Such invective guaranteed that the address would achieve massive media coverage. Focused on the upcoming speech, journalists downplayed Obama’s description of the jihadists who deliberately murdered four French Jews in a kosher supermarket as “vicious zealots who…randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli.” Similarly underreported were the Supreme Leader’s demands for 190,000 centrifuges, his chants of “death to America,” and the blowing up of a model U.S. aircraft carrier by Iranian missile boats. Even the imprisonment on false espionage charges of The Washington Post’s bureau chief in Tehran failed to impress most journalists.
Rather, the headlines focused on the fifty-five Democratic representatives who intended to boycott Netanyahu’s speech. Among these were many members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including the legendary John Lewis, offended by what they saw as the prime minister’s disrespect for the first African-American president. The decision by Lewis, long my personal hero, was especially painful. Sally also seemed depressed. “Everything we worked for, all we built,” she lamented. “It’s gone.”
The speech, delivered on March 3, galvanized world attention. In place of the absentee Democrats were Republican philanthropist Sheldon Adelson, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and, most movingly, Elie Wiesel, who felt compelled to speak out against yet another possible genocide. Netanyahu opened by denying that his motivations were political and by praising “all that Obama has done for Israel.” But then he assailed the president’s tendency to view Iran as a potential ally against IS by asserting that, in the Middle East, “the enemy of my enemy is my enemy.”
Tying Churchill’s record for the most joint meeting appearances, Netanyahu reveled in Churchillian locutions. “This deal doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb, it paves Iran’s path to the bomb,” he declared, and, “This deal won’t be a farewell to arms. It would be a farewell to arms control.” But then, substantively, the prime minister attacked the purported ten-year limit to the Iranian deal—“a decade is a blink of an eye in the life of a nation…[and of] our children,” he said. He rejected the administration’s binary claim of either diplomacy or war, asserting, “The alternative to this bad deal is a much better deal.” Such an agreement, Netanyahu specified, must be conditioned on ending Iranian support for terrorism, aggression against neighboring countries, and threats to destroy Israel. Pointing at the image of Moses painted on one of the chamber’s walls, Netanyahu quoted him in Hebrew and then translated: “Be strong and resolute, neither fear nor dread them.”
The address spurred a spate of ovations and relentless controversy. A visibly downcast president told interviewers that he had not watched the speech but nevertheless dismissed it as “politics” and “theater,” and denied that it contained anything new. Once distant from Obama, indignant Democrats rallied now around him. “I was near to tears,” Nancy Pelosi bemoaned, “saddened by [Netanyahu’s] insult to the intelligence of the United States and the condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran.” Forty-seven Republican senators, by contrast, were emboldened to dispatch a letter to the supreme leader warning him that any deal signed by Obama without congressional approval could be rescinded by future presidents. Bipartisan bills challenged the White House’s ability to relieve sanctions on Iran without congressional approval. Beyond becoming a wedge issue, Israel, I feared, might be dragged into one of the bitterest-ever constitutional battles between the executive and legislative branches.
Israelis, meanwhile, were caught up in their own democratic struggle as their election day approached. A candidate for a poor party, I traversed the country in my own car, footing my own expenses, to canvas votes. As in earlier elections, these were to an extraordinary degree about Netanyahu—“It’s Us or Him,” warned the opposition’s posters—and the prime minister lagged behind. In a move widely interpreted as desperate, Netanyahu backed away from his earlier support for a two-state solution. “Anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state…gives territory away to radical Islamist attacks against Israel,” he proclaimed. And then, as reports showed steep gains for the newly founded joint list of all of Israel’s Arab parties, Netanyahu warned that “the right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are going en masse to the polls. Left-wing NGOs are bringing them on buses.”
