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writing for godot

Obama and Netanyahu: Towards a Unified Political Field Theory of American/Israeli Relations

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Written by Richard Rapaport   
Monday, 03 May 2010 11:04



What pundits never quite got their heads around in the ongoing spat between the Obama Administration and Netanyahu government is that, at its most basic, the affair said more about the complexities of political allegiances in the U.S. these days than about the loopiness of Israeli democracy.

There is no doubt that the dust-up over the announcement of hundreds of permits for new Jewish apartments in East Jerusalem, caught Vice President Biden by surprise, souring both his visit to Israel and Netanyahu’s subsequent trip to Washington. Nor was the timing of the announcement any accident.

Rather, it was a well-calculated slight engineered by Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yeshai to poke the Netanyahu government in which his Shas Party, with its eleven seats in the Knesset, is a nominal member. Even more than that, however, it was a ploy by the ultra-ultra Orthodox “Haredi” Jewish communities both in Israel, where it is represented by Shas Party, and in upstate New York, where Haredi’s live in towns like Kiryat Joel where the street signs are in English and Yiddish. In Haredi America, politics are as right-wing and fundamentalist as the people are attached to a lifestyle more at home in 14th Century Poland than modern America.

The dynamics of the Biden incident become particularly clear when you look at the underlying politics of Yeshai, the Shas Party leader and Interior Minister who represents the 550,000 Haredi Jews in Israel. More strictly orthodox than the Brooklyn-based Lubavicher and Satmar Hassidim, the Shas is the least predictable of “Bibi” Netanyahu’s uneasy Likud coalition. The Haredi’s fundamental religious opposition to Zionism and fundamentalist belief that democracy is “a cancer,” pushes Shas’s political presence in the government into the category of “strangest bedfellows.”

Israel’s respected daily, “Haaretz,” has in fact called Yeshai, the “Jean Marie Le Pen of Israel,” a reference to the extreme-right-wing French politician who was a contender for the French Presidency in the ‘80s. In American terms, you might think of Yeshai as Sara Palin with a beard. It is an analogy that brings us around to the fact that America’s 200,000 Haredi Jews are currently making common right-wing political cause with their compatriots in Israel.

The Haredi’s are certainly no friends of Barack Obama. They align, in fact, in interesting ways with America’s Christian fundamentalists. This would explain the recent editorial in “Day to Day,” Shas’s official news organ dissing Obama as "a Palestinian stone-throwing youth in East Jerusalem.” It makes compelling political sense then to imagine how easily a couple of phone calls between Haredi cousins in Westchester County and Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood, where they enforce the Sabbath with baseball bats, could have led to Yeshai’s gleeful pantsing of the American Vice President, and by implication, Obama himself.

Israel’s concern with American politics is understandable, but what is not so widely understood is that so many of the top players in Israel got their political educations in the U.S. This connection was made entirely clear to me in early summer, 1997, when I was sitting outside the office of “Bibi” Netanyahu in Jerusalem’s Kiryat Ben Gurion district. Netanyahu was then in his first go-round as Israeli Prime Minister and it was relatively easy to get an appointment.

My icebreaker was a story for Forbes about Israel’s phenomenal high-technology explosion that has made the Jewish State a magnet for science, medical, and information technology spectacularly out of proportion to its tiny size and population. So delighted was Netanyahu to talk about anything other than the Palestinians, that one hour stretched into two and beyond. Long after I was out of questions Netanyahu ambled on in his agreeable bass, talking about a pet scheme, to expand Israel not by absorbing territory to the east, but rather by building a series of islands off the coast of Tel Aviv. Here, he explained, would be land to which no one else could lay claim.

While waiting outside the Prime Minister’s antechamber, I was approached by a balding, fortyish man, who sat down beside me, and began talking to me as if we were old friends. His English was accent-less, and it dawned on me that I knew him. “Where have we met,” I asked, and he introduced himself as Dore Gold, an aide to Netanyahu who would serve in the truly unenviable post as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. We compared notes and discovered that we had grown up in the same town, West Hartford Connecticut, and attended King Phillip Junior High School together in the mid-sixties.

It was clear that Gold had been sent out to lighten things up a bit which he did. What struck me then about Gold and later, Netanyahu, was that with only the slightest existential backspin, either could have succeeded in U.S. politics. Netanyahu had, after all, grown up in suburban Philadelphia, attended MIT, and then returned to Israel where he went into politics. Sitting in his office, it struck me that “Bibi” could have been a contender for Governor of Pennsylvania, a sort of conservative Ed Rendell.

Fortunately for the Obama/Biden Administration, the passage of an historic health care bill took some of the sting out of the transatlantic slight over housing in Jerusalem, but only some. If Netanyahu is by upbringing a Philadelphia politico, Barack Obama’s political roots are entrenched in the Daly school of Chicago political payback.

Flush from his health care victory, a newly energized American President expended just a little of his political capital when he gave the Israeli PM a taste of the same medicine that fed Vice President Biden. Or perhaps a preparation prescribed by Rahm Emanuel, another American Jewish boy who could easily have made good in Israeli politics. In any case, Netanyahu’s punishment; to forgo the Presidential photo-op, and sit on his hands in the White House Map Room while Obama ate dinner with his family, seemed almost Talmudic in its balance.

It is said that political payback is a bitch, but teaches necessary lessons. One of which is that you don’t let the nuts out of the asylum, the Israeli PM needs to pay closer attention to the people and parties he lets into his cabinet and how much leash he gives them. Ultimately however, AIPAC needn’t worry too much about this latest go-round in America’s long-term, slow dance with Israel. This storm shall pass, and the Obama Administration will, by necessity and inclination, remain Israel’s staunchest friend. At least as long as “Bibi” and friends understands that Chicago-style political payback wins any day of the week and twice on shabbos.

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Richard Rapaport is a Bay Area-based, writer, reporter, he can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it




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