The visit of an Israeli prime minister to New York City used to make a dent in the news cycle.
Last week’s visit by Yair Lapid barely registered here. It’s not just that Israeli prime ministers seem to come like buses: if you miss one, there’s sure to be another just round the corner. Jewish Americans are baffled by Israeli politics and, like other Americans, they are preoccupied with domestic politics.
As Israel has grown into a modern Middle Eastern society, it has become a living rebuke to the commonplaces of American liberalism. Israel is particularist, not universal. Religion is at the centre of public life, and Israelis are tribalists.
The vast majority of Jewish Americans “get” the idea of Israel, but actually getting there and absorbing the difference between the two halves of the Jewish world is another matter, especially for the older cohort who didn’t get a Birthright trip.
Lapid built bridges with the leaders of the major Jewish American organisations in a private meeting. They sounded relieved to be having a conversation, rather than receiving a lecture, which is what they used to get from Benjamin Netanyahu. But if you stopped Jewish Americans in the street and asked who the prime minister of Israel was, I doubt the majority of them would know. I suspect a majority would say Netanyahu.
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US President Joe Biden (Getty Images)
Lapid’s address to the UN seemed not to register on the political level with either Republicans or Democrats. President Biden was in New York City for the UN General Assembly, but he didn’t meet Lapid.
Again, not so long ago, this non-event would have caused much anxious checking of the diplomatic pulse.
The same goes for Mahmoud Abbas managing to get a photo with POTUS despite his disgraceful “50 Holocausts” remark.
Part of this silence reflects the contrast between Netanyahu’s grandstanding and Lapid’s discretion.
Part of it reflects the political moment; this administration is overwhelmed by its reckless and inept handling of Russia, China and Iran. And part of it reflects the Democrats’ deepening hostility to Israel, and Americans general disengagement from the outside world.
This administration, previously so aggressive when it came to unisex bathrooms and the rights of male transvestites to serve their sentences in women’s prisons, is doing its best to ignore the footage of Iranian women protesting for what would otherwise be basic human rights. The Democrats want an Iran deal at all costs. They really don’t care if it’s Israelis or Iranians who pay it.
Nor does this administration like being reminded, as Lapid said in his UN address, about the success of the Abraham Accords.
These were the work of the amateurs of the Trump administration and the autocrats of the Gulf. A golf-playing reality TV star and his hedge-fund-managing son-in-law had a better grasp of the material realities of the Middle East than the professionals of the State Department.
The export of democracy, the bipartisan calling-card of George W Bush’s bombers and Barack Obama’s outreach, didn’t figure at all. America’s diplomats will not forgive this slight to their dignity.
The Biden team is the Obama team, and this time it’s really in charge, because this president is blatantly incapable of stopping the buck even if he wanted to. In the last week, he’s told us that the US would send troops to Taiwan if China invaded, and that the pandemic was over. His handlers issued corrections on both occasions.
The world is increasingly accustomed to an American president’s words not being worth much. This is the first time that Americans have been told that the president’s words are worth nothing at all.
We are moving rapidly into the post-American age. Lapid knows this.
American politicians now promise to decouple from the Chinese economy, but earlier this month, Israel and China agreed to sign a free-trade deal, China’s first in the Middle East. That deal would be a massive insult to Israel’s closest ally. Again, its announcement barely registered over here. Interesting times to be a Jewish American. About to get more interesting.
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor, a Washington Examiner columnist and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute
