The address to Congress ‘was a hands-down victory for Netanyahu, Israel, and their ally America,’ said Mari Will, who trains Republican candidates for debates.
By Andrew Bernard and Mencahem Wecker, JNS
During Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meetings at the White House on Thursday with U.S. President Joe Biden and, separately, with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris—the Democratic presumptive nominee—reporters were shooed out of the room promptly, as officials ignored their shouted questions.
The public was left only with a handful of video clips and images that were released, as well as official U.S. and Israeli readouts.
But the public saw enough of the 81-year-old U.S. president during his video address, when he ostensibly explained his reasons for dropping out of the presidential race, on Wednesday evening, and from the 74-year-old Israeli prime minister’s address to a joint session of Congress that day to compare and contrast their rhetorical performances.
“Strength is always a premier value in American politics. Netanyahu demonstrated unwavering strength in a packed chamber,” said Mari Will, who trains Republican candidates for debates and media appearances and who advised the presidential campaign of Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.).
“The vice president was pouting elsewhere. The president was the weak old man that Hur so accurately described,” Will told JNS, of special counsel Robert Hur’s February report calling Biden “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The address to Congress “was a hands-down victory for Netanyahu, Israel and their ally America,” Will said.
Sally Kohn, a media trainer and public speaking coach who works with Democrats, didn’t assess Biden’s rhetorical skill.
“More and more, Netanyahu comes across as angry and defensive,” Kohn told JNS. “Just like his actions reject peace and diplomacy, so does his tone. In front of Congress, his speaking style felt violent.”
David May, research manager and a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JNS that “Israel’s enemies launched the Oct. 7 massacre when they perceived weakness.”
He said “expect perceptions regarding President Biden’s mental acuity to encourage America’s enemies, though maybe not to the same extent. As with the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the gravest danger is a divided nation, not just a possible lack of leadership.”
“One of Netanyahu’s claims to authority is that he is in a different league than other Israeli politicians,” May told JNS.
“The extensive rounds of applause and standing ovations and the fact that he is now the foreign leader who has addressed the most joint sessions of Congress support Bibi’s claim, at least in the American context.”
Robert Greenway, director of the Allison Center for National Security at the Heritage Foundation, told JNS that Netanyahu’s visit to Washington wasn’t likely to make a large impact.
“If you supported Israel before the trip, you support them now. If you supported Netanyahu’s pursuit of his goals, you’re there now. I don’t think it changed any minds,” Greenway said.
“I don’t think it was supposed to. The purpose of the visit to Washington is to shore up and to demonstrate visibly the relationship.”
In his view, Netanyahu’s visit to Washington might not have won hearts and minds, but it did showcase the Israeli prime minister’s mastery in communicating.
“Like or hate or anywhere in between, I don’t think anyone can really doubt Netanyahu’s rhetorical skills. He is a great and skilled rhetorician,” Greenway said.
“You can’t take that away from him, and it’s hard to manipulate when someone is effective and when someone is good.”
‘They have to exploit this weakness’
The problem, according to Greenway, a former president and executive director of the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, was the friction on display.
“Everybody knows it, and that didn’t change. We all know that that could change in November, and if anything, this probably complicated the domestic political environment for the White House,” he said.
“That might have been a derivative goal—probably not an objective of Netanyahu’s visit, but it might be to his benefit, because it exposes this division.
“The Democrats are torn between Jewish-American donations, which are significant, and at the same time, the votes, which are larger among the youth, that are generally supportive of the Palestinian cause, and the Arab-American vote,” Greenway said.
“They’re caught in the horns of that dilemma, and Biden had to navigate it. Now, Harris has to navigate it. We will see how that works.”
People pay close attention to what world leaders say—“the content, the delivery, the circumstances, the audience, the response, reaction, all of that,” Greenway said.
“External audiences—our adversaries like Iran or Russia and China—I think are all looking at the current administration as being weak and unwilling to confront aggression, and so they exploit that,” he said, noting that Russian and Chinese bombers recently penetrated Alaskan air-defense identification zones for the first time in history.
“In Iran, they’ll show videos of Bibi being ignored. They will show Rashida Tlaib holding the ping-pong paddle saying ‘war criminal.’ They’re going to point at that as evidence that the United States doesn’t support Netanyahu and Israel, and that the United States is divided and showing them burning the flag, and showing Hamas flags and uniforms on full display in protests,” Greenway said. “That’s what gets airtime.”
He added that “when they see that, Hamas digs in because they think that they have more leverage. They think the United States administration is on their side.”
Foes of Israel and the United States “know that an election may swing in a different direction, so they are on the clock,” Greenway told JNS. “They have to exploit this weakness as long as they can, not knowing what the outcome is going to be in November.”
While the White House, Pentagon and U.S. State Department have stressed publicly for months that they believe Israel must de-escalate the war and focus on negotiations for the return of the hostages, Greenway told JNS that “negotiations have yielded probably very little results.”
“When hostages were released early on, it was in exchange for a large volume of convicted criminals and terrorists, who got returned to the general population. As the numbers dwindled, the only thing that made progress was progress on the battlefield,” he said. “Negotiations in and of themselves, I don’t think have been terribly fruitful.”
In his four decades of experience, Greenway has found that America’s enemies will exploit any daylight between Washington and Jerusalem “100% of the time.”
“There’s no exception to it,” he said.
Greenway also thinks that the anti-Israel protesters burning American flags and praising Hamas will have “a galvanizing effect on our adversaries and on a domestic U.S. audience that finds that activity repulsive.”