Exactly Why Is It that All American Presidents Dance to Bibi's Tune?

[Celerity]

Trump is the most pliable. But Netanyahu plays them all like cheap violins, despite being wrong about every important matter of the last 25 years.

https://newrepublic.com/article/197001/netanyahu-american-presidents-israel-war-iran

https://archive.ph/v3kdG


Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office on April 7

Despite the extremely stiff competition, it’s fair to say that Donald Trump may be about to win the historical contest to become the all-time “Bibi’s Lapdog” among American presidents. After repeatedly rejecting the idea of joining with Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and distancing himself when it finally happened, then reversing himself again to take partial credit for it, Trump appears to be ready to go one massive step further and turn the Israeli attack into a full-fledged American war. To be more than fair to two profoundly corrupt leaders who don’t remotely deserve it, this is alas nothing new: Israeli prime ministers who bend American presidents to their will have a long and distinguished pedigree.

The last U.S. president to stand up to Israel and demand that it reverse itself in a matter of war was Dwight Eisenhower, who, after the 1956 Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt over the closing of the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping, insisted on an immediate withdrawal. (It did not endear Israel to Eisenhower that he was trying to focus the world on Moscow’s invasion of Hungary at the same time.) Even then, France and England immediately complied. Israel took its time and eventually extracted most of the concessions it wanted from the U.S.

This phenomenon has only grown in scope with the rise of the myriad groups that make up the extraordinarily influential “Israel lobby,” together with the growing power of Christian Zionism in the Republican Party. Robert Gates, who spent decades of service in top national security positions under both Democratic and Republican presidents, once observed that of all the presidents he had served, literally “every” one of them would, at some point in his presidency, “get so pissed off at the Israelis that he couldn’t speak.” They would all “rant and rave around the Oval Office” out of “frustration about knowing that there was so little they could do about it because of domestic politics.”

To say this is understandable would be a considerable understatement. Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg reported a now-famous conversation he had with an official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee during the Clinton era. Goldberg asked the official if AIPAC had lost influence after a leader had been caught on tape speaking in an impolitic fashion. The official interrupted him and pushed his napkin across the table: “You see this napkin?” he asked, before explaining, “In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”

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