“Biden’s Win Means a Demotion for Netanyahu and Less Focus on Israel,” declared the headline of a recent report in the New York Times. Therein its author, Jerusalem bureau chief David Halbfinger, opines that “the new administration is expected to exert a calming influence” on the Middle East. Isaac Schorr comments:
In [Halbfinger’s] view, the agreements that the Trump administration has brokered between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, and Sudan are not signs of a more stable region. But he does believe that a Biden administration would somehow have a pacifying effect. Especially if it responded to other Arab states’ expressing an interest in formalizing relations with the world’s only Jewish state by urging them to ask for more concessions from Israel in the Palestinian conflict. His idea of a balanced approach, then, entails the United States urging one of two willing parties in question not to agree to a deal unless one of the two provides more benefits to an unwilling fourth party. Got that?
[Halbfinger moreover] asserts that “Mr. Netanyahu’s stature on the global stage” has been “diminished.” He also approvingly quotes the critical Netanyahu biographer Anshel Pfeffer, who holds that “he’s gone from Trump’s wingman to the guy who polishes the canopy of the F-16.” He offers no evidence for these claims. Instead, as proof that Netanyahu is “unusually flummoxed” by Biden’s victory, he cites the fact that it took Netanyahu twelve hours after CNN and Fox News projected that Biden would become the 46th president of the United States to offer his congratulations on Twitter and that when he did, he did not by name reference the office of the presidency. Perhaps Halbfinger’s conception of being “flummoxed” differs from that of the rest of us.
Read more on National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/the-new-york-times-misleading-analysis-of-benjamin-netanyahu/