PART FIVE
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Both men were elected leaders of their countries in their mid-forties, with little political experience but enough eloquence and charisma to defy the entrenched political establishments. But despite similarity between their political trajectories, there was never much hope of Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama getting along. Nevertheless, of all Israeli PM–POTUS duos, Bibi and Barack spent the longest period working together—Netanyahu returned to office two months after Obama’s inauguration and was still there in January 2017 when Obama’s presidency ended.
Their first meeting, in Washington, where they both addressed AIPAC’s annual conference, was in March 2007. Obama, a freshman senator at the time, had launched his presidential campaign three weeks earlier, and when he appeared before the pro-Israel lobby he hit all the right notes. He described Israel as “our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy,” called Iran “one of the greatest threats to the United States, to Israel, and world peace,” and waxed lyrically on his first visit to Israel the previous year.1
At that first meeting, which took place at Obama’s request, he mainly listened as Netanyahu delivered his standard speech on the region. At the time, Bibi hoped the unlikely candidate would surprise everyone and beat Hillary Clinton to the Democratic nomination. He assumed he would be back in power soon, and the last thing he wanted was to face another Clinton in the Oval Office.
They next met seventeen months later in Jerusalem. Obama was by then the Democratic candidate. Netanyahu was still leader of the opposition, but anticipating Ehud Olmert’s downfall. It was the last stop on Obama’s whirlwind seven-nation tour to burnish his paltry foreign policy credentials. He joked with Netanyahu that he “could fall asleep standing up”—not that it stopped Netanyahu from delivering another lecture on the Iranian nuclear threat, or Obama from studiously taking it all in.2
At their next meeting, predicted Netanyahu, smiling, we will both be in office. Obama wasn’t naïve enough to believe that Bibi favored him. There was no question that he was rooting for his Republican opponent, John McCain, who just that day had criticized Obama for being too soft on Iran.
Netanyahu’s American allies had vetted Obama’s record. They knew that in Chicago the young state senator had been close to the local Palestinian community, and that he had demanded a more “even-handed” US policy in the Middle East. He also had close ties to many prominent Jewish figures in Chicago, some of whom played pivotal roles in his ascendancy. But they all were from the liberal wing of the community and not enamored of Netanyahu. Once in national politics, Obama presented himself as staunchly pro-Israel, but he had also made clear in a meeting with Jewish leaders that “there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel, and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel.”3
Sheldon Adelson and Netanyahu’s other benefactors were all donating heavily to McCain’s campaign. Bibi’s old friend Malcolm Hoenlein, leader of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said in Jerusalem that “of course Obama has plenty of Jewish supporters, and there are many Jews around him. But there is a legitimate concern over the zeitgeist around the campaign.”4
Obama’s first appointments after the election did little to allay Netanyahu’s fears. Hillary Clinton was the new secretary of state, and the new White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had been one of the senior aides urging Bill Clinton to confront Netanyahu.
Prior to his first White House meeting with Clinton in 1996, Netanyahu had insisted on no advance meetings. Before his first meeting as prime minister with Obama in May 2009, a team of Netanyahu’s closest aides flew to Washington to work the agenda. Netanyahu wanted Iran at the top of the list, but Obama had other ideas, and nothing could have prepared Bibi for that meeting.
The statements and pleasantries in the open part of the meeting were friendly. Obama kept the bombshell for when he sat alone with Netanyahu. To get the diplomatic process with the Palestinians back on track, he demanded that Israel completely “freeze” building on the settlements.
Obama’s foreign policy team had analyzed the past eight years of the stagnant process and reached the conclusion that once the level of violence had been significantly reduced, the main obstacle was construction on the settlements. In a dramatic departure from the Bush administration’s approach, Obama had decided to remove the obstacle.
