(Nahum Barnea in Yediot Acharonoth).The visits paid by Israeli premiers to the Oval Office are usually like class reunions: everybody knows one another and likes one another. And even if the fondness is forced, contingent, it isn't hard to do it for the media. After all, we're all one big happy family.
Not last night. Obama and Netanyahu were as grim looking and formal as politicians can be. Maybe it's the situation: it's hard to tell jokes when the issue at hand is the Iranian threat. Maybe it's the desire shared by both of them to demonstrate seriousness. Obama praised Netanyahu's "youth and wisdom." Netanyahu immediately remarked that at the age of 60 it was hard to talk about youth any more. Indeed, Obama after 100 days in office and Netanyahu after 50 look like two people who urgently need a vacation.
I don't know what Obama told his aides a moment after he parted ways with Netanyahu. Did he say to them: listen to me, there's a lot of justice to what that man just said and I believe him. Or, did he said: what a waste of time, that guy is only going to be trouble. The compliments the two men exchanged at the end of the ceremony were predictable and, as such, didn't convey much. Words that are spoken at the end of such meetings do more to obfuscate than to clarify the situation.
But the boundaries within which the Israeli government operates have now been drawn. There is an agreement about the severity of the problem posed by the Iranian bomb to regional stability, to world peace, to America and Israel. That is good. Netanyahu, who doesn't believe that anything can be gotten out of the Iranians by means of negotiations, failed to secure from Obama a commitment to an end date for those talks or, no less important, to the behavior that America will demand from Iran during the period of the talks. There isn't any deadline, Obama said publicly and privately.
That said, he set a deadline of sorts when he said that towards the end of the year the administration would assess the progress that had been made. If no progress has been made, the United States will try to persuade the world to tighten sanctions.
Netanyahu can be pleased with the direction things have taken, not with the timetable. It would seem, for all intents and purposes, that Iran has a year and more to continue to promote its nuclear program.
That is something that Israel is going to be very hard put to live with.
