American-Israeli relations

Where did all the love go?

Barack Obama has lost patience with Israel. But neither side dares risk a break-up

IT HAS been like a lovers’ tiff without the love—quickly tamped down but with none of the kissing and making up, and no soothing of the underlying rage. As Palestinian violence flared in Jerusalem, Barack Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said through gritted teeth on March 16th that Israel and America enjoyed “a close, unshakable bond”. On the same day Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, claimed he had been “flagrantly misquoted” in a widely reported leak that he had called the quarrel the worst crisis between the allies for 35 years.

It is nonetheless plain that relations between Israel and the Obama administration are indeed in crisis. The spark was last week’s approval by Israel’s interior ministry of 1,600 new homes in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish suburb in East (Palestinian) Jerusalem. This coincided not only with a visit by Vice-President Joe Biden but also with the eve of the “proximity talks” America had at last persuaded Mahmoud Abbas to enter with Binyamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. Mr Biden is known for his affection towards Israel but took the announcement as a gratuitous insult. So did Mrs Clinton, who on March 12th berated Mr Netanyahu for three-quarters of an hour on the phone. She reportedly told Mr Biden to “condemn” the announcement rather than merely “express concern”.

Friends have spats, but this seems to be more than that. America has not simply accepted Mr Netanyahu’s prompt apology. Opinion in the administration is said to be divided. Mr Biden himself and many State Department officials, together with George Mitchell, who was to have supervised the now-stalled proximity talks, advised cooling things down. But, whether out of rage or calculation, Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton preferred to escalate.

On television last Sunday David Axelrod, the president’s chief policy adviser, called Israel’s announcement an “affront” and an “insult”—extraordinary language in exchanges with an ally. And notwithstanding that “unshakable bond”, Mrs Clinton is insisting that Mr Netanyahu must comply with a string of fresh demands. These reportedly include shelving the building plans, avoiding new provocations, agreeing to talk about “core issues” such as Jerusalem in the proximity talks, and offering a new concession, the details of which are not yet clear, to the Palestinian side.

In a confrontation with its superpower patron, must Israel blink first? Perhaps not. “No government of Israel for the last 40 years has agreed to place restrictions on building in Jerusalem,” Mr Netanyahu told the Knesset on March 15th, eliding the distinction between building in all-Jewish suburbs (albeit in territory internationally recognised as Palestinian) and forcibly inserting Jewish settlers into Palestinian suburbs, which he encourages or at least condones. Tensions in the city spilled over on March 16th in a splurge of rioting. There are plans for more building projects in many of the Jewish suburbs. Mr Netanyahu would be hard put to stop them and survive politically.

As for Mr Obama, a president in a titanic struggle over health reform may find it dangerous to inflame the Israel lobby. By the time Israel’s ambassador at last denied having called this the worse crisis for 35 years, Israel’s friends had rallied to its side. The America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) called on the administration to address differences with Israel privately, “in a manner befitting strategic allies”.

Many in Congress echoed the sentiment. Senator Joe Lieberman, who caucuses with the Democrats, said he found the public scolding “very troubling”. Mrs Clinton and Mr Netanyahu are due to attend AIPAC’s conference next week, as are nearly half the members of Congress. AIPAC, it is true, no longer has the field to itself. A newish and doveish pro-Israel lobby group with rising resonance, J Street, urged Mr Obama to push at once for redrawing Israel’s borders on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed land swaps. But the new organisation is still a tiddler, and the White House knows that more than six out of ten Americans sympathise more with Israel than with the Palestinians, a proportion that has risen sharply since the terror attacks on America of September 11th 2001.

How to handle Bibi?

Since becoming prime minister for a second time in 2009, Mr Netanyahu has struggled to befriend Mr Obama and enlist his help against Iran while presiding over a coalition dominated by ultranationalist and religious parties. One school of thought holds that Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton escalated their reaction to the Biden insult in order to make Mr Netanyahu abandon his rightist allies and tread the American path to peace; some say the president was waiting for a chance to destabilise him to force his replacement by someone more emollient. A rival theory is that there is no plan: Ramat Shlomo simply ignited the rage that has smouldered in Mr Obama’s breast since Mr Netanyahu refused his call last year for a total freeze on settlements, forcing Mr Mitchell to waste nearly a year niggling for a temporary compromise.

Aaron David Miller, a veteran State Department negotiator now at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, is one of those who suspect the administration has been driven more by anger than calculation and that its war of words could misfire. “If the president backs down, round two also goes to Netanyahu,” he says. “The administration has created a problem for itself and I’m not sure how they climb down unless Bibi himself helps them.” But patching over the underlying tensions will be hard. In testimony to a Senate committee this week, General David Petraeus, hero of Iraq and America’s commander in the wider Middle East, said the unsolved conflict in Palestine was fomenting anti-Americanism in the wider region. An obvious point, perhaps; but yet another reason why the love is draining out of a special relationship.