Bibi and Barack: Can They Bridge the Gap?

Story updated and correction appended June 1

The relationship between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu hit rock bottom in the late afternoon of Friday, March 12, 2010, Jerusalem time. That is when Netanyahu took a call from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Upset at Israel’s announcement three days earlier of a massive expansion of housing units in occupied East Jerusalem just as Vice President Joe Biden arrived for a goodwill visit, Obama had asked Clinton to call Netanyahu and dress him down. The President was “deeply offended and hurt” by what had happened, Clinton told Netanyahu, according to senior Israeli and American officials familiar with the call. Clinton laid out a series of steps Netanyahu needed to take to repair the damage. Nir Barkat, the mayor of Jerusalem, described the call as a “slap in the face.” “It was the lowest point” in the relationship between the two men, says a senior Israeli official.

Obama and Netanyahu are two profoundly different politicians with divergent personalities and worldviews, and over the course of three years, six face-to-face meetings and frequent phone calls, their relationship has never been a natural one. The two men had been scheduled to meet Tuesday June 1 for a seventh time in Washington at Obama’s invitation to again try to overcome their differences, when the deadly Israeli raid of a flotilla of Gaza-bound aid ships early Monday forced Netanyahu to return home early, canceling the meeting. As the White House voiced “deep regret” over the deaths and Israel defended its actions, the incident showed how hard a rapprochement between two politicians with such different outlooks and instincts will be. Obama, a former professor, is impassive and pragmatic; Netanyahu, a former commando, is macho and proud. Obama reaches out to rivals; Netanyahu confronts them. Outsiders, some with their own agendas, have made things worse. Obama Administration officials suspect Netanyahu of intentionally undermining U.S. diplomatic initiatives. Prominent Israelis, including Netanyahu’s brother-in-law, publicly accuse Obama of anti-Semitism, citing his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his father’s Muslim background.

(See pictures of Jerusalem, a divided city.)

This personal fault line has strategic implications: the Obama-Netanyahu relationship has the capacity to affect the security of the U.S., the Middle East and the world. Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren said privately after Clinton’s March 12 call that the U.S. and Israel were in their greatest crisis of the past 30 years. Jordan’s King Abdullah recently said there could be war in the region this summer if the U.S. doesn’t move Israel and the Palestinians toward talks. Most dangerous is Iran’s nuclear march, which Netanyahu says he will stop by force if necessary, potentially drawing the U.S. into a wider conflict.

Both men realize what is at stake and are struggling to separate their deep disagreements over the peace process from their common interests. The U.S. remains committed to Israel’s security, which Obama has called “sacrosanct,” and the countries’ military alliance is perhaps tighter than ever. But dozens of interviews with the two leaders’ closest advisers, some speaking only on condition of anonymity, reveal the relationship’s limits and how the wedge of Jerusalem is deepening the divide between them. Some observers question whether they can communicate should a crisis arise. “Leaders matter,” says Daniel Kurtzer, who was an early campaign adviser to Obama and worked with Netanyahu as U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2001 to 2005. “The two of them are going to define what we do on the most critical issues.”

(See pictures of Israel at 60.)

Two Worlds Collide
Netanyahu is a man with a compelling family history. His older brother led the 1976 raid on Entebbe and was killed, becoming a national hero. His father Benzion, 100, was among the intellectual leaders of what is known as revisionist Zionism, a movement whose members first sought to create a Jewish state in British-controlled Palestine in the 1930s, pushed to expand it into East Jerusalem and the West Bank and formed the core of what would later become the Likud Party. In Tel Aviv in 1949, a year after Israel’s founding, Benjamin “was born into the ideological wing of the Likud,” says a Netanyahu staffer. “It’s deeply ingrained.” His politics are determined by this history. “Netanyahu thinks of a direct line from Moses down to him — at the minimum, he has to be a guardian [of the Jewish state],” says his sometime political opponent, former Labor Party member and speaker of the Knesset Avrum Burg. Avishai Margalit, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jesey, says, “The revisionists put tremendous weight on symbols and declarations. Netanyahu thinks that the minute he stops making symbolic gestures, that’s the end of the Israeli cause.”

