Israel’s global standing appears to be the worst it’s ever been. That is the consensus in Israel’s Foreign Ministry, among ambassadors, and in the IDF. One person disagrees: Benjamin Netanyahu.
This week, he was asked when Israel’s situation has been more severe. “Plenty of times,” he replied. For example? “A year ago, under the Biden administration.” To understand his answer, one must consider that for Netanyahu, “the world” is, in fact, a very small area, a diameter of just over one mile: between Capitol Hill and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
If one had to draw a world map based on where Israel focuses its attention, Washington would be the size of Europe, and Europe would be a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. And in Washington terms, Netanyahu says, last year we were under a practical embargo: President Biden opposed IDF action in Rafah, Vice President Harris boycotted the prime minister’s speech in Congress, and Washington was not briefed about Israel’s beeper operation and assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, so that it could not sabotage them by leaking the plans. By that measure, in Washington, everything today seems like a dream. The problem is, of course, that every dream ends when you wake up.
Indeed, 27 Democratic senators recently signed a letter supporting a practical arms embargo on Israel — a number unimaginable just a few years ago. Young, Trump-aligned podcasters who interviewed Netanyahu, meanwhile, went through an online shaming campaign that led to them comparing the prime minister to Hitler and interviewing, as apparent compensation, Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef, who, amongst other things, has claimed that “the number one threat to Jewish people in the world is Zionism,” and that Israel kidnapped Yemenite children in 1950 “in order to instill semitic DNA in their population.”
But back to Netanyahu. He believes that Israel’s standing with the rest of the world has, in fact, been worse in years gone by, namely during the 1970s oil embargo after the Yom Kippur War.
There is, however, one difference: today, many countries that publicly distance themselves from Israel and declare arms embargoes are the same ones that behind closed doors beg for more weapons and more Israeli technology, due to hysteria over Russia and Trump’s demand to increase NATO members’ defense budgets. Once Israel was the mistress of the Middle East; now it is also the mistress of Europe.
But, Netanyahu said this week, this is reversible. When Israel wins the war, he believes Jerusalem will leave this all behind. After all, the source of nearly all of Israel’s international troubles is Gaza, which Israel left 20 years ago — not Judea and Samaria, where the so-called “occupation” continues.
The conclusion: better to solve the problem now than to delay and pay the price for temporary legitimacy.
The above is an excerpt from my Shabbat column in Israel Hayom.
