As we suggested last week (“The President May Have Learned What the Vatican Still Hasn’t”), President Obama, no doubt distracted by the faltering nuclear negotiations with Iran, seems to have taken the issue of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians off the top of his “to do” list.
Rather, he said in an interview with the Arab news outlet Al Arabiya, “the politics inside of Israel and the politics among the Palestinians as well made it very difficult for each side to trust each other enough to make that leap. And what I think at this point, realistically, we can do is to try to rebuild trust – not through a big overarching deal, which I don’t think is probably possible in the next year…but if we can start building some trust…then I continue to believe that the logic of a two-state solution will reassert itself.”
And then in an interview last week with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Mr. Obama spoke in moving terms about his empathy for Israel and the Jewish people, noting the suffering endured by Jews over the ages and extolling the support he has always received from the Jewish community.
In context, this was truly a gift from Heaven and seemed to suggest that Israel would not, at least for a while, have President Obama looking over its shoulder as it proceeded to flesh out through settlement building those areas needed for its security.
Yet barely a week later Prime Minister Netanyahu told Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, that he was proposing the resumption of peace negotiations with the Palestinians
(To be sure, Mr. Netanyahu told Ms. Mogherini he envisions negotiations that would initially focus on identifying those parts of the territories won in 1967 that Israel would keep and those that would be left under Palestinian control.)
The Netanyahu offer may well have been designed to strike while the iron is hot – i.e. as President Obama is at least temporarily preoccupied with Iran. It may also have been seen as a way to give something back to Mr. Obama and thereby discourage him from pressing Israel to muffle its criticism of the emerging Iran deal.
As for the president’s new, softer tone vis-à-vis Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel, this is most likely being driven by the results of the recent Israeli election. The Obama administration had taken to depicting Mr. Netanyahu as the singular obstacle to progress on the negotiating front. It wasn’t Israel, according to this scenario, that was thwarting negotiations with the Palestinians or the Iranians, but rather its out of control prime minister.
But the impressive Likud victory seems to have changed all that. Mr. Obama can no longer portray Prime Minister Netanyahu as an extremist politician thwarting the will of his people. It’s to the president’s credit that he seems to have recognized this and ratcheted down his rhetoric. How long the “cease-fire” will last is anybody’s guess.