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Cohen: Netanyahu visit may cost Israel America's liberals

It would not surprise me if at the next Republican National Convention Benjamin Netanyahu took a seat in the delegates-from-abroad section. The Israeli leader has both allied and associated himself with congressional Republicans who differ with President Obama over whether to impose additional sanctions on Iran and who also - let's not beat around the bush - hate his guts. Their foreign policy is actually a domestic one: to destroy the president.

Whether this is political or personal is beside the point. Whatever the case, when Netanyahu accepted John Boehner's invitation to address a joint session of Congress in March, he did so without informing the White House. Boehner, too, bypassed the White House. As a result, Netanyahu will come and go and not meet with the president.

Boehner insists that, as speaker of the House, he has the standing to issue an invitation. That's debatable. He is, after all, elected by the Republican caucus, not by the full House and not, significantly, by the American people. He knew what this invitation would look like. This is high school stuff.

I stand with the president on this sanctions matter. Additional ones may drive the Iranians from the table. The Europeans may go with them. Let's give the talks more time.

I stand with Netanyahu, though, in worrying about a president who has been awfully twitchy in his foreign policy. His faux threat to take Syria to task if it used chemical weapons in its civil war - the famous red line - turned out to be a red-faced embarrassment. It has cost Obama much more than it cost Bashar al-Assad.

But what concerns me most is how Netanyahu threatens to harm the bipartisan understanding and support of Israel. The Israeli prime minister has never been able to hide his disdain for Obama. In May 2011, he made Obama squirm before the TV cameras as he lectured him about Middle East matters. It was, simply, no way to treat the president.

Accepting Boehner's invitation sent the same message of contempt. I know Netanyahu sees the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel, but that does not excuse his boorish manners. I am an ardent Israel supporter but I am also an American: Do not insult my president!

My feelings, however, are immaterial. What matters is the possibility that support of Israel will become a partisan political issue in the U.S. It may come as a surprise, but Zionism was once beloved by the American and European left. Now, though, the European left has abandoned Israel, adoring the Palestinian cause with a striking naiveté.

The American left is not quite as robustly anti-Israel - but the trend is unmistakable. Even some American Jews are either cooler toward Israel or indifferent. The Holocaust has faded as an emotional rallying point, and with both an intermarriage rate well over 50 percent and a declining population, the American Jewish community is both contracting and losing clout.

A generation of Americans who support gay rights, same-sex marriage and reproductive freedom and who fear global warming are going to wonder about an Israeli prime minister who embraces a speaker of the House who personifies all they loathe.

Israel should not become yet another right-wing issue.

(c) 2015, Washington Post Writers Group

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