Israel alienating President Biden and Senator Schumer would be reckless - opinion

In his speech denouncing Benjamin Netanyahu, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) wronged the people of Israel. His call for new Israeli elections to replace the prime minister violated the strong rule that democracies do not intervene in another democracy’s internal politics.

According to the late former US senator Joseph Lieberman in The Wall Street Journal and David Suissa in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Netanyahu has damaged the State of Israel. For decades, Israel’s legitimacy as a state has been denied, first by Arab nations, then by the Soviet Union and its satellites, and then by Islamist and terror groups. Israel has been the one state in the world whose right to exist can be denied (or can be threatened with destruction), and the offending nations will still be treated as respectable members of the international community. 

Lieberman and Suissa’s point is that intervention in Israel’s internal democratic process implies that Israel’s standing as a state beyond question is fragile. 

Russia unleashed an aggressive war on Chechnya and Ukraine; China executed cultural genocidal attacks on Tibetans and Uighurs. And no one says that the international community should dictate a change of regime for such crimes against humanity. 

Yet on the radical Left, people declare that having killed many Palestinian civilians, Israel’s right to existence may be denied (as Hamas and Iran have done repeatedly.)  Schumer’s intervention reinforces the discriminatory, antisemitic claim (which he rejects) that Israel’s sovereignty is in a different category than other established governments – and not beyond being contested.

Nevertheless, those who dismiss Schumer or accuse him of betrayal of Israel are wrong. 

Even if you judge him wrong in his criticism of Netanyahu or that this speech was a sop to the anti-Israel left wing of the Democratic party at Israel’s expense, Schumer’s 40 years of leadership (as representative and as senator) enabling American support for Israel, cannot be dismissed. Schumer continues to be a major force bonding the US and the state of Israel and upholding the value of their strategic alliance. His leadership is needed and will be valuable for the America-Israel connection in the future.

What can Israelis learn from the Senate Majority Leader?

Instead of dismissing Schumer, what are the lessons Israelis should take from his words? Schumer’s speech highlights the damage Netanyahu and the present government have inflicted on the alliance with the United States – which is the bedrock of Israel’s security. Even our most devoted allies, such as Biden and Schumer, have been alienated by the extremist anti-democratic and anti-Arab leaders recruited and appointed to key positions by Netanyahu to enable him to serve as prime minister. 

Netanyahu cannot be blamed for the growth of the anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party. But instead of trying to keep the Democratic mainstream close to the Jewish state, he has played to his base and allies and has distanced the Democrats. Netanyahu has played to the Trumpist Republican Party. This is particularly irresponsible because close readers of Trump see that he is seething, obsessed by Netanyahu’s unavoidable recognition of Biden’s victory. 

For decades, one of the main criteria by which Israelis judge prime ministers is their ability to maintain the US-Israel strategic alliance. Schumer’s speech shows that Netanyahu has been destructive to this indispensable connection. He has squandered the bipartisanship that put the support of Israel beyond narrow party interests and assured military cooperation and foreign aid, whatever changes in administration that there were. 

The Gaza war with its nightly scenes of Gaza in ruins and Palestinian children suffering or dead was bound to hurt Israel’s standing among the moderates in the American electorate. The one approach that could have mitigated the erosion was the prime minister of Israel on a nightly basis making clear that Israel was doing everything that it could to save Palestinian civilian lives. First should have come the repeated explanation that the evacuation of a million Gazans was not to rebuild Jewish settlements but to save Palestinian lives – even as Israel evacuated 150,000 of its own population to put them beyond enemy fire. Netanyahu could not do that because his allies wanted to rebuild Jewish communities in Gaza. For similar reasons, Netanyahu has failed to provide a credible “day after” scenario for governing/ rebuilding Gaza, thus destroying Israel’s trust and credibility with the Biden administration.

Night after night, the prime minister should have appeared on news media expressing heartbreak and grief felt by all people seeing the suffering of Palestinian children. He should have explained how Hamas embedded their fighters in mosques, schools, hospitals, and their attack tunnels in civilian homes and sites, turning Palestinian civilians into human shields. Hamas’ deliberate tactics meant that Israel’s just war would cause civilian casualties – but Israel tried in every which way to minimize such casualties. 

Sadly, Netanyahu was silent because his allies would allow no statement of sympathy and concern for the Palestinians. This left the general impression with the world public that Israel’s war in Gaza was for revenge and to inflict suffering rather than about self-defense. 

Israel saw the gathering food shortage in Gaza and started sending in humanitarian aid for weeks before famine became a public issue but the government could not say what it was doing for fear of offending its allies, who wanted to deal pitilessly with the Palestinians. Thus the government signaled heartlessness and possible utilization of starvation as a military tactic.

Time and again, the American (and international) push for humanitarian aid was projected as policies being imposed on a cruel Israel rather than as Israel grappling with food shortages coming out of a just war, and doing more than any government fighting in self-defense had done for the other side. The starvation due to Hamas taking supplies for itself while dooming its civilian population to hunger and death was attributed to Israel’s ill will. The outcome is the portrait of Israel as a moral pariah, a heartless oppressor. 

Statements like Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu’s (Otzma Yehudit) suggesting that Israel might drop nuclear bombs in Gaza were not rebuked by Netanyahu for fear of offending his extremist allies. His silence was exploited to give credence to the charge of genocide against Israel. The net result is that for reasons of political expediency and cowardice – and for personal political survival – Netanyahu handed Hamas a public relations bonanza. Israel came across as murderers and impervious to Palestinian suffering, while Hamas’ genocidal message and intentions were airbrushed out of the picture. 

The final straw in Netanyahu’s sacrifice of Israel’s security for personal political advantage was his attempt to turn the US objections to a full-scale ground invasion of Rafah into a betrayal of Israel’s need to demolish Hamas. Instead of taking America’s offered lifeline for such an invasion (i.e. planning together how to move the Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way and reduce civilian casualties), Netanyahu repeatedly proclaimed his intention to invade Rafah without meeting America’s concerns.

His fake news cancellation of the mission to moderate the Rafah incursion was designed to excite his base that he stands up to the US while turning Biden into a politician protecting his own electoral base and harming Israel. To alienate the Bidens and Schumers of this world – the people in the 99th percentile of supporting Israel – at the very moment that Israel could not fight on successfully without American resupply of munitions and planes will go down in Israel’s history as reckless folly.

The writer is an oleh, an activist and public intellectual in America, and author of The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Jews and Judaism (Jewish Publication Society, forthcoming).