Susan Rice warns about the damage that will be done to the U.S.-Israel relationship by Netayahu’s stunt:

U.S. President Barack Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned address to Congress next week will be “destructive” to the close ties between the two allies.

Many critics of Netanyahu’s planned speech have said the same, but it’s not surprising that Netanyahu doesn’t seem to believe these warnings. As I’ve noted before, he has gone out of his way to sour relations with this administration at every turn, and except for some complaints and empty threats from anonymous staffers in the press there haven’t been any practical consequences. Biden and about two dozen Democrats say they won’t be attending the speech, but that seems to be about as far as anyone is prepared to go to protest the stunt. There have been no noticeable, meaningful changes to the relationship, and I suspect there won’t be any. Each time that the Netanyahu government has rebuffed, insulted, or otherwise annoyed the administration on a range of issues, the administration has responded by professing their commitment to the relationship and by reminding everyone how much they have done to support Israel over the years. So when administration officials start issuing warnings about the damage that Netanyahu’s latest stunt will cause, it is hard for anyone to take the threat seriously. Maybe this time is different, but I haven’t seen anyone make a persuasive argument on this score. Netanyahu may be overconfident and he may be overlooking changes in public opinion on Israel, as Scott McConnell argues today, but in the short to medium term I’m not sure that any of that will matter.

Rice also said this:

When the U.S.-Israel relationship “becomes infused with politics, that’s a problem,” she said.

I have heard some version of this many times from different people over the last few weeks. The assumption behind this is a ludicrous notion that a patron-client relationship is somehow “above” or “beyond” politics, as if there shouldn’t be any political divisions over the nature of that relationship. That’s an unreasonable standard for any international relationship, and it is an extremely unhealthy one. Many of Netanyahu’s critics fault him for creating a disturbance in the bilateral relationship because they don’t like seeing the “pro-Israel” consensus in the U.S. called into question. The intensity of criticism that Netanyahu has faced is itself an acknowledgment that what most “pro-Israel” people in both parties want is for things to get back to the dysfunctional “normal” arrangement where we pretend not to notice the divergence in U.S. and Israeli interests. Netanyahu is calling too much attention to that divergence at the same time that he is trying to deny that it exists.