Ceasefire rift between Biden and Netanyahu is nothing new
The president of the United States sent the prime minister of Israel the following message:
“I need not assure you of the deep interest which the United States has in your country, nor recall the various elements of our policy of support to Israel in so many ways…It would be a matter of the greatest regret to all my countrymen if Israeli policy on a matter of such grave concern to the world should in any way impair the friendly cooperation between our two countries.”
This wasn’t President Joe Biden recently prodding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to collaborate on a Gaza ceasefire.
It was President
Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, on Nov. 7, 1956, demanded that David
Ben Gurion, then prime minister of Israel, pull the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) out of Sini, which it had conquered a week before, causing a great surprise to the U.S.
Ben Gurion, who had just declared in the Knesset that with the conquest of Sinai the “Third Kingdom
of Israel” had been established, had to make an embarrassing turnabout and comply with the American demand.
Relationships between U.S. presidents and Israeli prime ministers had their ups and downs. During the First Lebanon War in 1982, President Ronald Reagan was so appalled by the severity of the Israeli bombing in Beirut that he called then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin and complained: “Here, on our television, night after night, our people are being shown the symbols of this war and it is a holocaust.”
Reagan demanded that the bombing cease since “our entire future relations are at stake if this continues.” Begin promised the president to halt the bombing, which the IDF ultimately did.
While fully appreciating the crucial American support for Israel, when it came to the most vital interests of the Jewish state, Israeli prime ministers knew how to stand up to American pressure.
Before the Six-Day
War, it became clear to then-Prime Minister Levy Eshkol that, in spite of the amassing of the Egyptian
army in Sinai and the closing of the Tiran
Straits to Israeli navigation, President Lyndon Johnson wasn’t giving him a green light to launch a preemptive strike. Eshkol went on to do it anyway, and the smashing victory quickly buried the friction between Washington and Jerusalem.
And I heard Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tell the story of how, in 2007, he called President George W. Bush, urging him to strike the newly discovered Syrian nuclear facility. When Bush refused, Olmert told him that, in that case, “we’ll do it ourselves.”
What is common to these cases is that beyond the periodical and circumstantial differences of opinions, there has always been a deep sense of trust between the leaders of the two countries.
And Netanyahu is creating a dangerous precedent.
It started with Netanyahu insulting President Barack Obama and thenVice President Joe Biden by going to speak to Congress behind their back, against their Iran policy, and it scratches the bottom now with Netanyahu’s
refusal to work with Biden on Gaza.
Who would imagine that the president – a staunch supporter of Israel – would praise the speech of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, in which the senator, another friend of Israel, had called for ousting Netanyahu, who “had lost his way.”
Netanyahu believes that feuding with Washington might portray him, in the eyes of his base, as a strong leader. He might be up to a bitter surprise, though: He surely remembers how, in 1992, President George H. Bush and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir locked horns over the issues of loan guarantees and the Israeli policy of settlements. In the elections in June
1992, Shamir’s Likkud lost painfully to Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor Party.
Israelis, with their healthy instincts, felt that it wasn’t wise to alienate Israel’s biggest ally. They will probably demonstrate it again, when the next, urgently-needed elections occur.
Uri Dromi was the spokesman of the Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres governments from 19921996.