For the first time, an Israeli prime minister issued a statement that many Israelis and their supporters worldwide regarded as racist. “What if a U.S. president had warned voters that too many blacks were voting?” an incensed American Jewish leader asked me. As someone who had worked with Netanyahu and never heard a prejudicial word from him, his action astonished me, but, having experienced discrimination in my youth, it wounded me as well. Proudly, my party—Kulanu—denounced the remark as “rash and inappropriate.” “Israel’s government,” I told CNN, “is elected not by Jews and Arabs, but by Israelis.”
Yet Netanyahu won. The retreat from the two-state plan and the fear of a left-wing success ignited his right-wing base and propelled him to victory. Likudniks rejoiced, but so, too, did we in Kulanu. With virtually no budget and a list of political underdogs, the party’s platform of social reform nevertheless garnered us ten seats, mine included.
On March 31, I stood as my name was called out in the Knesset and committed to uphold the laws of the State. Looking down on me from the gallery were Sally and my children as well as my eighty-six-year-old mother and ninety-year-old father, who had just arrived in Israel. Having attended the presentation of my credentials at the White House, they were not going to miss my swearing-in ceremony at the Knesset. They watched as I cast my first vote reelecting the Speaker to a second term, and then as I left my seat to embrace that Speaker, Yuli Yoel Edelstein, whom I first met in Moscow in 1982.
Throughout, I could not help reflecting on my own journey, beginning with the day I descended from the bus to Kibbutz Gan Shmuel. How could I have seen, squinting through the dust, that someday I would be elected to the first sovereign Jewish parliament in two thousand years? Who could have imagined the tortuous route ahead and the divides—American and Israeli—yet to be crossed?
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And who could have halted the acute decline of the U.S.-Israeli alliance? Though Netanyahu later reiterated his support for the two-state solution—conditions were just not ripe for one, he clarified—and apologized to Israeli Arabs for his offensive statement, the administration rejected the gestures. Instead, Obama said that the prime minister’s words “erode the name of democracy” in Israel, and necessitated a “reevaluation” of America’s policy toward the Jewish State—that lone pocket of Middle East stability—“to make sure that we don’t see a chaotic situation in the region.” The same White House that once refused to refute charges of Israeli spying against the United States began making them, evoking harsh Israeli denials. Israeli papers meanwhile leaked—or perhaps disleaked—Netanyahu’s advisors claiming that his congressional speech was worth provoking Obama and accusing the president of interfering in Israel’s elections.
Against this irascible background, on April 2, the P5+1 unveiled its Framework Agreement with Iran. This limited Iran’s ability to break out and make a nuclear bomb to one year, but only for a ten-year period. It reduced the number of centrifuges by two-thirds, and froze those remaining underground in Fordow. Enrichment would be capped at 3.75 percent and the stockpile cut down from ten thousand to three hundred kilograms. The Arak facility would be reconfigured to prevent production of plutonium bombs. International inspectors would aggressively monitor all aspects of Iran’s nuclear program, including uranium mines and the importation of parts, for as long as twenty-five years. Fulfilling these terms would relieve Iran of the sanctions, all of which could “snap back” if it failed to comply. Praising this “historic” agreement, President Obama warned Congress that killing it could trigger another Middle East war for which America would be blamed. “International unity will collapse and the path to conflict will widen.”
Numerous Congress members, commentat
ors, and, of course, Benjamin Netanyahu read the treaty differently. In addition to activating one-third of its centrifuges and dismantling none, Iran would keep its entire nuclear infrastructure. Obama cited Iran’s good faith in upholding the interim agreement—in spite of the IAEA’s claim that Iran violated that treaty by increasing its nuclear stockpile by 20 percent—and insisted that sanctions would not be lifted unless Iran complied with the Final Framework. Critics, though, pointed to Tehran’s opposition to shipping its enriched uranium abroad and to truly intrusive inspections of its facilities. Iran insisted on instantly removing all sanctions that, having taken many years to impose, could never be “snapped back,” the agreement’s detractors claimed. Most deplored was the treaty’s failure to tie acceptance of Iran’s status as a nuclear threshold state to the slightest change in its behavior. Ceasing all attempts to destroy Israel, much less recognize it, was never an American demand.
