Matt Yglesias on the aftermath of Bibi Netanyahu’s hamhanded public lecturing of the current president of the United States last week, which largely produced bipartisan attacks on the president:
Despite Obama’s lack of desire to shift US policy, he’s subject to opportunistic political attacks from members of the opposition party, attacks which are echoed rather than rebutted by members of his own political coalition. Meanwhile, despite an overhyped trend toward younger Jewish American adopting more sympathetic views toward Palestinians, the fact of the matter is that the Palestinian cause is deeply and increasingly unpopular in the United States.
….It turns out that it’s not true that Israel needs to be willing to make tactical concessions to the Palestinians or even be polite to the White House in order to retain American support. Israel has a basically free hand to behave as it wishes, taking the pieces of the West Bank it wants….If liberal American Jews think this strategy is morally wrong (I do!) or that it’s a strategic mistake for the United States to go along with it (me too!), that it involves denying sufficient weight to the objective humanity of Palestinians, then we ought to say that. Simply assuming that it can’t work is, I think, a slightly naive read of the situation.
This is roughly correct. I happen to think Netanyahu’s approach is probably disastrous for Israel in the long term, but that’s certainly debatable. For better or worse, Netanyahu and his allies have very clearly decided that they can live without peace pretty much forever, occupying the land they currently occupy and keeping a stifling military presence in the rest of the West Bank. And they’ve also decided that their support in the United States is strong enough that they don’t even have to be civil to a sitting U.S. president, let alone make actual concessions to him.
And maybe they’re right. I don’t see how this state of affairs can last forever, but it can probably last longer than I think. The Israeli and American right has correctly concluded that no one can stop them, after all.