Rather than Netanyahu, the Biden administration and Congress will welcome Israeli President Isaac Herzog this week to commemorate Israel’s 1948 founding. Here's why
US President Joe Biden poses for a picture with Israeli President Isaac Herzog at the Presidential residence in Jerusalem on July 14, 2022.foreign leader visiting Washington to celebrate their country’s 75th birthday would normally be an occasion for backslapping comity. But with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leading the most right-wing government in the nation’s history—punctuated by its attempt to weaken the judiciary—the U.S. will mark the milestone under a dark cloud.
The sources of Biden’s grievances are manifold. Since reclaiming power, Netanyahu has formed a hard-right coalition filled with ultraconservative and ultra-Orthodox voices. They have moved quickly to expand Israel’s settlement presence in the West Bank—gobbling up land that Palestinians see as their own and making the conditions near-impossible for an independent state to ever emerge there. Equally disconcerting has been Netanyahu’s assault on Israeli democracy.
But Israel has become such a flashpoint on the left that any Israeli leader’s visit is a source of consternation to progressives. Several Democratic House members have already said they’re boycotting the speech, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York.
For Israel’s fiercest critics, that’s the point. “I think there’s a real danger in pretending that Mr. Herzog is an acceptable face of Israel,” says Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian-American activist and a senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC. “He is at the end of the day, a representative of this state.”
That perception was only compounded in the Trump years, with the former President appearing to act as Netanyahu’s faithful servant by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moving the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv, cutting aid to the Palestinians, and withdrawing from the Iran nuclear accord. Since then, the possibility of a Israeli-Palestinian peace accord has only become more elusive.
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