Binyamin Netanyahu at the UN: this year, a voice in the wilderness

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/01/binyamin-netanyahi-un-voice-wilderness

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Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech to the United Nations last year was a rare example of a UN general assembly address that made headlines. Though often portrayed as a global gathering of the world's leaders, only a small portion of them are actually present in New York at any given time. And very few speeches from the podium get even a passing mention in international media; instead, they're broadcast live back home on prime-time – to provide rather misleading "evidence" of leaders' supposed standing in the world.

But Netanyahu got everyone's attention in 2012 – mainly due to his brandishing a placard with a cartoon-style bomb demonstrating the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon. While his creative illustration drew a fair amount of derision and mocking spoofs on the internet, as far his party was concerned, the speech did the trick. Six months later, it featured prominently in a Likud election broadcast titled "When Netanyahu Speaks, the World Listens".

This year, once again, his UN speech Tuesday is scheduled for prime-time viewing in Israel, but the home audience is of lesser importance now. Elections are not on the horizon and his domestic political position is relatively secure. But neither is it directed at other world leaders.

Netanyahu met US President Barack Obama in Washington, DC Monday. Obama – who knew in advance that there would be some form of engagement with Iran's new President Hassan Rouhani on the UN general assembly "sidelines" – invited Netanyahu in order to reassure him, and Israel's many supporters in America, that the US president still has Israel's back. Obama will, no doubt, underline that the sudden optimism being expressed by the western powers of a breakthrough in talks over Iran's nuclear programme does not mean that sanctions will be removed before, as Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday on CBS:

It is clear that a very verifiable, accountable, transparent process is in place, whereby we know exactly what Iran is going to be doing with its program.

Netanyahu is far from reassured. He has seen the eagerness with which the entire international community, with the exception of Iran's Sunni neighbours, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, who continue, like Israel, to view Iran as an immediate threat, have embraced the soft-spoken Rouhani and his urbane foreign minister, Javad Zarif. As the decision earlier this month not to launch an attack on Syria already proved, the prevailing mood in the west is to prefer diplomacy at almost any price.

From Israel's perspective, nothing has changed except the tone of Iranian statements. But Netanyahu began to realise over a week ago, as rumours of an Obama-Rouhani meeting began to circulate, that his speech this year may well fall upon deaf ears. As it is, due to the timing of his meeting with Obama, he has been forced to take the very last general debate slot, speaking after most of the leaders and delegations have already left town.

There is no difficulty in predicting what Netanyahu will say on Tuesday. He summarised it succinctly before taking off from Ben Gurion Airport:

I will tell the truth in the face of the sweet-talk and onslaught of smiles.

It will be a speech heavy on facts and there will be no visual aids this time. He will detail how the nuclear programme continues at ever-increasing pace, with hundreds more centrifuges enriching uranium, and a plutonium "heavy-water" plant to come online next year. But no one will care, as Kerry is already predicting a deal on enrichment in three to six months.

Netanyahu will accuse Iran of abetting and orchestrating mass-murder in Syria, but that won't work either because, in the space of a few weeks, Iran has in western eyes gone from being Bashar al-Assad's accomplice to a vital party in bringing about a ceasefire in the intractable civil war. And neither will quoting the official Holocaust-denying positions from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's website work – as the world's media are already satisfied with the (largely cosmetic) difference between the crude denialism of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the more nuanced take by Rouhani and Zarif – which can be summed up as: sure, some Jews were killed and that's a bad thing, but lots of others were killed as well, including Palestinians.

Netanyahu is arriving too late with his truth. The party is over and he wasn't even invited.

The Iranian issue has been Israel's top priority for over a decade now. Billions have been spent preparing military options, upgrading intelligence capabilities and waging clandestine campaigns, often in close cooperation with the US and Britain, warding off Iran's nuclear ambitions. Israeli pressure and, to a large extent, Netanyahu's own consistent rhetoric has led to the increasingly tough sanctions regime against Iran, and to the unbending positions of western negotiators in the P5+1 talks.

Contingency plans were prepared for two possible outcomes: either Israel was going to have to act on its own and bomb the uranium enrichment plants and weapons research facilities; or the US would act itself.

One outcome, however, wasn't taken into account: what if the sanctions actually yielded a result? Besides Rouhani's promises, there is, as yet, no tangible sign of any change in Iran's nuclear designs. But the fact that Khamenei was forced to allow the election of a relatively moderate president and give him at least some flexibility to engage with the west is a direct result of the economic crisis caused by the sanctions.

Israel should be viewing this, at least, as a potential success for its policy of constant pressure on Tehran. But Netanyahu cannot see it that way. It isn't only a tactical move for him to play bad cop to Obama's good cop, trying to prevent a hasty backtracking from the sanctions before a rigorous verification framework is in place to ensure the Iranians have relinquished their ambitions. This is a stance beyond tactics or even strategy: Netanyahu is convinced that the Iranian leadership is gripped by a genocidal ideology which sees the destruction of the Jewish State as its prime objective.

His belief transcends politics and diplomacy. While it may be a narrow and dark view of the world, and seem to many a thuggish and warmongering policy, it is based on scholarship and reasoning, even if misguided.

So, who will Netanyahu be speaking to as he mounts the general assembly podium Tuesday? Not to Obama whom he already met; nor to any other leader of the UN security council permanent member states (and Germany), whose senior diplomats will be negotiating very soon with Iran. He can get them on the phone whenever he needs to. As it is, Netanyahu perceives them as too weak and ignorant of lessons from the past. Neither has he any realistic hope of swaying international opinion. The media, he believes, is too shallow, defeatist and biased to properly convey his message. Netanyahu will be talking over their heads, addressing, instead, the history books.

Last year, at the funeral in Jerusalem of his father, Benzion Netanyahu, the prime minister quoted words his father wrote in 1937, which Bibi claimed foretold the tragedy about to envelope the Jews of Europe. Professor Netanyahu devoted his academic career to the study of the lives of Jews in 15th-century Spain, to the Inquisition and the expulsion of 1492. He saw direct correlations between the Spanish Catholic church's murderous persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany 450 year later.

His son is convinced that the radical Shia ideology of today's Iran is yet another incarnation of that pervasive ancient hatred. He has made it clear in countless speeches and interviews over the years. No amount of tweeting, friendly interviews on CNN and moderate talking at diplomatic lunches by Hassan Rouhani is going to change Bibi's convictions.

Netanyahu, perhaps egotistically, sincerely believes history has thrust him into the position where he must singlehandedly ensure the Jews' survival in front of a hostile and skeptical world. In recent appearances, he has taken to quoting Hillel the Elder's ancient Hebrew saying "<em>Im ein ani li, mi li</em>" (if I am not for myself then who will be for me?) The meaning is clear: Netanyahu never trusted Obama, anyway – despite the US president's promises never to forsake Israel.

Netanyahu is the lone prophet, well aware that even his own defence chiefs and most Israelis disagree with his position on Iran. At the UN, he will stand alone, the friendless and isolated historian's son, raging against the world's complacency.

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