MIDDLE EAST

Netanyahu’s Speech Opens Political Divisions in Israel, Too

By ISABEL KERSHNER
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli leader, prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Saturday, ahead of his United States visit. Marc Sellem/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 
JERUSALEM — At Jerusalem’s bustling Mahane Yehuda market, a traditional bastion of support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative Likud Party, Israeli divisions played out among the fruit and vegetable stalls on Sunday as Mr. Netanyahu departed for Washington with plans to deliver a contentious speech on the Iranian nuclear threat before a joint meeting of Congress.
“This is the best step he could take,” Avraham Levy, 63, a merchant, said of the speech in which Mr. Netanyahu is expected to deliver a strong warning against a possible deal being discussed to limit Iran’s nuclear activities. The address has set Mr. Netanyahu on a collision course with the Obama administration.
“When six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, nobody came and saved us,” Mr. Levy said as he sold bananas and avocados below a fading portrait of Menachem Begin, the Likud founder who became the first Likud prime minister. “We were slaughtered like sheep. We can only rely on ourselves,” he said. If Mr. Netanyahu could persuade a few Democrats to cross the aisle, Mr. Levy added, perhaps the whole Iran deal could be thwarted.
Rivka Alkalai, 84, a retired civil servant who defined herself as a centrist on the Israeli political map, shook her head and tut-tutted in disapproval.
“You don’t blatantly go and fly in the face of your good friends,” Ms. Alkalai said of Mr. Netanyahu and the Americans. “He will only do harm,” she said as she shopped for green beans and celery.
Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to the Republican-led Congress, set for Tuesday, is not only proving divisive in the United States, where he is being accused of interfering in American politics and damaging a decades-old alliance based on bipartisan support for Israel. It is also taking place in the highly charged period before Israel’s March 17 elections and has spawned an increasingly fraught debate in Israel about the potential benefits versus the risk of damaging to the crucial Israeli-American relationship.
More broadly, Israelis are now questioning whether Mr. Netanyahu, who is running for a third consecutive term, is Israel’s savior against the Iranian nuclear threat, which many here regard as existential, or whether his Iran policy has, instead, been an abject failure, with Iran apparently on a course to gain the potential to produce nuclear weapons regardless.
“I am leaving for Washington on a fateful, even historic, mission,” Mr. Netanyahu said before his departure on Sunday. “I feel that I am the emissary of all Israelis, even those who disagree with me, of the entire Jewish people.”
Adding gravitas to the occasion, Mr. Netanyahu was photographed offering a prayer the night before at the Western Wall, and at his desk handwriting the address in a bold script.
Still, many here remained unconvinced.
Adir Ben-Nahum, 28, a medical student who said he was generally liberal and left-leaning, described Mr. Netanyahu as “brilliant, but unfortunately only at politics.” The speech to Congress, he said, was “a dangerous political exercise” intended to bolster Mr. Netanyahu’s standing in the Israeli elections.
That popular criticism has now been bolstered by prominent voices from Israel’s security establishment. A group of nearly 200 former military and intelligence officials called on Mr. Netanyahu to cancel the speech, an unusually public challenge. At a news conference in Tel Aviv on Sunday, several of the former officers and officials warned that Mr. Netanyahu’s policies were endangering the strategic alliance with the United States and were actually bringing Iran closer to a nuclear bomb.
“It is hard for me to come out against Bibi,” said Amiram Levine, a retired general, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. Noting that he had recruited Mr. Netanyahu into the elite Sayeret Matkal unit and was his commander there, Mr. Levine said, “I taught Bibi navigation, how to get to the goal, and this time I regret that I have to say, ‘Bibi, you made a mistake in navigation, the goal is in Tehran, not in Washington.’ ”
Meir Dagan, the former chief of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, has described Mr. Netanyahu as “the person who has caused the greatest strategic damage to Israel on the Iranian issue.”
In an interview published in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper this weekend, Mr. Dagan, who has been critical of Israel’s leaders before, said Mr. Netanyahu’s conduct was likely to motivate the American administration to hurry to reach a deal with Iran. “How would Obama explain not reaching a deal?” Mr. Dagan said. “That Netanyahu persuaded him? Or the Republicans?”
On Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry, seeking to soothe the bruised relations between Washington and Tel Aviv, said on ABC’s “This Week” that Mr. Netanyahu was welcome to speak in the United States. The two men spoke by telephone on Saturday.
Israel says that a proposal under consideration that would strictly limit, for at least 10 years, Iran’s ability to produce nuclear material in exchange for an easing of sanctions would allow thousands of Iranian centrifuges to continue spinning and enriching uranium — a far cry from Israel’s demand for zero enrichment and the complete dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and capabilities.
Top Israeli officials and experts say the concern expressed by Mr. Netanyahu is genuine and legitimate. But that has not stopped internal criticism about his approach from growing, and becoming louder.
Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, said Mr. Netanyahu had made a critical error in continuing to insist on an end to enrichment instead of, say, the transfer of low-enriched material to a third country, which might have been more palatable to the world powers negotiating with Iran.
“When you say all or nothing, you are left with nothing, and that is where we are,” Mr. Eiland said in a telephone interview. “Our official position was so far from the international consensus that no one thought we had to be considered,” he said.
But Israel, a party with a crucial stake in the nuclear talks even though it is not at the negotiating table, apparently decided to stick to a maximalist position for fear that any Israeli flexibility might be taken as a pass for even more concessions.
Isaac Herzog, the center-left Zionist Union candidate who is challenging Mr. Netanyahu for the premiership, has called the speech “a mistake” and argues that the way to deal with the strategic threat of a nuclear-armed Iran is through intimate relations with the United States.
Amos Yadlin, the former chief of Israel’s military intelligence and the Zionist Union’s candidate for the post of defense minister, told Israeli television that “speeches won’t stop Iran’s nuclear program” and that Iran was “on the threshold, a few months away from a nuclear bomb.” That, he added, had happened on Mr. Netanyahu’s watch.
And for many Israeli voters, there are more immediate concerns. As Mr. Netanyahu was preparing to leave for Washington, a few hundred chemical industry workers from the southern Negev region were demonstrating outside his residence to protest against recent mass layoffs. One placard read, “Bibi, unemployment in the Negev is the real threat,” and another, “Bibi, we will die of hunger before Iran.”
“The speech to Congress is important,” said Ilan Hajaj, 51, a father of four who had just lost his job. “But at the moment, the war for us is at home.”
Jodi Rudoren contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on March 2, 2015, on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Netanyahu’s Speech Opens Political Divisions in Israel, Too. Order Reprints|  Today's Paper|Subscribe