Rebukes From White House Risk Buoying Netanyahu, Netanyahu next steps

Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, is hardly an advocate for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Mr. Eiland called on Mr. Netanyahu to cancel his speech to Congress this month, and he has criticized the prime minister’s strategy for fighting both the Iranian nuclear threat and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In last week’s election, he cast a ballot for someone else.

But in the days since, he and many other Israelis have been astonished by the unrelenting White House criticism that has helped sink relations between Washington and Jerusalem to a nadir not seen for more than 25 years. Even some who mainly blame Mr. Netanyahu for antagonizing President Obama over the last six years now see the scales flipped.

“Everybody understands this is part of the political campaign,” Mr. Eiland said of Mr. Netanyahu’s pre-election comments promising that a Palestinian state would not be established on his watch. “To try and say: ‘I caught you; I heard you say something. Since that’s what you said, I’m going to make a reassessment,’ it sounds like, ‘Well, I have been waiting until you make such a mistake, and now I’m going to exploit it.’ ”

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Mr. Obama showed no signs on Tuesday of softening his stance on Mr. Netanyahu’s momentary disavowal of the two-state solution that has long been the cornerstone of American policy.

“What we can’t do is pretend that there’s the possibility of something that’s not there,” he said at a news conference. “This can’t be reduced to a matter of somehow, ‘Let’s all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.’ ”

Israeli analysts are now suggesting that Mr. Obama and his aides might be overplaying their hand, inviting a backlash of sympathy for Mr. Netanyahu, and that they may not have clearly defined what they expected to gain diplomatically by continuing to pressure the Israeli leader.

The president’s harsh words have been deemed by some to be patronizing and disrespectful not only to Mr. Netanyahu but also to the voters who rewarded his uncompromising stances with aresounding mandate for a fourth term.

Several Israeli analysts said the administration’s criticism of Mr. Netanyahu seemed like a pretext for a longstanding plan to change the United States’ policy of protecting Israel in international forums, which the administration has said it will reassess. Others suspect a ploy to undermine Israel’s lobbying efforts against the American negotiations for a nuclear accord with Iran.

The rift widened further on Tuesday with a Wall Street Journal reportin which administration officials accused Israeli officials of spying on the closed-door negotiations with Iran and sharing secret details about them with Congress and journalists. Three top Israeli ministers vehemently denied the report. Several congressional Republicans said they had received no such information, and those in Mr. Netanyahu’s close circle said it seemed like more poisoning of dirty waters.

“Sometimes you have these unfortunate patterns that occur when you have tensions in the relationship,” said Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. “Stories based on anonymous sources pop up, and their purpose seems to be to undermine the alliance between the two countries.”

In contrast with the White House, leading Israeli voices seem to have accepted Mr. Netanyahu’s post-election clarification that current circumstances make it impossible to imagine meeting his longstanding conditions for supporting aPalestinian state. While Israel’s Arab politicians rejected Mr. Netanyahu’sapology on Monday for an election-day video in which he warned about Arab citizens’ descending in “droves” to the polls, several of his most virulent Jewish critics praised it.

Despite the deep freeze with Washington, Europe’s mounting threat of sanctions over settlement construction, and soul-searching among some American Jews whose love for Israel stops at its occupation of the West Bank, much of Israel’s political class and commentariat has now turned inward to focus on the assembling of a governing coalition that follows every election.

“During the building of the government, and stabilizing the new political table of the state of Israel, that’s not the time to try to have speculations,” said Avi Dichter, a member of Parliament from Mr. Netanyahu’s party. “Once we shall have a government, we shall have a plan that everyone in the government will have to obey. It will be clear enough to all of us, in Europe, in the U.S. and in Israel.”

First, though, there is next week’s deadline on the Iran deal to get through. At the same time, Speaker John A. Boehner, the Ohio Republican who orchestrated Mr. Netanyahu’s congressional speech against the White House’s wishes, is scheduled to visit Israel, a trip already derided in some quarters as an unseemly victory lap.

To rebuff criticism of the visit, Mr. Netanyahu’s office let it be known that the prime minister had hosted 183 Democratic politicians and 179 Republican ones in Israel since April 2009.

“What are we going to do, tell him not to come here?” asked Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington who is close to Mr. Netanyahu. “We certainly will have to make a major effort, including through our friends in the Democratic Party, to put things back in proportion, taking into consideration that they still have to run for election, while the president doesn’t.”

Middle East experts in Jerusalem and Washington said Mr. Netanyahu was likely to make moves soon to show the White House that his position on Palestinian statehood had not changed. The first would be to release nearly $400 million in Palestinian tax revenue Israel has withheld since January.

Israel has dangled the possibility of up to 5,000 work permits for residents of the Gaza Strip. It could also allow a badly needed desalination plant in Gaza and provide more electricity there.

For the West Bank, Washington is pressing for a freeze onconstruction in Israeli settlements beyond the urban blocks Israelis expect to keep under any future peace deal. But that is unlikely to pass muster with Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative coalition partners.

But people who know the prime minister well said he might relax restrictions on Palestinian development in areas under Israeli control, give the Palestinian Authority more autonomy in other places and even impose an unstated settlement slowdown.

“I believe that from now he will try to find ways to compromise,” said Yoaz Hendel, Mr. Netanyahu’s former spokesman. “He will look for ways to convince Washington that he is still on the edge, he didn’t fall to the side that Washington wouldn’t like to see.”

As for Washington, the Obama administration’s rethinking of its policy on protecting Israel in the United Nations and other international forums may not be as simple as it sounds.

The White House is likely to want any United Nations Security Council resolution on the two-state solution to include Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, something the Palestinians have roundly refused. And Republicans have already threatened to cut off United Nations funding if Mr. Obama supports such a resolution.

“The very tough thing for the administration to explain to itself is, ‘What is the actual strategy?’ ” said Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group. “O.K., so you’ve passed a Security Council resolution, both sides say they reject it, so what do you do and what have you achieved? It’s going to be a big headache to get it done, you’re going to expend a bunch of diplomatic effort, and for what? The arguments that you hear in favor of doing it is that Obama would leave a legacy.”

Right now, that legacy includes the lowest point in the alliance that diplomatic sages can recall.

Itamar Rabinovich was Israel’s ambassador to Washington in the 1990s, after the Bush administration briefly withheld loan guarantees over settlement construction and Secretary of State James A. Baker III famously gave out the White House phone number for Palestinians and Israelis to call if they ever got serious about peace. “It’s much more profound this time,” Mr. Rabinovich said.

“Obama and his team had assembled this rage over several months or maybe a few years, and now it’s all coming out,” added Mr. Rabinovich, no fan of Mr. Netanyahu. “I think they are overdoing it. I think they are ignoring the complexity of Israeli politics. I think Netanyahu would like to make amends, but if Obama doesn’t want to make amends, the fight will continue.”