Browbeating friend and foe, Netanyahu tries out an undiplomatic foreign policy
PM’s refusal to turn the other cheek when wronged is leading to a flowering of ties, supporters say, but critics charge he’s only winning friends at home and influencing nobody

On Tuesday, Israel’s government announced it was restoring ties with New Zealand, some six months after clipping its relations with the island nation and others in retaliation for Wellington’s support of a United Nations Security Council resolution critical of West Bank settlements.
“I regret the damage caused to New Zealand-Israel relations,” New Zealand Prime Minister Bill English wrote Monday to his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a statement from Netanyahu’s office, which added that the countries would once again exchange envoys.
Last December, Netanyahu raged against Wellington and other capitals over the UN vote, kicking off a new, aggressive foreign policy doctrine that mercilessly avenges every perceived hostile diplomatic act, but which the prime minister claims has helped bolster Israel’s standing in the world.
Possibly emboldened by the election of Donald Trump as US president, Netanyahu has been following what might be summed up as a belligerent foreign policy approach, which the prime minister’s supporters hail for championing Israel’s national pride, but which critics charge has harmed Israel’s standing, sacrificing ties with allies on the altar of domestic politics.
The new policy became crystal clear on Christmas Day, when Netanyahu — who is also foreign minister — summoned the top diplomats from 10 countries to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem for a dressing-down over their respective capitals’ support for the Security Council resolution. In the case of the US, which opted not to veto the resolution and thus allowed it to pass, he both summoned the ambassador and castigated the outgoing president Barack Obama for ostensibly “ambushing” Israel with the “shameful” resolution.
He went on to curtail relations with Senegal and New Zealand for having co-sponsored Resolution 2334, and canceled planned meetings with the prime ministers of the UK and Ukraine for having voted in favor of the motion.
He has repeatedly cut funds to the UN to punish the body for anti-Israel resolutions. He shunned the German foreign minister because he met with leftist NGO Breaking the Silence. He did not hesitate to risk Israel’s sensitive ties with Jordan and Turkey when he instructed aides to issue unusually harsh statements condemning Amman and Ankara over statements he didn’t like. The list goes on.
“We are adopting a much more aggressive policy with regard to actions directed against the State of Israel,” Netanyahu said Monday at the weekly faction meeting of his Likud party. Announcing his intention to bar Israeli NGOs from accepting donations from foreign governments, he recalled his demand that Denmark stop funding pro-Palestinian groups “that glorify terrorists.” Copenhagen agreed to Netanyahu’s request, ostensibly bolstering his claim that only a combative foreign policy yields tangible results.
Only world powers like Russia, China and the US under Trump have avoided his wrathful sanctions, despite supporting UN measures critical of Israel in the case of Moscow and Beijing. As for Washington, Trump’s apparent leak of sensitive Israeli intelligence, calls to curb settlement building, and failure to move his embassy to Jerusalem as promised, have to date evoked only smiles from Netanyahu.

At least in the short run, Netanyahu’s take-no-prisoners approach seems to be effective. New Zealand and Senegal made great efforts to get back into Israel’s good graces. So did Ukraine. Neither Turkey nor Amman picked a fight after Israel’s rebukes. The German president, who arrived in Israel two weeks after the country’s foreign minister, refrained from meeting Breaking the Silence, a group his predecessor and he himself had always made a point in seeing on previous trips.
Various UN agencies still pass resolutions critical of Israel, but the wording has steadily become softer and fewer countries support them. “For the first time in UNESCO, more countries voted to oppose or abstained than voted in favor, and of course this is important,” Netanyahu gushed in May, after the UN’s cultural agency passed yet another resolution denying Israel’s claims to Jerusalem.
‘Netanyahu has always believed in driving a hard bargain in international relations’
“It’s working. There’s no way past this observation,” said Yigal Palmor, a former spokesperson for Israel’s Foreign Ministry. “Netanyahu has always believed in driving a hard bargain in international relations. I think that he has recently come to implement this policy in its fullest extent since he became prime minister.”
Some others — unsurprisingly including opposition politicians — accuse Netanyahu of eroding Israel’s standing in the international community. Netanyahu might win little diplomatic battles, but risks losing the war, they argue. Even some who were highly critical of UNSC Resolution 2334, which lambasted Israeli settlement building, said it was reckless to cancel a planned meeting with the UK’s Theresa May and disinvite the Ukrainian prime minister. Staunch critics of Breaking the Silence felt that it was improper to antagonize Berlin over the group.
“The fact that UNESCO has issued a resolution that is not only anti-Israel but also anti-Semitic is considered a success now? No, it’s not a success. There should be no such resolutions,” MK and self-styled shadow foreign minister Yair Lapid told The Times of Israel in a recent interview. “It’s on the verge of fake news to claim that the UNESCO resolution is a success, when it is not.”
A successful leader would prevent all hostile resolutions, Lapid added, positing that Netanyahu’s failed foreign policy was solely responsible for such texts being passed.