“The United States appears to have lost the courage of its convictions,” Natan Sharansky, the former Prisoner of Zion, bemoaned in The Washington Post. “Democratic governments made a critical mistake before World War II and they are making a grave mistake now,” Netanyahu declared at Yad Vashem on Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2015. “The bad deal with Iran—a country that clearly states its plans to exterminate six million Jews—demonstrates that this lesson has not been internalized.” The man who would be Churchill, who once likened Obama’s policies to Roosevelt’s refusal to bomb Auschwitz, was now identifying new Neville Chamberlains seeking to appease, rather than defeat, evil.
Whether for or against the framework, all observers agreed that the document remained unsigned. Recalling how the Palestinians always pocketed American and Israeli concessions and then left the table, I wondered whether the Iranians would do the same. After all, they had already secured recognition of their nuclear rights and their Middle East preeminence without paying any real price. The sanctions might already break down, as evidenced by Russia’s willingness to sell sophisticated weaponry to Tehran. Like Syria’s Assad, who built chemical arms to ensure his regime’s survival, the ayatollahs created a nuclear program to preserve their rule and extend their Middle East hegemony. And just as Assad’s willingness to forfeit his arsenal restored his international legitimacy, so, too, did Iran’s openness to nuclear negotiations facilitate its regional expansion. Assad, international investigators later charged, continued to kill his people with chemical weapons, but the world was no longer interested. Once part of the problem, Iran, like Syria before it, was now seen as the solution. Few countries would be concerned about evidence to the contrary.
“I’m an historian,” I routinely say in response to anybody asking me about the future. “I have enough difficulty predicting the past.” Many decades from now scholars will still be debating whether Netanyahu’s effort to stop the Iranian bomb presciently succeeded or tragically failed. Was an Israeli-Palestinian accord really possible in these years, they will ask, and, if so, which party bore the greatest responsibility for undermining it? Did Obama achieve his goal of bringing Arabs and Israelis together not through peace but—paradoxically—through their common fear of his policies? Chroniclers will quote Obama’s affirmation of his “deep and abiding friendship and concern and understanding for Israel,” made in an interview with Thomas Friedman, and weigh it against the facts. Similarly, they will judge if Netanyahu’s repeated pledges “to act alone, if necessary” against a nuclear-empowered Iran were serious or simply bluster. Later generations will recall the duel between Obama’s quest for legacy and Netanyahu’s claim to destiny, and determine which of them prevailed.
History has this humbling habit of diminishing the events we see as monumental and of reducing our roles in them to footnotes. And yet, what choice do we have? Our responsibility is to strive for the objectives we see as fateful for our time. Entering government, my primary task would be to uphold Israel’s historic alliance with America. Despite the policy disagreements of the previous years, the personality clashes and periodic crises, I remain convinced that the U.S.-Israel relationship is essential to both countries’ interests. It assures a modicum of Middle East stability and sends a message of American dependability to the world. The time had arrived for U.S. and Israel leaders to cease sparring and reaffirm the vitality, and the centrality, of their ties.
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Israel needs America. Though cobbled from disparate cultures, situated in an epicenter of strife, the Jewish State is remarkably resilient. Nothing history throws at us—wars, economic upheavals, an entire region unraveling—dulls our determination to thrive. Deprive of us water, we will build the desalination plants that make us water exporters. Give us a land without oil or natural riches, and we will resourcefully plumb our minds. “It’s what we Jews are best at,” the revered Bank of Israel governor Stanley Fischer, later vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, once assured me. “Dealing with uncertainty.”
