Schumer’s rebuke of Netanyahu shows long, fragile line U.S. and allies walk on interference
WASHINGTON — Republicans and Israeli officials were quick to express outrage after Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer sharply criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the war in Gaza and called for Israel to hold new elections. They accused the Democratic leader of breaking an unwritten rule against interfering in a close ally’s electoral politics.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky reacted to Schumer’s floor speech by saying it was “hypocritical for Americans who hyperventilate about interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of a democratically elected leader.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Schumer’s call for an election in Israel was “inappropriate.”
And even Netanyahu political rival Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s wartime Cabinet, called the remarks “counterproductive.”
Schumer’s stinging rebuke of Netanyahu — the senator from New York said the Israeli leader had “lost his way” and was an obstacle to peace — was certainly provocative, but it was hardly norm-breaking. U.S. leaders, as well as American allies, have often butted into electoral politics beyond the water’s edge.
Look no further than the close and complicated relationship that American presidents and congressional leaders have had with Israel’s leaders over the last 75 years.
“It is an urban legend that we don’t intervene in Israeli politics and they don’t try to intervene in ours,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has worked as a Middle East negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations. “We do intercede, and they do intercede in ours.”
Religious Zionists, most believing in a divine right to govern, now have outsize influence in Israel. The war in the Gaza Strip is energizing their settlement push.
In 2019, just weeks before a difficult election for Netanyahu, then-President Trump gave him a badly needed political boost by abruptly declaring that the U.S. was recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights, seized from Syria in 1967.
In 2015, GOP House Speaker John A. Boehner invited Netanyahu to deliver an address to Congress during sensitive negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and shortly before a national election in Israel.
Boehner did not coordinate the invitation with President Obama’s administration, and Obama declined to invite Netanyahu to the White House during the visit. White House officials said that such a visit so close to Israel’s election would be inappropriate.
The standard that Obama set for a White House visit was a departure from President Clinton’s stance years earlier. In April 1996, Clinton invited then-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres to the White House to sign a $100-million counter=terrorism accord shortly before an Israeli election. Years later, Clinton acknowledged in an interview that he was trying to give Peres a boost with voters.
It didn’t work; Peres lost to Netanyahu.
In practice, keeping out of allies’ elections has been more of a professed American value than enshrined protocol. U.S. leaders have frequently demonstrated a “varsity versus junior varsity” approach to how overtly they noodle in the internal politics of friends, says Edward Frantz, a University of Indianapolis historian. The bigger an ally’s economy, the less likely U.S. leaders are to meddle openly in its elections.
With family trapped in Gaza, two Palestinian friends in the West Bank hold each other up amid crushing grief.
“American politicians want to have it both ways,” Frantz said. “There are moments when American leaders want to and need to speak out and have their say. But there is reason to stay close to the lines on elections. You don’t want foreign governments to interfere in our own internal politics, either.”
The lines have only become blurrier in recent years, and are being tested by how world leaders are approaching November’s Biden-Trump rematch.
This month, during a White House visit on the 25th anniversary of Poland’s accession into NATO, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk didn’t obscure his desire to see Biden win another term.
“I want you to know that your campaign four years ago was really inspirational for me and for so many Poles,” said Tusk, conservative Polish President Andrzej Duda by his side. “And we were encouraged ... after your victory. Thank you for your determination. It was something really important for — not only for the United States.”
Tusk later singled out Johnson, the Republican House speaker, to blame for Washington’s deadlock on a spending bill with $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, which is running low on ammunition and arms in its war with Russia.
“This is not some political skirmish that has significance only here, on the American political stage,” Tusk said. He told reporters that inaction by Johnson could “cost thousands of human lives in Ukraine.”
Former President Trump met with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a conservative populist in Hungary under criticism that he’s eroding its democracy.
Earlier this month, Biden slammed Trump for hosting Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has described a possible Trump comeback as the “only serious chance” for an end to the war in Ukraine.
Orban, whose country is also a U.S. ally as a fellow member of NATO, has become a hero to some conservative populists for championing “illiberal democracy” replete with restrictions on immigration and LGBTQ+ rights.
During a recent campaign event, Biden noted that Trump was meeting with Orban, and said the Hungarian leader is “looking for dictatorship.”
Budapest summoned U.S. Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman, to register displeasure with the president’s comments. But White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan said the president stood by his comments.
“Our position is that Hungary has engaged in an assault on democratic institutions, and that remains a source of grave concern to us,” he said.
Schumer’s comments, coming in the midst of Israel’s five-month war in Gaza, have put new strain on the U.S.-Israel relationship.
That relationship already has seen tensions mount between Biden and Netanyahu as the Palestinian death toll rises, and as innocent civilians continue to suffer while the U.S. and others struggle to get aid past Israel’s blockade and into Gaza.
Biden, in a brief exchange with reporters on Friday, said he thought Schumer had delivered “a good speech.” He and White House officials, however, stopped short of endorsing Schumer’s call for an early election in Israel, which has a national vote scheduled in 2026, though it could be moved up.
There have been several other moments of deep tension in the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
President Eisenhower pressured Israel with the threat of sanctions into withdrawing from the Sinai in 1957 in the midst of the Suez crisis. President Reagan delayed the delivery of F-16 fighter jets to Israel in the 1980s at a time of escalating violence in the Middle East.
And President George H.W. Bush later held up $10 billion in loan guarantees to force the cessation of Israeli settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territories.
But Schumer’s push for a new election amid war does touch on some uncharted territory.
“All of those other crises were sort of one-offs,” Miller said. “They were efforts to move Israel in a focused, discrete way on a specific issue.
“What you have now, after years of Netanyahu’s premierships, is a fundamental crisis of confidence, which cuts to the core of the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
Madhani writes for the Associated Press.
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