Chemi Shalev Netanyahu’s bigheaded Euro-bashing is Bannon 101
Benjamin
Netanyahu’s hot mic Euro-bashing rant in Budapest was politically savvy
and diplomatically demented. Like American conservatives, most Israeli
voters relish an occasional outburst of outrage toward the continent
they love to visit and to hate. On the other hand, to describe one of
the West’s foundational success stories, which also happens to be Israel’s largest trading partner, as “crazy,” is, not to put to fine a point on it, crazy.
Netanyahu’s
animosity toward Europe in general and some of its countries in
particular is firmly established and multi-layered. In addition to
garden variety Israeli and Jewish resentment of European anti-Semitism
and criticism of the occupation, Netanyahu imbibed European antipathy
from the day he was born. His historian father Benzion Netanyahu
portrayed the last 500 years of European-Jewish relations, from the
Inquisition onward, as “a history of holocausts,” as the New York Times
wrote in his obituary. Netanyahu was molded by the Entebbe Operation, in
which his heroic brother was killed, and which featured a French
government too weak and appeasing to rescue the Jews who were hijacked
on its national carrier. He absorbed it from his right-wing and
conservative cohorts in Israel and in the United States, starting with
his Reaganite benefactors in Washington and New York in the 1980s
through his neo-con admirers in the 1990s and his Freedom Fries fans in
the 2003 Gulf War, and culminating with his current GOP groupies in
Congress and his alt-right aficionados in Donald Trump’s White House,
led by their guru Steve Bannon. Netanyahu was present as godfather and
inspiration, let’s not forget, when Andrew Breitbart and Larry Solov
decided in 2007 to establish Breitbart News, from which Bannon
eventually catapulted to the corridors of power.
Netanyahu shares the
American right’s historic disdain for the weak-kneed and lily-livered
continent Donald Rumsfeld once described as “Old Europe”: decadent,
effete and selling its soul. Often described as more American than
Israeli, Netanyahu is and was a champion of the kind of daring and
muscular America that Rumsfeld and his ilk dreamed of, though they gave
us the Islamic State instead. Barack Obama, in Netanyahu’s eyes, was
European in nature if not by complexion. Trump, for all his
shortcomings, is a true blue American and there’s nothing Netanyahu
would like more than to see him make America great again.
Which is why he told
the Eastern European leaders that he met in Budapest how much better
things are now that Obama is gone and Trump is running the show. “The
U.S. is more engaged in the region and conducting more bombings [in Syria].
It is a positive thing.” Netanyahu said, conveniently ignoring the
havoc that Trump has strewn and the damage he’s caused to America’s
standing in the world. He ignored his own reservations,
which have surfaced recently, about the U.S-Russia cease-fire deal in
Syria, Trump’s plans for the “ultimate” Israeli-Palestinian peace deal
and, presumably, the inconvenient truth about the degree of Trump’s
collaboration with, if not subservience to, Vladimir Putin.
In
making the case for the enormity of Europe’s folly, Netanyahu channeled
Steve Bannon through and through. He appealed to the nationalistic and
xenophobic side of his four Visegrad Group hosts from Hungary, Poland,
Slovakia and the Czech Republic, with which, unfortunately, Israel
increasingly identifies despite its almost visible underside of
Holocaust revisionism and anti-Semitism. Netanyahu played to his hosts’
ethnocentric nationalism and their fear of a Muslim “mongrelization” of
Europe, an attitude that has put them at odds with Brussels. EU
officials certainly won’t take kindly to the evidence that Netanyahu is
inciting their renegades on Muslim immigration to oppose them on Israeli
policies as well.
Netanyahu
described Israel as Europe’s last bulwark against another wave of mass
migration, of Muslim hordes, presumably, that would flood the continent
and drown it. Even if Europe doesn’t realize it, Israel is its forward
outpost, Netanyahu said, holding the gates that would stop the
barbarians. Two weeks after Trump’s controversial battle cry for the
West in Warsaw, Netanyahu made clear that he wrote the book on the
subject, literally. His seminal treatise "Terrorism: How the West Can
Win," published over thirty years ago, firmly established him as an
inspiration for America’s clash-of-civilizations adherents.
But perhaps the most
glaring feature of Netanyahu’s comments was his clear, unadulterated and
seemingly unhinged hubris. It is reckless of Netanyahu to describe
India and China as countries that have no political interests in the
Middle East, which means that they don’t give two figs for the
Palestinians. But it takes a special mix of arrogance, delusion and
ignorance, frankly, to boast that by cutting themselves off from Israeli
innovation – which they don’t by the way – Europe is condemning itself
to decay and rot. One can only pray that Netanyahu doesn’t believe his
own drivel and that he doesn’t even believe that his hosts believe it.
Netanyahu resents
Europe because he views it as the last bastion of Palestinian
resistance. With the Arab world in tatters and much of it siding with
Israel against Iran anyway, with India and China pursuing their
self-interests and abandoning their traditional Third World sympathies,
and, most of all, with the White House firmly held by Muslim-bashers and
Congress controlled by solid majorities of Israel-lovers, Europe is the
last remaining pocket. It clings on almost religiously to the 1967
borders, it makes its considerable contributions to Israel’s economy and
technological know-how contingent on the nearly defunct differentiation
between Israel and the West Bank and it insists on linking its support
for Israel with its opposition to its policies. No less importantly,
many of its leaders, in the West much more than the East, can’t stand
Netanyahu personally, a sentiment in a previous and memorable hot mic incident in which two Europeans – Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy – famously badmouthed Netanyahu as a tedious liar.
Netanyahu’s haughty
anti-European tirade, which will certainly go over well with his
right-wing base in Israel, is the flip side of his Trump-like whines
about the Israeli “fake news” industry which insists on covering the suspected criminal activities
of his closest confidantes. Here he is in Budapest, courting world
leaders, forging alliances, playing an international game of chess like a
true grandmaster, and there they are in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, those
nattering nabobs of negativism, as Spiro Agnew called them, focusing on
the trivial, questioning his virtue, blinding themselves and Israelis to
his absolute magnificence. If it’s true, as Prometheus asserts in
Longfellow’s "Masque of Pandora," that “Those whom the Gods would
destroy they first make mad,” this is a good a sign as any that the
process has begun.
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