Obama challenges Sarkozy about France’s disregarding of the US on the UNESCO issue. One could even argue that Obama was upset about France’s abandonment of Israel on this for which the US was advocating, but that might be going a bit far here. [Supporters will see a strong pro-Israel intent here by Obama]. The conversation leads to Netanyahu. This is interesting because there could well then be linkage between Sarkozy’s decision to vote for statehood in UNESCO, to abandon support for Israel, and to disregard the US. That personal dislike could have that impact on Sarkozy would be a major indictment of his character in and of itself. Sarkozy calls Netanyahu a “liar.” What did he lie about? I am wondering here. Anyway this leads to Obama.

Now with the leader of France being attacked by Obama for not supporting the US and EU stance and launching a tirade about Bibi as a liar, Obama’s response is not “You bet. He’s lied out his you know what!” Nor is it “I can’t stand the man. He is awful!” Instead, Obama actually deflected the conversation in an attempt to create camaraderie with Sarkozy, or to avoid an argument, while playing DOWN the situation. By saying he has to deal with Bibi every day, Obama ended the conversation.

Considering the fact that we already know that there have been a number of heated exchanges over the past couple of years between Obama and Bibi, Obama’s response to Sarkozy was highly restrained, in fact frankly surprisingly so. While Obama would not have said what he did in public, what he did say is a far cry from the sentiments that many ascribe to him and would have expected to hear from him under these circumstances.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of people who each of us like very well to whom we might refer at times as a pain in the ass, and certainly might in response to others who are very angry at those people. I think that Obama supporters will see Obama’s response as nothing more than that, essentially calling Netanyahu a pain in the butt. In fact, one could argue that no few of Netanyahu’s political opponents in Israel would say similar things about him or much worse. Sarkozy’s comments on the other hand are not acceptable at all and were clearly much more hostile and even slanderous.

On the whole, I think that people who dislike Obama will play this situation up, while those who support Obama will have an easy time maintaining that support. Sarkozy has some explaining to do. I think that this conversation will have little or no impact on swaying the opinions of those who support the President and consider him a friend of Israel.

Avi Issacharoff, Barak Ravid and Natasha Mozgovaya in Ha’aretz (via the Daily Alert Blog)

Israel and the Palestinians are at odds over which subjects will open their next round of peace talks.

Prime Minister Netanyahu wants to begin with security arrangements, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and a Palestinian willingness to declare an end to the conflict when an agreement is signed. But Palestinian President Abbas wants to begin by defining the borders of the Palestinian state.

Palestinian leaders adamantly refuse to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Boaz Ganor in Globes (via the Daily Alert Blog):

From the point of view of the heads of the Palestinian Authority, holding direct negotiations with Israel is an obstacle to their strategy, and even puts it at risk. This is because, until now, they have been working to achieve their strategic goals with wall-to wall support (to a certain degree even with the support of Hamas), without being asked to pay any price to Israel without signing any agreements, without recognizing Israel’s right to exist, and without renouncing “the right of return”, etc. Any significant progress in the direct negotiations with Israel will necessarily result in sharp criticism within the Palestinian arena and their position will be weakened.

Related see Jackson Diehl (via memeorandum)

But it’s worth noting that Abbas, following his first extended private conversation with Netanyahu in Washington, spent the subsequent days giving interviews to Arab media in which he publicly rejected each of those terms. Palestinians, he said, will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state; they will not allow Israeli forces to remain in the West Bank. In fact, if he’s pressured to make any concessions, he told the al-Quds newspaper, “I’ll grab my briefcase and leave.”

I don’t agree with everything Diehl writes and hope to follow up tonight.

Credit for the image: Elder of Ziyon.

See previous editions: the original and part ii.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Abbas does not have a mandate to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians since his term in office had expired in January.

Nothing like forcing Abbas to negotiate against his will on behalf of a people whom he does not legitimately represent! There is a slight problem here, I think.

Spock (to Stonn): “After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.”
From the Star Trek episode “Amok Time“

A number of President Obama’s fans in the media used to compare him to Mr. Spock, the logical Vulcan on Star Trek. But maybe they’ve picked the wrong Vulcan to compare him to. Maybe he’s more like Stonn, the Vulcan preferred by Spock’s intended, T’Ping. Spock admonished Stonn, warning him that getting what he wants – T’Ping – may not be as pleasing to him as he now imagines.