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Obama’s family history has become deeply symbolic to his critics as well. Obama is the Christian son of an atheist father who had been raised a Muslim. But it was Obama’s childhood years in Jakarta, where he and his mother lived with his Indonesian stepfather, that the President uses to describe the origins of his views on foreign policy. Arriving in 1967 at age 6, Obama lived in a house with no refrigerator and no flushing toilet, “ran the streets with the children of farmers, servants, tailors and clerks” and still bears on his arm a scar from a playing-field cut perfunctorily stitched up in a Jakarta hospital. That life among poor Muslims taught Obama two large lessons, according to his account of the period in his books. First, he learned that the world was “violent,” “unpredictable” and “often cruel” and that survival depended not on higher principles but on “taking life on its own terms.” Second, Obama lived in the kind of neighborhood from which, as he has noted before, many terrorists come. A top priority for winning the war against terrorism, he said, would be “drying up the rising well of support for extremism” in places like Indonesia — and the Middle East.

Now at the height of their careers, Obama and Netanyahu are having difficulty transcending their differences. “Bibi feels the need to show he is a great Israeli patriot,” says a senior Administration official, “whereas this President is a cold-blooded calculator of interest. He doesn’t have time for that kind of stuff.” In his previous term as Prime Minister, from 1996 to 1999, Netanyahu thwarted Bill Clinton’s efforts to advance the peace process. That left residual distrust among those officials who returned to the White House under Obama, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Secretary of State Clinton. Netanyahu’s aides, for their part, distrust Obama’s inexperience. “Whenever new people get into a complex situation, if they are people who are confident, they believe they can do things others can’t,” says a senior Israeli source. Burg thinks the two men are irreconcilable. “You cannot stitch together the world visions of Obama and Netanyahu,” he says. “This is a clash of the psychological infrastructure.”

(See pictures of Israel’s assault on Gaza.)

From their first, hastily arranged meeting, in a custodian’s office at a Washington airport in March 2007, both men have tried to bridge their differences — Netanyahu engaging warmly; Obama cultivating their common bond, politics. When the two men met for a second time, in Jerusalem in July 2008, each had further reasons to make nice. Obama needed to reassure independent and Jewish voters spooked by his middle name and his association with Rev. Wright that he could be a strong friend to Israel. Netanyahu knew “he couldn’t afford to have a bad relationship with another [U.S.] Administration,” says someone who knows him well. Obama told Netanyahu he had introduced in the U.S. Senate an Iran divestment bill Netanyahu had promoted at their previous meeting. Obama said, “You know, Mr. Prime Minister, people attribute a lot more ideological baggage to us than we actually carry.” Netanyahu said, “I agree with you completely.”

But “whatever peace was made that summer,” says Kurtzer, “was clearly very, very shallow.” When Obama and Netanyahu held their first meeting as President and Prime Minister on May 18, 2009, in Washington, Obama explained that to begin drying up the sources of Muslim extremism, he wanted to jump-start the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Talks would provide hope to Palestinians, Obama argued, diminishing their motivation to attack Israel, and would undermine Islamic extremists abroad who use the confrontation as a recruiting tool. He asked Netanyahu to do something no other Israeli Prime Minister had done: stop the appropriation of Arab land in East Jerusalem by Jewish activists. Palestinians, who claim East Jerusalem as their capital, had made that a precondition for peace talks with Israel, but Netanyahu, who had formed his right-wing government six weeks earlier on a platform opposing Palestinian statehood, would have none of it. “We weren’t even going there,” recalls Oren. Days later, Netanyahu said, “Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people, a city reunified so as never again to be divided.”

