Put aside the cursing, and focus on defeating Iran |
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
On multiple occasions when denigrating his political rivals and asserting his own credentials, Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly asserted that the single most important quality an Israeli prime minister must possess is the strength of purpose needed to say “no” to the president of the United States.
He has made the point in public speeches, in smaller meetings, and from the Knesset podium. In February 2022, to give just one example, during the period when, to his horror, he had been briefly ousted from the premiership by the Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid coalition, he told parliament, “The prime minister of Israel must have one ability, one ability — and without it, he cannot be here [in that job]: He must be capable of saying one word to the president of the United States. And the word is: No.”
And the fact is that Netanyahu has said “no” to American presidents — most relevantly when opposing Barack Obama’s drive to the lousy 2015 deal intended to thwart Iran’s efforts to attain nuclear weapons. He told Obama that the agreement would, as proved to be the case, in fact enable the regime to advance toward the bomb, and he attempted to marshal the US Congress to his and Israel’s cause. In vain.
Evidently, despite the particularly high risk of attempting to oppose the current irascible, unpredictable and flailing US president, Netanyahu has again been attempting to say “no” to a leader of the free world — over Donald Trump’s handling of the battle to bring down the would-be genocidal regime in Iran, and specifically, this week, over how to counter the intensifying and widening attacks on Israel by the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror army in Lebanon.
It is unlikely that Trump planned to denounce Netanyahu in expletive-filled terms in their conversations on Monday, when the US president is reported to have furiously demanded to know “What the fuck are you doing?” ahead of intended Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah’s Dahiya stronghold in the Beirut suburbs, and to have shouted down the line to the prime minister something like: “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”
But the resort to the f-word is familiar: Trump publicly castigated Netanyahu at the end of last year’s 12-day war with Iran, and ordered him to recall pilots about to carry out airstrikes after Tehran had breached the president’s fresh ceasefire: “You know what?” he told........