The Netanyahu speech controversy, explained

At 11 am on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress that has, before it’s even occurred, become a major controversy in both countries. More than that, it has become a test for the US-Israel relationship. It has come to represent the changing ways in which politics in both countries shape, and are shaped by, that relationship.

Netanyahu’s goal is to convince Congress to torpedo the US-led Iranian nuclear negotiations, which he thinks will result in a deal that hands Iran the bomb on a silver platter. He wants Congress to vote to impose new sanctions on Iran, which would kill the talks, and thus significantly alter US policy toward the Middle East.

The Obama administration sees Netanyahu and Republicans as working to undermine not just Obama’s efforts to strike a nuclear deal with Iran, but his presidential authority over foreign policy. Democrats are angry at the perceived insult to the president. The effect has been to politically polarize an issue that has long been bipartisan in Washington: support for Israel.

On January 8, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reached out to Ron Dermer, Israel’s Ambassador to the US (and a former Republican operative), to discuss having Netanyahu speak in Congress. The Israelis and Republicans worked out the details of the event without notifying the White House, to “make sure,” in Boehner’s words, “that there was no interference” from the administration.

That process went on for two weeks. The afternoon of January 20, Boehner’s office “informed Ambassador Dermer of our intent to issue the invitation.” Dermer “accepted and acknowledged [their] intent to do so.”

Sometime between then and the morning of January 21, the Speaker’s office told the Obama administration of the plan. That morning, Boehner issued a formal invitation to Netanyahu. The Prime Minister accepted, and here we are.

The details of the timing are important. Dermer knew about the invitation before Obama did, and, according to Boehner’s office, accepted that the invitation was coming. But Netanyahu did not formally accept until after the White House had been informed.

Still, this was a major breach, both of diplomatic protocol for a foreign government to work directly with a US opposition party, and of political protocol for Congressional Republicans to freelance their own foreign policy independent of the White House. Democrats were outraged at Boehner and Dermer for undermining both the president and his foreign policy. A number of them will be skipping the speech, including Vice President Joe Biden.

That’s how the speech became a partisan flashpoint. Boehner and Netanyahu weren’t just coordinating to undermine one of Obama’s top foreign policy priorities, a nuclear deal with Iran, according to Democrats. They were seeking to ambush and embarrass the president.

Even though the fight now is all about the US-Israel relationship and US partisan politics, at its core this is all about a fundamental disagreement between Netanyahu and Obama over Iran’s nuclear program.

President Obama believes that reaching a deal with Iran, in which Tehran will agree to strict limits on its nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions, is the best way to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, and to prevent a war with Iran. Years of sanctions and threats have not stopped Iran’s nuclear program nor made a huge dent in Tehran’s commitment to the program, thus raising the prospect of a bomb and perhaps even war. The 2013 election of moderate President Hassan Rouhani, in Obama’s view, presented an opening to finally resolve this.

Netanyahu believes that the Iranians are not negotiating in good faith, and that any deal likely to be struck would be a bad one. He argues that their plan is to continue developing a nuclear weapon no matter what, while also dishonestly engaging in these talks in order to buy more time and to weaken the international coalition and sanctions against them. He believes a nuclear Iran would pose a threat to Israel’s very survival, either because Iran would use its bomb on Israel or because it would at least embolden Iranian-backed, anti-Israel terrorist groups such as Hezbollah.

Obama and Netanyahu have disagreed over this since the most recent outreach between Washington and Tehran began in 2013. That disagreement has intensified. As a deal looks potentially more likely — the next deadline is in March, for a political framework — Netanyahu has become more assertive. This speech to Congress is his effort to kill the talks.

In order to stop that deal from happening, Netanyahu would need to convince Congress to impose new sanctions on Iran.

This would probably destroy the negotiations because it would make the American negotiators look powerless and unable to uphold their own promises. A big part of any deal would be the US lessening sanctions on Iran; if Obama can’t even hold back new sanctions, there’s less reason for Tehran to trust him. New sanctions would also embarrass Iranian negotiators and thus strengthen Iranian hard-liners who oppose a deal.