If those of us who suspect that President Obama is seeking to bring down the government of Binyamin Netanyahu are correct and he is successful, the President still may not find the region any closer to peace when he leaves office than when he entered.

Hard to believe, but we’ve been here before.

In order to pass the Hebron Accords in January, 1997, then-Prime Minister Netanyahu got an assurance from the Clinton administration that further redeployments (Israeli withdrawals from Judea and Samaria) would be determined unilaterally by Israel. Netanyahu, though, demanded that the Palestinians observe the obligation they signed onto. A year later, the American government was frustrated with Netanyahu for not planning on withdrawals of sufficient size to satisfy Arafat and for not moving ahead. Netanyahu for his part insisted that the Palestinians keep their part of the bargain.

In January 1998, Charles Krauthammer wrote a column, “He negotiates by the rules” about the developing impasse and concluded:

The Hebron agreement was to be the hallmark of reciprocity: Netanyahu got Likud, for the first time in its history, to agree to a withdrawal from part of the Land of Israel, a very significant part — in return for several Palestinian commitments, every one of which has since been violated.
It is now up to President Clinton. The United States brokered the Hebron deal, enshrining these Palestinian obligations in the “Note for the Record.” If Clinton treats his own Hebron agreement as a dead letter — an Israeli withdrawal to be pocketed, Palestinian commitments to be ignored — what possible confidence can Israel have that the next withdrawal will not be yet another sham, another betrayal?

Four months later, Krauthammer wrote:

But even more significant than the absurd arbitrariness of this number is its very existence. Under the Oslo Accords, these interim “further redeployments” are left to Israel’s discretion (unlike the “final status” talks, at which Israel and the Palestinians will together negotiate their final borders).

Indeed, just 16 months ago the Clinton administration reaffirmed this principle. At 11 p.m. on the night of Jan. 15, 1997, as Netanyahu’s cabinet was agonizing over the proposed withdrawal from Hebron, it received an urgent memo from then-ambassador Martin Indyk stating the official US position that “further redeployment phases are issues for implementation by Israel rather than issues for negotiation with the Palestinians. The letters of assurance which secretary Christopher intends to provide to both parties also refer to the process of further redeployments as an Israeli responsibility.”

Sixteen months later in London, Albright tells Israel that its 9 percent is no good. The withdrawal must be 13.1 percent – or else she walks away. She gives Netanyahu three days to give his answer. He tells her: “I don’t need three days. The answer is no.”

So now we have a crisis. And though it was manufactured by State to put pressure on Netanyahu, it reveals instead a crisis of credibility for this administration: How can Israel make ever more dangerous concessions to the Palestinians when the American assurances it receives to offset those concessions are so perishable?

LAST week at the National Press Club, Albright gave a hastily arranged speech to explain her position. Its essential, tendentious theme was that all of the problems in the peace process are traceable to Netanyahu. Everything has gone to pieces, she averred, “in just two years.” You don’t need to be a CIA codebreaker to understand what that means: Netanyahu was elected prime minister two years ago this month.

The historic Hebron withdrawal, in which Netanyahu single-handedly brought Likud and the Israeli Right into the land-for-peace Oslo process, received nary a word. That’s because the only praise offered in her speech was reserved for Arafat.

Albright credits him for making “substantial changes in {his} negotiating position.” He had wanted a 30 percent Israeli withdrawal but was willing to accept 13.1.

How generous.

Eventually, this led to the Wye agreements after which Netanyahu lost his right wing support and the election of Ehud Barak as Prime Minister in May 1999. During the next year and a half, PM Barak worked very well with President Clinton. In 2000 he withdrew Israeli troops from southern Lebanon. And in July, 2000 Barak met with Arafat at the Camp David summit and offered him more than any other Israeli leader ever did. Arafat rejected the offer and two months later started the “Aqsa intidfada.”

Clinton’s term in office that started off with such high hopes for peace ended with a terror war launched against Israel, despite having an Israeli Prime Minister ready to make unheard of concessions.

The problem of course, was that Clinton – as well as much of the conventional wisdom at the time – concerned himself only with (non-existent) Israeli instransigence and ignored the very real intransigence of Yasser Arafat.

