It was President Bill Clinton who drily observed after meeting the newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “he thinks he is the superpower and we are here to do whatever he requires.”
If Netanyahu emerges as victor in tomorrow’s election and in the process of government formation that will follow, he is unlikely to treat President Barack Obama to a repeat of what Clinton’s key Middle East aide, Dennis Ross, would later recall as that “nearly insufferable” performance in the White House in 1996.
Netanyahu, who has gone out of his way to be publicly flattering about Obama in recent weeks, knows a little more about diplomacy than he did then; one of several reasons why he lost the election three years later was that the Israeli public was unhappy about how unwelcome their prime minister had become in Washington.
The question of whether this is more than a superficial change, and whether he can manage to avoid alienating a new US president professedly intent on progress in the Middle East, remains a vexed one, however.
With his lead over Tzipi Livni’s Kadima party narrowing this weekend, Netanyahu’s Likud cannot be regarded as a shoo-in. But if he does win, it will have been on a platform of expanding rather than uprooting existing West Bank settlements, of the indivisibility of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state, and of the need to remedy what he sees as the unfinished military job last month of toppling Hamas. None of these positions, on present showing, are likely to commend themselves to the White House.
What mainly exasperated the Clinton administration once Netanyahu became prime minister was his foot-dragging over the Oslo accords — which he had vigorously rejected, personalizing much of his opposition around the then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated in 1995. Today, he remains deeply opposed to territorial concessions to the Palestinians in any foreseeable future, arguing that they would be to pave the way for a further “Hamastan” — the term he is proud of having coined about Gaza — in the West Bank. He has several times during the campaign dropped the name of Tony Blair when advancing his own favored alternative: An “economic peace” under which some of the formidable obstacles to West Bank trade might be removed — but not (as many others, including Blair, envisage) as a prelude to an independent Palestinian state. The Israeli analyst Yossi Alpher thinks that if Netanyahu wins and is able to form a unity government with Livni and Labor leader Ehud Barak, he might just be able to avert an early collision with the US president. He might, Alpher says, be able to persuade the president’s envoy, George Mitchell, that instead of a deal with the Palestinians he could “live with” serious negotiations with Syria as an alternative — despite his campaign pledges not to surrender the Golan. This would at least have the merits of detaching Damascus from Iran — the nuclear threat from which Netanyahu has made a centerpiece of his campaign. But if, instead, he forms a right-wing coalition including the fast-rising Avigdor Lieberman, Alpher believes “he’s in trouble.”
