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It’s been a rough week and a half for everybody who sits to the political left of Bill O’Reilly.
This, of course, includes everybody working in the Obama administration. Not only has the president’s party just been decimated in the midterms, but also an anonymous administration official made a horrific mistake by calling a world leader a “chickenshit” in the Atlantic Monthly.
To make matters worse, this world leader happened to be Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister.
The predictable firestorm of moral outrage kicked up almost immediately. A blunder like this would have been bad enough had the alleged “chickenshit” in question been, say, Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Löfven. But Israel is a whole other situation — so politically sacred that our alliance will last up to and including the moment one of us ceases to exist. No American who also wishes to have a political career would dream of criticizing the state of Israel directly. This has caused a minor scandal here and overseas, heralded as proof that President Barack Obama really does secretly hate Israel.
The more likely — less conspiratorial — explanation is that Netanyahu is very difficult to work with. While it’s incredibly disrespectful and certainly not OK for someone in government to refer to a world leader as a “chickenshit,” private political discourse is in fact rife with colorful language.
When asked about the comment at a press conference, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said, “My job often involves taking the product you just described and turning it into chicken salad.” This was a reference to Lyndon Johnson’s famous use of the epithet, one of his favorite expletives, to describe the ascent of Richard Nixon. “In politics,” Johnson said, “you’ve got to learn that chicken s*** can turn overnight into chicken salad.” The list of other political leaders who’ve used that very term is extensive and stretches across both sides of the aisle.
This is not the first instance of colorful language used by political leaders — officials, in this case — behind closed doors and in public. Why did this strike such a painful nerve?
Simply put, this has been the largest visible crack in the Israeli-American diplomatic facade in recent memory. Diplomacy should be a collaborative effort. However, in the case of U.S.-Israel relations, our diplomatic efforts have been so heavily institutionalized they’re really just a set of prescribed behaviors that overlay frequently resentful cooperation. We give Israel millions in military aid and use our position on the U.N. Security Council to its benefit, while Israel’s status as the most successful liberal democracy in the Middle East and its enormous popularity in the U.S. makes supporting it politically lucrative.
This relationship is inherently toxic — even when relations between our two countries are at their best. It reduces the ideal of diplomatic cooperation through mutual independence to a situation where both sides just go through the expected motions.
But when tensions are high, as they are now in the wake of the construction of new West Bank settlements and clashes in Jerusalem, this relationship is downright counterproductive. In this current state of affairs, our government will be able to do nothing but issue an empty plea for peace.
Time and experience have shown this ploy will not work and will leave room for further escalation of the violent rhetoric and actions of extremists. Netanyahu’s political party, Likud, will forge ahead the right-wing direction the country has taken under his watch, while the Republicans’ victory on nearly all fronts hands him and his allies more sympathy.
The closest we’ve come to peace in our time was the Oslo Accords of Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995 by an angry Israeli nationalist. Children born that year served in this summer’s military operations in Gaza while ultranationalist gangs roamed the streets of Tel Aviv, assaulting Arab and Israeli anti-war protesters alike in a bloody rage. Human rights abuses will continue to go unanswered by our State Department, and this shallow, pathetic state of affairs will go on indefinitely
Alec Carver is a UF history sophomore. His columns appear on Thursdays.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 11/6/2014]