Many Congressional Republicans already support new sanctions, either out of an earnest desire to kill the talks or because of simpler opposition to Obama. But in order to pass new sanctions, a number of Democrats would need to sign on as well, to get a two-thirds majority to override an inevitable Obama veto.

Netanyahu’s plan to get Democrats to vote against the president by undermining and insulting Obama might seem crazy. But his approach starts to make a little more sense if you take a harder look at the way Congress normally deals with Israel.

Despite the dramatic divergence between Democrats and Republicans on most issues in recent years, support for the Jewish state remains a rare bipartisan bright spot. Pro-Israel resolutions routinely pass by unanimous votes. There are lots of reasons for this: Israel is a core part of America’s Middle East strategy, the US public deeply and strongly sympathizes with Israel, and, yes, there is an effective pro-Israel lobby on the Hill.

Netanyahu wants to use this pro-Israel sentiment against Obama. The speech is designed to signal, in the highest-profile manner possible, that new Iran sanctions are Israel’s top priority in Washington, and thus to position opposing sanctions as opposing Israel. That could conceivably prod pro-Israel Dems, especially ones with more hawkish views about Iran, to go against Obama on sanctions.

Netanyahu’s strategy is playing with fire. The more you make Iran sanctions into an Obama-versus-Republicans issue, the more pressure Democrats are going to feel to side with Obama and against Netanyahu.

That seems to be happening. A number of Democrats are threatening to boycott the speech, and a key vote on new sanctions has been delayed.

There is concern that Netanyahu’s sharp-elbowed strategy risks turning support for Israel, long a bipartisan issue in Washington, into something more partisan. He’s hoping that forcing Democrats to choose between Obama and Israel will make them pick Israel. But what if they pick Obama?

American bipartisan support for Israel is one of Israel’s greatest geopolitical assets: it helps guarantee that US presidents will provide Israel military aid, security cooperation, and vital diplomatic cover at the UN. The sense that Netanyahu might be putting that at risk is becoming a political issue within Israel itself.

It’s certainly true that, up to now, Netanyahu and Obama have had an intensely antagonistic relationship. They’ve repeatedly clashed over West Bank settlements, the peace process, and Iran’s nuclear program. But it’s been about Obama-Netanyahu disagreement, not about the US-Israel relationship more fundamentally. Many in both Israel and the United States worry that the speech’s partisanship might entrench these short-term tensions into long-term partisanship over Israel.

“Netanyahu’s position will not change the West’s position on the Iranian issue, but his actions bring our relationship with the Americans to an extreme point and this might extract an unbearable price from us in the future,” Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad (Israel’s CIA), has said. “Talking to my Democratic colleagues, I believe this is not an idle concern,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) said in response to Dagan’s comments.

There are some long-term trends in American politics that make this particularly risky for Netanyahu, and that tilt away from US bipartisan support for Israel in a way that he could be worsening.

First, the Democratic base is less sympathetic to Israel than their Republican peers. Polls consistently show that while Democrats still take Israel’s side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by a wide margin, they do so at significantly lower rates than Republicans.

According to a recent poll by University of Maryland’s Shibley Telhami and Katayoun Kishi, the gaps might be even wider than previously thought. When they asked “what role” America should play “in mediating the conflict,” 51 percent of Republicans said the US should “lean towards Israel.” The figure is 17 percent among Democrats.

This partisan polarization could accelerate as the Democratic party gets increasingly younger and less white over time. Telhami and Kishi found that African Americans, Latinos, and younger Democrats are all more sympathetic to Palestinians than the general population.

That doesn’t mean that Democrats are going to stop supporting Israel — far from it. There are moments, however, when this trend could overlap with growing American political polarization. If support for Israel gets coded as a “Republican” issue, Democrats who are less enthusiastic about certain elements of the US-Israel relationship will be in a much stronger position, and pro-Israel Democrats will be in a bit weaker of a position.

“Younger Democrats look at their leaders and they see Nancy Pelosi irate, and they see the president obviously irate,” Natan Sachs, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East policy, says. “They’re probably taking cues. And I think in the future, you may see a generation of Democratic leaders that’s quite different [from the current pro-Israel leaders].”

