Tuesday marked the beginning of the two day NATO summit in the Turkey capital of Ankara, with President Trump in attendance and making news on several fronts early on, including saying he will consider allowing Turkey to buy American F-35 fighter jets, something opposed by many in Congress, and by Israel. Tuesday on CNN's Inside Politics, Host Dana Bash conducted an interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Bash began the 19 minute sit-down with the F-35's, and used it to segue into the broader issue of the U.S-Israel relationship, and Netanyahu did not accept all of her facts, or her implication that he was not running his own country.
BASH: The conversation that the President is having with Turkey today is just the latest move that he has made that are not making you happy. He obviously imposed ceasefires in Gaza, in Lebanon, on Iran. He made you turn fighters back from attacking Iran last summer. He's told you what you can and can't do in Hezbollah. Who is calling the shots for Israel?
NETANYAHU: I think there's a wide misperception, everything you said, because a lot of these things, some of them were not true, and some of them were agreed in advance, and some of it, yes, we had occasional disagreements. He is the President of the United States. He does what is good for the United States. I'm the Prime Minister of Israel. I do what is important for what is good for Israel. And most of the time, these things are identical.
Soon Bash brought up support for Israel in the U.S.
BASH: The issue of supporting Israel as a Jewish state and just U.S. support for Israel overall, they have become a central issue in American politics.
Especially in the growing anti-Israel chunk of the Democratic Party. Bash bizarrely then chose to play a clip from one of the most anti-Israel politicians around, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The Mayor said he does not support Israel as a Jewish State, or "any state that privileges one religion over the other". Netanyahu responded with the facts.
NETANYAHU: Well, he conveniently forgets that the only democracy in the Middle East is Israel. 20% of our citizens are, in fact, Muslims. They sit on the Supreme Court. They are in the Knesset, our Parliament. They share every walk of life. That's the only place in the Middle East where you actually have this...about. But he is supported, uh, or his supporters have supported Hamas.
And then came the accusation that the Prime Minister is endangering Jews in the U.S.
BASH: Some American Jews in Congress who support Israel and support what you just said, say that a lot of the actions by you and your government are making Jews in the United States unsafe.... Have you?
Netanyahu offered several interesting observations.
NETANYAHU: I've looked at the the Gallup polls.... And you see the decline in support for Israel. And it's several years before the Gaza war took place.... The one correlation you see...is the penetration of Tik Tok and other social media in the United States. And as the penetration increases, the support for Israel decreases. And let me tell you something else, The support for America decreases. The number of people who say they're not proud to be Americans. It's just correlation.
The Gallup numbers do bear that out. But Bash wasn't satisfied with Netanyahu not taking blame for putting the safety of American Jews at risk.
BASH: All things can be true....But are you saying that Israel and you personally bear no responsibility?
She went on to blame Israel for the continued suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and then asked him to admit that social media images of Gaza harms Israel, which he had previously done.
NETANYAHU: I think that the what you're raising is how do you fight a war in the digital age when you have terrorists that embed themselves in civilian populations....They send rockets to indiscriminately kill our people, and they hide behind....What do you think would happen if this happened to New York City from New Jersey? You think if they rocketed you with this firepower and murdered about about 10,000 of your people murdered, raped, maimed, disemboweled.
BASH: Yeah, but--
NETANYAHU: What do you think the response would be?--
BASH: But let me ask you about right now--
NETANYAHU: It would be a lot stronger than ours.
Dana Bash's desired narrative was easy to see. Netanyahu is bad in Gaza, bad in the U.S., putting Jews at risk, and selling out his own people in Israel. He didn't let it happen.
