Throughout his career, but especially in the time since President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has revealed himself to be something most politicians are not: a terrible bullshitter.
I don’t mean “terrible” in a normative sense, though he often deploys bullshit for ends that I find morally abhorrent. I mean “terrible” in the sense of lacking skill. Even if you adjust your measurements to reflect his profession (where bullshit is nearly omnipresent), Netanyahu’s phoniness is obvious. It’s a strange thing to say about the second-longest serving PM in Israel’s history, I grant, but it’s true nonetheless. It’s easy absurdly easy to tell when “Bibi” is full of it.
Let’s take the multiple appearances he made this weekend on American television, for example. During his time on both NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CNN’s “State of the Union” and ABC’s “This Week,” Netanyahu repeated the argument he made during his farcical speech before (most of) the Congress earlier this year. Evidently, the fact that the outline of an agreement negotiators
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unveiled last week is broadly seen as better than expected has not caused him to reevaluate his position.
That’s his right, of course; and I’d never suggest that this longtime hawk’s fear of a nuclear Iran is insincere. But when Netanyahu tried to respond to a criticism levied his way by supporters of an agreement — that he wouldn’t accept any deal with the Iranian regime, short of its complete capitulation — he meandered over the line separating alarmism from bullshit. The choice wasn’t between compromise and war, he said. There was “a third alternative” of “standing firm, [and] ratcheting up the pressure until you get a better deal.”
As countless people familiar with the issue have noted, it’s hard to imagine Netanyahu’s strategy not backfiring spectacularly. If the West walked away from negotiations, as Netanyahu recommends, it’s unlikely that countries in the European Union would respond by increasing sanctions to force Iran to be more compliant. What’s more likely is that they’d blame the U.S., relax their sanctions, and get back in business with the regime instead. As far as many businesspeople in Europe, China and Russia see it, time and money are being wasted; and many of them don’t particularly care if Israel is under threat.