But our plight arises not from what we cannot know, but rather from what we do. Hamas and Hezbollah aim more than a hundred thousand rockets at our homes. Instability surges on all of our borders and radical Islamists—Sunni and Shiite—dream of our demise. Europeans, claiming they care about the Palestinians but also revealing their deep-seated difficulty with Jews, threaten to cut off commerce with Israel, and even Turkey has turned hostile. Resilient, rooted, and innovative, Israel is nevertheless vulnerable. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon once asked me to describe Israel’s geopolitical situation in historical terms. “At best we’re in May 1967,” I replied. “At worst, it’s May 1948.”
At both those times, Israel appeared on the verge of destruction, surrounded by belligerent forces and shorn of international friends. So, too, today, Israeli decision makers awake—when they manage to sleep—to a spectrum of dangers rarely confronted by their predecessors. And yet, one immense distinction separates contemporary Israel from that of the eve of the 1967 and 1948 wars: Israel is no longer alone.
The deep, multifaceted alliance with America that emerged after the Six-Day War enabled Israel to make peace with two of its bitterest foes, Egypt and Jordan. It assisted us in absorbing more than a million refugees from the former Soviet Bloc and Ethiopia, and reinforced global confidence in our economy. In international forums, the United States consistently resisted an almost unbroken procession of anti-Israel resolutions. Above all, the alliance fortified our ability to defend ourselves. Israel’s enemies saw not only the Made in the U.S.A. weaponry, the jet aircraft, and the joint maneuvers, but also the solidarity underlying them.
Preserving and strengthening that unity is a supreme Israeli interest. In making strategic choices, Israeli leaders must always take into account the impact of those choices on the United States. They must reaffirm the democratic principles so cherished by America, and their seriousness in the search for peace. They must contribute to the well-being of the American Jewish community and fulfill Israel’s promise as the nation-state of all the Jewish people. And if those leaders occasionally have to act in ways unpopular among some Americans, they must do so with the utmost reluctance, and always with an earnest “Thank you, but…” While the perspective of a minuscule Middle Eastern state can never dovetail entirely with that of a distant superpower, Israeli decision makers must never lose sight of how the Middle East—indeed, the world—looks from Washington. Israel needs to acknowledge that view and, whenever possible, adapt to it.
During my time in Washington, support for Israel among Americans rose steadily to some 74 percent. Even during the last Gaza war, despite the critical press, that backing climbed. But we can never take that affection for granted nor cease courting it. The outreach is one-way and imperative. More Israeli resources must be allocated to enable Americans from multiple backgrounds to visit the Jewish State and see us as we are, a normal nation grappling with abnormal circumstances. And as American society continues to change, Israelis must chart those transformations and navigate them. Burgeoning communities—Hispanic, African-A
merican, Asian—must be introduced to Israel and helped to understand why it is in their interests, as Americans, to support a sliver of a country located thousands of miles away. They should know how that state, scientifically and technologically, enriches their families’ lives, and how its security forces help protect them.
For America needs Israel as well. Though the dependence is not, of course, symmetrical, the presence of an American ally at the world’s most strategically crucial crossroads, deploying an army more than twice the size of Britain’s and France’s combined, cannot be undervalued. Neither can the willingness of its citizens to fight. During the Protective Edge operation, the IDF called up ninety thousand reservists, all of whom—women and men—unhesitatingly left their jobs and homes to defend their country. All knew that some would never return. In how many democratic countries today would this happen?
That asset must not be squandered. Just as Israel benefits from a strong America—an America viewed as strong from the Ukraine to the South China Sea—so, too, does the United States gain from a secure and powerful Israel. For all of the talk about “pivoting to Asia,” the United States will remain inextricably linked to the Middle East, bound to the region both by the profits and the threats it generates. Americans cannot detach from the Middle East, for it will follow them home. A robust Israel helps to keep that Middle East at bay and assists in safeguarding that home.
The world, meanwhile, watches us. Friends and adversaries alike—the French and the Iranians, the Japanese and jihadists—all look at the alliance as a litmus of America’s willingness to stand up for its fellow democracy and even to stand up for itself. The alliance is vital not only for its two partners, but also for the security of all nations.
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