NOVANEWS
The Zio-Nazi PM was back in his element, working the New York media, but his message of gloom and doom marred his vindication as the man who warned the West.
Haaretz
Throughout his long, exhaustive and often intimate interview with Charlie Rose on PBS this week, Benjamin Netanyahu glanced sideways every few minutes, away from his host and toward his aides and confidantes standing on the sidelines.
“How’m I doing?” his eyes seemed to be asking, Ed Koch-style. “Look, I’m still a master of the pointed one-liner, a connoisseur of the appropriate phrase. Tell me I’m not the best, after all these years.”
There was something touching in Netanyahu’s need for approval, you must admit, at least if you’re in a generous mood. Netanyahu is one of the most accomplished spokespersons that Israel has ever had, at least in English, with the legendary Abba Eban as his only serious rival. But here he was, begging for some positive feedback, seeking and expecting applause for a nifty metaphor, a cute idiom, a clever colloquialism delivered in the kind of impeccable American accent that only daily usage can maintain.
Netanyahu was back in his element, at the scene of his prime, working the New York media just as he did almost 30 years ago when he served as Israel’s envoy to the United Nations. He huddled with his old chum Andrea from NBC, joked around with Charlie from PBS and gave interviews in Spanish and even Farsi, carefully planting his pithy observations and his pointed one-liners to shore up his dark and foreboding speech on Tuesday at the UN General Assembly.
It was just like the good old days. Netanyahu was on a “media blitz,” his bureau explained, “to puncture the balloon” that Iranian President Rohani had inflated, pulling the U.S. media back down to earth from the delusional heights to which they had soared. His spokespersons distributed YouTube pictorials of Netanyahu being interviewed along with tweets that proclaimed, without blushing it seems, that he was a “Light to the (United) Nations.”
Netanyahu and his aides claimed that they had carefully bided their time before lowering Bibi’s boom on the Rohani festivities, but underneath their boastful bravado one could detect clear signs disappointment, if not desperation. The American media dutifully broadcast their interviews with Netanyahu, but did so furtively and minimialistically, as if an old friend had asked for an inconvenient favor, before switching back to the political drama of the government shutdown in Washington. Netanyahu, suddenly, was the wrong man, at the wrong time, with the wrong message.
The cruel irony, of course, is that Netanyahu was being relegated to the sidelines at the very minute that he was arguably marking his greatest victory, his historic vindication.
It was he, after all, who started warning the West 30 years ago about the Iranian threat; he, who wrote in his book “A Place Among the Nations” two decades ago that only American leadership and tough international sanctions could stop the nuclear drive of Iranian fundamentalism, a “cancerous tumor that threatens Western civilization.” He, who at a chance meeting seven years ago in the VIP lounge at Reagan International Airport in Washington DC convinced then-senator Barack Obama – according to Netanyahu’s aides – to sponsor a bill toughening sanctions against Tehran; he, who campaigned against Iran’s nuclear program from his first day as prime minister; he, who enlisted the U.S. Congress and American Jewry to his side; he, who was the driving force, in many ways, behind the toughest sanctions regime the world has ever seen, the one that is now bringing Tehran, possibly on its knees, to seek an accommodation.
This was the moment that Netanyahu could have smugly said “I told you so,” but his triumph was also the instrument of his undoing, an affliction in disguise, the sweet taste of victory that turned bitter in his mouth. He was entangled in the internal contradiction of having to express grudging support for a diplomatic solution in which he hardly believes, a process of negotiations that he himself had engineered but which now rendered him largely irrelevant.
Netanyahu, who does nothing to discourage sycophants who place him on a pedestal with his hero, Winston Churchill, could have been compared this week to the Churchill of July, 1945, after his astonishing thrashing by Labour’s Clement Atlee in the general elections, when the Brits saluted the British bulldog’s triumph over Nazi Germany but decided it was time for something completely different.
Suddenly, Netanyahu found himself recast once again as that annoying killjoy of yesteryear, the self-anointed prophet of doom, the obsessive pessimist who can’t see a ray of light, even when it is shining in his eyes – who “can’t take ‘yes’ for an answer,” just like the Republicans on Capitol Hill.
His tough and uncompromising speech at the UN may have been appreciated by most Israelis – including this one – but it was less favorably received, when it wasn’t being ignored, by American officials and opinion-makers. Even Jewish leaders who tend to agree with Netanyahu’s overall analysis of Iran’s sinister designs told me later that his speech was too black, too dire, too eager to erase any hope. The additional two days that Netanyahu spent in New York, they said, only poured fat on the fire, driving home his somewhat insulting view that naïve Americans were being duped by the sweet but empty words of Rohani.
Netanyahu, in fact, may have overstayed his welcome. By Thursday, when he was slated to leave, some Administration officials were already grumbling that he had gone back to his bad old ways, drumming up public opinion against the Administration in its own back yard. In unusually blunt diplomatese, Secretary of State John Kerry said that refraining from pursuing talks with Iran would be “diplomatic malpractice of the worst kind” – not that Netanyahu was suggesting anything of the kind, of course.
In the next weeks, as he travels to Asia and deals with the government shutdown and debt ceiling crises, President Obama will formulate the principles of U.S. engagement that Kerry will carry with him to the October 15 P5+1 round of talks in Geneva, in which Iran is expected to submit its opening offer to resolve the nuclear standoff. Netanyahu will have to mark time as a kibitzer on the sidelines and to play second fiddle. as Rohani takes center stage in a play that Netanyahu, at least by his own account, largely wrote on his own.
Of course, it’s too early to tell, if one may borrow from Dickens, whether we are approaching an age of wisdom or foolishness, a season of Light or a season of Darkness, a spring of hope or a winter of despair.
Though he may be shunned now, Netanyahu has once again put his money on the worst possible scenario. In the Middle East, of course, that usually turns out to be to be the safest bet of all.
