29
Barack Obama was not surprised by Netanyahu’s fourth election victory. As his aides gleefully pored over the latest polls predicting Bibi’s downfall, he advised they keep their hopes down. “[Obama] didn’t think Herzog could win and said the Israeli people have been consistent in supporting Bibi and weren’t about to change their minds,” a senior administration official later recalled. “He said Abbas hadn’t helped either.” By the last quarter of his presidency, Obama had long realized that the foreign policy holy grail of American presidents, Israeli-Palestinian peace, was beyond his grasp. Disappointed by Netanyahu and his Palestinian counterpart, Obama was pinning all his hopes on the Iranians. Just like Netanyahu, he was already preparing for a battle on the Hill over the Iran deal.
For years, the two allies had been playing a double-game with each other. US diplomats routinely briefed their Israeli counterparts on the state of play in the P5+1 negotiations, and the Israelis made their comments, which were usually critical. Beneath the surface, the administration engaged with the Iranian leadership through a secret Omani back channel. Obama sent secret letters to the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei urging him to renew the nuclear talks and proposing an alliance against ISIS. Mossad discovered the backchannel’s existence and Israel informed the administration that it was aware. The US National Security Agency maintained surveillance on Netanyahu, even after he’d given up on an Iran strike in late 2012, to keep tabs on his conversations with Jewish American leaders and his Republican allies, in which they suspected Netanyahu of leaking details of the P5+1 talks that he had received from the administration. It wasn’t the first time the United States and Israel had cooperated while spying on each other.
After countless rounds of talks, on July 14, 2015, John Kerry and the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, signed the deal, along with the other P5+1 representatives. The details of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action were much as Netanyahu had described in his speech to Congress. Iran would freeze its nuclear development for a decade. Its nuclear infrastructure was to remain largely intact, and Iran was allowed to continue its low-grade uranium enrichment, subject to international supervision. In return, all nuclear-related sanctions would be removed.
In a tense phone call, Netanyahu told Obama that it was “a bad mistake of historic proportions.”1 Obama tried taking a conciliatory tone, promising America’s continuing support and proposing that the two countries take advantage of Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s upcoming visit to Israel to begin negotiating a new ten-year military assistance treaty. But Netanyahu wasn’t interested in negotiating. He needed one more showdown with Obama in Congress. For history’s sake.
There followed two and a half months of intense lobbying, quarterbacked in Washington by Ron Dermer, to get Congress to oppose the deal. The Jewish community and the pro-Israel organizations would be split between the president and the prime minister. For Netanyahu, it was a lost cause. He had all the Republican senators, but Obama needed only thirty-four Democrats to support him to deny his opponents a veto-proof majority. The deal was not technically a treaty, so it didn’t have to be ratified by the US Senate. Instead, to oppose it, Congress would have to pass a resolution of disapproval, and to do so it would have to break a Democratic filibuster. No amount of lobbying would make more than a handful of Democratic senators abandon their president on a “legacy” vote.
Obama had another ace up his sleeve—the Israeli security chiefs. He already knew that, although in their professional opinion, the deal could have been much better, they still realized it would effectively give them a ten-year break from Iran’s nuclear program. That break would allow Israel’s security establishment to focus on more immediate threats. Once again, the IDF generals were conspiring against Bibi.
By September 2, it was all over. Thirty-four senators had publicly confirmed their support. Obama had his Iran deal. A month later, Netanyahu delivered his concession speech at the United Nations General Assembly. He was still very critical of the deal. “After three days of listening to world leaders praise the nuclear deal with Iran,” he said, “I begin my speech today by saying: Ladies and gentlemen, check your enthusiasm at the door.” But for the first time he admitted there were good points to the deal, which “does place several constraints on Iran’s nuclear program.” Finally beaten by Obama, he was reduced to imploring the international community to “make sure that the inspectors actually inspect.”2
OBAMA AND NETANYAHU’S relationship would never recover. It had already taken a turn for the worse following the election in March. Obama had pointedly waited two days before calling to congratulate Netanyahu on his victory, demonstrating his displeasure at the “Arabs in droves” remark and the promise not to establish a Palestinian state during his term.
