At Politico, Laura Rozen surveys current and former powercrats, from left to right, on the wisdom of the Obama administration’s strategy of "waiting for a pragmatic Bibi."
Netanyahu is frequently described by both his Israeli and American interlocutors as having conflicting impulses. They see him as torn between the hawkish ideological views of his Likud party, and a more reasonable side that eventually emerged in the late 1990s, though only after he had exhausted the patience of the Clinton administration officials who dealt with him.
Back in 1997, after Netanyahu announced settlement construction in Har Homa, the Clinton administration was apoplectic about what to do about him, Dennis Ross, President Bill Clinton’s Middle East peace envoy, recounted in his memoir The Missing Peace.
But, Ross recounts, he argued for a different approach: “I had no illusions about Bibi, but also believed we could not wish Bibi away… It was important, I argued, not to lose sight of who Bibi was and what he wanted. He saw himself in historic, grandiose terms…. If we could demonstrate that we were making every effort to work with him, we would have a basis for taking him on later if he did not deliver. Better to let him fail than to cut him off—allowing him to say that we were unfairly pressuring Israel, and making failure a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
In his second incarnation as Israeli prime minister, however, Netanyahu is operating in an Israeli political landscape grown even more reluctant of making the concessions that may be necessary to achieve a peace agreement than it was in the late 1990s.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/35616.html#ixzz0klK0sWhm
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