washington | For Benjamin Netanyahu, the formula for resolving U.S.-Israeli tensions came in a flow chart.
The Israeli prime minister brought the chart to meetings with Obama administration officials and his visit to the White House March 23 — two weeks after Israel angered the U.S. administration by announcing plans for 1,600 new housing units in a Jewish neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem during a visit to Israel by Vice President Joe Biden.
But the flow chart presentation didn’t quite do the trick, and Netanyahu’s relationship with President Barack Obama remains tense, although Obama on March 30 told MSNBC that the underlying relationship between the two countries is “solid as a rock.”
In that interview, Obama said Netanyahu “intellectually understands that he has got to take some bold steps” and that the Palestinians have to do the same. “This is a disagreement among friends about how to move forward,” he added.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, asked specifically about a rift between Obama and Netanyahu, answered by saying, “Between the two countries, as I’ve said here countless times, there is an unbreakable bond. The United States has long been dedicated to the security of an important ally. And that hasn’t, in any way, changed.”
Last week, at the outset of three meetings in Washington, Netanyahu pulled three sheets of paper from a manila accordion folder. Two featured the Israeli bureaucracy that approves Israeli construction projects; the third was a simple color-coded chart and a sketch of a new, reformed Israeli system that Netanyahu envisions would replace the existing one.
The point of Netanyahu’s presentations — given to Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the leadership of the House of Representatives — was to illustrate how he wasn’t directly at fault for spoiling Biden’s visit. At any stage of the current process, an announcement by a mid-level Jerusalem bureaucrat could derail Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Netanyahu explained.
The charts didn’t work for several reasons. For one, they were in Hebrew, with print that was tiny and virtually unreadable. More substantively, however, Netanyahu’s interlocutors were less interested in explanations about what went awry during Biden’s visit and more in how Netanyahu could fix the problem — namely, the plan to build in eastern Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Authority has made a freeze on Israeli construction in eastern Jerusalem a condition of restarting talks. The Obama administration, while frustrated with Palestinian stubbornness, was even less in the mood for Netanyahu’s excuses.
Ultimately, Netanyahu did not offer what the U.S. administration wanted: an unmitigated freeze on building in eastern Jerusalem. Israel considers the area, which Israel annexed in 1980 after its capture during the 1967 Six-Day War, part of its sovereign territory, but the rest of the world views it as part of the West Bank.
While some Israelis favor freezing construction in eastern Jerusalem and ceding much of it to the Palestinians in exchange for a peace deal, Netanyahu’s coalition government includes at least two parties that would exit at the mere whiff of such a concession. If Netanyahu allowed for negotiations over Jerusalem, he could even lose a chunk of his own Likud Party.
During his visit to Washington, the prime minister nonetheless sought a formula that could extricate him from the humiliation of going home without a resolution. He met with Obama for 90 minutes on the evening of March 23 — about a half-hour longer than such meetings usually last — and retired with his staff to the Roosevelt Room to come up with formulas that might please the president. Later in the evening they asked Obama to return, and the leaders talked for another 35 minutes.
But no resolution emerged.
The next day, Netanyahu and his advisers retreated to the Israeli Embassy for consultations, which was taken as a bad sign. Netanyahu continued to hope for a breakthrough, delaying his trip home and forcing his staff into overdrive. He finally gave up that evening, setting off for Andrews Air Force Base at 10:30 p.m.
All Netanyahu had to show for his trip — originally scheduled to address the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which gave him a warm reception — was a pledge for yet another mission to the Middle East by George Mitchell, the Obama administration’s special envoy to the region.
In Washington on March 29, David Axelrod, a top Obama adviser, said the relationship with Israel remains strong. However, he gave no indication the sides were any closer to resolving their dispute.
“Israel is a close, dear, and valued friend of the U.S., a great ally. That is an unshakable bond,” Axelrod told CNN. “But sometimes part of friendship is expressing yourself bluntly.”
In the absence of tractable success with the Obama administration, Netanyahu has invested hope in Congress and the Jewish community.
The results have been mixed: Three-quarters of the House of Representatives, or 327 members to date, have signed onto a letter urging the Obama administration to keep its differences with Israel private, and Netanyahu’s meeting with the House leadership produced statements about wall-to-wall support for Israel on Capitol Hill.
“We in Congress stand by Israel … [with] no separation between us on this subject,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), the House speaker. “In Congress, we speak with one voice on the subject of Israel.”
Beneath the surface, however, it was not so sanguine.
Official statements of support were lacking following Netanyahu’s meeting with the unofficial Jewish congressional caucus. Those in Capitol Hill meetings with Netanyahu were nonplussed by the presentation of the charts, some staffers said, and some left wondering if he understood the gravity of the rift with the Obama administration.
There was similar public-private dissonance within the Jewish community. In Netanyahu’s March 22 speech to AIPAC, he received a rousing standing ovation for his declaration that “Jerusalem is not a settlement.”
But Jewish organizational leaders privately expressed anxiety about the direction in which things were going.
The leaders, who did not want to speak for attribution, were not focused on the substance of the disagreement — such issues were better left to diplomats, they said — but on its mechanics. Both sides were stumbling: The Americans by denying Netanyahu the protocols due a visiting head of government, such as a photo op; the Israelis by relentlessly and anxiously leaking information.