Israeli
Opposition Leader: Iran Deal Will Bring Chaos to the Middle East
By Jeffrey
Goldberg
In a telephone
call with me late last night, Herzog’s message was very different. The deal just
finalized in Vienna, he said, “will unleash a lion from the cage, it will
have a direct influence over the balance of power in our region, it’s going to
affect our borders, and it will affect the safety of my children.”
Iran, he said,
is an “empire of evil and hate that spreads terror across the region,”
adding that, under the terms of the deal, Iran “will become a
nuclear-threshold state in a decade or so.” Iran will take its post-sanctions
windfall, he said, and use the funds to supply more rockets to Hezbollah in
Lebanon, more ammunition to Hamas in Gaza, and “generally increase the worst
type of activities that they’ve been doing.”
Herzog, who
lost a race for the
prime ministership in March to the Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, had mainly
kind words for his archrival, and he even invoked an expression popularized by
Netanyahu’s ideological guide, the founding father of right-wing Zionist
revisionism, Ze’ev
Jabotinsky, to describe what he sees as Israel’s next, necessary step:
“We have to build an iron wall to protect Israel. There are clear risks to
Israel’s security in this deal.”
The Iran deal
represents one of those rare issues that has unified
Israelis of most political parties. Herzog and Netanyahu agree on very
little—not on a whole basket of social and economic issues, and certainly not
on the need for territorial compromise to advance the cause of a
two-state solution. But Iran, Herzog told me, has Israelis—of the “left,
center, and right,” he said—frightened.
Netanyahu
appears eager to bring Herzog, the official head of the Israeli opposition in
the Knesset, into his government as foreign minister. This makes good sense from
Netanyahu’s perspective—he knows that he
has burned bridges with the Obama administration, and he needs an
interlocutor who could gain access to the West Wing. Herzog wouldn’t tell me
the status of his talks with Netanyahu, though he said he believed he could do a
more effective job critiquing the Iran deal from outside the government. And
this is where things gets complicated: When I asked Herzog if he would be
lobbying Congress to disapprove the deal (AIPAC, I’m told, has invited him to
do so), he said he wouldn’t. “I think it’s a bad deal, but I’m not going
to lobby, I’m not going to tell senators what to vote. I think what I need to
do is explain the weak points and have them understand our concerns. I’m
taking the practical approach.”
Isn’t that a
description of lobbying? “I don’t intend to hide my feelings. Most of the
Israeli body politic is worried about the agreement, and people need to
understand our worries. The world doesn’t fully understand the fact that we
are left here alone in this neighborhood, that there is a Shia empire that is
trying to inflame the region with a heavy hand. But I don’t intend to clash
with the administration. We’re very glad for all that the Obama administration
has done for us. We have respect for the United States, for this great ally and
friend, and we don’t want to be in a confrontation or clash. But we have to
let people know that we think this is a dangerous situation.”
“We
have to build an iron wall to protect Israel. There are clear risks to
Israel’s security in this deal.”
Herzog’s
militancy on the subject of the deal places the Obama administration in an
uneasy position. While the administration can—and has—dismissed Netanyahu as
an hysteric, the eminently reasonable Herzog, who is Secretary of State John
Kerry’s dream of an Israeli peace-process partner, will find receptive ears
among Democrats for his criticism. Herzog’s critique of the deal also places
American Jewish organizations in a curious dilemma. It will be fraught for
liberal Jewish organizations to endorse the Vienna agreement if both the
right-wing government in Jerusalem, and its center-left opposition, are so
vehemently opposed to it. (The only major Jewish organization to line up with
the Obama administration so far is J
Street, which describes itself as “pro-Israel and pro-peace,” but which
is keenly interested in advancing Obama administration interests, whether or not
Israelis agree with them. “Our No. 1 agenda item,” its founder, Jeremy
Ben-Ami, once
said, “is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s
blocking back.” Herzog, J Street’s natural ally in Israeli politics on
matters of the peace process, is putting the group in an uncomfortable position.
It can’t be easy to be a self-described pro-Israel group that is lobbying for
a deal that the large majority of Israelis loathe.)
Herzog would not tell me when he’s arriving in Washington to launch his non-lobbying lobbying campaign, but I expect he will arrive soon, and I expect that he will find himself the target of a great deal of lobbying as well; from the administration’s perspective, Netanyahu is a permanent adversary, but Herzog is a respected friend—one who could do damage to the administration’s cause on Capitol Hill, if he so chooses.