Long before moving into the White House, President Biden compared the relationship between the United States and Israel to that of close friends. “We love one another,” he said, “and we drive one another crazy.”
The United States and Israel are currently in one of those driving-each-other-crazy phases of their usually tight but often turbulent 75-year partnership.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s quest to rein in the judiciary has become the latest point of contention as he pushed the first part of his package through the Israeli Parliament on Monday, defying widespread protests and repeated expressions of caution from Mr. Biden.
What makes this moment different is that the rift has nothing to do with the foreign policy and national security matters that typically provoke disagreement, like arms sales, Iran’s nuclear program, territorial claims or the long-running push to forge peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Instead, it concerns a strictly domestic issue inside Israel, namely the balance of power and future of freedom in the one historical bastion of democracy in the Middle East.
The friction among friends has complicated cooperation in other areas where the two allies have common interests. For months, Mr. Biden refused to invite Mr. Netanyahu to Washington, which prevented at least some meetings between lower-level officials. The president relented last week and agreed to get together at some as-yet-unspecified time and place in the United States this year. But he then felt compelled to issue two public statements making clear that he had not changed his mind about Mr. Netanyahu’s drive to limit the power of the courts even as the prime minister is on trial for corruption.
The debate about the prime minister’s plan, which drew hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets of Israel over the weekend in the latest of months of demonstrations, has spread to the Jewish community in the United States as well, at a time when rising partisanship has threatened to undermine American support for Israel.
“People who are left of center are worried or more upset about it overall than people who are right of center,” said Nathan J. Diament, executive director for public policy for the Orthodox Union, one of the largest Orthodox Jewish organizations in the country.
“There are many people in the American Orthodox community whose view on the substance is sympathetic or supportive to the reforms,” he added, noting that his community leans more politically conservative, “but nonetheless are worried about the divisiveness that the process has caused.”
Still, he and other longtime advocates and analysts said they remained confident that the relationship between the United States and Israel would endure. After a liberal Democratic congresswoman called Israel a “racist state,” the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution declaring the opposite was true. Only a handful of Democrats boycotted last week’s address to a…
2023-07-24 08:42:27
Original from www.nytimes.com