Don't let this lull in the continuing brouhaha between Israel and the United States fool you.
It will get noisy again.
Here's why: The recent confrontation between President Barack Obama, fresh from his masterful victory on health care reform, and a more uncertain Benjamin Netanyahu reflects a far deeper problem in the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
Amid all the distraction – consider Candy Crowley's “Who's serious about peace?” back and forth with Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren Sunday on CNN — one thing is clear: Neither the United States nor Israel has a coherent strategy to deal with the Palestinian issue.
Until they find one, the U.S.-Israeli relationship will continue looking more like a soap opera than a successful tool in Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
It’s not unusual for a new administration to stumble when taking on the Arab-Israeli issue. Still, Obama has made more than his fair share of mistakes.
Fourteen months in, we have no negotiations, a major fight with the Israelis and little street cred on the Arab side. Moreover, the goal of the enterprise — proximity talks, in which Washington shuttles between the two sides — now hardly seems worth the time and effort.
This is all taking us back to the Stone Age of Arab-Israeli peacemaking — when the two sides wouldn’t even sit down together.
That the Obama administration spent much of the last year trying to decide whether to pander to the Israelis or pummel them reflects that it doesn’t quite know where it’s heading.
Not surprisingly, Israel looks to have no credible approach to the Palestinian problem either. On peace process issues, Israel is deeply divided. And Netanyahu’s coalition reflects this.
Netanyahu is older and wiser than his first iteration as prime minister. But he is ever the juggler, with many balls in the air. Constrained by the settlers, his own Likud ideology and his coalition partners, he is unable — and unwilling — to come up with a coherent approach to negotiations that is credible to the Palestinians and the Americans.
He’d probably like to be friends with Obama. But there’s that pesky matter of those new housing units and settlements. Indeed in East Jerusalem, building new units in Jewish neighborhoods and elsewhere has become, for Netanyahu, as natural, and as unthinking, as breathing.
There’s nothing all that unusual about tension in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. It comes and goes — like a summer storm that breaks hard but then leaves behind blue sky.
But unlike previous outbursts, there appears to be no one in charge on either side. Both act and react without any direction or semblance of strategy.
Fighting with the Israelis is an occupational reality in any serious diplomacy about Arab-Israeli relations. In fact, success depends on it. Just ask Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and James Baker — the only three Americans who succeeded in Arab-Israeli diplomacy. (I worked for Baker, and know how much strategy matters.)
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