As a tactic for jump-starting talks, it was a mistake. Obama was telling a freshly elected right-wing prime minister to take a step no previous Israeli prime minister, not even the “leftist” Rabin and Peres, had agreed to. More crucially, Obama was setting a threshold for Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who in the past had grudgingly negotiated with Israel while it continued building. How could Abbas countenance doing so in the future once the demand had been made by the Americans?
The US administration had briefed Israeli journalists that for enhanced support on the Iranian issue, Netanyahu would have to show flexibility toward the Palestinians. Ultimately, it would work the other way around. Public clashes with Netanyahu during Obama’s first term would revolve mainly around the Palestinian issue, while differences over Iran remained largely below the surface. In his second term, Obama would openly break with Bibi on Iran, but give up on peace with the Palestinians.
OBAMA AND NETANYAHU were on a collision course from that point on, all the way through the next seven and a half years. Netanyahu’s GOP supporters established the narrative early on that Obama had “thrown Israel under the bus,” an accusation that three years later would become a constant refrain of Republican candidates on the campaign trail. Obama insisted that he had Israel’s best interests at heart, but made no attempt to deny there were deep disagreements. In a meeting with Jewish leaders in July 2009, he said that “when there is no daylight [between Israel and the United States], Israel just sits on the sidelines and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states.”5 This sentiment shocked Israelis, as did the administration’s refusal to adhere to the letter from President George W. Bush to Ariel Sharon in 2004 as US policy. That letter had stated that in the permanent status, Israeli settlement blocs in the West Bank would remain part of Israel.
Three groups were stoking the impression of a no-holds-barred conflict between Obama and Netanyahu. One consisted of members of Obama’s team who felt that the more the president was seen as being at odds with Netanyahu, the more the administration’s credibility in the rest of the Middle East was enhanced. The second group consisted of those in the media, both Israeli and international, who were eager to cast the two men as belligerents, with Netanyahu clearly the “bad guy.”
While the antipathy between Netanyahu and Obama was unmissable, often the perceived slights and insults were manufactured retroactively, and not even noticed by either of them when allegedly taking place. Every nuance of body language, or whether or not they posed for a photograph during a meeting, or if Netanyahu was invited on any particular visit to stay at Blair House, the presidential guest quarters, became proof of “tension” or “snubs.” When the White House released a photograph of Obama speaking to Netanyahu on the phone, his feet on the desk, the prime minister’s people interpreted what had originally been intended as a display of casual intimacy as deliberate “dissing” of Bibi. When, in front of the cameras during a White House meeting in May 2011, Netanyahu explained at length, to a bemused Obama, why Israel could not retreat to the 1967 lines, Obama’s aides described it as an “intolerable lecture,” though the president had not been overly perturbed. In September 2012, after Netanyahu publicly criticized Obama’s Iranian policy, his ambassador to the United Nations, and later National Security Adviser Susan Rice, complained to an American Jewish leader that Netanyahu had done everything but “use the N-word” against the president.
The third group stoking the negative atmosphere was Netanyahu’s own team. This seems counterintuitive—Israeli prime ministers usually have an interest in being perceived as getting along with the US president. Netanyahu had paid a political price in 1999 for Clinton’s obvious displeasure. But Netanyahu’s aides were speaking openly about how much “Obama hates us,” saying, “If our friends in Washington don’t stand by us, we’re lost.” It wasn’t only an appeal to Netanyahu’s American supporters: Bibi was intentionally defining Obama in the consciousness of the Israeli public as the nation’s enemy.
OBAMA’S PRESSURE EVENTUALLY yielded results. On November 25, 2009, Netanyahu became the first Israeli prime minister to officially announce a freeze on settlement building. It would only be for ten months, and it was not a total freeze—Netanyahu insisted that building would continue in East Jerusalem, and in the West Bank only new construction would be frozen, while existing projects would be completed. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas used these qualifications to delay entering talks for another nine months. When Abbas finally relented, in mid-2010, Netanyahu, citing coalition pressure, refused to extend the freeze by more than another month. Other events in the region would soon intervene anyway and reduce the pressure on him. But meanwhile, some were tempted to believe that Netanyahu had been forced by Obama to make a significant shift on the Palestinian issue.
