Trump made Netanyahu look bad, but that’s over now! — Sen. Chris Murphy

Republican and Democratic legislators made a “decision” long ago not to argue about Israel support, then the Trump administration caused the violation of that pact. But Joe Biden will restore it. So says Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who has been notioned as a possible secretary of state in the Biden administration.

Murphy said that Donald Trump’s “anti-Muslim” actions had the unfortunate effect of reflecting badly on Israel and Netanyahu, in the eyes of some Democrats. And Republicans seized the opportunity to make Democrats look anti-Israel.

Murphy spoke to the American Jewish Committee yesterday and explained how Trump ruined good feelings about Israel:

I do think that you have to understand the intersection of some of the things that were happening in Israel, some of the policies of the Netanayhu government, and how they were interpreted by people in this country in the context of the things Donald Trump was saying. When you have the president engaged in this overt war against Muslims, when you have him banning Muslims from coming to the country, suggesting that they are all terrorists, I do think that there are people in the Democratic Party who then are more skeptical of some of the things that Netanyahu is doing and saying about the risks to Israel presented by all Palestinians.

So I think that this will become easier now that Joe Biden is president, and that there is less of an overt anti-Muslim conversation happening in the United States. I think that some of these things ultimately got conflated together. A lot of that changes just by virtue of the administratiton changing.

He went on to explain the “decision” by both parties not to argue about Israel, and let’s restore that.

I’ve seen a lot of ads on TV against my Democratic colleagues on the issue of Israel that really perverts their position, and I never saw that when I first got to Congress [in 2007]. I didn’t see people sort of stretching the truth on the issue of support for Israel in order to win political points.

There was for a long time a decision made by both parties to just sort of stand down on this issue politically, and say, Let’s use all of our effort to try to bring people together instead of seeing it as a potential wedge issue that can be exploited politically and my hope is that that can change, it has to change. It has to change because there’s plenty to fight about in this town. We should not be engaged in open conflict often with I think very damaging spin on each others’ position regarding support for Israel. We can have arguments– or we can have discussions about the best way to support Israel, the best way to advance the U.S. Israel partnership. But we shouldn’t be playing political games with the topic as I think we have been doing over the course of the last four or five years.

When you read this, reflect that Democrats Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Beto O’Rourke all harshly criticized Israel for its own actions in the last year, and O’Rourke and Sanders said Netanyahu is racist. They drew on the fact that Israel killed hundreds of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza in 2018, and maimed thousands more, not to mention the Gaza massacre of 2014. Israel also passed a law in 2018 saying that Jews have the “exclusive” right to self-determination in the state of Israel, and higher rights to land. And by the way, Israel has put more than 600,000 Jewish settlers in territories slated for a Palestinian state, with separate roadways and a separate law system that amount to apartheid.

Whatever Trump said about Muslims, Israel has been pushing such policies for decades.

Murphy said Republicans drafted the Taylor Force act with the intention of making Democrats look Israel-critical. But he made it clear to the American Jewish Committee that he’s not in that branch of the Democratic Party.

I am deeply worried about the politicization of the issue of Israel here in Congress and I will be very honest with you, and while you may see divisions inside the Democratic party– Poll US Senators here, there is near unanimity in the Democratic caucus in the U.S. Senate around the way that we support the US Israel relationship

Murphy’s comments had the air of an audition for secretary of state. He bristled when the AJC’s Julie Fishman Rayman said that he and two other senators, Chris Van Hollen and Tim Kaine, had written a “tough” letter to Netanyahu last spring warning Israel not to annex land.

Murphy sought to spin the letter as a friendly gesture, “not a hard line stance.” The letter, he said, said, “Listen if you go forwrd with this, just know that it it has the potential to harm and change the binational relationship. ..I do sometimes bristle at some of the characterization of some of our position on this as being hard line.”

This was hardly an “outlandish” position, he said. All senators have “steadfast” support for Israel, he said. But most Democrats and many Republicans legislators agree that annexation is “not a good decision for Israel to do that– and we were willing to say it out loud.”

“I will be honest Julie, I was frankly surprised that there were advocacy groups that were so opposed to our letter. We thought we had written it in a way that was more reflective of a consensus position. So I think it’s important to read the words on the page.”

(From the letter: “As friends and supporters of Israel, we caution you against taking unilateral steps that would fray our unique bonds, imperil Israel’s future and place out of reach the prospect of a lasting peace. If you move forward with unilateral annexation, we would not support that action.”)

Murphy went on to say that the letter “did not call on the conditioning of US aid to Israel.” Some Democrats have called for conditioning aid to Israel if it proceeds with further annexation of West Bank territory. Murphy said he could “certainly imagine a set of decisions made by any nation in the world that would in the aggregate be so antithetical to US security interests that we would have to rethink our partnership,” but he said, “This bilateral relationship is different from all others.”

Murphy also said that it would be hard to return to the Iran deal under a Biden administration because the alliances President Obama used to form the deal have been shattered.

I think it will be very difficult to return to the kind of alliance structure that we built in order to negotiate the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action]…. It’s wild to think that the Obama administration was able to unite the United States, Europe including Britain, China and Russia around an Iran strategy . It may be possible that Donald Trump has blown up that structure so completely that it can’t be put back together… We saw that as a unique opportunity to cement the US, China, Russia and Europe on an Iran policy that then could be built upon.. Our contention was that you move forward with the JCPOA … once you have all these nations working together on nuclear policy, you could then build on that.

“We should give it a try,” Murphy said of the Iran deal, but confessed he’s “skeptical” that the team can be reassembled.

Murphy also said leftwing criticism of Israel can be antisemitic.

There are unfortunately antisemitic fringes on both sides of the political spectrum. But if we do the work up front we can maintain consensus here. I worry that sometimes we don’t do that and we haven’t done that over the last few years.

Murphy’s comments are concerning because he is surely reflecting the views of Joe Biden, and the remarks are very one-sided. He never expressed any concern about Palestinian human rights. And if you don’t think this was an audition, consider that in 2008 Barack Obama only hired his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, after reaching out to a major Israel lobby group to be the intermediary.