On the spot, Netanyahu aides could feel the relationship going south. Nor did everyone in the U.S. think confronting Netanyahu over Jerusalem was a good idea. Obama’s peace envoy, George Mitchell, argued that the demand could have a “counterproductive” impact by putting the hardest issue, Jerusalem, on the table before talks had even started, driving Netanyahu into a defensive, nationalist crouch. But Rahm Emanuel, who had volunteered in the Israel Defense Forces as a civilian mechanic during the first Gulf War, contended that if the U.S. didn’t push Netanyahu “hard and clear and early” on Jerusalem, Netanyahu would never make concessions once negotiations got under way. It was fundamentally a disagreement over two “different views of how Bibi would react,” says a senior Administration official. In the wake of the May 18 summit, the President held a meeting with a dozen or so of his closest advisers on Israeli-Palestinian issues, known as the “peace team,” to figure out how to proceed. After hearing the arguments on both sides, Obama decided in favor of Emanuel’s view.

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The first test of the tougher approach came on July 2, 2009, when the city of Jerusalem approved the demolition of an 80-year-old building called the Shepherd’s Hotel, once the home of Jerusalem’s mufti, or Islamic religious leader. A Florida-based millionaire named Irving Moskowitz, who funds Jewish religious projects “reclaiming” Arab Jerusalem and somehow obtained the title to the hotel more than 15 years ago, wanted to raze the building and erect 20 housing units on the property. Obama’s predecessors had mostly looked the other way at Israeli eviction, demolition and construction in land occupied during the 1967 war, even though such activities violated the fourth Geneva Convention, which bars settlement activity in conquered territory. But ignoring the hotel’s demolition would undermine the speech Obama had made in Cairo just four weeks earlier, which the Administration had billed as a turning point in U.S.-Muslim relations. With Obama’s approval, Hillary Clinton instructed her two deputies separately to dress down the incoming Israeli ambassador, Oren, over the planned demolition in meetings with him July 17 and 18.

The reaction in Israel was immediate. “I’ll be damned if they’re going to tell me whether I can build in East Jerusalem or not!” Netanyahu told his closest advisers when Oren reported back. On July 19, he said publicly there would be no limits on Jewish construction anywhere in Jerusalem. “I can only imagine what would happen if someone suggested Jews could not live in certain neighborhoods in New York, London, Paris or Rome,” Netanyahu said. “There would certainly be a major international outcry.” Looking back at this and other Israeli suggestions of anti-Jewish sentiment from Obama, the President’s aides claim bewilderment. “They’re just fundamentally misreading him,” says Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. Powerful Jewish families in Chicago had helped organize, fund and run his election campaign, they noted, and Michelle Obama’s cousin was one of the most influential African-American rabbis in the U.S.

But Netanyahu’s outburst was, at the very least, shrewd. It uncapped a latent distrust of Obama in Israel, where even cosmopolitan Israelis readily ask Americans if Obama is in fact anti-Semitic. That worry reverberated across the Atlantic to pro-Israel groups in the U.S. The fight with Netanyahu was getting Obama off track with the Jewish community, as members of Congress and others began to complain about his approach. Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee attended a high-profile dinner at the Shepherd’s Hotel in August 2009 and later attacked Obama. Netanyahu offered to suspend eviction, demolition and construction in some of the Israeli-occupied territories but not Jerusalem, and Obama eventually accepted, convinced he could get nothing more.

