“Netanyahu at War” Documentary – Some Comments

Last night (January 5, 2016), PBS broadcasted an interesting Frontline documentary, “Netanyahu at War.” The documentary focuses on the troubled relationship Israel has had with the U.S while Benjamin Netanyahu has been Prime Minister.

Interestingly, the documentary indicates that Netanyahu has failed to understand U.S. politics even though, of all Israeli leaders, he has the best background to understand this country. He and his family moved to the U.S. when he was seven, and he went to U.S. schools from that time on (including high school). He earned two degrees at MIT and was studying for a doctorate in political science at Harvard but returned to Israel after his older brother was killed in the Entebbe raid. He also was an official at the Israeli embassy in Washington in the early 80s and subsequently served as the Israeli ambassador to the U.S.

This documentary, which is almost two hours long, is well worth watching. The end of the program focuses on the nuclear negotiations with Iran and the dismal professional and personal relationship between Netanyahu and President Obama. Netanyahu’s decision to address Congress in order to urge them to scuttle the deal was clearly a mistake. Since he lost, his actions in defiance of a U.S. President showed that the supposedly invincible Israeli lobby could be beaten. His attempt to convince American Jewish voters of the rightness of his cause also did not succeed. The vast majority of Jews voted for Obama both times he ran. Throwing his hat in with the Republicans, when most Jews are Democrats, was a mistake by Netanyahu that Israel will have to correct. It is possible that Netanyahu mistook his conversations with rich, conservative American Jews as representing general American Jewish opinion. According to Jeffrey Goldberg, who is interviewed in the documentary, Netanyahu and his entourage were sure that Mitt Romney would win the 2012 presidential election, and were like Fox News “bitter enders” before admitting to themselves that Obama had won. (The Israelis would have had better intelligence if they had read Nate Silver’s 538 blog, then hosted by the New York Times.)

There is a lot more to the documentary, including arguments concerning whether Netanyahu’s actions and speeches in 1995 helped create the atmosphere contributing to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Netanyahu was an implacable opponent of the Oslo peace process to which Rabin had subcribed. The treatment of this subject gives both sides their say.

Nevertheless, I have a few quibbles. The first is stylistic. I dislike Will Lyman’s voice of god narration for the Frontline programs, which seems to be a cheap way to stack the deck in favor of whatever point Frontline is making. (How could you possible disagree with that authoritative voice? But I have.)

Also, the program did not indicate the background and positions of some of the interviewees. For example, while correctly identifying Ron Dermer as Israel’s current ambassador to the U.S., there is no mention of his professional ties to the Republican Party as an American citizen and his role in arranging Netanyahu’s speech to Congress with Speaker John Boehner. However, Ron Dermer does not come off all that well in the show unless you totally agree with him. He sounds like many political operatives who show up on cable political shows who do not depart from their talking points.

Also, Ari Shavit, who wrote an interesting book on Israel (my review is here) makes the main point of the documentary at the end that, if things turn out badly, the years 2009 to 2015 will be viewed as a sad chapter in history and a failure of the Americans and the Israeli governments to work together. What is not mentioned is that, while Ari Shavit, who work for the liberal Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, is in some ways a liberal in Israeli politics, he agreed with Netanyahu’s reasons for opposing  the nuclear deal with Iran. This is probably what he was talking about in his interview, but the editing takes away some of the context. (Shavit though did not agree with Netanyahu’s tactics of opposing the American President on this. See “An Israeli Triumph Over Obama on Iran Could Be Disastrous.”)

Nevertheless, I recommend the program for those interested in Israel and the Middle East in general. Now that we see the total breakdown of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Israeli situation underlines how complicated the politics of the region are. For the U.S., there is no obvious optimal Middle East foreign policy, but the current and subsequent American presidents will have to navigate this difficult terrain as best they can. It is way too easy to get things wrong. One can only hope that they avoid some of the disastrous decisions of some of their predecessors.