U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides has come under intense scrutiny for dictating to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on how to run his government, and in particular, his — and the Biden administration’s — open contempt for the proposal to reform Israel’s left-leaning judiciary.
Nides told Netanyahu to “pump the brakes” on the judicial reform, which has sparked a wave of protests in the country, and accused the Israeli premier of having a “backyard on fire.”
After being told by a government minister to “mind his own business,” Nides snapped back: “I really think that most Israelis do not want America to stay out of their business.”
Nides was likely referring only to his “friends from Israel’s elite,” according to director of the D.C.-based Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East Michael Doran, who are “openly gleeful to see the United States support them against their domestic political foes.”
As reported by Breitbart, Nides also proudly declared last month that he spends “60% of my time trying to help the Palestinian people” – an unusual remark from a diplomat purporting to serve as the U.S. envoy to Israel.
He also drew a moral equivalency between Palestinian terrorism and the IDF’s counter-terror operations, and made no differentiation between the accidental death of a Palestinian civilian during an anti-terror raid with dozens of Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists, and the intentional murder of Jewish Israelis in any one of the five terror attacks to take place in Jerusalem in the past three weeks.
Nides has touted the Biden administration’s decision to restore funding to the Palestinians, amounting to some $1 billion so far, which had been cut by former President Donald Trump over the PA’s pay-for-slay program paying monthly stipends to convicted terrorists and their families. Since Biden restored aid, Israeli deaths resulting from terror attacks have increased by 900%.
“Nides’ intervention in domestic Israeli politics has become so open and self-assured that it is impossible to dismiss his behavior as the freelancing of an undisciplined envoy,” Doran writes in Tablet Magazine.
He continues by outlining two distinct crises shaping U.S.-Israel relations:
The first is the crisis in President Biden’s Iran policy. By any sane measure, the gambit to resurrect the Iran nuclear deal has failed. Two years of diplomatic outreach to Iran have given it breathing room to enrich uranium to 60%, if not higher (“weapons-grade” uranium is enriched up to 90%). Tehran is now estimated to be 12 days from producing enough highly enriched uranium to build a single nuclear device. Meanwhile, it is openly pursuing plots to kill former American officials while murdering protesters on its own streets and working closely with Russia on the production of more advanced killer drones.
In reaction to the rising threat from Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is calling on Washington to develop a plan B, one based on compelling Iran to dismantle its nuclear weapons program by presenting Tehran with a credible military threat. The Biden team, however, refuses. Despite the fact that Tehran treats every American overture with undisguised contempt, the Biden team insists that a “diplomatic solution” remains the preferred way to solve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program—that phrase being a euphemism for continuing to avoid any serious effort to pressure Iran economically or militarily. Netanyahu, meanwhile, is developing capabilities that will allow Israel, if necessary, to remove the threat on its own, while, at the same time, ordering sabotage operations inside Iran. He and Biden, therefore, are set on a collision course.
The second crisis is over Israel’s judicial reform, which for nine weeks now has routinely flooded the streets with hundreds of thousands of protesters. The reform’s opponents depict it as nothing less than the end of democracy, and many of them welcome intervention by the Biden administration. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for example, recently urged J Street, a progressive organization that lobbies for the Iran nuclear deal, to encourage “every member of Congress …, every member in the administration” to bring their influence to bear against the reform.
But the Biden administration needs no such prompting. Even before Olmert issued this call, Ambassador Nides was endorsing the anti-reform agenda. In remarks broadcast on Feb. 18, he urged Netanyahu to “pump the brakes” on the reforms, which he depicted as an impediment to U.S.-Israeli cooperation against Iran. “The prime minister … tells us he wants to do big things,” Nides observed, referring to Netanyahu’s twin goals of normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia and thwarting Iran. “I said to … the prime minister, a hundred times, we can’t spend time with things we want to work on together if your backyard is on fire.”
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