I could point to other things – such as the Israeli withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza, both of which strengthened terrorist groups and led to war – but the basic lessonn of recent history is that no matter far Israel is willing to go, the Palestinians and their Arab supporters have always claimed it wasn’t enough and used concessions, not to build for peace but to prepare for war.

President Obama may indeed want a new Prime Minister in Israel. And if his hardball tactics with Netanyahu are successful, he might. But he’ll also discover that having a compliant Israeli leader in place won’t bring peace unless there’s an equally committed Palestinian leader. We haven’t seen such a leader yet.

The question is how many people will have to die if President Obama gets his wish.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Here’s why I think the Obama administration is ratcheting up the pressure over 1,600 new housing units in a Jewish neighborhood of northeastern Jerusalem that will almost certainly remain Israeli in any future agreement with the Palestinians: The Obama administration is trying to topple the Netanyahu government. The Clinton administration did its level best to prevent Bibi from being elected in 1996, and worked very hard to get him thrown out as soon as possible thereafter. The Obama administration has found a stick, and they’re using it to beat the Netanyahu administration in the eyes of the world. The Chicago Machine lies and smears have gone out to the appropriate media outlets. The hyperbole is rising as the Machine cogs hit the media trail. It’s an all-out assault on Bibi and his administration.

Noah Pollak, in a similar vein:

It should be obvious, at this point, that Obama is trying to manufacture an immense political dilemma for Netanyahu by forcing him to choose between two crises — one with the United States should he accept the demands, the other with his coalition partners and the Israeli public should he reject them. For Netanyahu, this is a no-win situation. The only choice is between less damaging options.

Netanyahu should reject the new demands, because they are not made in good faith, they are a reversal of previous Obama commitments, and, most important, the proximity talks themselves are a trap.

And finally, Jeffrey Goldberg (via memeorandum):

I’ve been on the phone with many of the usual suspects (White House and otherwise), and I think it’s fair to say that Obama is not trying to destroy America’s relations with Israel; he’s trying to organize Tzipi Livni’s campaign for prime minister, or at least for her inclusion in a broad-based centrist government. I’m not actually suggesting that the White House is directly meddling in internal Israeli politics, but it’s clear to everyone — at the White House, at the State Department, at Goldblog — that no progress will be made on any front if Avigdor Lieberman’s far-right party, Yisrael Beiteinu, and Eli Yishai’s fundamentalist Shas Party, remain in Netanyahu’s surpassingly fragile coalition.

So what is the goal? The goal is force a rupture in the governing coalition that will make it necessary for Netanyahu to take into his government Livni’s centrist Kadima Party (he has already tried to do this, but too much on his terms) and form a broad, 68-seat majority in Knesset that does not have to rely on gangsters, messianists and medievalists for votes. It’s up to Livni, of course, to recognize that it is in Israel’s best interests to join a government with Netanyahu and Barak, and I, for one, hope she puts the interests of Israel ahead of her own ambitions.

Obama knows that this sort of stable, centrist coalition is the key to success. He would rather, I understand, not have to deal with Netanyahu at all — people near the President say that, for one thing, Obama doesn’t think that Netanyahu is very bright, and there is no chemistry at all between the two men — but he’d rather have a Netanyahu who is being pressured from his left than a Netanyahu who is being pressured from the right.

Goldberg, I think, is right about what’s going on, but his view of Israeli politics is skewed. Shas, for example, has been known to support the peace process, much to the chagrin of other religious parties. Eli Yishai wasn’t announcing a plan for a new community on a remote hilltop, but rather expanding the housing stock in an established neighborhood in Jerusalem.

And to call Avigdor Lieberman’s party “far right” when the party at least believes in territorial compromise is a woeful misnomer. Lieberman holds some views that are characterized as such, but his party, overall, is part of Israel’s mainstream.

