Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to speak at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., last year. On Tuesday he will speak to Congress about U.S.-Iranian relations.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is being pilloried by friend and foe alike for accepting an invitation to speak to the U.S. Congress on Tuesday about the threat posed by Iran's nuclear program and the concern that a U.S.-negotiated nuclear agreement with Iran may be short-sighted. Shame on him, they say.
In part, the criticism comes from those who say Mr. Netanyahu went around the usual channels of the State Department in agreeing to come to Washington. Such visits are supposed to be cleared with the president, they say.
For this offence President Barack Obama's national security adviser, Susan Rice, said the Israeli leader has done something "destructive of the fabric of the relationship" between the two countries.
Then there are those who argue that the speech is nothing more than a prop for Mr. Netanyahu's re-election campaign. The Israeli leader, said Jeffrey Goldberg, a staff writer for the Atlantic magazine and an Obama insider, "is facing an existential threat." But it isn't Iran, he wrote. It's "unemployment."
Israelis will vote in the closely fought election in two weeks, and the optics of the Israeli leader addressing the world's most powerful country through the address to a joint session of Congress will give a boost to Mr. Netanyahu's faltering political efforts, the reasoning goes. The trouble is, for every vote the Likud leader gains, he'll likely lose one because of the damage he's said to have done to the Israel-U.S. relationship.
The other big criticism being levelled at the Israeli Prime Minister is that he has inserted himself into partisan U.S. politics, choosing to support Republican friends such as Speaker of the House John Boehner, who also thinks the international community is going soft on Iran. Both Mr. Boehner and Mr. Netanyahu are perturbed that the deal being negotiated with Iran will allow the Tehran regime to continue to enrich uranium at any level, no matter how small.
By involving himself in the political wars between Mr. Boehner and Mr. Obama, "Netanyahu is engaging in behaviour that is without precedent," wrote Mr. Goldberg. But what U.S. leader hasn't tried to use Israeli support to enhance his or her electoral chances?
Right or wrong, what can be said is that the abuse being heaped on Mr. Netanyahu is greater than that piled on any other Israeli leader in memory.
It's more than was dished out to David Ben-Gurion in 1956 when he connived with the British and French to try to capture the Suez Canal from Egypt, and more than was levied on Levi Eshkol in 1967, when his Israel Defence Forces "accidentally" attacked a U.S. naval spy ship monitoring the Six-Day War, killing 34 Americans. And it's a lot more than Menachem Begin received when he followed up his peace treaty with Egypt with an invasion of Lebanon that would last 18 years.
Mr. Netanyahu is being treated worse than any of these other Israeli leaders because, this time, the actions and reactions have been personal.
By design or default the big winner in this affair may turn out to be Isaac Herzog, leader of Israel's Labour Party and the only other contender for the Prime Minister's job.
In a Friday op-ed in The New York Times, Mr. Herzog chided his political rival for stirring up a hornets' nest in Washington while supporting Mr. Netanyahu in expressing concern about the emerging nuclear agreement with Iran.
"I too am concerned about the possibility that American diplomats could be tempted to accept an insufficient guarantee of our safety," wrote Mr. Herzog. "But those concerns can be fully expressed without injecting ourselves into America's own politics."
He added that "however deeply I disagree with Mr. Netanyahu on many issues – the peace process, settlement policy, social justice issues and his coming speech to Congress – on one thing there is no daylight between us: Israel's security."
"Especially on the Iranian nuclear threat," he said, "Israelis are one."