For US president Barack Obama, it was a day of celebration. He had just signed the most important domestic measure of his presidency, his health care program. So when Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu arrived at the White House for a hastily arranged visit, it was likely not the main thing on his mind.
To White House officials, it was a show of respect to make time for Netanyahu on that day back in March 2010. But Netanyahu did not see it that way. He felt squeezed in, not accorded the rituals of such a visit. No photographers were invited to record the moment. “That wasn’t a good way to treat me,” he complained to an American afterward.
The tortured relationship between Barack and Bibi, as they call each other, has been a story of crossed signals, misunderstandings, slights perceived and real. Burdened by mistrust, divided by ideology, the leaders of the US and Israel talked past each other for years until the rupture over Obama’s push for a nuclear agreement with Iran led to the spectacle of Netanyahu denouncing the president’s efforts before a joint meeting of Congress.
As Netanyahu arrives at the White House on Monday for his first visit in more than a year, both leaders have reasons to put the past behind them. They will discuss a new security agreement and ways to counter Iran. But few believe their relationship can ever be more than coolly transactional. Undergirding their personal disconnect are different world views. Obama sees Netanyahu as captured by a hard-line philosophy that blocks progress. Netanyahu considers Obama hopelessly naive about one of the world’s most volatile neighbourhoods.
‘Fraught relationship’
“They have a fraught relationship, and it’s fueled by a belief on the part of both of them that the other is trying to screw them, trip them up, thwart their policies, corner them, ambush them,” said Martin Indyk, the president’s former special envoy to the Middle East. “They each have a number of cases where they feel the other acted in bad faith.”
Uzi Arad, Netanyahu’s former national security adviser, said no single issue had caused the rift. “It was a gradual thing that widened over time,” he said. “History will probably say that both leaders mismanaged their relationship. It’s not one party.”
Competitive Relationship If the current animosity between the United States and Israel is not unique in the history of relations between the two governments, it is the worst in more than two decades. Netanyahu feels disrespected and misled by a president he thinks does not have Israel’s best interests at heart. Obama feels aggrieved at being portrayed as anti-Israel even though he has provided extensive security aid and fought Palestinian efforts seeking recognition as a state at the United Nations.
“My sense is they each thought they could get the better of the other,” said Mara Rudman, a former deputy envoy for Middle East peace under Obama. “They’re competitive. And I don’t know that that sense of competition ever dissipated.” Yaakov Amidror, another former national security adviser to Netanyahu, said the differences lay more in the substance than their personalities. “I’m not saying there are no personal issues – for sure, at the end of the day, they are human beings,” he said. “But it is much more about how we evaluate the situation than how we evaluate each other.”
A phone call between Obama and Netanyahu can last up to 90 minutes. “They like debating each other, to an extent,” said Benjamin J Rhodes, the US president’s deputy national security adviser. After all, they have done it a lot.
Janitor’s office
Obama and Netanyahu first met in 2007 when their aides hastily arranged a chat at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, in a janitor’s office. Netanyahu, then in the opposition, was heading home and Obama, running for president, was returning from the campaign trail. They “actually had chemistry,” Rhodes said.
Netanyahu was impressed. “He’s got it, he can beat Hillary,” he told advisers afterward, according to Arad, referring to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was also seeking the Democratic nomination. They met again, in July 2008, when Obama had secured the Democratic nomination and was visiting Jerusalem. The day before, a Palestinian had rammed a bulldozer into Israelis at a bus stop. After talking about security, Netanyahu suggested they walk to the attack site. Obama demurred, seeing it as showmanship.
Once he was president, Obama made obtaining a Middle East peace agreement a priority, announcing the appointment of former Sen George J Mitchell as special envoy two days after taking office. “I really want to try to do something here,” Mitchell recalled the president telling him.
As a start, Obama decided to press Israel to freeze settlement construction in the occupied West Bank. Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff then, urged a strong stand saying otherwise Netanyahu, now prime minister, would “walk all over us,” as Clinton, then the secretary of state, put it in her memoir.
The decision was included in a White House briefing paper without asking Mitchell first. Mitchell supported the idea. But others did not. “My advice was not to do it,” recalled James B Cunningham, then ambassador to Israel. “It didn’t seem to me to be the right way to start building a relationship.” When Netanyahu came to Washington in May 2009, he felt blindsided by the demand. Emerging from nearly two hours alone with Obama, the prime minister “looked ashen,” Arad said, from “the direct body blow.”
Settlement freeze
The settlement freeze became the defining issue. Netanyahu finally agreed to a 10-month moratorium, but when Vice President Joe Biden visited Israel in March 2010, he was caught off guard by the announcement of a new housing project in East Jerusalem. Netanyahu assured him it was done without his knowledge but Obama was furious, leading to the tense meeting at the White House in March 2010.
The Palestinians resisted talks until three weeks before the freeze was to expire, and Netanyahu refused to extend it. The process collapsed before really beginning. Disillusioned, Mitchell resigned, convinced that Washington had let the settlement issue become too central. “My own view is the failure was not one of policy but clearly articulating a policy,” he said last month. “We did not do a good job of explaining that our request for a settlement freeze was not a precondition for negotiating.”
Then came Obama’s decision not to follow through on threats of airstrikes against Syria if it was found to use chemical weapons. When it did, he instead struck a deal to eliminate Syria’s chemical arsenal. Arguably, it was a better result for Israel since it removed a threat. But Israelis saw irresolution: If Obama would not keep his word to punish Syria, they feared he would not use force to stop Iran from gaining a nuclear bomb if necessary.
As it turned out, the United States had been conducting secret talks with Iran brokered by Oman. “What the Americans did is try to deceive us,” said Amidror, the former security adviser. “They didn’t tell us about Oman. That was not the turning point, but it gave those who still had some trust in America a very good reason to go to the other side.”
Netanyahu was outraged. “He was shouting at Kerry, out of control,” Indyk recalled. Publicly, the Israeli leader called an interim nuclear deal a “historic mistake.” Obama called with reassurances to no avail.
With the Iran deal finalized, the two sides have talked about moving on. But it will not be easy, as was made clear last week when Netanyahu appointed a diplomacy chief who had accused Obama of anti-Semitism. “There’s a lot of water under the bridge,” Indyk said, “and it’s very hard to imagine they can do anything but paper over their differences at this point for the sake of common interests.”
