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

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.”

This is to say nothing of the virtually unchallenged (until recently) rock-solid support Israel has enjoyed in the punditocracy. From William Safire to A.M. Rosenthal to William Kristol to Bret Stephens, for instance, almost never in the past half-century has The New York Times op-ed page been without a columnist who would take Israel’s side no matter what or who was arguing the contrary. Ditto this publication during the 38 years that Martin Peretz ran it as editor in chief.

For decades, Israeli leaders have ignored American objections and done what they wanted to do as U.S. presidents fumed privately, issuing occasional public warnings before ultimately deciding to go along. That’s why Israel now occupies so large a chunk of the West Bank with so many hundreds of thousands of settlers that the creation of a viable Palestinian state is now likely foreclosed (by the way, Netanyahu announced the biggest expansion in about three decades just three weeks ago). It’s why Israel can plan unimpeded to occupy as much of Gaza as it wishes for as long as it wishes, as it has done since the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack. It’s why, since Israel’s 1948 creation, more than half of the 89 U.S. vetoes in the U.N. Security Council have been taken in support of the Jewish state.

But even given this pattern, Netanyahu is something special. There’s a famous story about Bill Clinton. After being lectured by the “nearly insufferable” Netanyahu about America’s alleged naïveté regarding Arabs and the Middle East, a furious Clinton was heard to complain: “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”

The typical pattern between Israeli prime ministers and American presidents could be defined by occasional American warnings to Israel not to do what it wanted to do, private complaints when it did it anyway, occasional public criticism met by congressional outrage from Israel’s supporters in both houses and, finally, American willingness to let bygones be bygones and move on from there.

Now by far Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, despite a record of naked corruption, incompetence, and a willingness to cave in to extremist demands in order to cling to power, Netanyahu has always demonstrated a unique sort of audacity when it comes to the United States. Before Trump, the post-1956 de facto rule between the two nations was that the U.S. could not prevent Israel from attacking whomever it wished whenever it wished. But neither could the Israelis issue orders to the U.S. about its own foreign policy. Under Reagan, for instance, Menachem Begin could not stop the U.S. sale of sophisticated AWAC planes to the Saudis, but neither did Israel care what the president thought of its brazen attack on Iraq’s nuclear facilities, its siege of Beirut, its aid to the guilty parties in the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, and, of course, its relentless expansion of settlements on the West Bank.

In a secretly recorded 2001 discussion with West Bank settlers, Netanyahu explained this commonly held view. “I know what America is,” he told them. “America is a thing that can be easily moved, moved in the right direction.… They will not bother us.”

Netanyahu has a long history now of trying to dictate not only Israel’s foreign policy but America’s. He tried this under Obama and failed. With remarkable brazenness, he secured an invitation from Republican leaders in Congress to address a rare joint session—he’s now made four such speeches, one more than his closest competitor, Winston Churchill—to try to undermine Obama’s plans to consummate what was called the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” or JCPOA, the deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for concessions related to Iran’s frozen bank accounts around the world.

But where he failed with Obama, he appears to be succeeding under Trump. Let’s remember first that a major, perhaps the major, reason the U.S. is facing the fait accompli of backing Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities is the fact that Trump withdrew the U.S. from the accord, thereby freeing Iran to pursue its original plans. He did so at the urging of Netanyahu, AIPAC, and other American Jewish and Christian Zionist organizations.

The Iran accord was not the only time Trump reversed U.S. policy to please Netanyahu and his minions. He moved the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thereby recognizing Israeli sovereignty there as no other president had done since Israel conquered it in 1967. (In her book on Trump, Maggie Haberman reported—and I confirmed this personally with her—that Sheldon Adelson had paid Trump a straightforward $20 million bribe for this, a fact that has yet to appear in The New York Times, where she works.) Trump did the same for Israel’s conquest of Syria’s Golan Heights. Also, his State Department reversed the department’s long-held position that Israel’s settlements on the West Bank were illegal. In virtually all of these positions, the U.S. is nearly alone in the world in adopting the Netanyahu line.

With Joe Biden, Netanyahu’s record was almost as flawless. The U.S. did not rejoin the JCPOA under Biden nor move the embassy back to Tel Aviv. (Sheldon Adelson bought the old building from the U.S. under Trump for $67 million to ensure it would not be available.)

More significantly, Biden failed to make almost any progress at all in ameliorating the awful damage that the Israeli attack on Gaza was doing to its civilian population. Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken did not deny that Israel was consistently failing to live up the demands of U.S. law in its use of American weaponry and its lack of respect for the Gazans’ human rights, but they nevertheless proved unwilling to abide by these same laws.

Now, given a second go at Donald Trump, Netanyahu appears on the verge of securing the prize he has lusted after for decades from his puppet. (Even Vladimir Putin must be jealous.) Unless Iran gives Trump the “unconditional surrender” he idiotically demands, Trump says he will finish what Israel could only start. Netanyahu certainly anticipated this. Without it, the Israeli attack would have been for naught, as only the U.S. possesses the 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs that would be necessary to reach Iran’s heavily fortified underground nuclear facility at Fordo.

This attack, should it occur, will likely violate the War Powers Act and kill countless innocent Iranians. It is also certain to inspire a rash of anti-U.S. terrorism around the world as Iran awakens its sleeper cells to carry out acts both of vengeance toward the U.S. and warnings to any other nation thinking of joining in. Most American Jewish legacy organizations are strongly behind Trump on this. These same organizations, however, demonstrate hypersensitivity to the threat of growing domestic antisemitism. Alas, there’s a clear contradiction here. Yes, no one is contemplating the large-scale deployment of U.S. troops in Iran, but wars fought thousands of miles away against countries and cultures for which our leaders lack even the most basic respect and understanding have a way of spiraling out of control. Massive bombing attacks could easily cause a breakdown of Iranian civil society and a collapse of law and order there.

Then what? As with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam, should the U.S. yet again find its troops bogged down in a quagmire for which our leaders have little understanding, in a country that it cannot credibly claim to have threatened American citizens, as it simultaneously inspires the violent hatred of much of the world, well, guess who this time is going to get the blame?

Finally, what ought to be most unnerving about this episode is the notion that Bibi Netanyahu is someone whose strategic thinking ought to be followed. He is widely recognized as responsible for Israel’s catastrophic unreadiness for the Hamas attack of October 7 and was even in the business of helping to build up that organization at the expense of the Palestinian Authority in order to forestall what he saw as the “threat” of a credible partner for a peaceful solution to the conflict. His opposition to, and subsequent campaign to undermine, the JPCOA is largely responsible for the conundrum we face today. Needless to say, he was also gung ho for America’s disastrous invasion of Iraq before it took place. 

If Trump decides to join Israel’s bombing campaign, historians will one day wonder how it was that someone so famously lacking in good judgment could have been the man to lead the world’s most powerful nation into a war with a proud nation 90-million strong that did not, in any meaningful way, threaten the lives of its people.