Goldberg’s promiscuous use of “right” to describe Netanyahu and the current Israeli government, ignores what’s really happened. Robert Satloff writes:

At the same time, it is also true that a quiet revolution has been going on inside Israel on the peace issue. What has been lost amid the histrionics about construction permits in Jerusalem and Israel’s habit of delivering concessions to Washington weeks after the Obama administration wanted them is that Binyamin Netanyahu has led the Likud-led government into totally uncharted waters. With his Bar-Ilan speech, he became the third “revisionist” prime minister in a row to adopt the “two states for two peoples” paradigm, effectively consigning Greater Israel advocates to the margins of Israeli politics, where they have no national champion. Moreover, with his decision on a West Bank settlement moratorium, Netanyahu made a commitment that no Israeli prime minister since Oslo — Rabin, Sharon, Peres, or Barak — ever made, and in the process tacitly rolled back forty years of Israeli policy that rejected the idea of settlements as an obstacle to peacemaking. The result is that mainstream Israeli debate on the peace process now centers on the fitness of the PA as a negotiating partner and the extent of Israeli territorial demands — 2 percent of the West Bank? 4 percent? 6 percent? — and not on the more basic question of a repartition of Palestine that would leave the other side with the vast majority of West Bank territory in an independent and more-or-less sovereign state. Over time, these developments will be recognized as seismic.

Goldberg’s also wrong when he writes, “this sort of stable, centrist coalition is the key to success” (i.e. a coaltion with Kadima instead of Yisrael Beiteinu). Israel had such a coaltion in 2000 and Arafat rejected Ehud Barak’s offer at Camp David. It had such a coaltion in 2008 and Abbas rejected Ehud Olmert’s offer as the coalition was unraveling.

The problem hasn’t been Israel. The problem has been the Palestinians.

And Meryl’s correct to recall the machinations of the Clinton administration. Netanyahu got his cabinet to approve the Hebron Accords given the assurances of Dennis Ross that Israel would be allowed to determine the future extents of its withdrawals. But though Arafat never kept any of the terms he agreed to back then, the administration spent the next year and a half (until Wye) battering Netanyahu politically and working to undermine his political support. Here’s Charles Krauthammer:

But even more significant than the absurd arbitrariness of this number is its very existence. Under the Oslo Accords, these interim “further redeployments” are left to Israel’s discretion (unlike the “final status” talks, at which Israel and the Palestinians will together negotiate their final borders).

Indeed, just 16 months ago the Clinton administration reaffirmed this principle. At 11 p.m. on the night of Jan. 15, 1997, as Netanyahu’s cabinet was agonizing over the proposed withdrawal from Hebron, it received an urgent memo from then-ambassador Martin Indyk stating the official US position that “further redeployment phases are issues for implementation by Israel rather than issues for negotiation with the Palestinians. The letters of assurance which secretary Christopher intends to provide to both parties also refer to the process of further redeployments as an Israeli responsibility.”

Sixteen months later in London, Albright tells Israel that its 9 percent is no good. The withdrawal must be 13.1 percent – or else she walks away. She gives Netanyahu three days to give his answer. He tells her: “I don’t need three days. The answer is no.”

So now we have a crisis. And though it was manufactured by State to put pressure on Netanyahu, it reveals instead a crisis of credibility for this administration: How can Israel make ever more dangerous concessions to the Palestinians when the American assurances it receives to offset those concessions are so perishable?

LAST week at the National Press Club, Albright gave a hastily arranged speech to explain her position. Its essential, tendentious theme was that all of the problems in the peace process are traceable to Netanyahu. Everything has gone to pieces, she averred, “in just two years.” You don’t need to be a CIA codebreaker to understand what that means: Netanyahu was elected prime minister two years ago this month.

The historic Hebron withdrawal, in which Netanyahu single-handedly brought Likud and the Israeli Right into the land-for-peace Oslo process, received nary a word. That’s because the only praise offered in her speech was reserved for Arafat.

Albright credits him for making “substantial changes in {his} negotiating position.” He had wanted a 30 percent Israeli withdrawal but was willing to accept 13.1.

How generous.

One of the great illusions of the peace process is that every few years, Israelis elect a right wing prime minister whose intransigence halts or reverses the success of the “peace process.” But as Satloff and Krauthammer observed, Israel’s “right wing” prime ministers since Oslo have all moved the “peace process” forward, though their concessions are pocketed by the Palestinians and ignored by the rest of the world. It is, I guess, easier to blame an Israeli Prime Minister who is subject to political pressure, but that hardly moves the “peace process” when the Palestinian leader refuses to make the smallest concession to Israel or even to peace.