On June 14, 2009, at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, Netanyahu gave his first major policy speech since returning to power. He worked on the speech for weeks after returning from Washington. For once, there were few leaks from his office, and the Obama administration was not sent its text in advance.
By Netanyahu’s standards, it was a radical departure. In a rare nod to Menachem Begin, he said he shared the vision of peace Begin had pursued with Anwar al-Sadat, and that he “fully” supported Obama’s “idea of a regional peace” and “desire to bring about a new era of reconciliation in our region.” To this purpose, Netanyahu for the first time acknowledged “[Israel’s] need to recognize [the Palestinians’] rights” and said that Israel “will be ready in a future peace agreement to reach a solution where a demilitarized Palestinian state exists alongside the Jewish state.”6
This was the same Netanyahu who seven years earlier had demanded that the Likud Central Committee censure Ariel Sharon for even mentioning a Palestinian state, insisting, “Self-rule for the Palestinians—yes. A state—no! A Palestinian state means no Jewish state and a Jewish state means no Palestinian state.” But a closer look at the Bar-Ilan Speech showed that beyond his rhetorical concession, Netanyahu’s core policy remained unchanged. He had not given any details of the shape and nature of the “demilitarized Palestinian state.”
At Bar-Ilan University, Netanyahu promised that while negotiating, Israel had “no intention of building new settlements or of expropriating additional land for existing settlements,” but stressed that the settlers must be allowed “to raise their children like families elsewhere.” In addition to complete demilitarization, Netanyahu placed an absolute condition—the “Palestinians must clearly and unambiguously recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people.”7
“In my vision of peace,” he said, “in this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect. Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government. Neither will threaten the security or survival of the other.” But there was nothing to suggest that beyond the words “Palestinian state,” and self-rule in a cluster of enclaves, hemmed in by settlements and military bases, Netanyahu was prepared to give the Palestinians anything. It was the same plan as the one he had proposed on the eve of Oslo fifteen years ago, just with a different name.8
To Netanyahu, for whom words are everything, the Bar-Ilan Speech was monumental. The rest of the world remained underwhelmed. Even the settlers didn’t bother taking him too seriously. Netanyahu had to match his speech with actions first. But he didn’t even try to get his own party to accept the speech as its policy. The Likud platform continued to oppose a Palestinian state.
Obama and his team continued to hope that Netanyahu would show a more pragmatic side, and not just in words. In March 2010, Vice President Joe Biden, one of the more pro-Israel voices in the US administration, traveled to Jerusalem. Biden’s visit, intended both as an overture to the Israeli public and reassurance to Netanyahu that Obama was serious about dealing with the Iranian threat, quickly developed into a full-blown crisis when the Jerusalem District Planning Council issued building permits for hundreds of new apartments in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The United States considered that neighborhood to be a settlement.
The Obama administration was certain it was a deliberate provocation. In a stormy phone call, Secretary of State Clinton yelled at Netanyahu as she relayed the president’s demands. The White House followed the call up with a heavy round of negative briefings to the press. Netanyahu insisted that the issuance of the permits was a bureaucratic procedure of which he had had no prior knowledge, and he may have been telling the truth. He promised that the new apartments would not be built for at least two years; still, trust between him and Obama had been further eroded.
Negotiations with the Palestinians continued in fits and starts. During 2010, the Obama administration cajoled Netanyahu and Abbas into meeting three times, but little progress was made. Israel cut off talks when Abbas’s Fatah faction signed a reconciliation agreement with Hamas. The administration wouldn’t accept the Fatah-Hamas agreement, which was never implemented, as sufficient reason for suspending negotiations.
