Now it’s urgent: Israel must rebuild support among Democrats
Eleven years ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu engineered an invitation from the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives to address a joint session of the United States Congress. The purpose of his speech was to rally congressional opposition to the signature foreign policy initiative of a popular Democratic president. The move broke with well-established political norms but failed to derail the Obama administration’s nuclear accord with Iran. Its main effect was to earn the Prime Minister the enduring resentment of the Democratic party.
In the years since, Netanyahu has sought to build support for Israel on an ever-narrower political basis in the United States. He pursued policies that alienated the Democratic party and many of its American Jewish supporters while investing ever more in his standing among Republicans. As gaps in support for Israel between the parties widened, Israel’s US ambassador Ron Dermer provided a strategic rationale for the gambit. There are millions of evangelical Christians in the United States who vote Republican, Dermer explained, and they would ensure American support for Israel in the future.
Under President Donald Trump, who demanded and mostly received obsequious loyalty and obedience from Republicans in Congress, Israel’s dependence increased, centering ever more on one man known for his mercurial character, impulsive policymaking, and unwillingness to confront realities he did not like. The strategy seemed to work, nevertheless. During the first Trump administration, the president moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, recognized the Golan Heights as a part of Israel, and helped cement the Abraham Accords that normalized Israel’s relationship with several Arab states.
The apparent benefits of concentrating Israel’s bets on the Republican Party, and then on its singular leader, Donald Trump, seemed to come to full fruition in his second term. During Trump’s first year back in the White House, he negotiated the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza (the living and the deceased) and joined Israel in bombing Iran’s nuclear sites. In February, the US and Israel launched a joint war on Iran, minimally intended to force a deal to end the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and support for proxy armies, and dismantle the country’s ballistic missile program.
Collapse of the Trump strategy
The Memorandum of Understanding that was signed on Thursday does none of those things. The document makes no mention of Iran’s ballistic missile program or support for militias in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq and Yemen. It requires of Iran only measures to restore shipping through the Strait of Hormuz (eventually charging “fees” to do so) and agreement to negotiate on its nuclear program in the future, revealing that the thorniest issues regarding the fate of the nuclear program have not been settled.
Worse than no agreement, the MOU rewards Iran immediately for these vague commitments, lifting sanctions on the export of oil and soon transferring $24 billion in frozen assets. These measures provide immediate relief to Iran’s strained economy, enabling the regime to rebuild its military capacity and fund Hezbollah and other partners in the “axis of resistance.” Longer term, the agreement envisions the United States helping to establish a $300 billion reconstruction fund.
As if that were not all damaging enough, the MOU also explicitly – three times in the opening paragraph – creates a linkage between Iran and Lebanon, establishing Iran as Lebanon’s protector, and the United States as the party responsible for preventing Israel from challenging Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah fighters on its northern border.
Israel now faces very grave strategic dilemmas. In the future, it will confront an emboldened Iran with access to new economic resources and increased leverage over neighboring states and the global economy, unconstrained in its capacity to repress opposition at home and support its proxy armies abroad. Israel will face new constraints on its capacity to defend its northern border and operate against Iran directly. Moreover, Israel’s political leadership cannot even seem to get into the room where the deals that are meant to define its future are being negotiated.
In 2015, when President Obama sought to advance a nuclear deal with Iran that Israel opposed, Netanyahu turned to the president’s political rivals for support. That partisan approach has now run its course. Netanyahu bet on the Republicans and then on a single unpredictable and profoundly narcissistic individual. It has proven to be a catastrophic bet.
Netanyahu cannot turn to the Democrats to rally opposition to President Trump. His government’s repudiation of a two-state solution and refusal to establish a political horizon beyond the current war have deeply alienated the mainstream of the Democratic party, not to mention the left flank. Indeed, it has even alienated a sizeable part of the American Jewish community.
Over the next several months, Israel is likely to continue operating in parts of southern Lebanon, testing the MOU, because it has little choice. It will also try to convince the White House to slow the economic relief promised to Tehran, and to take a reasonably tough line in the nuclear negotiations. None of these measures will fully offset the severe damage done by the accord to Israel’s national security and strategic position in the region.
Rebuilding a bipartisan alliance
There is only one approach that offers the possibility of mitigating the disaster Netanyahu has wrought. The Israeli public must vote-in a new government in the upcoming elections, and Israel’s next prime minister must seek, as an urgent matter of national security, to rebuild Israel’s alliances with its Western allies, first and foremost the United States. The new government in particular will need to court mainstream centrist Democrats who for decades were a critical pillar of the bipartisan alliance and who can once again be mobilized to support Israel’s genuine and vital strategic needs.
The threshold requirement for rebuilding Israel’s alliances in the United States and beyond is well known. Israel must offer a diplomatic vision for the region that includes an end to Israel’s half-century rule over millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. That vision must clearly declare Israel’s commitment to remaining a Jewish and democratic state at peace with its neighbors. And it must include immediate policy moves that halt the slide toward annexation of the West Bank.
Such moves will entail a very difficult political confrontation with the Israeli settler movement which will resist any change in Israel’s trajectory toward permanent occupation. Until now, the Israeli opposition parties have sought to kick this can down the road, promising to focus on matters that enjoy broad consensus among Israeli voters. That strategy is no longer relevant. Israel’s strategic imperative now is to overcome international isolation so that it can act in its sovereign interests to defend its borders and citizenry. The only way to accomplish that is by offering a vision of how to wind down the conflict with the Palestinians and ensure Israel’s future as a democratic state.