Prime Minister Naftali Bennett (Yamina) is said to have expressed astonishment last week at the vehemence with which the United States opposes West Bank Jewish construction.
According to a report last Wednesday on Galei Tzahal radio, Bennett told ministers during a security cabinet meeting that he had been surprised by US President Joe Biden’s intense focus on the issue during a September meeting between the two leaders at the White House.
“I was surprised by the American pressure against construction in Judea and Samaria,” Bennet told his ministers.
“It is critical to them.”
The fact that Bennett found himself so bewildered by the intensity with which Washington opposes a Jewish presence in the West Bank – an issue presumably central to his political worldview – indicates the extent to which he’s ill equipped to serve as Israel’s prime minister.
Member of Knesset Simḥa Rothman highlighted this fact in a sarcastic tweet insinuating that US hostility to Jewish West Bank construction should be as obvious to an Israeli national leader as the Iranian nuclear threat.
While it’s true that Bennett often sounds like a Diaspora college student drunk on Hasbara kool-aid while trying to run a state, his boyish naivety on even the issues most important to him should alarm but not surprise.
Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, a longtime close political ally of Bennett’s and number two on his Yamina list, met with LAVI student organizers in the summer of 2019. When challenged about Israel’s need to overcome its dependency on US money and weapons, Shaked’s response exposed her ignorance of the fact that the money is actually an American government subsidy to its own arms industry that stifles the economic growth and independence of recipient nations.
While Israeli leaders have generally been careful to make a point of loudly praising the “great friendship” between Jerusalem and Washington in public, the best of them have also recognized the true nature of that relationship and have struggled to balance Israel’s national interests with appeasing the Americans. At least one prime minister even went so far as to try breaking Israel free from US control.
Even The Prime Ministers by the late Yehuda Avner, generally regarded as a “G-rated” telling of Israeli history, couldn’t help but cast successive US administrations as the antagonist every Israeli prime minister is forced to outmaneuver in defense of Israel’s interests.
From the time of Israel’s establishment in 1948, the core disagreement between Washington and Jerusalem has been whether or not the Jewish people’s return to political independence carries with it any meaningful historic significance. While early Israeli governments insisted on relating to Jerusalem as the state’s capital, Washington refused to acknowledge Israeli sovereignty in even the parts of Jerusalem remaining in Jewish hands after the 1948 War.
Since the Six Day War, the Americans have shown a willingness to fund and arm a small Jewish refuge state in pre-1967 borders. But this “generosity” has been primarily about imperial control and ensuring that Israel exist as an extension of US power in the region.
While there is no shortage of materialist explanations for why the United States consistently opposes Jewish life and Israeli sovereignty in the cradle of Hebrew civilization, a deeper subconscious reason might be a concern that returning to the Biblical Judean mountains offers a significance to Israel’s rebirth Western civilization cannot accept.
But regardless of the motivations driving US policy towards Israel, any viable candidate for prime minister has an obligation to understand the complexity of the relationship before assuming office. The fact that Bennett allows Foreign Minister Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) – who we should see as actually running Israel’s current coalition – to steer the ship on foreign policy and give Washington veto power over Jerusalem’s Iran policy already indicates how unfit he is to lead.
Former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud), for all his faults, has become an expert in outmaneuvering the Americans. Despite years of holding his cards close and creating enough ambiguity to allow some to see him as a nationalist ideologue and others to see him as a self-serving political opportunist, Netanyahu spent his twelve year second stint as prime minister quietly protecting Israel from US Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
That Bennett entered the prime minister’s office with no understanding of the unspoken true nature of the US-Israel relationship, or any readiness to defend Israel from Washington’s designs, exposes him as a political amateur with no business leading the nation.