In May 2011, it was time for another speech. The Speaker of the new Republican Congress, John Boehner, invited Netanyahu for his second joint session address. The White House noted what was a clearly partisan gesture of support by the GOP to the embattled prime minister, but Vice President Biden was in his chair, beside Boehner, when Netanyahu took to the podium. His rhetoric went even further than it had in the Bar-Ilan Speech. “I am willing to make painful compromises to achieve this historical peace,” Netanyahu promised. “I recognize that in a genuine peace we will be required to give up parts of the ancestral Jewish homeland.” But once again he demanded that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the sovereign state of the Jewish people, and once again he refused to go into any specifics over the size of the Palestinian state, emphasizing that Israel “will not return to the indefensible borders of 1967.”9
Netanyahu milked his audience, getting twenty-nine standing ovations. The speech was a challenge to Obama, who two days earlier had made his own speech calling for negotiations on a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines. Netanyahu politely thanked Obama for his support for Israel while using the Republican Congress (and a large number of applauding Democratic representatives as well) to demonstrate his power in Washington.
But both Netanyahu and Obama were to discover that there was a limit to what can be achieved by speeches.
NETANYAHU’S BAR-ILAN SPEECH had partly been in response to an earlier one by Obama. Two weeks after their meeting in the White House, the president had landed in the Middle East, fulfilling his campaign promise to visit a major Arab capital and repair the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world. Obama’s June 4 speech at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, titled “A New Beginning,” addressed a wide range of subjects, including the Israel-Palestine conflict. He reaffirmed America’s “bond” with Israel, describing it as “unbreakable,” and called out anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in Muslim countries. He spoke more eloquently than any previous American president on the Palestinians’ plight under Israeli occupation. The “daily humiliations—large and small—that come with occupation,” he said, were “intolerable.”10
However, what angered Israelis more was the suggestion in Obama’s speech that their state had been founded because of the Holocaust—an old Palestinian claim against the West—rather than because of the Jewish people’s ancient claim to the land. Obama hadn’t actually said that, but he had juxtaposed the statement “The aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied” with words on the Holocaust, which implied a strong connection. The Israelis were also offended that Obama had visited Cairo and the Saudi capital, Riyadh, but had not found time to land in Israel before continuing, ironically, to a tour of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. A stopover in Israel had been considered by the White House, but discarded in the interest of demonstrating that Obama was indeed “different” in his attitude toward Israel.
Later in Obama’s term, some of his advisers would admit that it had been a mistake not to grasp the opportunity to engage earlier with the Israeli public and counter the image being created by Netanyahu’s people of the president as an “Israel-hater.”
But the more significant mixed message from Obama’s Cairo Speech was to the Arab public, not just in Cairo, but across the Arab world. While making it clear that the United States was no longer interested in imposing its order on other countries, he also extolled the virtues of democracy and human rights. Obama had set out to show the Arab world that the United States was not their enemy. As he warmly greeted the dictators of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah, respectively, assuring them that America was out of the regime-change business, many Arabs, especially young people, were asking themselves if Obama really was their friend.
A year and a half later, as millions of Arab citizens took to the streets, first in Tunisia, then in Egypt and other Arab countries, clamoring to “remove the dictator,” Obama became determined to change his dictator-friendly image and put himself on the right side of history. America’s allies in the Middle East looked on horrified as, in January 2011, Obama cold-shouldered Mubarak’s appeal for support as chaos reigned in the streets of Cairo, and publicly declared that the transition of power in Egypt “must begin now.”11
Netanyahu appealed to Western leaders to stand behind Mubarak. For two decades, the tough old tyrant had maintained Egypt’s cold but stable peace with Israel, kept Islamic extremism under his iron thumb, and anchored a regional alliance against Iran. Bibi ominously warned that the “Arab Spring” would be followed by an “Islamic winter.” America’s Arab allies were sending Washington identical warnings, fearing that the Muslim Brotherhood would take over Egypt and other countries. But in the heady months of early 2011, Obama was willing to give the Brotherhood’s brand of political Islam a chance.