There are two ways to read Netanyahu’s willingness to so publicly undermine Obama, and thus risk the strength of the US relationship that is so important to his country. The first is that he, and most likely Dermer as well, simply misread American politics, wrongly believing that Democrats would rally behind Israel over Obama, and that the move would not blow back on Israel.

The second reading is that Netanyahu understood the risks but still thinks that an Iran nuclear deal posed an even greater danger to his country. In this thinking, he is convinced both the structure of the deal wouldn’t prevent Iran from going nuclear, and that an Iranian warhead would pose an unacceptable risk to his country.

“If you think that [Iran’s nuclear program poses an existential threat], then angering a lot of Democrats, angering a president, breaking some protocol — all those pale in comparison,” Sachs told me in early February. “If you’re trying to stop a historically terrible thing for the national security of your country, and you think it’s imminent, then it’s rational to try and do this.”

Reasonable people can disagree about whether Iran really intends to hold to its end of any nuclear deal; the country’s long record of secret enrichment facilities does not inspire tremendous confidence. While a deal would involve more inspections meant to spot cheating, it would also give Iran sanctions relief. Moreover, Netanyahu appears concerned that the terms of the deal itself might be loose enough to simply allow Iran to nuclearize eventually.

Netanyahu’s rhetoric on what would happen if Iran did get a nuclear weapon has been a bit extreme — there’s little reason to believe that Iran would nuke Israel out of the blue, as he’s suggested. However, Iran would very likely use a nuclear deterrent as a shield to step up its aggression abroad, including its long-held support for anti-Israel terrorism. Political scientists call this the stability-instability paradox; nukes can deter large wars but exacerbate smaller conflicts. That’s a serious threat to Israeli security.

The Obama administration agrees that Iran should not have a warhead, but believes that risks of a deal — which it sees as lower than Netanyahu does — are worthwhile because the alternative means to stop Iran would be war. The last decade of sanctions haven’t been able to shut down Iranian nuclear progress, so there’s little reason to think new ones would change anything. While Israeli officials have floated limited air strikes against Iranian facilities, this would set back the program only temporarily, and if anything would make the Middle East more violent and hostile.

This seems unacceptable to the US after enduring a decade of fighting in Iraq, which has cost many American lives and thrown the country into the chaos that helped give rise to ISIS.

The fact that both the Americans and the Israelis think the stakes here are enormous explains why the speech controversy has gotten so heated. Neither side will back down even a little bit, because both think the alternative to their preferred Iran policy is disastrous. So disastrous, in fact, that they’re willing to risk a crisis in US-Israel relations over it.

Israel will hold elections on March 17. Netanyahu is running for reelection on a platform of stopping an Iranian bomb; his opponents are ripping into him for undermining the alliance with America.

So far, the impact of the speech controversy on the Israeli primary isn’t fully clear. Depending on how it ends up playing, it could help or hurt the prime minister’s chances.

“Israelis, by and large, don’t like it when their prime minister quarrels with the United States,” Sachs says. Safeguarding that relationship is seen as a crucial responsibility for the Israeli prime minister.

Biden’s planned absence from the speech could alarm Israeli voters concerned about the US-Israel relationship. Any mass boycott from Democrats could also look bad. But the spectacle of dramatic Republican support could also help turn out Netanyahu’s base.

“For most voters, especially in the core base on the right and I think center right, here’s Bibi doing something that opposition leaders cannot do: speak the way he does with his English and this reception from Americans,” Sachs explains.

So if Israelis conclude that Netanyahu is doing important work protecting Israeli national security from Iran, he might get a boost. But if they buy into the Israeli opposition’s argument — that he’s weakening crucial ties with America — the prime minister may pay a price in an election that’s shaping up to be very close.

“Netanyahu just put all his chips on Iran. Nothing else matters in the election,”Ha’aretz contributor Anshel Pfeffer wrote after a fiery Netanyahu speech on Iran last Wednesday. “The elections in Israel are Netanyahu v. Obama.”