When Benjamin Netanyahu decided to address the US Congress in 2015 to mount a no-holds-barred attack on then-US president Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, it alienated Democrats, energized Republicans, and put US Jews in an uncomfortable position. It also placed the prime minister on the world’s biggest stage two weeks before a bruising Israeli election.

One thing the speech didn’t do: achieve its stated goal.

Netanyahu could hardly have been more explicit: Obama’s deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program, the prime minister argued at the time, actually “paves Iran’s path to the bomb.” He implicitly compared the danger to the Holocaust, singling out Elie Wiesel in the gallery, and called on Congress to prevent the agreement from going through.

“My friends, for over a year, we’ve been told that no deal is better than a bad deal,” he said. “Well, this is a bad deal. It’s a very bad deal. We’re better off without it.”

Less than a year later, the deal did go into effect. An effort to stop it in Congress failed, despite a full-court press by the Israeli government, the Republican Party, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and a lineup of American Jewish organizations.

A decade on, the Netanyahu government is again confronting an Iran deal negotiated by a US president. Again, Israeli security officials fear it because it lifts sanctions on the Islamic Republic, may leave much of its nuclear infrastructure in place, and doesn’t address other threats posed by Iran.

But this time, there’s no speech to Congress, no national campaign by Jewish groups, and the outcry from AIPAC is far more timid.

Anyone who’s surprised by that difference shouldn’t be. In 2015, Netanyahu’s campaign went as far as it did because he was somewhat popular in the United States; commanded the loyalty, if not the affection, of many US Jewish organizations; and was able to leverage a Republican-led Congress against a Democratic president. And he still failed.

This year, basically none of those conditions exist, and many of them have flipped. That’s left Netanyahu, facing an emerging agreement that many Israelis view as a grave danger, with few options to mount a robust attack. And the problem for the prime minister is that Trump knows it.

“Bibi actually went to Congress and pleaded with them, and he got nowhere,” Trump said last week at the G7 summit of global leaders. “And they had this horrible deal. It was horrible for Israel.”

At the same press conference, he quipped, “We’re the big partner, and he’s the very small partner.”

Netanyahu styles himself a keen........

© The Times of Israel