(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
In the end, Benjamin Netanyahu's speech before Congress was precisely what was expected from the beginning, from the day that House Speaker John Boehner publicly invited the Israeli prime minister: an Israeli campaign event before a more impressive and much more sycophantic audience than the Israeli prime minister could have found at home; a Republican show designed to use Israel against President Barack Obama; and a blow to the connection between Israel and the United States that Netanyahu and Boehner supposedly hold so dear.
The campaign theatrics were there in Netanyahu's opening lines, when he addressed the leaders of the House and Senate and called special attention to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid-a move meant to distract the Israeli audience from the absence of Vice President Joe Biden and more than 50 Democratic members of Congress. (Reid, it must be said, offered Netanyahu the opportunity by not absenting himself.)
Those campaign gestures were evident when the prime minister finished speaking and waved to the crowd like any candidate after a speech. They were there in between, when he noted the presence of Elie Weisel, so that TV cameras would show Sarah Netanyahu seated next to the Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor. The occasion offered the prime minister a chance to present his wife as his elegant companion on the world stage, rather than as the woman who may have committed petty theft from the public till or as the person who phoned the partner of a political critic and ranted at her for half an hour, those being the news stories for which she has received Israeli media attention lately.
And yes, in between there was the speech itself, in which
Netanyahu portrayed Obama as poised to sign an accord virtually guaranteeing that Iran gets nuclear weapons, and himself as the new Churchill
warning against appeasement.
Netanyahu insistently, desperately, wants to get the campaign conversation back to Iran. Much more than he'd like, that conversation has been devoted to economic issues, particularly to out-of-control housing prices. Last week, Israel's state comptroller issued a detailed report that assigned central blame for the housing crisis to Netanyahu. The prime minister's immediate response to the comptroller's report on housing prices was, "The biggest challenge facing us… is the threat of Iran having nuclear arms."
A poll published mere hours before Netanyahu's speech showed that 56 percent of the public consider home prices the main issue of the campaign, and only 31 percent assign that status to Iran. The pollsters framed the choice too narrowly, but the mood it reflects is real.
The chance to speak about Iranian nukes to reflexively applauding members of Congress came just when needed. When he picked the date, Netanyahu didn't know the housing report was coming. But he did know that he'd get an hour of free television time, two weeks before elections. Israeli election law strictly limits the amount of broadcast time that parties get for campaign ads. And the ads began, as scheduled, on the very day that Netanyahu addressed Congress-but the speech didn't use any minutes of his Likud Party's quota, because it didn't count as an ad.
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Netanyahu, undeniably, is a smooth speaker. His delivery nicely concealed the contradictions in what he said. A deal that provides for strict inspections of Iran's nuclear sites is useless, he said, because Iran builds secret sites. But if Iran can develop a bomb in secret, why would his proposed accord, requiring Iran to dismantle its nuclear facilities, be any better? The secret sites would remain.
You might just suspect that Netanyahu wants to set conditions for an accord that could never be met, thereby leaving the United States no choice but a military attack. For his Republican friends in Congress, not getting to a deal with Iran has the political advantage of denying Obama a diplomatic achievement. Netanyahu doesn't seem to have noticed that by identifying Israel with the GOP and with the diplomatic failure he seeks, he has not exactly generated the wide political backing needed for an offensive against Iran. But then, according to his own argument, the offensive would likely miss Iran's secret nuclear facilities, since nobody would know where they are. So, actually, there's nothing to be done -except to declare, as he did in his speech today, that if America doesn't protect Israel, "we, the Jewish people, can defend ourselves."
In his rhetoric, Netanyahu regularly presents himself as the prime minister of the Jewish people, rather than as prime minister of Israel. But he knows better. The votes he's looking for are in Israel. If the speech alienated a large piece of American Jewry, he's got other concerns at the moment. If it also alienated the Democratic Party, that also doesn't seem to matter to him. He has an election coming up.
In the end, Netanyahu offered only hopelessness, fear, and a quote from Deuteronomy: "'Be strong and resolute, neither fear nor dread them." The strange combination of dread and overconfidence is his real election platform. It stands in place of policy. If he can stir those feelings in enough voters, he believes, he will be re-elected.
In the end, the U.S. Congress turned itself into the fairgrounds for the campaign rally of a candidate in another country's election. It's rather stunning-demeaning to the institution, and unfair to the citizens of that other country.
