Much ado about Netanyahu

By the time Netanyahu’s visit ended, he was being variously blamed (by Eliot Spitzer in Slate) for having picked “a useless, counterproductive fight with the president’’ and hailed (by Edward Morrissey in The Week) for having established himself “as the real statesman in the conflict.’’ No one could deny the rapturous enthusiasm with which Congress received Netanyahu — senators and representatives gave him two dozen standing ovations — but did such pro-Israel passion risk “undermining America’s long-term interests in the region’’ (as Michael A. Cohen charged in Foreign Policy)? Or did it signal the creation of “a significant new political dynamic in the United States’’ (as former UN Ambassador John Bolton wrote for Fox News)?

All of these, it seems to me, go too far. The interplay among Obama, Netanyahu, and Congress made for an interesting show, but it changed nothing on the ground. The US-Israeli relationship was and is strong. The Israeli-Palestinian “peace process’’ was and is fruitless. Those realities are no different today than they were last month.

If anything, Netanyahu’s visit and its attendant fireworks served mostly as a reminder of two political axioms: 1) It takes more than Congress to change a president’s foreign policy. But 2) it takes more than a president to change a fundamental US relationship.

For better or for worse, presidential attitudes shape US foreign policy, and it is clear that the current president, unlike his two predecessors, feels little instinctive warmth for Israel. In his address last week to AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, Obama described America’s commitment to Israel as “unwavering,’’ “ironclad,’’ “unbreakable,’’ “profound,’’ and several other synonyms for “strong’’ — which it is. He also described himself as a friend of Israel, which is not so clear. Between picking fights over housing starts in Jerusalem or insinuating that Israeli policy in Gaza endangers US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the president has seemed at times to go out of his way to telegraph an aloof coolness toward the Jewish state.