Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech Sunday evening at Bar-Ilan University had one goal: To get US President Barack Obama off of Israel's back.
Obama with then-opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, July 2008.
Photo: AP
Netanyahu's speech was an eloquent, rational and at times impassioned defense of Israel. For Israeli ears, after years of former prime minister Ehud Olmert's and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni's continuous assaults on Israeli rights, and their strident defenses of capitulation to the Palestinians and the Syrians, Netanyahu's address was a breath of fresh air. But it is hard to see how it could have possibly had any lasting impact on Obama or his advisers.
To be moved by rational argument, a person has to be open to rational discourse. And what we have witnessed over the past week with the Obama administration's reactions to both North Korea's nuclear brinksmanship and Iran's sham elections is that its foreign policy is not informed by rationality but by the president's morally relative, post-modern ideology. In this anti-intellectual and anti-rational climate, Netanyahu's speech has little chance of making a lasting impact on the White House.
If rational thought was the basis for the administration's policymaking on foreign affairs, North Korea's decisions to test long range ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, send two US citizens to long prison terms and then threaten nuclear war should have made the administration reconsider its current policy of seeking the approval and assistance of North Korea's primary enabler - China - for any action it takes against Pyongyang. As Nicholas Eberstadt suggested in Friday's Wall Street Journal, rather than spending its time passing UN Security Council resolutions with no enforcement mechanisms against North Korea, the administration would be working with a coalition of the willing to adopt measures aimed at lowering the threat North Korea constitutes to regional, US and global security through its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and its proliferation activities.
But the administration has done no such thing. Instead of working with and strengthening its allies, it has opted to work with North Korea's allies China and Russia to forge a Security Council resolution harsh enough to convince North Korean leader Kim Jung Il to threaten nuclear war, but too weak to degrade his capacity to wage one.
Similar to Obama's refusal to reassess his failed policy regarding North Korea, his nonreaction to the fraudulent Iranian election shows that he will not allow facts to interfere with his slavish devotion to his ideological canon that claims that no enemy is unappeasable and no ally deserves automatic support. Far from standing with the democratic dissidents now risking their lives to oppose Iran's sham democracy, the administration has reportedly expressed concern that the current postelection protests will destabilize the regime.
Obama has also refused to reconsider his decision to reach a grand bargain with the ayatollahs on Iran's nuclear weapons program that would serve to legitimize their continued grip on power. His refusal to make a moral distinction between the mullahs and their democratic opponents - like his refusal in Cairo to make a moral distinction between a nuclear-armed Iran and a nuclear-armed America - makes clear that he is not interested in forging a factually accurate or morally clear-sighted foreign policy.
ALL OF THIS brings us back to Israel - and Netanyahu's speech about the nature and causes of the Palestinian conflict and the conditions that must be met if peace is ever to be achieved. His address aimed in two ways to lower US pressure while averting an open confrontation with a president whose approval ratings remain above 60 percent. First, Netanyahu demonstrated that through their consistent rejection of Israel's right to exist as the Jewish state, the Palestinians - not us - are the side responsible for the absence of Middle East peace.
Second, he tried to decrease US pressure on his government by conditionally accepting the idea of a Palestinian state. Clearly, it was Netanyahu's acceptance of the idea of a Palestinian state - albeit a demilitarized one - that was supposed to do the most to fend off US pressure. After all, Obama and his advisers have made the swift establishment of a Palestinian state their primary foreign policy aim.
Irrespective of its impact on the Obama administration, Netanyahu's speech was a positive contribution to the general discourse on the Middle East and Israel's place in it. He made good use of his opportunity to address the nation above the heads of the uniformly leftist media to forge a new definition of the national consensus. Whereas his defeatist predecessors consistently spoke of the people's willingness to make painful concessions for peace, and treated the establishment of a Jew-free Palestinian state as their primary duty as Zionists, Netanyahu recast the national consensus along patriotic lines.
He echoed the sentiments of the vast majority of Israelis when he refused to end building inside of Jewish communities located beyond the 1949 armistice lines; when he asserted that he would make no concessions on sovereignty over Jerusalem; would insist that we retain defensible borders; would refuse entrance of so-called Palestinian refugees to our territory; and demanded Palestinian recognition of our right to exist as the Jewish state.
He stridently and eloquently corrected Obama's false characterization of this country as the product of the Holocaust during his speeches at Cairo and Buchenwald by recalling the 3,500 year old Jewish ties to the Land of Israel. And he made clear that the association Obama made between the Holocaust and this country's founding was a precise inversion of the historical record. It is not Israel that owes its existence to the Holocaust. Rather, the Holocaust was only able to happen because there was no Israel.
NETANYAHU'S SPEECH was a much-needed strong defense. But it was not a perfect defense. It suffered from two flaws that may come back to haunt the premier in the years to come. First, his demand that the US lead the international community in guaranteeing that the Palestinian state is demilitarized provided the Obama administration with a new means to trick Israel into making suicidal concessions.
