The deep rift between the U.S. and Israeli governments has been growing steadily for some time, and not just because President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu don’t like one another.
The split, laid bare by Netanyahu’s planned address to Congress on Tuesday, happened because of one thing: Iran.
For Obama, Iran represents the potential to redeem a foreign policy ethos dented by six years in the tough trenches of governing.
If he strikes a deal to roll back Iran’s feared nuclear program, Obama could make good on a now-hazy campaign promise to productively extend a hand of peace to dictators. He might end more than three decades of enmity between two great powers with much in common. He might be the American president to go to Tehran the way Nixon went to China.
For Netanyahu, Iran is more than a well-armed enemy at his Mideast doorstep. It’s the obsession of Netanyahu’s political life, the alarm he has sounded for decades, his raison d’etre, his white whale.
“I plan to speak about an Iranian regime that is threatening to destroy Israel, that’s devouring country after country in the Middle East, that’s exporting terror throughout the world and that is developing, as we speak, the capacity to make nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu said Monday. “Lots of them.”
Obama began working to improve U.S. relations with Iran almost from the dawn of his administration. He is now weeks away from the prospect of a historic deal to hobble Iran’s nuclear program, which the White House argues would make the world, and especially Netanyahu’s neighborhood, a lot safer than it is now.
Netanyahu, whose second term as prime minister began shortly after Obama took office in 2009, insists that a negotiated agreement with Iran is a fool’s errand.
For the U.S.-educated Israeli leader, any deal that lets Iran retain its ability to make nuclear fuel endangers Israel. And he says that the United States and other world powers negotiating the deal are giving away the store by easing economic sanctions without an airtight guarantee that Iran can never build a bomb.
His view finds many supporters in Congress, from both American political parties. The speech, to be delivered over the objections of a White House that was not told of the invitation, is a rallying cry to members of Congress to sunder the deal by piling on more sanctions.
“The purpose of my address to Congress tomorrow is to speak up about a potential deal with Iran that could threaten the survival of Israel,” Netanyahu told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Monday.
Obama is not addressing AIPAC this year. Neither is Vice President Biden, or Secretary of State John F. Kerry.
Obama will not receive Netanyahu at the White House. The president didn’t watch Netanyahu’s warm-up speech to AIPAC on Monday, White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters.
“As the prime minister of Israel, he can set his own schedule,” Earnest said. “And he gets to take the actions that he believes are consistent with his own objectives, whatever they may be.”
The invitation to address Congress, however, violated years of protocol in which foreign leaders speak at the behest of both Congress and the sitting president.
“As prime minister of Israel, I have a moral obligation to speak up in the face of these dangers while there’s still time to avert them,” Netanyahu said Monday.
Netanyahu used his AIPAC appearance to warn that Iran is already the “foremost state sponsor of terrorism in the world,” a charge U.S. officials don’t make as often as they used to.
“Iran envelops the entire world with its tentacles of terror. This is what Iran is doing now without nuclear weapons. Imagine what Iran would do with nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu said. “And this same Iran vows to annihilate Israel. If it develops nuclear weapons, it would have the means to achieve that goal. We must not let that happen.”
He reminded his audience that Israel is a small democracy, an outpost of decency and progressive mores “in a dark, and savage, and desperate Middle East.”
He invoked the persecution of Jews over millennia, and he invoked the Holocaust.
“The days when the Jewish people are passive in the face of threats to annihilate us, those days are over, Netanyahu thundered.
And this was supposed to be the boring speech, the one that the famously theatrical Israeli leader would use to temper the fireworks to come on Tuesday.
The congressional speech amounts to a writing-off of Netanyahu’s already abysmal personal relationship with Obama, with nearly two years to go until a new U.S. president takes over. Netanyahu faces a tight reelection contest this month but is considered likely to retain the prime minister’s office.
Obama considers Netanyahu a bully and a showboat, U.S. and Israeli officials said in interviews ahead of the speech.
Netanyahu considers Obama callow and bloodless, those officials said. The Israeli regarded Obama’s first election as a fluke and assumed it could not be repeated, he told associates ahead of Obama’s 2012 reelection.
Stuck with one another, the two leaders have mostly kept up appearances for the sake of a national alliance that both vow cannot be broken. Iran has been the chief irritant since 2013, with the White House fuming at what it saw as Netanyahu’s open attempt to sink a deal it has painstakingly nurtured.
The international talks face an end-of-March deadline.
Both Netanyahu and U.S. officials stressed Monday that the U.S.-Israel bond will survive.
Netanyahu ticked off several past examples of tension, including the suspension of American arms transfers over the 1981 Israeli military strike that destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor.
Netanyahu didn’t mention then-Secretary of State James A. Baker’s famous 1990 put-down, when he told Congress that Israel should “call us when you’re serious about peace.” Baker then read out the number of the White House switchboard.
None of the past splits were permanent, Netanyahu said.
“We’re like a family. We’re practically mishpocha,” he said, using a Yiddish word for a family network or clan.
“Now, disagreements in the family are always uncomfortable, but we must always remember that we are family.”
Now that the dirty laundry is flapping, U.S. officials were cordial Monday.
“We believe firmly that Israel’s security and the U.S.-Israeli partnership transcends politics and always will,” the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, told the AIPAC audience.
Power defended the Obama administration’s approach to negotiation with Iran and pledged anew that the United States won’t allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. She reassured the audience that American military force remains an option if diplomacy fails.
“Maybe the president has made this point so often that it isn’t heard in the same way anymore, but we have to keep repeating it,” Power said.
“Talks, no talks, agreement, no agreement, the United States will take whatever steps are necessary to protect our national security and that of our closest allies,” she said.
“We believe diplomacy is the preferred route to secure our shared aim. But if diplomacy should fail, we know the stakes of a nuclear-armed Iran as well as everyone here. We will not let it happen.”
Anne Gearan is a national politics correspondent for The Washington Post.
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