(Time).The relationship between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu hit rock bottom in the late afternoon of Friday, March 12, 2010, Jerusalem time. That is when Netanyahu took a call from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Upset at Israel's announcement three days earlier of a massive expansion of housing units in occupied East Jerusalem just as Vice President Joe Biden arrived for a goodwill visit, Obama had asked Clinton to call Netanyahu and dress him down. The President was "deeply offended and hurt" by what had happened, Clinton told Netanyahu, according to senior Israeli and American officials familiar with the call. Clinton laid out a series of steps Netanyahu needed to take to repair the damage. Nir Barkat, the mayor of Jerusalem, described the call as a "slap in the face." "It was the lowest point" in the relationship between the two men, says a senior Israeli official.
Obama and Netanyahu are two profoundly different politicians with divergent personalities and worldviews, and over the course of three years, six face-to-face meetings and frequent phone calls, their relationship has never been a natural one. On June 1, when they meet for a seventh time, in Washington at Obama's invitation, both men will again try to overcome their differences. But a breakthrough from two politicians with such different outlooks and instincts is a long-term project. Obama, a former professor, is impassive and pragmatic; Netanyahu, a former commando, is macho and proud. Obama reaches out to rivals; Netanyahu confronts them. Outsiders, some with their own agendas, have made things worse. Obama Administration officials suspect Netanyahu of intentionally undermining U.S. diplomatic initiatives. Prominent Israelis, including Netanyahu's brother-in-law, publicly accuse Obama of anti-Semitism, citing his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his father's Muslim background.
(See pictures of Jerusalem, a divided city.)
This personal fault line has strategic implications: the Obama-Netanyahu relationship has the capacity to affect the security of the U.S., the Middle East and the world. Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren said privately after Clinton's March 12 call that the U.S. and Israel were in their greatest crisis of the past 30 years. Jordan's King Abdullah recently said there could be war in the region this summer if the U.S. doesn't move Israel and the Palestinians toward talks. Most dangerous is Iran's nuclear march, which Netanyahu says he will stop by force if necessary, potentially drawing the U.S. into a wider conflict.
Both men realize what is at stake and are struggling to separate their deep disagreements over the peace process from their common interests. The U.S. remains committed to Israel's security, which Obama has called "sacrosanct," and the countries' military alliance is perhaps tighter than ever. But dozens of interviews with the two leaders' closest advisers, some speaking only on condition of anonymity, reveal the relationship's limits and how the wedge of Jerusalem is deepening the divide between them. Some observers question whether they can communicate should a crisis arise. "Leaders matter," says Daniel Kurtzer, who was an early campaign adviser to Obama and worked with Netanyahu as U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2001 to 2005. "The two of them are going to define what we do on the most critical issues."
Now at the height of their careers, Obama and Netanyahu are having difficulty transcending their differences. "Bibi feels the need to show he is a great Israeli patriot," says a senior Administration official, "whereas this President is a cold-blooded calculator of interest. He doesn't have time for that kind of stuff." In his previous term as Prime Minister, from 1996 to 1999, Netanyahu thwarted Bill Clinton's efforts to advance the peace process. That left residual distrust among those officials who returned to the White House under Obama, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Secretary of State Clinton. Netanyahu's aides, for their part, distrust Obama's inexperience. "Whenever new people get into a complex situation, if they are people who are confident, they believe they can do things others can't," says a senior Israeli source. Burg thinks the two men are irreconcilable. "You cannot stitch together the world visions of Obama and Netanyahu," he says. "This is a clash of the psychological infrastructure."
(See pictures of Israel's assault on Gaza.)
From their first, hastily arranged meeting, in a custodian's office at a Washington airport in March 2007, both men have tried to bridge their differences — Netanyahu engaging warmly; Obama cultivating their common bond, politics. When the two men met for a second time, in Jerusalem in July 2008, each had further reasons to make nice. Obama needed to reassure independent and Jewish voters spooked by his middle name and his association with Rev. Wright that he could be a strong friend to Israel. Netanyahu knew "he couldn't afford to have a bad relationship with another [U.S.] Administration," says someone who knows him well. Obama told Netanyahu he had introduced in the U.S. Senate an Iran divestment bill Netanyahu had promoted at their previous meeting. Obama said, "You know, Mr. Prime Minister, people attribute a lot more ideological baggage to us than we actually carry." Netanyahu said, "I agree with you completely."
But "whatever peace was made that summer," says Kurtzer, "was clearly very, very shallow." When Obama and Netanyahu held their first meeting as President and Prime Minister on May 18, 2009, in Washington, Obama explained that to begin drying up the sources of Muslim extremism, he wanted to jump-start the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Talks would provide hope to Palestinians, Obama argued, diminishing their motivation to attack Israel, and would undermine Islamic extremists abroad who use the confrontation as a recruiting tool. He asked Netanyahu to do something no other Israeli Prime Minister had done: stop the appropriation of Arab land in East Jerusalem by Jewish activists. Palestinians, who claim East Jerusalem as their capital, had made that a precondition for peace talks with Israel, but Netanyahu, who had formed his right-wing government six weeks earlier on a platform opposing Palestinian statehood, would have none of it. "We weren't even going there," recalls Oren. Days later, Netanyahu said, "Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people, a city reunified so as never again to be divided."
On the spot, Netanyahu aides could feel the relationship going south. Nor did everyone in the U.S. think confronting Netanyahu over Jerusalem was a good idea. Obama's peace envoy, George Mitchell, argued that the demand could have a "counterproductive" impact by putting the hardest issue, Jerusalem, on the table before talks had even started, driving Netanyahu into a defensive, nationalist crouch. But Rahm Emanuel, who had volunteered in the Israel Defense Forces as a civilian mechanic during the first Gulf War, contended that if the U.S. didn't push Netanyahu "hard and clear and early" on Jerusalem, Netanyahu would never make concessions once negotiations got under way. It was fundamentally a disagreement over two "different views of how Bibi would react," says a senior Administration official. In the wake of the May 18 summit, the President held a meeting with a dozen or so of his closest advisers on Israeli-Palestinian issues, known as the "peace team," to figure out how to proceed. After hearing the arguments on both sides, Obama decided in favor of Emanuel's view.
Both sides were shaken by their troubled first year, and the relationship between the two men has remained brittle. Three weeks ago, indirect talks between Israelis and Palestinians began in Jerusalem, but little progress is expected from negotiations between two sides that aren't actually speaking face to face. Obama has spent time this spring repairing relations with American Jewish groups, dispatching top aides David Axelrod, General James Jones and others to reassure them and speaking directly to Jewish members of Congress about the state of relations with Israel. On Iran, Obama's latest push for sanctions has Israelis breathing a sigh of relief that his promises to get tough on Tehran's nuclear program are not just for show.
And then, on May 26, while on a private family trip to Israel, Rahm Emanuel held a meeting with Netanyahu in Jerusalem. During this session, he invited his host to the White House June 1 to discuss Iran and the peace process, after Netanyahu's scheduled visit to Canada. It has quickly turned into a chance for the two leaders to lower the temperature, get past any personal differences and perhaps make progress on the peace process as well. "It's an opportunity to reset the whole thing and turn a new page," says a senior Netanyahu adviser. But neither side is expecting any great leap forward.