Meryl, Noah Pollak and Jeffrey Goldberg are all correct in their reading of President Obama’s motives. It’s happened before. Goldberg, however, is wrong in his reading of the Israeli government and offers support to ongoing Palestinian intransigence.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

For five months, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been fending off U.S. pressure to halt the expansion of West Bank settlements. Now he is reaping dividends for his defiance.

Although Israeli leaders have historically been reluctant to publicly break with the United States for fear of paying a price in domestic support, polls show that Netanyahu’s strategy is working. And that means that after months of diplomacy, the quick breakthrough that President Obama had hoped would restart peace talks has instead turned into a familiar stalemate.

Arab states largely have rebuffed Obama’s request for an overture to Israel until the settlement issue is resolved — a stand that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak emphasized in a meeting with Obama on Tuesday — and the Palestinians have said a settlement freeze is a precondition for resuming negotiations. Meanwhile, the Israeli public seems to have rallied around Netanyahu’s refusal to halt all settlement construction, a backlash that intensified when the Obama administration made clear that it wanted Israel to stop building Jewish homes in some parts of Jerusalem as well as in the occupied West Bank.

In Israel, the dynamic seems to have shifted further from any dramatic concessions. Netanyahu “scored points” for standing up to Obama, said Yoel Hasson, a member of parliament from the opposition Kadima party. In contrast to the United States’ public demands for a settlement freeze, signaled early in the relationship between the two new governments, “I think the U.S. understands that it is better for them to do everything with Netanyahu more quietly,” Hasson said.

Note a few things. First of all despite their differences, Netanyahu has been working with the Obama administration. Now you can quibble whether Netanyahu caved or made a strategic retreat, but it doesn’t appear that Netanyahu is “defying” the administration. (via memeorandum)

(This would indicate strategic retreat.)

By coupling an article that highlights Israeli “defiance” with an article about President Obama being hopeful about peace, the Post effectively identifies Israel as the obstacle to peace. Yes, the reporter, Howard Schneider, acknowledges that no Arab country has acceded to President Obama’s request for confidence building measures for Israel, but he presents it as a reaction to Israel’s refusal to freeze “settlements.”

Israel’s political situation is also being misrepresented. Yes, Israelis apparently approve of Netanyahu’s handling of the diplomacy with the United States. But the approval isn’t simply a matter of Netanyahu’s defiance; he represents a large portion of the Israeli electorate. This isn’t 1996 anymore, Israel has conceded a lot and received nothing in return. At some point any country will get tired of giving away concrete assets in return for unfulfilled promises.

Lastly, Howard Schneider, the Post’s reporter, of course, ignored the hardline resolutions passed by the recently concluded Fatah convention. (See here or here.) For him to frame the issue as Israeli “defiance” is misleading, when, no matter moderate the Israeli government were, it would have no one to deal with on the other side.

The New York Times was somewhat more responsible and accurate in the way it presented the situation:

The leaders’ cautiously optimistic comments coincided with a sign that the Israeli government was trying to lower tensions with the United States on the settlement issue. That signal was in the form of an announcement by Israel’s housing minister that his government had not given final approval for any new housing projects in the West Bank since it took office in late March.

While the gesture from Jerusalem does not affect settlement housing units under construction, it at least allowed the American and Egyptian presidents to say they were hopeful about getting peace talks started again.

The Obama administration has demanded a freeze on all settlement construction, saying that such a move would create momentum for a peace agreement in the Middle East. The conservative-leaning Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has balked at the demand, resulting in an unusually public dispute between Israel and the United States.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Well, Netanyahu won. And he’s the Prime Minister. And Israelis are pretty happy with what he’s doing right now.

In other news, 43 percent of Israelis think the Benjamin Netanyahu government is doing a better job than its predecessor, as opposed to 30 percent who said it is faring worse than the previous Ehud Olmert-led government, according to a poll published Friday in the Haaretz daily.

The Dialog poll also found than Netanyahu himself enjoys a 49 percent approval rating from the public, with 52 percent saying he is best suited to lead the country, as opposed to 34 percent saying opposition leader Tzipi Livni was a better fit.

Israel’s proponents have been saying this all along—the Obama administration’s attempt to repeat what Bill Clinton did to Netanyahu in the 90s will fail. Netanyahu was elected by the will of the people, and is doing what his people want him to do. Those are pretty high numbers for a man who was elected without a party majoriy in the Knesset.

