BOSTON — No one has ever had any illusions about where stands on the two hottest disputes in the Middle East: the argument over the creation of a state, and the debate over what can be done to assure that does not get a nuclear weapon.
In both cases, he has taken positions very close to those of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of , his friend from their days together as young consultants here in Boston.
But if he is elected president in November and finds himself in negotiations over a future Palestine on Israel’s borders, Mr. Romney may find that his comment at a campaign fund-raiser — captured on video — that “there’s just no way” a separate state can be workable could undermine his effectiveness in bringing the two sides together. And any dealings with the mullahs of Iran may not be facilitated by his description of them, in the same video, as “crazy people.”
Mr. Romney’s aides, in interviews on Tuesday at the campaign’s headquarters in the North End of Boston, played down the statements. They said that there was no news in the Iran comments, and that Mr. Romney was simply arguing for a more credible strategy that would strike fear in the Iranian leadership. And they said his position on the Palestinian dispute remained unchanged: he believes in a two-state solution, the kind President George W. Bush endorsed early in his presidency.
On both the Palestinian and Iran issues, the aides said the real problem was President Obama, who they said had not been tough enough with Iran and had left the Mideast peace process to die, worsening the problem by separating the United States from Israel and leaving its ally feeling insecure and unwilling to negotiate.
Mr. Romney’s foreign and legal policy director, Alex Wong, said the candidate believed that while Mr. Obama says the military option for dealing with Iran is on the table, “he spends more time worrying about an Israeli strike than he does about stopping Iranian nuclear capability.”
Still, Mr. Romney’s comments on the video left the strong impression that he believes any Palestinian state, jammed close to Israel’s most vital and economically vibrant cities, may well be unworkable. He said he had felt “for some time” that “the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.”
Mr. Romney asked his audience to imagine a map where the “border would be, maybe seven miles from Tel Aviv,” and on “the other side of what would be this new Palestinian state would either be Syria at one point or Jordan.”
“And of course the Iranians would want to do through the West Bank exactly what they did through Lebanon, what they did in Gaza,” Mr. Romney said, “which is, the Iranians would want to bring missiles and armament into the West Bank and potentially threaten Israel.”
If Israel patrolled the border, he went on, “the Palestinians would say: ‘No way! We’re an independent country. You can’t, you know, guard our border with other Arab nations.’ ”
“And now how about the airport? How about flying into this Palestinian nation? Are we going to allow military aircraft to come in and weaponry to come in? And if not, who’s going to keep it from coming in? Well, the Israelis. Well, the Palestinians are going to say, ‘We’re not an independent nation if Israel is able to come in and tell us what can land in our airport.’ ”
He concluded: “I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, there’s just no way.”
Mr. Romney said the best that could be hoped for was “some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem.”
The Palestinians, not surprising, had a different view. Yehia Moussa, a Hamas official in Gaza, argued that the United States had “never been suitable” as an arbiter in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute because it instinctively sided with Israel.
“We are sensing a new pattern of alliances among the Zionist lobby and the rightist Americans who believe in Zionist legends and predictions,” Mr. Moussa said. “Romney is part of this.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, Mark Regev, said the prime minister would not comment.
On Iran, Mr. Romney made an argument — often repeated by experts in both political parties — that the biggest risk of an Iranian is that it would supply terrorist groups with the means to make a nuclear weapon or a “dirty bomb,” a conventional device laced with radioactive material that can make parts of a city uninhabitable. But his problem may come in how he characterized the Iranian leadership.
“America could be held up and blackmailed by Iran, by the mullahs, by crazy people,” he said. “So we really don’t have any option but to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon.”
Mr. Romney’s aides did not say whether he believed that Iran’s leaders were rational actors who could be subjected to pressure.
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