Boehner and Netanyahu

If Prime Minister Netanyahu ends up delivering a speech directly to a joint meeting of the United States Congress, well, let’s just say it won’t be the first time he made such a demarche to defuse tensions with an American administration. In July of 1996, in the thick of the tug of war over policy between Israel and America, Mr. Netanyahu, then a newly minted premier, bypassed the Clinton administration and went directly to Capitol Hill. Now it is being reported in the New York Times this morning that the Israeli leader may make just such a speech at the invitation of the new speaker, John Boehner.

The way the 1996 speech was characterized by the editor of The New York Sun in a retrospective piece issued last year in the Wall Street Journal is that the “young prime minister, a free-market reformer from a country that had long suffered from socialist economic policies, was speaking to a Congress in which another free-market reformer, Newt Gingrich, had recently acceded as speaker. ” It was an electrifying speech that brought the Congress to its feet several times.

The most memorable part of the speech concerned Jerusalem, which was then, as now, at the center of the dispute. Mr. Netanyahu spoke of how, in his boyhood, he “knew that city, when it was divided into enemy camps, with coils of barbed wire stretched through its heart.” Then, the Sun’s editor recalled in the Wall Street Journal, he said: “Since 1967, under Israeli sovereignty, united Jerusalem has, for the first time in 2,000 years, become the city of peace . . .

“For the first time,” Mr. Netanyahu continued, “a single sovereign authority has afforded security and protection to members of every nationality who sought to come to pray there. There have been efforts to re-divide this city by those who claim that peace can come through division, that it can be secured through multiple sovereignties, multiple laws and multiple police forces. This is a groundless and dangerous assumption, which impels me to declare today: There will never be such a re-division of Jerusalem. Never.”

When Mr. Netanyahu repeated the word “never,” the Sun’s editor recalled, “suddenly the whole chamber rose, on both sides of the aisle. The ovation lasted nearly a minute.”

It happens that Prime Minister Begin used to warn against fighting the battle of Jerusalem in the halls of Congress. We were told of that years ago by Senator Moynihan, and we’ve repeated the story here on a number of occasions, including when Mr. Obama, as a presidential candidate, made his own trip to Jerusalem in 2008.

It is going to be illuminating to see whether Mr. Netanyahu, if he gets the chance to address the Congress, makes that point again. He would be speaking at a most dangerous time, when an administration that has been floundering on the democratic movements in the Arab countries and Iran can’t seem to get it’s policies aligned with a Jewish state that is, save for Iraq, the only democracy in the Middle East. It is also a moment when the Palestinian Arabs are trying to make an end run around the United Nations Security Council by taking their case for statehood directly to the General Assembly.

It is clear that Mr. Netanyahu is aware that it is a dangerous game for the head of government of a foreign country to play off the White House and the Congress. It is less clear whether the White House comprehends that it — because of the shabbiness of its own treatment of Mr. Netanyahu and of Israel — has left itself open to just such a demarche as Mr. Boehner made when he issued the invitation to Mr. Netanyhu. In any event there is also at least the opportunity for something constructive to come out of a visit by Mr. Netanyahu to Capitol Hill, including a reminder that there has been broad, bipartisan support in the Congress for the idea that in the Battle of Jerusalem, America and Israel are on the same side.