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One week after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took office Causing uproar His video, shot in English, harshly criticized the Biden administration for withholding weapons and ammunition, but one question remains: What was he thinking?
The question emerged immediately after the video was released and gained more urgency when U.S. officials flatly denied the allegations.
“We don’t know what he’s talking about in general,” said White House press secretary Karina Jean-Pierre. “We just don’t know.” Even National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, a staunch supporter of Netanyahu, said Netanyahu’s statement “irritates and disappoints us because it’s not true — so [it’s] It’s hard to know exactly what he was thinking at the time.”
This problem has not gone away. Netanyahu’s explanation Video from Sunday’s Cabinet meeting.
Four months ago, Netanyahu said there had been a “dramatic decrease in American ammunition deliveries to Israel.” He said Israel had tried to resolve the issue behind closed doors, but to no avail.
The prime minister said he had decided to “voice this opinion publicly” after months of no change in the situation and “based on years of experience, recognised that this move was essential to breaking the bottleneck”.
Netanyahu obviously knew his comments would cause a diplomatic storm, but he said them anyway and doubled down on them.
Why?
Some believe that Netanyahu’s decision to make these remarks despite the obvious diplomatic risks and dispute with the United States is just a testament to the seriousness of the situation, with Washington’s alleged delays in weapons deliveries severely undermining the country’s war efforts.
It is noteworthy that ever since Netanyahu released the video and the US flatly denied withholding the weapons, the tone of the Israeli media has been to believe the US version of events. Many Israelis seem to believe that the government is above their own prime minister, which is not a healthy situation for the country.
Some saw Netanyahu’s comments as having to do with domestic politics — an attempt to upstage Defense Minister Yoav Galant, who is in the United States talking about the munitions the prime minister says Washington is withholding.
How to tell a story
If weapons are transported in Galante’s VisitAccording to this Machiavellian interpretation, the credit should go to Netanyahu rather than Galant, who has gradually become his main political rival.
If not, Netanyahu’s office would blame Galant for the failure to deliver the weapons if the United States does not expedite the delivery of the weapons.
There is a third explanation, and it has to do with politics — but American politics, not Israeli politics. See an article on CNN’s website on Sunday, titled: “As the Gaza war drags on and anti-Semitism rises, what are the warning signs that Biden is supporting Jews?”
After months of mainstream media pushing the narrative that Biden’s election depended on winning the Arab vote in Michigan and ensuring that progressives unhappy with his support for Israel turned out to vote or not vote for a third-party candidate, the piece pointed out an obvious but underreported fact: Arabs in Dearborn, Michigan, are important to Biden’s campaign, but Jewish voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona may be even more important — fierce battleground states that the president needs to win in November.
“While all the focus has been on how Israel’s war with Hamas jeopardizes Biden’s standing with Arab Americans and progressives who support the Palestinian cause in key states, Jewish Americans — who make up a large portion of the U.S. population and are decisive in fierce battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona — are also being affected,” the CNN article reads.
Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, are expected to be neck and neck in the November election. In the 2020 election, Biden won by flipping five states that voted for Trump in 2016: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Biden’s chances of re-election to the White House will likely depend on whether he can hold on to most of those states, as well as Nevada or North Carolina. These seven states are key battlegrounds in this election.
So far, much of the attention has been on Arab voters in Michigan and the progressives who may remain in Wisconsin. But those aren’t the only votes Biden needs to win. He also needs to win Pennsylvania, which has nearly 300,000 Jewish voters, or nearly 3.5% of the state’s registered voters, according to a 2021 report from the Jewish Voter Institute.
Or take Arizona, a state Biden won by 10,457 votes (0.3%) in 2020. Arizona has about 115,000 Jewish adults, or about 3% of the electorate. Or take Nevada: Biden won the state by fewer than 34,000 votes in 2020. There are an estimated 80,000 Jewish voters there, not a small percentage of the population, and likely to have influenced the outcome there, too.
In other words, as the CNN article makes clear, the Biden administration needs to understand Jewish voters. Biden holds a narrow lead over Trump among Jewish voters in New York, 53% to 46%, according to a Siena College poll released last week. That’s well below the national average during the 2020 election, when — according to exit polls — only 30% of Jews voted for Trump, compared to 68% for Biden.
Biden already carries New York, but if this trend among Jewish voters is representative of Jewish views nationwide, Biden needs to be worried.
This is apparently something Netanyahu knows as well.
At a cabinet meeting on Sunday, the prime minister said he decided to publicly criticise the government “based on years of experience”.
Netanyahu understands that American Jews are very sensitive about being banned from supplying weapons to Israel. By publicly announcing that there is a problem with weapons deliveries, he is doing two things: informing Jewish voters of the problem and signaling to those in the government who might be tempted to slow down weapons deliveries to Israel because of threats from anti-Israel minorities that this could also have political consequences.
Some people will scream: How dare Netanyahu interfere in American domestic politics? As if the United States and the Biden administration are not involved in Israel’s political game.
To realize how deeply the United States is involved in trying to influence the political conversation here, one only needs to recall Senate leader Chuck Schumer’s speech in March, in which he called for new elections in Israel to replace Netanyahu. It is hard to imagine Schumer making such a speech without the approval of the White House.
Schumer’s involvement in Israeli politics has been unequivocal, explicit, outspoken, and brazen.
But it failed, too. Netanyahu remained in power, and his poll ratings began to rise soon thereafter; Schumer’s comments were strongly rejected by voters; and, in the end, the New York senator signed an invitation to Netanyahu to a special joint session of Congress next month.
Schumer’s efforts to influence Israeli politics have had no immediate effect at best and, at worst — at least from his perspective — have backfired.
If Netanyahu tried to interfere in American politics, even a little more covertly than Schumer did, would he suffer the same fate?
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