A final clash after years of clawing conflict

When US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel met in September for the last time before Obama leaves office, the session was marked by forced smiles and strained jokes about playing golf in retirement, as if bygones were bygones after nearly eight years of clawing conflict.

Of course it was never going to end that way. How could it? The narrative of the tense and tetchy relationship between the liberal president and conservative prime minister instead reached a climax in a hyper-politicised showdown over war, peace, justice, security, human rights and, at last, the very meaning of international friendship.

Obama’s decision on Friday not to block a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli colonies laid bare all the grievances the two men have nursed since shortly after they took office in 2009. For Netanyahu, it was the final betrayal by a president who was supposed to be an ally but never really was. For Obama, it was the inevitable result of Netanyahu’s own stubborn defiance of international concerns with his policies. The two sides did little to hide their mutual contempt. After talks led them to conclude that Obama would not veto the resolution, as presidents of both parties have done in the past, Israeli officials essentially washed their hands of the incumbent and contacted his successor in the wings. US President-elect Donald Trump promptly put out a statement calling on Obama to veto the resolution.

When that ultimately did not stop the council from acting, Netanyahu’s team expressed blistering anger at Obama. An Israeli official, insisting on anonymity to maintain the veneer of diplomatic protocol, gave a statement to multiple reporters on Friday blasting Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, by name. “President Obama and Secretary Kerry are behind this shameful move against Israel at the UN,” the official said. “The US administration secretly cooked up with the Palestinians an extreme anti-Israeli resolution behind Israel’s back which would be a tailwind for terror and boycotts and effectively make the Western Wall occupied Palestinian territory.” The White House bristled at the attack, denying that it was behind the resolution but defending the decision to abstain rather than veto it as consistent with long-standing, bipartisan US opposition to Israeli colony construction as an obstacle to peace with the Palestinians.

The Israeli statement was “full of inaccuracies and falsehoods,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to Obama, told reporters on a conference call. The president, he said, tried repeatedly to bring the rivals together at the negotiating table, only to see Israel continue building more housing in the occupied West Bank in a way that would make a peace agreement even harder to broker. “We tried everything,” Rhodes said. In effect, he added just after Friday’s UN vote, Netanyahu had it coming. “Prime Minister Netanyahu had the opportunity to pursue policies that would have led to a different outcome today,” he said. “Absent this acceleration of settlement [colony] activity, absent the type of rhetoric we’ve seen out of the current Israeli government, I think the United States likely would have taken a different view.”

Mistrust and animosity

The clash just four weeks before Obama leaves office culminated a fractious eight years between the men. From the start, the two did not see eye to eye. Idealistic and perhaps overconfident, Obama arrived in the White House certain that he could be the president who would finally resolve the decades-old dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. But Netanyahu saw a naif who failed to grasp the existential threat to Israel and who demanded more of his friends than his enemies.

The relationship was marked by one conflict after another, a reflection of not just personal differences but deeply held and diverging policy objectives of the men and their countries. Obama’s demand that Israel suspend new colonies to enter negotiations infuriated Netanyahu. The announcement of new construction in East Jerusalem while US Vice-President Joe Biden was visiting infuriated Obama. Two major pushes for negotiations by Obama unravelled amid mistrust and animosity. The multinational deal masterminded by Obama to curb Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for relief from international sanctions proved a breaking point. At first, Obama hid the secret talks with Iran from the Israelis. After the talks became public knowledge, Netanyahu flew to Washington to excoriate the effort in a joint meeting of Congress. But he could not stop it.

The two tried to put the rupture behind them last fall by sealing a 10-year $38 billion (Dh139.5 billion) US security aid package for Israel, but even then the bitterness of their quarrels hung over the agreement. Netanyahu’s critics at home asserted that the package should have been $45 billion and that the prime minister’s speech to Congress had come with a $7 billion price tag. US officials said it never would have been that high, but the opposing sides remained scratchy.

Even after the smiles and golf get-together in New York in September, Obama made it clear that he was not yet done with his efforts to leave his mark on Middle East peace efforts as he considered outlining a US framework for an agreement. Obama was angered by Netanyahu’s proposal to save an illegal Israeli outpost in Amona by moving the colonists to another plot of land claimed by the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s critics in Israel said the Amona controversy and proposed legislation to legalise other outlaw outposts were responsible for Obama’s decision to abandon Israel’s government Friday. “Netanyahu chose to advance the legalisation bill, insisted on Amona and galloped into the wall in full knowledge that this would be the result — while choosing his personal interest over the national interest,” Tzipi Livni, a former foreign minister, wrote on Facebook.

Netanyahu’s team rejected that. “I think the legalisation bill had nothing to do with this,” said Michael Oren, a deputy minister and former ambassador to the United States, although he conceded that “it would have been good to discuss the legalisation bill at a later time just because of questions like that.”

Oren said the real obstacle to peace was Palestinian incitement, not Israeli colonies. The United Nations was hypocritical, he said, because it singled out Israel while ignoring scores of other territorial disputes around the world. “It’s not only an anti-Israel resolution but an anti-Semitic resolution,” he said.

In the United States, Obama faced criticism not only from Republicans but from pro-Israel Democrats like Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and a cross section of Jewish-American organisations, including several that have been at odds with Trump. “It is deeply troubling that this biased resolution appears to be the final word of the administration on this issue,” Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement. If it is the last word — and there are still a few days left in the Obama presidency — it will serve as a coda to a relationship that never clicked.

— New York Times News Service