SLATE: …Over the weekend, that posture changed. On Monday, in a speech to J Street, a liberal Jewish group, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough explained why the administration didn’t buy Netanyahu’s post-election spin:
After the election, the prime minister said that he had not changed his position. But for many in Israel and in the international community, such contradictory comments call into question his commitment to a two-state solution, as did his suggestion that the construction of settlements has a strategic purpose of dividing Palestinian communities and his claim that conditions in the larger Middle East must be more stable before a Palestinian state can be established. We cannot simply pretend that those comments were never made, or that they don’t raise questions about the prime minister’s commitment to achieving peace through direct negotiations.
McDonough’s speech cut through the agnosticism. In his analysis, Netanyahu’s election-eve rejection of statehood wasn’t just a superficial gesture to the Israeli right. It matched the prime minister’s remarks about Har Homa and creating a staging ground for Islamic radicals. Each statement—no state on my watch, any state would be a military threat, settlements divide the West Bank—reinforced the others. The portrait cohered. This was the real Netanyahu…
Many people with an interest in the U.S.-Israeli relationship have watched the administration’s post-election statements with alarm. Its criticism of Netanyahu has seemed unyielding and unappeasable. I don’t think Obama and his aides have worked out exactly what they want. But they do seem to be settling on a critique that focuses on Israel’s settlement policy and its unrealistic insistence on regional stability as a prerequisite to statehood. If Netanyahu wants to regain credibility in Washington and the rest of the world, that’s what he’ll have to surrender… (more)