Over the winter, Mitchell and others worked behind the scenes to start “indirect” conversations between Israelis and Palestinians, hoping the talks would cool the atmosphere and perhaps lead to something more concrete. To “celebrate” the start of those conversations, Biden traveled in early March to Israel, where he was greeted with the announcement by the city of Jerusalem of 1,600 new housing units in the occupied part of the city. The Palestinians immediately canceled the indirect talks. Obama wasn’t happy about raising East Jerusalem again, but the Israeli announcement “so called into question our credibility,” says a senior Administration official, “that we needed to respond to it.” In her bracing Friday-afternoon telephone call to Netanyahu, in which she relayed Obama’s disappointment to his Israeli counterpart, Clinton demanded that he temporarily halt construction, demolition and eviction in East Jerusalem. Since that day, U.S. officials have disagreed about exactly what signal Clinton was instructed to send. Ben Rhodes says, “It’s factually untrue that the President asked Hillary to tell Netanyahu that he was in any way personally affected by [the announcement].” Philippe Reines, Clinton’s spokesman, disputes the senior U.S. and Israeli officials’ account of the call. “That was not said,” he says.

But the stiff démarche — intended or not — nonetheless seemed to break the logjam. On March 23, Netanyahu and Obama held a one-on-one in the Oval Office with no staffers. Scheduled for half an hour, it ran 90 minutes, the longest meeting Obama had held with any foreign leader. Much of it focused on Iran and issues unrelated to the peace process. But Netanyahu also put a proposal on the table for East Jerusalem, according to Israeli and American sources familiar with the conversation. Obama thought Netanyahu’s ideas were promising, and the two men continued the discussion with a handful of staffers, then joined a larger group in the Roosevelt Room.

Obama went to the residence for dinner with his family; Netanyahu continued to work on specific language with U.S. and Israeli staffers in the Roosevelt Room. At Netanyahu’s request, Obama returned, in casual clothes, and the two men spent an additional 35 minutes together alone, going over Netanyahu’s proposal for getting past the East Jerusalem impasse. When Netanyahu put his new proposal to his closest Cabinet members days later, they approved it. Netanyahu refused to accept a blanket freeze on eviction, demolition and construction in East Jerusalem, but he broke with previous Prime Ministers and offered to allow the Palestinians to reopen paragovernmental institutions in East Jerusalem, say senior Israeli and American officials. It was a rare moment of unity between two opposing worldviews: a symbolic gesture by Netanyahu that satisfied Obama’s practical needs.

The New Opportunity
Both sides were shaken by their troubled first year, and the relationship between the two men has remained brittle. Three weeks ago, indirect talks between Israelis and Palestinians began in Jerusalem, but little progress is expected from negotiations between two sides that aren’t actually speaking face to face. Obama has spent time this spring repairing relations with American Jewish groups, dispatching top aides David Axelrod, General James Jones and others to reassure them and speaking directly to Jewish members of Congress about the state of relations with Israel. On Iran, Obama’s latest push for sanctions has Israelis breathing a sigh of relief that his promises to get tough on Tehran’s nuclear program are not just for show.

And then, on May 26, while on a private family trip to Israel, Rahm Emanuel held a meeting with Netanyahu in Jerusalem. During this session, he invited his host to the White House June 1 to discuss Iran and the peace process, after Netanyahu’s scheduled visit to Canada. It has quickly turned into a chance for the two leaders to lower the temperature, get past any personal differences and perhaps make progress on the peace process as well. “It’s an opportunity to reset the whole thing and turn a new page,” says a senior Netanyahu adviser. But neither side is expecting any great leap forward. And the violent confrontation on the Gaza-bound aid ships shows how fragile any improvement in relations will remain.

Netanyahu continues to declare unwavering commitment to Jewish expansion in all of East Jerusalem. U.S. officials say the President is committed to pushing on where so many of his predecessors have fallen short. For as Obama said to Netanyahu in a mid-May telephone call, “Both sides will be held to account for doing things that are antithetical to the peace process.”

— With reporting by Aaron J. Klein / Jerusalem

The original story said Avishai Margalit was a professor at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study. The Institute is located in Princeton, N.J., but is not affiliated with Princeton University. The article has also been updated to reflect the fact that Netanyahu canceled his June 1 planned meeting with Obama after the deadly Israeli raid of a Gaza-bound aid-ship flotilla.

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