Netanyahu tried to walk back his pledge to the settlers, saying he was still committed to a “sustainable, peaceful two-state solution.” In an interview two days later, Obama said, “We take him at his word when he said that it wouldn’t happen during his prime ministership, and so that’s why we’ve got to evaluate what other options are available.” On the “Arabs in droves,” Obama noted, it “starts to erode the name of democracy in the country.”3
Netanyahu, aside from a weak apology to Israel’s Arab citizens a week after the election, made no attempt to prevent his Likud MKs from making a stream of racist anti-Arab statements. The 2013 and 2015 elections had brought a new crop of populist Likudniks to the Knesset. Likud still officially called itself a “national-liberal party,” but not a shred of liberalism remained. The only active senior Likudniks still espousing the Jabotinskean tradition of “decorum,” combining Jewish nationalism with a commitment to human rights and the rule of law, were Benny Begin, a lone voice on the backbenches, and President Reuven Rivlin.
Netanyahu had fought tooth and nail against Rivlin’s election in 2014. Not only was he an old rival, but Rivlin was too independent for Netanyahu’s taste. As Knesset Speaker, Rivlin had once insulted Sara by seating her next to Tzipi Livni at an official event. Bibi did everything he could to find an alternative candidate, even calling the non-Israeli Elie Wiesel in New York, hours before the ballot, begging him to put himself forward as candidate for president. But the popular Rivlin was ultimately elected president. From his new position, Rivlin lambasted the wave of anti-Arab racism. But even the prime minister continued to indulge himself occasionally. After a terrorist attack carried out by Israeli Arabs in January 2016, Netanyahu arrived on the scene, promising, “We won’t allow two states here, one law-abiding state for Jews and another one without the rule of law.”4
The racism was stoked by a new wave of Palestinian violence that began in October 2015. Unlike previous waves, when attacks were usually carried out by members of Palestinian organizations, this time the perpetrators were young nonaffiliated individuals, often just teenagers motivated online to take a kitchen knife, a makeshift gun, or a vehicle to ram into Israelis. The violence was bred of desperation among Palestinians at the lack of any progress toward independence. Religious incitement online accused the Jews of “defiling” the Haram al-Sharif mosques.
It wasn’t a full-fledged intifada. The violence failed to spread to wider swaths of Palestinian society and petered out after a few months. But the period of nearly daily stabbings and shootings were a stark reminder that the conflict wasn’t going away. It also exposed a deep divide within Israeli society, as populist politicians called for making sure attackers “didn’t leave the scene alive.” Once again, it was the generals calling for moderation. The IDF chief of staff, Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkott, angered the politicians when he said in a lecture that soldiers didn’t always need to shoot to kill. “I don’t want to see a soldier emptying a magazine on a 13-year-old girl holding scissors,” he said.5
On March 24, 2016, Sergeant Elor Azaria was captured on camera shooting a wounded Palestinian assailant to death. By the time the shooting took place, however, the assailant had been lying on the ground for ten minutes, after he was injured in a stabbing attempt. Azaria was arrested and later put on trial for manslaughter, and the IDF High Command, as well as Netanyahu’s defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, condemned his action. But a large proportion of the public, and nearly all the right-wing parliamentarians, were scandalized that an IDF soldier was under arrest for shooting a terrorist. Netanyahu had initially condemned, but quickly changed his tune, calling Azaria’s parents to express his support.
Yaalon’s views on the Palestinian issue were virtually indistinguishable from Netanyahu’s. He had no problem saying publicly that there was no chance of a Palestinian state being established this century. But he was no racist, and as a stickler for military discipline, he abhorred Azaria’s act of vigilantism. The pro-Azaria chorus and growing criticism of the IDF commanders isolated him within Likud. In May, he discovered that Netanyahu was holding secret talks with Avigdor Lieberman on Yisrael Beiteinu’s return to the coalition. Lieberman demanded the Defense Ministry. Yaalon resigned from the government, the Knesset, and Likud before Netanyahu could fire him. He and Netanyahu had also clashed recently over the prime minister’s insistence on buying more submarines for the navy, a demand that only later on would begin to make sense to him.
With Lieberman back in his cabinet and Likud purged of yet another moderate voice, Netanyahu now headed his most right-wing coalition ever. Dan Meridor, the moderate Likud “prince” who had returned to the party in 2009 in the hope of finding a more pragmatic Netanyahu, said that “Bibi isn’t a racist himself, but he is adept at using racism for political purposes. He gave up on centrist voters ever supporting him again and now only appeals to his base.”
ALONG WITH RACISM, during his fourth term Netanyahu began to show an increasing tendency toward authoritarianism. He left the post of foreign minister vacant. Ostensibly, this was to allow for a coalition deal with Labor in which Herzog would become foreign minister. But Netanyahu preferred to run the Foreign Ministry himself, having always seen the role of Israel’s diplomats merely to project his own policies and beliefs and serve as hasbara envoys. On delicate diplomatic missions he preferred to send one of his old confidantes—Ron Dermer; his lawyer Yitzhak Molcho; Dore Gold, whom he appointed as the Foreign Ministry’s director-general; or a new addition to this group, the former deputy Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, who had won Netanyahu’s trust as national security adviser.
