The coming confrontation?

For now I’m going to persist in my illusion that Binyamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama are not headed for a major showdown next week when they meet.

Steve Rosen wrote:

The commentariat and the blogs are full of predictions that Obama and Netanyahu are headed for a clash when they meet on May 18, or soon after. These predictions are coming from pundits on the left, who imagine that U.S. pressure on Israel is the magical key to peace, and many on the right, who think the Obama team is dominated by the naive left and Arabists who know and care little about Israel’s security.

I am betting against all of them. My prediction: while Obama and Netanyahu will have differences on the margins, they will find common ground on the main elements of a coordinated strategy for an initial period of 12-24 months.

I know that I’m at odds with a number of bloggers I’m friendly with. But isn’t Obama surrounded by advisers who aren’t especially fond of Israel? Yes, that’s true. Doesn’t the President come from a background that’s hostile to Israel? Yes, that’s true too.

And didn’t the President just send a humiliating message to Israel demanding that Israel not strike Iran without informing him first? That I’m not so sure about. But it was reported in Ha’aretz! I’m not convinced that the message is as clear as Aluf Benn reported.

U.S. President Barack Obama has sent a message to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanding that Israel not surprise the U.S. with an Israeli military operation against Iran. The message was conveyed by a senior American official who met in Israel with Netanyahu, ministers and other senior officials. Earlier, Netanyahu’s envoy visited Washington and met with National Security Adviser James Jones and with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and discussed the dialogue Obama has initiated with Tehran.

The message from the American envoy to the prime minister reveals U.S. concern that Israel could lose patience and act against Iran. It is important to the Americans that they not be caught off guard and find themselves facing facts on the ground at the last minute.

Obama did not wait for his White House meeting with Netanyahu, scheduled for next Monday, to deliver his message, but rather sent it ahead of time with his envoy.

Note what’s going on. While I don’t know if this is standard diplomatic protocol, it appears that both President Obama and PM Netanyahu had an advance man going over the particulars of their meeting. Note that the message was apparently a concern that was “revealed” by the administration’s advance man.

I don’t think that the administration’s advance man leaked the message to Benn. So that means that he heard it from someone on the Israeli side. So would the Israelis have complained that they were dressed down by the President in advance of the meeting with Netanyahu next week? I’m skeptical. More likely, in the course of discussing the meeting with Benn, one of the Israelis commented that the possibility of an Israeli strike against Iran clearly concerned the administration. (How much someone from the advance team could reveal is unclear.) Benn worded the information he got in the most spectacular way, but the actual information that he learned was a lot more pedestrian.

Why do I think that it wasn’t the administration leaking the supposed message that Aluf Benn reported? Because if it came from the United States why didn’t either the NY Times or Washington Post report it? If the President issued a major rebuke to the PM, wouldn’t that be newsworthy here? Yet neither reported that an Israeli paper reported this rebuke. (The Jerusalem Post, from what I can tell didn’t report it either.)

The NY Times even had an article on the upcoming meeting, Israeli Leader to Meet Obama as U.S. Priorities Shift about the likely differences between Israel and the United States, especially regarding Iran and it didn’t mention the warning. The article is worth looking at for a number of details, but it doesn’t confirm Benn’s report at all.

The last time Benjamin Netanyahu met an American president as Israel’s new leader, in 1996, it did not go well. Mr. Netanyahu lectured President Bill Clinton about Arab-Israeli relations, aides recalled, driving Mr. Clinton into a profane outburst after his guest left.

Mr. Netanyahu is likely to avoid a repeat of that when he meets President Obama at the White House on Monday. But the underlying relationship between Israel and the United States has become more unsettled since Mr. Obama took office.

Left unmentioned is that during the Israeli campaign, Clinton held a “summit of the peacemakers” as a way of bolstering Shimon Peres’s campaign against Netanyahu. Obama didn’t interfere as blatantly in the recent Israeli elections.

The Times reports further:

Two weeks ago, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, held a quiet meeting with Mr. Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Israel asked the United States for benchmarks to demonstrate that its diplomatic campaign was working.

The Israeli government, officials said, has assured the United States that it will not take military action against Iran without first consulting Washington. But it has also signaled that it will give the United States only a year or so to show that its good-will approach is getting results.

This would appear to cover the ground about the differences between the United States and Israel regarding Iran. (It also appears that Iran doesn’t have a year to convince the Americans, but only about five months.)

Even Robert Malley is quoted by the Times:

“There is potential for greater tensions than have existed for some time, certainly,” said Robert Malley, another veteran of Middle East peacemaking efforts. “But a collision is not inevitable.”

Presumably he’s somewhat aware of the administration is planning and he doesn’t necessarily see a conflict coming.

So why isn’t a confrontation as likely this time around as it was thirteen years ago?

1) Netanyahu is more popular at home than he was in 1996.
2) American support for Israel against Iran is pretty strong.
3) Nearly sixteen years of bad faith since Oslo has rendered the IOI syndrome InOperatIve.
4) Despite Obama’s leftist background, lately his foreign policy moves have belied his background as Victor Davis Hanson observes:

Consider also the dexterous Obama administration’s own about-face. It still finds it useful to damn the old Bush government’s embrace of wiretaps, military tribunals, and renditions — even as it dares not drop or completely discount these apparently useful Bush policies, albeit under new names and with new qualifiers.

Maybe the administration will see an advantage to showing Israel more sympathy.

Still J-Street thinks that peace won’t be achieved without American pressure (h/t My Right Word) And J-Street’s partners in undermining Israel, the IPF, has gotten the names of several ambassadors attached to a letter (.pdf) they’ve written urging Israel to, among other things, get rid of superfluous checkpoints and urge the Palestinians to stop terror. Of course they also recommend rebuilding funds for Gaza, which will only serve to strengthen Hamas. But then this letter is recommended by someone who considers M. J. Rosenberg, one of the “best Middle East analysts,” so take the recommendation with a grain of salt.

I hope I’m right that there will be no major friction between President Obama and PM Netanyahu. Obviously there is reason to expect differences. Hopefully despite their differing visions they will see the American-Israel alliance as more important than those differences.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.