The Ha’aretz spin is negative, of course, since Ha’aretz wanted Tzipi Livni. But here are the salient facts:

The survey by Dialog, conducted Thursday under the auspices of Prof. Camil Fuchs of Tel Aviv University, found Netanyahu’s approval ratings were 18 percent higher than Tzipi Livni’s – a much larger margin than when they were competing for prime minister. Asked who was better suited to be prime minister, 52 percent said Netanyahu, while only 34 said Livni.

[...] Netanyahu’s approval ratings may have jumped 5 points since the last Dialog survey, on June 15. In the most recent survey, 49 percent of the 500 respondents said they were satisfied with Netanyahu’s performance.

So Netanyahu’s approval ratings are going up, more than half of Israelis think he is the right man to lead the country, and Livni’s approval ratings are dropping like lead.

Say, President Obama: Netanyahu won.

A leading contender to become defense minister once characterized the two-state solution that forms the basis of U.S. and international policy toward Israel and the Palestinians as “a story the Western world tells with Western eyes.”

At the end he identifies the candidate:

A top contender for defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, has opposed territorial concessions to the Palestinians for security reasons. As military chief of staff under then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, he opposed the Gaza withdrawal and lost his job.

And how exactly did the withdrawal from Gaza work out? Well elsewhere Schneider described it like this:

Israel dismantled settlements and withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, but the move did not bring the expected quiet. Rockets and mortars fall regularly into Israeli towns. The Islamist group Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections and, about a year later, forced the rival Fatah faction out of Gaza.

“Fall regularly?!?!” Does he mean like manna from heaven? For crying out loud, rockets and mortars don’t fall passively, they are fired by people with murderous intent. No matter how Schneider tries to softpedal it, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza did damage Israel’s security. It made things less peaceful. And yet he describes Gen. Yaalon’s hesitation to withdraw from territory as a liability!

And the biggest problem according to Schneider is the Prime Minster apparent.

Israel’s next government seems tailor-made for conflict with an administration in Washington that supports a Palestinian state and is expected to push for progress on drawing its borders. Prime Minister-designate Binyamin Netanyahu is himself a skeptic when it comes to Palestinian statehood and has referred to U.S.-backed peace talks as a waste of time.

Of course with the recent revelations that Fatah the main constituent organization of the Palestinian Authority – as well as purported “moderates” – doesn’t accept Israel’s right to exist (though this isn’t really news) or that Fatah continues to incite against Israel don’t make it onto Schneider’s radar. Also Fatah seems more inclined to reconcile with Hamas – in a move that will make peace with Israel impossible – than to come to an agreement with Israel. As Barry Rubin writes:

Despite this, the relationship between Hamas and Fatah remain quite complex. It seems bizarre that Hamas set off a civil war, murdered Fatah men in cold blood, and kicked the group out of Gaza yet still most of Fatah is ready to forgive it. There is a strong likelihood that if given the choice, Fatah leaders—though not necessarily Abbas himself—would prefer conciliation with Hamas, which would make any peace with Israel impossible—to making a diplomatic deal with Israel and getting a Palestinian state.
From Israel’s standpoint, of course, how can it negotiate any comprehensive solution with the PA when it cannot deliver half of the territory, people, and armed men who are supposed to be bound by such an agreement? Moreover, the possibility that either Hamas will overthrow Fatah at some future point or even that the two will join together in a new war against Israel rather puts a damper on Israeli willingness to make concessions.

Schneider is probably accurately portraying the Obama administration’s interest in having an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. And he’s identified a likely source of contention between a Netanyahu government and the Americans. But the Israeli reticence towards further concessions or negotiations is well founded. It’s a shame that the administration (and Schneider) are dismissive about Netanyahu’s concerns.

Shmuel Rosner reports:

Netanyahu might think that his refusal to utter the term “Two State Solution” is ideologically justified and logically sound. He might think that Tzipi Livni’s attempt to argue that this was the reason for which she’s refused to join his coalition is lame. No matter what he thinks, Washington – official Washington – doesn’t like this revisionist position. One official told me it was just “childish”. When Netanyahu comes for a visit, he might be asked to make a choice. The price for press availability with President Obama will be a commitment to say the words “two”, “state” and “solution” in the same sentence.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.