people of southern Israel as well. Bringing peace—not just "calling" for it—is the only thing that could possibly make it worth while.