Traumatized by Meir Dagan’s rebelliousness, Netanyahu had taken to appointing Mossad chiefs he could trust. Dagan was replaced by Tamir Pardo, who had served under Yoni Netanyahu in Sayeret Matkal and had been beside him at his death in Entebbe. But Pardo had been a disappointment, not fully backing Netanyahu on Iran. In a private meeting in July 2014, he said the Palestinian conflict was a more existential issue for Israel than the Iranian threat. His remarks were reported by Barak Ravid of Haaretz, enraging Netanyahu.6 When Pardo’s term ended in December 2015, his deputy (called only “N” because his name was classified) was frontrunner to replace him. Hours before the announcement, N received a phone call from Netanyahu with a strange question. “Will you be loyal to me?” N answered that he would do everything necessary to protect the state. “I’ll get back to you,” said Netanyahu. But that evening, the appointment went not to N, but to the loyal Yossi Cohen.7
Another obsession Netanyahu could never let go of was the media. In 2012, he said in a private meeting, “We have two enemies, the New York Times and Haaretz. They set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world.”8 Haaretz, Israel’s oldest newspaper, is staunchly liberal-Zionist. But for Netanyahu, its criticisms of his policies made it anti-Israel. Holding an early election to block the legislation against Adelson’s Yisrael Hayom hadn’t been enough. In his fourth term, he appointed himself communications minister, and the coalition partners had to sign an agreement promising to support him on any media legislation.
Netanyahu appointed another loyalist, his former chief of staff and 2015 campaign manager, Shlomo Filber, as director-general of the Communications Ministry. Together they set about “breaking the media monopolies.” The license-holders of Channel 2, Israel’s most popular station, were forced to divide it into two weaker stations. But their efforts to force Channel 10, the combative station that had broadcast hard-hitting investigations on Netanyahu’s financial affairs, to close down over unpaid licensing fees was stymied by Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon. A campaign to prevent the new public broadcasting corporation, a result of legislation in Netanyahu’s previous term, from going on air was blocked by the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu as communications minister was in charge of authorizing mergers for the owner of the telecommunications giant Bezeq, Shaul Alovich. Alovich, a personal friend of his, also owned one of Israel’s largest websites, Walla. Walla’s coverage of Bibi and Sara had become increasingly positive since Alovich had acquired it. In February 2017, the Israeli Supreme Court put an end to the farce, ruling that due to conflict of interest, Netanyahu could not continue as communications minister.
For two and a half years after the election, Netanyahu’s only interviews with the Israeli media were to the obscure “Heritage Channel,” which is owned by an Israeli-Georgian oligarch friendly to Netanyahu. Its sycophantic interviewers could be relied upon to deliver softball questions and nod along with the answers. Occasionally, Netanyahu would meet with groups of journalists for off-the-record sessions. In one of them, he turned to Ilana Dayan, the anchor of Channel 2’s investigative journalism show, asking, in all seriousness, “Why don’t you do an investigation on how much I’m admired abroad?”
Dayan had recently broadcast an investigation into the goings-on in Netanyahu’s office. Netanyahu had responded by accusing Dayan of having “not even a drop of personal integrity” and being “one of the leaders of a concerted frenzy against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, aimed at toppling the right-wing government.”9 It took Dayan six minutes to read the entire response onscreen. Having failed to tame or shut down Israel’s adversarial press, Netanyahu was going for the jugular, accusing the media of trying to bring down an elected government.
Most of the professional staff in his press office had been replaced by young online gunslingers, who helped Bibi overcome his technophobia and communicate with the public by Facebook and Twitter, bypassing the heads of the mainstream media. When Donald Trump came along, Netanyahu eagerly adopted his “fake news” terminology, branding with it most of Israel’s news organizations.
AS 2016 BEGAN, Netanyahu was counting down the months until Obama’s departure. It had been seven long years, in which they had achieved little together. Obama had prevented Netanyahu from launching a war in Iran, which could well have drawn in the United States. Netanyahu had failed to prevent the Iran deal. No progress whatsoever had been made on the Palestinian front, although Obama blamed Abbas for this as well. That the West Bank had remained relatively calm for most of the period could be chalked down as an achievement.
