Israel’s new foreign minister, Yair Lapid, said on Monday that Israel must fix its relationship with the Democratic Party.
“The previous government took a bad and lightheaded bet to focus only on the Republican Party and abandon Israel’s bipartisan status in America,” he said, taking a shot at now-former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The Republicans are important to us, but not only them,” Lapid added. “We find ourselves with a Democratic White House and a Democratic Congress. Those Democrats are angry at us, and we need to change that.”
Lapid is wrong. The onus is on Democrats, not Israel, to improve the relationship. After all, it is Democrats, not Netanyahu, who are to blame for this division.
The divide was first cut with former President Barack Obama creating “daylight” between the United States and the Jewish state.
The rocky relationship between Obama and Netanyahu started when the former hosted the latter at the White House in 2010 and objected to Israeli neighborhoods in the West Bank. Obama then left Netanyahu to have dinner with his family. There wasn’t even the opportunity for Obama and Netanyahu to pose with photographers. That added public salt to a fresh wound.
In 2015, the U.S. led the effort to reach the Iran nuclear deal, which gave the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief. Iran, unsurprisingly, then used much of this money to fund its proxies, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen. The agreement did not cut off Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon, nor did it address Iran’s other malign activities, including its ballistic missile program. Netanyahu was right to be Churchillian and sound the alarm.
In December 2016, with a middle finger to its closest ally in the Middle East, the Obama administration abstained from exercising its veto on a United Nations Security Council resolution declaring that Israeli neighborhoods in territory captured by Israel from Jordan in 1967, including east Jerusalem, are illegal.
Fast-forward.
Today, the congressional “Squad” promotes an antisemitic and anti-Israel agenda. Instead of condemning and censoring its members, including Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the House Democratic leadership has failed to rebuke them unequivocally — even in the aftermath of Omar putting the U.S. and Israel in the same moral category as Hamas and the Taliban.
Despite the Republican-controlled Senate passing legislation in 2019 that would tackle the antisemitic movement to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives has failed to take up, let alone pass, that legislation.
Last month, as Israel was defending itself against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket attacks, the Biden administration took a page out of the Obama administration’s playbook. While acknowledging Israel’s right to defend itself, it called for the Jewish state to stop doing so and instead exercise restraint.
Granted, Israel is responsible for some of the division with the Democratic Party. When then-Vice President Joe Biden visited Israel in 2010, Israel announced a plan for new housing units in east Jerusalem. Biden slammed the move as “precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.” Israel could have held off on the announcement until Biden had departed. Israel also conducted aggression espionage operations against U.S. government interests during both the Obama and Trump administrations. This undercut the otherwise stellar cooperation between Washington and Jerusalem, particularly toward counterterrorism and Iran.
However, those Israeli actions are insignificant compared to how Democrats have shied away from supporting Israel during times of need. Israel should be angry at the Democrats, not the other way around.
Jackson Richman is a journalist in Washington, D.C. Follow him @jacksonrichman.
