Netanyahu Speech Could Allow Obama to 'Take on the Jewish Lobby'

posted on: Jan 31, 2015

Martin Indyk, the former peace negotiator for the State Department, says that the invitation to Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to Congress and rebut Obama’s policy on Iran threatens to drive a wedge between Obama and “the Jewish lobby,” turning the battle into “the President versus Israel and its supporters.”

After all, the president has taken on the Cuba lobby, Indyk said. So this is the true danger of the invitation, that it will turn Israel lobby in the U.S., which Israel needs for its survival, into an open political issue in the U.S.

Indyk made his comments on Day 1 of the scandal, in a January 21 conversation with New York Times columnist (and author) Roger Cohen at the 92d Street Y in New York. Indyk, a longtime supporter of Israel who served under Obama, already saw that the invitation was generating rage in the White House, and this was a terrible strategic error by Netanyahu, endangering the “precious” US-Israel relationship:

So it’s an approach which is bound to create a good deal of anger in the White House. So why would you do that? I mean the president is going to be there for two more years. He’s just taken on the Cuba lobby. And he’s basically saying that I’ll veto any effort to impose new sanctions. So there’s a potential here for him to take on the Jewish lobby. Because I assume that AIPAC and the pro-Israel community will get behind the Prime Minister. And so we’re going to move from a kind of what was– a Democrat versus Republican argument with some Democrats supporting the Republicans on this issue of sanctions, to the President versus Israel and its supporters, and that’s not a place where we want to be. Anybody  who cares about the Israel US relationship should not want to be there.

This is the wisest analysis I’ve seen about the fiasco. “Anybody who cares about the Israel US relationship should not want” this speech. It is why so many segments of the lobby, centrists, liberal Zionists, even neocon Robert Kagan now in the Washington Post, have thrown themselves into opposing the speech. The only ones who want the speech are diehard neocons who seem to think this is the only way to get a war with Iran– and the left and national interest types, people who want the speech to come off so that America will have to watch as the Congress jumps up and down to give repeated standing ovations to a foreign prime minister who opposes our president, so that America will ask why? As Scott Horton tweeted:

Source: mondoweiss.net