Lapid, head of the centrist Yesh Atid opposition party, shares Netanyahu’s disdain for Breaking the Silence, an organization that says it documents serious human rights violations by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. And yet he faulted the prime minister for slamming the door in German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel’s face for meeting the group.
“Being impolite is not good for policy,” said Lapid, who insists that Israel’s foreign relations have never been as bad as today. “You can be straightforward as much as you want. But vetoing and ‘ultimating’ your friends is never a good idea.”
Oded Eran, a senior research fellow at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies, accused the prime minister of putting internal political gains ahead of the good of the country. “His assertive line is a merely a function of domestic considerations,” he said.
‘You can be straightforward as much as you want. But vetoing and ultimating your friends is never a good idea’
Eran, who has served in various senior diplomatic and ambassadorial positions, said Netanyahu was not a fearless leader but was hurting Israel’s foreign relations in a bid to mollify hawkish critics from within his Likud party and other coalition factions.
“Jerusalem’s ties with Berlin are worse than they’ve ever been,” he claimed, pointing to the Breaking the Silence episode.
The snub of Gabriel over his decision to meet the group, after issuing an ultimatum, exposed a rare fissure between Israel and Germany, which the Jewish state sees as one of its staunchest and most powerful allies in Europe.
While some German officials attempted to downplay the episode, others saw it as a sign of further deteriorating ties, calling Israel’s historical “special relationship” with the European powerhouse into question. Moshe Zimmermann, a geopolitical analyst at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told AFP in April that Netanyahu’s decision to take a hard line and refuse to answer German concerns about settlement building had led Chancellor Angela Merkel to downgrade ties, canceling a planned meeting.
“Merkel has now changed her tone because the Israeli government has taken the reservations expressed by Germany as a joke,” he said.

Asked to respond to a list of questions posed by The Times of Israel, Netanyahu’s spokesperson David Keyes said in a statement only that the prime minister “resolutely defends Israel’s vital interests around the world. His principled stand has led to an unprecedented diplomatic flourishing for Israel. Today Israel has more allies and friends than ever before in its history.”
Netanyahu himself has defended his combative attitude as the reason for Jerusalem’s flowering of diplomatic ties, along with Israel’s indispensability as a world leader in technology, intelligence gathering and counter-terrorism measures.
“We do not turn the other cheek,” he declared on December 26, two days after UNSCR 2334 was passed. “I suggest: enough of this Diaspora-think. I tell you that there is no diplomatic wisdom in being ingratiating. Not only will our relations with the nations of the world not be harmed, over time they will only improve because the nations of the world respect strong countries that stand up for themselves and do not respect weak ingratiating countries that bow their heads.”
He repeated the sentiment in April, defending his ultimatum to Gabriel, and claiming to be leading Israel’s foreign relations to “unprecedented growth” based on “a proud and assertive national policy, not out of weakness and with a bowed head.”
But Uzi Arad, a former security adviser to Netanyahu, charged that the prime minister’s claims of expanding ties were actually misleading.
“The number of visits from important countries is low,” Arad recently told the Hebrew-language magazine The Liberal. “During the Oslo years and the decade preceding, this was a major stop for important visits. Today, most visits are lower level or from less important countries. There haven’t been any breakthroughs in visits from important countries, aside from the expected trip by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”
‘Being tough on Senegal and Ukraine had no cost. But with China it would have a price, and the prime minister decides not to pay it’
As for Israel’s ties to those larger countries, Netanyahu’s “proud and assertive” policy seems to disappear when it comes to Russia, China and other powers that routinely vote against Israel in international forums, research fellow Eran pointed out.
“There is no clear-cut Israeli policy,” Eran charged. “It is easy to punish Senegal or Ukraine for backing anti-Israel moves at the UN, but he would never dare do that with major powers.”
“Being tough on Senegal and Ukraine had no cost,” Eran added. “But with China it would have a price, and the prime minister decides not to pay it.”
Is this aggressive style of policy sustainable in the long run? Ex-foreign minister spokesman Palmor, who today serves as director of public affairs at the Jewish Agency, replied like the diplomat he used to be. “You have to look at the bottom line, and the bottom line is evolving all the time,” he said. “At this point in time one can safely say that this is a high-yield policy, as in high-yield bonds. A greater risk reaps a greater benefit.”
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