ISRAEL WAS TO have its own, much more benign—but for Netanyahu politically threatening—version of the Arab Spring.
In July 2011, thousands of young Israelis camped out on the grassy thoroughfare in the middle of Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard. It had started with graphic designer Daphni Leef, who built a tent and set up a Facebook page protesting the rising cost of rent. It quickly spread to a much wider protest movement over the straitened circumstances of Israel’s middle class. There was very little violence. Many of those marching chanted a slogan adapted from the Tahrir Square protests: “The people demand social justice!” Most of them were ordinary young people, including couples and families, not people who had been particularly interested in politics in the past.
The “tent protests” evolved into the “social protest movement,” involving hundreds of thousands of people across the country, and exposed one of the weakest links in Netanyahu’s economic policies. Hidden behind the healthy financial statistics and the headlines heralding yet more multimillion-dollar high-tech startup “exits,” the majority of Israelis were struggling on their salaries to afford housing and keep up a Western-standard lifestyle without incurring crushing debt. A similar protest movement would take place in the United States shortly thereafter, in September 2011, when Occupy Wall Street began, and Europe saw protests over economic inequality as well. But for Israel, in the Middle East, the Arab Spring resonated more than in other places where “occupy” movements took place. The awkward truth was that Netanyahu’s Israel had two economies: a healthy technology-driven economy, trading with the world and bringing in handsome rewards for its successful entrepreneurs and software engineers, on the one hand, and, on the other, a second economy in which most of the middle and working classes floundered.
For once, the Israeli media focused almost entirely on social issues—and naturally blamed Netanyahu for the situation. The recommendations of a hastily assembled government committee on ways to rein in the housing market and alleviate the suffering of the middle class failed to assuage the protesters. Even an Islamist terrorist attack on the Egyptian border, killing eight Israelis, and Netanyahu’s subsequent decision to allocate billions to building a new border fence, didn’t dislodge them from the headlines for more than a few days. Netanyahu was convinced that left-wing nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with European funding were orchestrating the protests, but his attempts to cast aspersions failed miserably. The protests were causing real political damage, and Bibi plummeted in the polls.
What finally pushed the protests off the public agenda was one of the most uncharacteristic decisions of Netanyahu’s career.
IN A SMALL country where nearly everyone serves in the military, MIAs and POWs have always been a highly sensitive issue. High-profile campaigns have been ongoing for decades to discover the whereabouts of missing soldiers, even after the intelligence community presumed them dead. In cases where Palestinian and Lebanese organizations held live captives, or even just bodies, Israel was often prepared to release hundreds of jailed terrorists in return for them. In 1985, Israel exchanged 1,150 prisoners for 3 Israeli soldiers who had been captured in Lebanon.
Netanyahu, whose brother Yoni had been killed in the Entebbe operation, when Israel refused to exchange prisoners for the hijacked hostages, adamantly opposed such lopsided exchanges. He had risked his job as ambassador to publicly criticize the deal in 1985, describing it as a “critical blow to all Israel’s efforts to form an international front against terror.”12 On the other hand, in 1997, under pressure to save six Mossad agents and the peace treaty with Jordan, he had released Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin. At the Wye River Summit, the most difficult detail for Netanyahu to swallow had been releasing Palestinian prisoners who had killed Israelis. It took intense pressure from President Clinton to get him to sign off.
Back in power, he had inherited another, similar dilemma from his predecessor. On June 25, 2006, Palestinian fighters had emerged from a tunnel under the Gaza border and attacked an Israeli tank, killing two of the tank crewmembers and wounding another. Grabbing the fourth crewmember, they rushed back into Gaza. For over five years, Gilad Shalit was held in an underground cell in Gaza while Israel’s intelligence efforts to locate him failed.
Hamas had demanded that Israel release a thousand Palestinian prisoners, including hundreds who had been convicted for killing Israelis, in exchange for Shalit’s return. The negotiations, conducted through Egypt and Germany, drew on for years.
