For Netanyahu, a bombshell battering by Obama
En route to his meeting at the White House, the PM and the rest of the world read that the president believes he’s leading Israel to wrack and ruin
March 3, 2014, 4:18 am
US
President Barack Obama talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu at the White House in 2012 (photo credit: Avi
Ohayon/Government Press Office/Flash90)
Hello, Mr. Prime Minister.
You’re attempting to maintain “a chronic situation” as regards the
Palestinians. You’ve been pursuing “more aggressive settlement
construction over the last couple years than we’ve seen in a very long
time.” There’ll come a point, you know, “where you can’t manage this
anymore, and then you start having to make very difficult choices: Do
you resign yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the
West Bank?… Do you perpetuate, over the course of a decade or two
decades, more and more restrictive policies in terms of Palestinian
movement? Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run
counter to Israel’s traditions?” But other than that, Mr. Prime
Minister, welcome to the White House.
Until he read the breaking news of President Obama’s earth-shattering interview with Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg
on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have anticipated
that Monday’s meeting was going to be one of his less confrontational
and unpleasant sessions of frank, allied diplomacy with his good friend
Barack.
Sure, the stakes were always going to be high:
The president was going to be urging Netanyahu to assent to Secretary
of State John Kerry’s framework proposal for continued peace talks. And
the prime minister was going to be urging Obama to toughen his demands
on Iran, to ensure that the ayatollahs are deprived of the wherewithal
to build the nuclear weapons they swear they don’t want to build, just
on the off chance that they might be lying.
But Netanyahu, his aides had long been
indicating, was ready to accept the framework proposals — as a
non-binding basis for further negotiations. So no need for confrontation
there. And he must have had little hope that he was going to shift
Obama’s stance on Iran, however powerful he believes his arguments to
be. So not much point in confrontation there, either.
But then came that bombshell Bloomberg battering.
The timing could not have been any more
deliberate — an assault on the prime minister’s policies delivered
precisely as Netanyahu was flying in to meet with him, and on the first
day, too, of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC’s annual tour de force
conference across town.
At the very least, that might be considered
bad manners, poor diplomatic protocol, a resounding preemptive slap in
the face: I’ve just told the world you’re leading your country to wrack
and ruin, Mr. Prime Minister. Now, what was it you wanted to talk to me
about?
More substantively, the president’s comments
reinforce years of grievance that have accumulated in Netanyahu’s
circles and some distance beyond, to the effect that the president
ignores the inconsistencies, duplicities and worse of the Palestinian
Authority and its leader Mahmoud Abbas, while placing exaggerated blame
for the failure of peace efforts at the door of the Israeli government.
As they read through the transcript of the
interview, Netanyahu and his aides were doubtless bemoaning what they
see as Obama’s obsession with settlements, to the exclusion of almost
any other issue on which the Israelis and the Palestinians are
deadlocked. They would certainly have been lamenting that the
president’s public display of disaffection will hardly encourage the
Palestinians to adopt more flexible positions on such other core issues
as their demand for a “right of return” for millions of Palestinians to
Israel. And they might have been wondering if some of the Obama
ammunition had been fired precisely now as a mark of his displeasure
with AIPAC, the irritating lobby that just won’t keep quiet on
pressuring Iran.
Since even before he became president, Obama
has made plain his conviction that Israel’s settlement enterprise is
profoundly counterproductive for the Jewish state. Many Israelis share
this belief. That Obama chose to highlight his concern in such ominous
and pointed terms, going so far as to warn that it would become harder
in the future for the US to protect Israel from the consequences of its
misguided West Bank building, would suggest that he has all but
despaired of Netanyahu’s willingness to rein in construction. Otherwise,
surely, he would have held his fire, and first consulted face-to-face
with the prime minister.
For one thing is certain, the president’s
resort to a newspaper interview on the eve of their talks to issue
near-apocalyptic warnings about the disaster Netanyahu risks bringing
upon Israel is just about the last thing likely to bolster the prime
minister’s confidence in their alliance, and just about the last thing
likely to encourage Netanyahu to further alienate his hawkish home base
by taking steps such as halting building outside the settlement blocs.
It will be particularly interesting now to see
what platitudes the pair can manage when they invite in the press for
the traditional, brief Q&A session at the White House on Monday.
Doubtless they’ll come up with something. But the fact is that Obama
chose to have his real say about Netanyahu before the prime minister had
arrived, and it constituted a brutal political assault. Other than
that, Mr. Prime Minister, how are you enjoying Washington, DC?
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