Netanyahu departed Washington for Israel late Wednesday night, after what some sources described as a sometimes frantic last 24 hours of decision-making after a late night meeting with Obama at the White House Tuesday night.
Netanyahu was reported to have spent part of the day Wednesday in a secure room in the Israeli Embassy making calls back to advisors in Israel, after canceling a round of interviews he had been scheduled to have with the media Wednesday morning. He also met with Sen. George Mitchell and his advisors worked with Dennis Ross and Dan Shapiro to try to come to agreement on a written document of confidence building measures Netanyahu would agree to, but could not close the gap.
“Apparently Bibi is very nervous, frantically calling his ‘seven,’ trying to figure out what to do,” one Washington Middle East hand said Wednesday. “The word I heard most today was ‘panic.’"
As Ben reports:
U.S. officials said they’re working to force the Israeli prime minister to take control of what they and Palestinian leaders see as provocative new construction projects in East Jerusalem — and to ease the Israelis into limited, indirect talks with the Palestinians regarding a two-state solution.
But Netanyahu has indicated that those two things may be in contradiction and has spurned American demands for immediate confidence-building measures since a spat erupted two weeks ago over the construction in Jerusalem. […]
The U.S. frustration, meanwhile, stems in part from a deep uncertainty over Netanyahu’s long-term goals.
“For [the Obama] administration, details are magnified when they’re not sure of Netanyahu’s overall direction,” said David Makovsky, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author, with Obama aide Dennis Ross, of a recent book on the region. “If they had a sense of where he’s going, they’d cut him slack.”
That distrust feeds a vicious circle: Netanyahu, observers said, has refused — out of distrust — to signal to Obama how far he’s willing to go in final-status negotiations. That caginess deepens the distrust.
“If last night they shared that strategic vision, that’s what will repair the relationship,” said Makovsky. “There’s no sign of that, but of course we don’t know.”
More on the question about what Netanyahu's strategic vision is -- and is there a Netanyahu 2.0 -- from David Remnick:
The essential question for Israel is not whether it has the friendship of the White House—it does—but whether Netanyahu remains the arrogant rejectionist that he was in the nineteen-nineties, the loyal son of a radical believer in Greater Israel, forever settling scores with the old Labor élites and making minimal concessions to ward off criticism from Washington and retain the affections of his far-right coalition partners. Is he capable of engaging with the moderate and constructive West Bank leadership of Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, and making history? Does there exist a Netanyahu 2.0, a Nixon Goes to China figure who will act with an awareness that demographic realities—the growth not only of the Palestinian population in the territories but also of the Arab and right-wing Jewish populations in Israel proper—make the status quo untenable as well as unjust?
....There is nothing the Israeli leadership could do to make the current fantasy of an indifferent American leadership become a reality faster than to get lost in the stubborn fantasy of sustaining the status quo.
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