In March 2009, Ehud Olmert had spent most of his last days as prime minister trying to finalize the deal. Netanyahu dearly wanted him to succeed, because it would save him from having to make difficult decisions. But Hamas wouldn’t budge, and Olmert balked at the price. Taking office two weeks later, Netanyahu reviewed the details and made it clear that he would not deal with Hamas on those terms. The German negotiator continued for a few months, going back and forth, but by the end of 2009 had abandoned hope. The Shalit family launched a well-funded and star-studded campaign under the slogan “Gilad Shalit—The child of all of us,” pressuring Olmert, and then Netanyahu, to pay whatever price was necessary. Every Israeli knew Gilad’s face, and most of them supported his parents’ demands.
In the late summer of 2011, there were signals that Hamas might be prepared to moderate its demands. A new German negotiator went to work, shuttling between Jerusalem, Gaza, and Cairo. The Syrian Civil War had begun, and the Syrian regime’s forces, under Bashar al-Assad, with Iranian backing, were gunning down Sunni demonstrators on the streets. Many of those killed were members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s ideological Sunni allies. The movement’s leaders, whose political headquarters were in Damascus, were being pressured to cut ties with their Syrian and Iranian sponsors. Anxious for a public relations coup to distract their critics, Hamas’s political leaders needed to show that they had forced Israel to release prisoners. But the Hamas military commander, Ahmed Jabari, still insisted on a thousand-for-one ratio in the exchange.
Ultimately, Hamas’s concessions were minimal. They accepted Israel’s veto on three senior prisoners on their original list and agreed to some of the prisoners being released to Gaza, instead of the West Bank, where it was feared they would organize a new terrorist campaign, both against Israel and against their Fatah rivals in the Palestinian Authority. But Jabari got his thousand. In fact, Israel released 1,027 Palestinians, including 280 who had been sentenced to life behind bars for murder.
Netanyahu, who authorized the deal and pushed it through a dramatic all-night cabinet meeting, gave a number of reasons for his change of heart: Hamas had reduced its demands, the security chiefs had agreed to the deal, and there was a threat that if Israel did not respond this time around, “Shalit would disappear for many years.” In Israel’s security establishment, even those who supported the deal were critical of this reasoning. Hamas had barely reduced its demands, and the threat of Shalit’s disappearance was almost certainly a bluff—a live Israeli soldier was the most powerful lever of pressure Hamas had over Israel, not something they would make disappear. And besides, Yoram Cohen, the Shin Bet chief, who gave his professional cover for the deal, had recently been a surprise appointment of Netanyahu’s, who had chosen him over the likelier candidate. He owed Bibi his job.
At the end of the day, Netanyahu had gone against his principles and paid the heaviest price any Israeli prime minister ever had for a single soldier. There is no evidence Netanyahu made the call for political or popularity reasons, though many senior Israeli figures have said so in private.
On October 18, Jabari handed Shalit over to Egyptian officials at the Rafah border crossing, and from there he was transferred to Israeli territory. As the helicopter carrying him landed at Tel Nof Airbase, Netanyahu was on the tarmac to greet him.
For weeks, Israeli media reported on nothing but the deliberations leading to the Shalit deal, the preparations, the implementation, and Gilad’s first days back home with his family. The social protest movement, already unsure about how to proceed after a successful summer of protests, was starved of publicity. Protesting against a prime minister who was working to bring “everyone’s child” home would have gone down very badly with the public. By the time the Shalit festival finally died down, the widespread passions behind the protests had petered out.
At the height of the protests in August, Netanyahu’s approval ratings stood at 29 percent, their lowest point since his return to power. Two months later, with Shalit safely home, 51 percent of Israelis, more than at any other time during that term, were pleased with their prime minister.
In Jerusalem and Washington, there were some who allowed themselves the illusion that there was a new pragmatic Bibi in Israel, a Bibi who was prepared to release prisoners, freeze settlements, and allow a Palestinian state.