Back in 2011, Obama and French president Nicolas Sarkozy had been overheard by journalists discussing Netanyahu at a G20 summit. “I cannot bear him, he’s a liar,” complained Sarkozy. “You’re fed up with him?” answered Obama. “I have to deal with him every day.”10 Sarkozy was long gone from the Élysée Palace, and Obama was fed up as well. Soon he would be leaving the White House and wouldn’t have to deal with Netanyahu at all.
Long after Obama had given up hope, Netanyahu continued to string along would-be peacemakers who believed they could somehow force the pragmatic Bibi out of him and get him to sign a historic agreement with the Palestinians. Shimon Peres tried and failed in 2011. In 2013, Tzipi Livni tried for twenty months after being appointed chief negotiator—until she got fired. All that time, in the background, Tony Blair, the “Quartet” envoy to the Middle East, had been traveling back and forth to Jerusalem and Ramallah, while maintaining in London a secret backchannel between Netanyahu and the representatives of Abbas.11 After the 2015 election, Netanyahu had promised Labor leader Herzog that should he join his government, he would be the one leading the negotiations. In a secret summit in Jordan in February 2016, King Abdullah and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi proposed to jointly host negotiations. There was talk of the Saudis getting involved.
Some of these tracks continued for years, but they never reached their destination. Netanyahu or Abbas, often both, would always find a reason to derail talks at the crucial moment. There was political pressure back home, and there were unilateral steps taken by the other side, or demands for further security arrangements, settlements, or prisoners, or Hamas lurking on the sidelines.
While even the most seasoned diplomats were eventually replaced by new hopefuls, Netanyahu and Abbas had been doing this for over twenty years, and they knew every pothole to get stuck in down the road. Ultimately, they both had an interest in maintaining the status quo, and were incapable of making the difficult decisions necessary for a breakthrough. However, they did maintain security cooperation between their officers, for the sake of keeping Hamas out of the West Bank. While nearly all the other Israeli prime ministers over the past three decades—Rabin, Peres, Barak, Sharon, and Olmert—had looked for ways to achieve a breakthrough with the Palestinians, Netanyahu, like Shamir, is intent on preserving the status quo. Unlike Shamir, who was forced to contend with the Intifada, Netanyahu inherited the Oslo framework, and he has learned over the years how to utilize it to his own benefit. He realized that while being dysfunctional, and nothing even close to the Palestinians’ aspirations, the semiautonomous Palestinian Authority in the West Bank had created a political and financial base that Abbas and the Fatah leaders around him were loath to give up on. As leader of the opposition in the early 1990s, Netanyahu had lambasted the Oslo Agreements. Twenty years later, he emerged as Oslo’s most valiant defender. The framework put in place by Rabin and Peres had left Netanyahu with the means to preserve a fragile calm in the West Bank. While his critics continue to insist that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians is “unsustainable,” Oslo allows Netanyahu to continue sustaining it and to prove to Israelis that Israel does not have to make peace with the Palestinians to enjoy financial prosperity and improving international relations. “Abbas is even more useless than Bibi,” said one senior Western diplomat at the end of yet another fruitless trip. “But Bibi has all the power.”
No one traveled down that road with more hope than John Kerry. In his four years as secretary of state, no matter how many times Netanyahu let him down, Kerry never lost faith in him. He continued trying to bring the Israelis and Palestinians together from wherever he was in the world, often holding video-conferences with them from exotic locations. He was continuously calling Netanyahu, speaking with him for hours on the phone. One American diplomat estimated that Kerry had called Netanyahu four hundred times during his tenure. Sometimes Kerry would phone from his home, out of the blue, without notifying his aides and without a note-taker listening in on the call. Such was his forlorn faith in Bibi.
Obama let Kerry founder, as Netanyahu refused to commit to fixed borders, or even to present the Americans with a map marking out proposed territory and borders for a two-state solution.
In July 2013, Kerry achieved his one breakthrough. After three years with no official negotiations, Israel and the Palestinians agreed to hold permanent status talks for nine months. During this period Israel committed to release 104 prisoners in four tranches, and the Palestinians suspended their requests to be accepted as an independent state by international organizations. Tzipi Livni was to represent Israel at the talks, but Yitzhak Molcho, who was there to report every detail back to Netanyahu—making sure maps never came up—gave Livni a limited mandate.
By April 2014, the talks were bogged down. The Palestinians presented Livni with a list of demands, starting with a written commitment from Netanyahu on a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital. When no answer was forthcoming, they renewed their application for full membership in the United Nations. In response, Israel announced that it would not release the last tranche of twenty-six prisoners and issued building permits for hundreds of new homes in East Jerusalem.
