Is the US-Israel relationship in crisis? The prominent journalist Jeffrey Goldberg – the man a White House aide once called the “official therapist” of the relationship – seems to think so.

But while most coverage of Goldberg’s long article in The Atlantic revolves around an unnamed official calling Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu “chickenshit” – which the Obama administration spent two days disavowing – lost in the pearl-clutching is the insightful look at how Netanyahu’s policies on Iran are a direct affront on American interests.

Even most of the rest of chatter about the story focused on Israel’s expansion of settlement plans in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a sore spot in the so-called “special relationship” between the US and Israel. Settlements are certainly an effective test of Israel’s intentions in the peace process (and the US would be remiss to not denounce their expansion as harmful to prospects for peace).

But while settlement expansion depletes hope for a two-state solution – and exact a price on America’s overall standing in the world – they are hardly as big a problem for the US as Israel’s Iran policies – especially considering Israel’s Iran-related involvement in American domestic politics and, most recently, its utter rejection of diplomatic progress in Iran and a prospective comprehensive nuclear accord.

American interests are far more threatened by Netanyahu’s Iran positions than by his reluctance to make peace with the Palestinians: the direct costs to America of Israeli settlement expansion and peace process intransigence over the past six years pale in comparison to the potential costs of a hot American war with another Middle Eastern country (especially a country whose regional power outstrips by orders of magnitude any actor the US has fought over the past decade).

For example, an eminent bi-partisan panel of experts from the Iran Project warned last year that the “unintended consequences” of an American attack on Iran could lead to the US being bogged down in an “all-out regional war”.

The tensions between the two leaders’ approaches to Iran were on display even before Obama took power. In 2008 – while Obama was touting diplomacy on the campaign trail – Netanyahu (then Israel’s opposition leader) reportedly told George W Bush’s national security adviser Stephen Hadley that then-Iranian president Mahmoud “Ahmadinejad is a modern Hitler and the mistakes that were made prior to the Second World War must not be repeated” – a reference to pre-war diplomatic agreements between the British and that Nazis that were subsequently violated by the latter.

After being elected, Obama maintained throughout his first term that Israel’s security was sacrosanct and pledged to keep “all options on the table” to prevent an Iranian from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But Obama’s offer to Iran of talks over the nuclear program also remained on the table.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, sharpened his rhetoric and made one thing clear: either the US would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, or Israel would do it. There was, as far as he was concerned, no room here for talking to today’s Nazis. Many regarded the bluster as a bluff, but his purpose was to pressure the US into taking harsher measures against Iran – climaxing in an inevitable military confrontation.

Israel’s Iran policy over the past half-dozen years has basically been to pressure the US – and it might’ve, as Goldberg noted in his piece, convinced the US to impose tougher sanctions on Iran. But most striking was how Netanyahu went about applying that pressure: by leveraging his American allies in Congress and special interest groups (particularly the powerful American Israeli Political Action Committee – Aipac) against the administration.

By late 2013, secret talks between the Obama administration and Iran – much to the consternation of Netanyahu’s government – came to a head in an interim nuclear agreement that laid a plan for this year’s effort to reach a comprehensive deal.



Netanyahu reacted with anger, calling the interim deal a “historic mistake”, and his cabinet ministers waged a campaign of either intentional or deeply sloppy misinformation about the deal. And Netanyahu to this day maintains that any deal with Iran must eliminate its domestic enrichment program – a view that Iran experts agree is an unrealistic and unworkable position.

Aipac swung into action around the interim deal, lobbying for a sanctions bill in Congress that would have ended talks and imposed onerous requirements on a final deal. That bill stalled due to grassroots opposition and parliamentary stone-walling by the Democratic majority leader Harry Reid.

Now the US, its international partners and Iran are on the cusp of a potential comprehensive nuclear accord that would restrain Iran’s program in exchange for reducing international sanctions against them – but Netanyahu’s opposition to the deal remains steadfast and his US allies have denounced a deal of which few of us currently know the exact contours.

If a deal is finally struck, it would be a major foreign policy accomplishment for the Obama administration amid a dark regional picture of chaos and instability. But Netanyahu would have the US throw it away in order to maintain the position that Iranian leaders are Nazis we cannot appease – in other words, a situation in which war is the only answer.

“The crisis in US-Israel relations is officially here,” blared Goldberg’s Atlantic headline. Given Israel’s positions on Iran over the past six years, what’s remarkable is that it took so long to arrive.

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