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WHY AMERICAN PRESIDENTS DANCE TO BIBI’S TUNE  
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Eric Alterman
June 20, 2025
The New Republic
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_ 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. _

,

 

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
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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
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“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
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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
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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
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“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
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“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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.

_Eric Alterman is a CUNY distinguished professor of English at
Brooklyn College and the author of We Are Not One: A History of
America’s Fight Over Israel
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_The New Republic [[link removed]] was founded in 1914 to
bring liberalism into the modern era. The founders understood that the
challenges facing a nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution
and mass immigration required bold new thinking._

_Today’s New Republic is wrestling with the same fundamental
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and how to fight for a fairer political economy in an age of rampaging
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from the climate crisis to Republicans hell-bent on subverting
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* Bibi Netanyahu
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* Israel
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* AIPAC
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* Iran
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* Israel-U.S. relations
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