“Both sides wound out in a position of unhelpful moves,” a woeful Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee three days later. “The prisoners were not released by Israel on the day they were supposed to be released and then another day passed and another day, and then 700 units were approved in Jerusalem and then poof—that was sort of the moment.”12 Kerry sounded as if he was placing most of the blame on Israel, but no serious pressure came from the Obama administration to renew talks. Obama needed Kerry for the Iran negotiations, and with the administration hoping soon to sign the nuclear agreement, which Netanyahu would hate, it wasn’t the best of times to try and force anything on him. Ultimately, it was the Iran deal that saved Netanyahu from making progress with the Palestinians.
Kerry would go on trying to renew negotiations to the very last days of the Obama administration. In the administration’s twilight, there was an expectation that Obama would deliver his “parameters” for the permanent status. Netanyahu was anxious to prevent that from happening. Parameters would set clear guidelines for negotiations with the Palestinians under future administrations. Netanyahu thrived on blurred lines. Obama was unsure whether the parameters were at all realistic and deferred his decision until after the election, not wanting to hamper Hillary Clinton’s campaign with an unnecessary Bibi case. After the election it was too late.
Kerry was to have the last laugh. On December 24, the United States decided to abstain rather than veto a UN resolution defining Israel’s settlements as illegal. Netanyahu was furious, saying that “the Obama administration not only failed to protect Israel against this gang-up at the UN, it colluded with it behind the scenes.”13 But he really had no reason to complain. Every previous administration had decided at some point not to veto resolutions condemning Israel. It had taken the Obama administration nearly eight years to reach that point. Besides, a new president was about to be inaugurated and things would never be the same. Donald Trump hadn’t even entered the White House, yet his transition team were already falling over themselves to try to prevent the UN vote. Their overtures to the Russian ambassador would feature, a year later, in the Mueller investigation into Trump’s ties with the Kremlin.
OBAMA WOULD NOT take revenge for all the times Netanyahu had confronted him. It seemed that he had meant what he said when he had promised to continue supporting Israel, despite Netanyahu. Or else Obama was simply trying not to create trouble for his hoped-for successor. He never did throw Israel under the bus. Bibi’s critics, who had accused him of causing irreparable damage to the US-Israeli relationship by going to speak in Congress, were astonished at Obama’s equanimity. Not only was Netanyahu not forced to pay a price, but as soon as the Iran deal passed Congress, talks began on the new ten-year military assistance agreement.
The Obama administration was prepared to give Israel an unprecedented package, but Netanyahu prevaricated for months. Some of his Republican friends were urging him not to sign with Obama, in the hope of getting a better deal from the next administration. But as the Republican primaries drew to their astonishing result, Netanyahu decided he would be better off signing with Obama than having to renegotiate with Hillary Clinton. On October 15, the United States and Israel signed the memorandum of understanding for a ten-year $38 billion military aid package.
A week later, Netanyahu and Obama met at the United Nations General Assembly for what was supposed to be their last meeting with Obama in office. Bibi joked that now that Obama would have lots of time to golf, he must come and visit their weekend home in Caesarea, near Israel’s only golf course. Obama looked mainly relieved that it was their last meeting. Netanyahu couldn’t hide his satisfaction. His old foe was leaving and he was still in power.
But they were to meet again just eight days later.
On September 28, Shimon Peres passed away at the age of ninety-three. Obama, the Clintons, and Kerry all flew to the funeral. In the VIP tent, Obama was disgusted to spot Sheldon Adelson, a man who literally stood for the opposite of Peres’s values in every possible way.
In his eulogy, Obama ruefully reflected on Peres’s “unfinished business” and recalled Peres saying to him that “Jews were not born to rule over another people.” Peres, said Obama, “showed us that justice and hope are at the heart of the Zionist idea” and “believed the Zionist idea would be best protected when Palestinians too had a state of their own.”14
It was a speech that many Israelis had hoped they would one day hear from their own prime minister. But Netanyahu preferred in his eulogy of Peres to dwell on their frequent arguments. Bibi was soon to be released from the shadow of three rivals—Peres, Clinton, and Obama—and with their departure, he hoped to be finally released of the irksome legacy of the Oslo process.
Mahmoud Abbas had arrived as well to pay his respects. But as Netanyahu laboriously name-checked each and every foreign dignitary, even the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, he pointedly left out the Palestinian president.