Wickham: Adelson behind Israel flap?

I suspect that Sheldon Adelson, the patron saint of both Benjamin Netanyahu and the Republican Party, is the brains behind the GOP decision to invite the Israeli prime minister to address a joint session of Congress in an attempt to scuttle the nuclear deal President Obama is negotiating with Iran.

Adelson is a billionaire Las Vegas gambling impresario and prominent backer of conservative politicians in Washington and Tel Aviv. In the U.S., where big spenders are allowed to pump as much money as they want into political campaigns, Adelson is believed to have poured between $100 million to $150 million into the GOP's failed 2012 effort to keep Obama from being re-elected.

In Israel, which limits campaign spending, Adelson used his deep pockets in 2007 to create a free newspaper that has quickly become the nation's biggest daily. Widely believedto be a big money loser, Israel Hayom is a platform that Adelson, 81, has turned into a mouthpiece for Netanyahu, whose conservative views mirror his own.

In the current spat over Netanyahu's acceptance of House Speaker John Boehner's invite to address a joint session of Congress on March 3 — two weeks before Israelis go to the polls to decide his political fate — Adelson's newspaper leaves little doubt that it is pro-Netanyahu.

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"It's just a pleasure to see the 'anyone but Bibi' bunch sweating and stamping their feet about how it's not OK that the head of the Jewish state was invited to speak before Congress. Wonder of wonders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn't push his way in; he was asked by both parties — yes, the Democrats, too," Dror Eydar, one of the paper's senior columnists, wrote in Sunday's edition.

But, according to at least one Israeli newspaper account, Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer — a former GOP operative and Adelson confidant — bypassed the White House and State Department in suggesting "the idea of the (Netanyahu) speech" to Republican congressional leaders.

Since the announcement of this end around the Obama administration, support among Senate Democratsfor the Iran sanctions billthat Netanyahu wants Congress to pass has waned. The Israeli prime minister fears the deal that's taking shape won't give his country the security guarantee it needs. "In coming weeks," the framework of an agreement is likely to be crafted that leaves Iran "as a nuclear threshold state," he told his cabinet Sunday.

But instead of trusting Obama to make good on his often-repeated commitment to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons, Netanyahu widened the rift between him and the president by crawling into the political swamp that engulfs this nation's domestic politics.

Like Netanyahu, Adelson would rather dictate to Iran than negotiate. During a 2013 speech at New York's Yeshiva University, he said that rather than negotiate with Iran, Obama should order a nuclear strike on an Iranian desert "that doesn't hurt a soul," and then say the next one will target the middle of Tehran if the Islamic state doesn't accept American terms for a nuclear deal.

More than two years ago, Adelson invested heavily in the GOP effort to unseat Obama. That was a bad bet. Now, I think he has decided to double down in his attempt to shape U.S. foreign policy towards Israel from his Las Vegas gambling den.

Though he probably wasn't in any of those backroom meetings between Dermer and the GOP leaders that produced the invitation for Netanyahu to address Congress, I think Adelson, who declined to talk to me, is a central character in the collusion between a foreign leader and congressional Republicans that generated this affront to the president of the United States.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism and Communication, writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.

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