Obama-Netanyahu history long strained

Israeli’s visit adds political tension

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prays at the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray, in Jerusalem's Old City, Saturday Feb. 28, 2015. (AP Photo/Marc Sellem, Pool)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prays at the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray, in Jerusalem's Old City, Saturday Feb. 28, 2015. (AP Photo/Marc Sellem, Pool)

WASHINGTON -- For six years, President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been on a collision course over how to halt Iran's nuclear ambitions, a high-stakes endeavor both men see as a centerpiece of their legacies.

The coming weeks will put the relationship between their countries, which otherwise remain stalwart allies, to one of its toughest tests.

Netanyahu is bound for Washington for an address Tuesday to Congress aimed squarely at derailing Obama's bid for a diplomatic deal with Tehran. At the same time, Secretary of State John Kerry and other international negotiators will be in Switzerland for talks with the Iranians, trying for a framework agreement before a late March deadline.

In between are Israel's elections March 17, which have heightened the political overtones of Netanyahu's visit to Washington.

And adding another political layer to the diplomatic tension, the architect of grass-roots and online efforts that propelled Obama's presidential campaigns from Chicago is advising an operation in Tel Aviv focused on ousting Netanyahu in those elections.

The prime minister is speaking to Congress at the request of Republicans. His visit was coordinated without the Obama administration's knowledge, deepening tensions between two leaders who have never shown much affection for each other.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal Jewish advocacy group J Street, said Netanyahu was "crossing some lines that haven't been crossed before and is putting Israel into the partisan crossfire in a way it has not been before."

But the largest pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has tried to play down the partisanship.

"AIPAC welcomes the prime minister's speech to Congress and we believe that this is a very important address," spokesman Marshall Wittmann said. "We have been actively encouraging senators and representatives to attend and we have received an overwhelmingly positive response from both sides of the aisle."

Nearly a dozen Democratic lawmakers plan to sit out Netanyahu's speech, calling it an affront to the president.

The White House has argued that Netanyahu's plan to deliver the speech two weeks before the Israeli elections is harming the U.S.-Israel relationship by injecting partisanship.

Republicans contend it is Obama who is playing politics and cite former Obama campaign strategist Jeremy Bird's consulting work for the group V15 -- an independent Israeli organization that does not support specific candidates but is campaigning to replace Israel's current government -- as proof that the president is quietly rooting for Netanyahu's defeat.

U.S. strategists have for decades signed on to work in Israeli political campaigns, with Democrats usually aligned with the Labor Party and Republicans often backing Netanyahu's Likud Party. There is no evidence to suggest Obama or any of his senior aides had anything to do with the move by his former top campaign official, who has never worked at the White House, to join the effort to defeat Netanyahu.

Asked about the suggestion that Obama was tacitly backing an effort to oust Netanyahu, Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, said, "The long tradition of bipartisan support for the U.S.-Israel relationship has served both our countries well for generations, and President Obama will continue to go to great lengths to shield our alliance from the smallness of party politics."

Bird, who was Obama's national field director in 2012 and is a founding partner of the political consulting firm 270 Strategies, declined to be interviewed. But he said through a spokesman that V15 and its partners had asked him and his firm "to share best practices in organizing so they can maximize their impact both online and on the ground."

Bird's work in Israel started in November 2013, when he began consulting with One­Voice, an organization pressing to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He signed on with V15 in December 2014, after Netanyahu called the March 2015 elections.

Bird is the latest in a long line of Americans who have worked on foreign political campaigns, particularly in Israel. In December, Netanyahu hired John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster. Former Obama aides, including Bill Knapp and Josh Isay, also have worked for the prime minister.

Former campaign strategists to Bill Clinton, including his pollster Stanley Greenberg and strategist James Carville, went to Israel in 1999 to help Ehud Barak defeat Netanyahu.

Iran negotiations

A defining challenge for both Obama and Netanyahu has been stopping Iran from building nuclear weapons, yet they have approached the negotiations far differently.

For Obama, getting Iran to veritably prove it is not pursuing nuclear weapons would be a bright spot in a foreign-policy arena in which numerous outcomes are uncertain and would validate his early political promise to negotiate with Iran without conditions.

Netanyahu considers unacceptable any deal with Iran that doesn't end its nuclear program entirely and opposes the diplomatic pursuit as one that minimizes what he considers an existential threat to Israel.

Tehran says its nuclear program is peaceful and exists only to produce energy for civilian use.

"Through scaremongering, falsification, propaganda and creating a false atmosphere even inside other countries, [Israel] is attempting to prevent peace," Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, said Saturday in Tehran. "I believe that these attempts are in vain and should not impede reaching a [nuclear] agreement."

U.S. and Iranian officials reported progress in the latest talks on a deal that would freeze Tehran's nuclear program for 10 years, but allow it to slowly ramp up in the final years of the accord.

Obama has refused to meet Netanyahu during his visit, with the White House citing its policy of not meeting with foreign leaders soon before their elections. Vice President Joe Biden and Kerry will both be out of the country on trips announced after Netanyahu accepted the GOP offer to speak on Capitol Hill.

The prime minister is scheduled to speak Monday at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual policy conference. The Obama administration will be represented at the event by United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power and national security adviser Susan Rice, who criticized Netanyahu's plans to address Congress as "destructive" to the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

The Iran dispute has spotlighted rifts in a relationship that has been frosty from the start. Obama and Netanyahu lack any personal chemistry, leaving them with virtually no reservoir of good will to get them through their policy disagreements.

Within months of taking office, Obama irritated Israel when, in an address to the Middle East, he challenged the legitimacy of Jewish settlements on Palestinian-claimed land and cited the Holocaust as the justification for Israel's existence, not any historical Jewish tie to the land.

The White House was furious when Netanyahu's government defied Obama and announced plans to construct new housing units in east Jerusalem while Biden was visiting Israel in 2010. Additional housing plans that year upended U.S. efforts to restart peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.

The tension between Obama and Netanyahu was laid bare in an unusually public manner during an Oval Office meeting in 2011. In front of a crowd of journalists, the prime minister lectured Obama at length on Israel's history and dismissed the president's conditions for restarting peace talks.

Later that year, a microphone caught Obama telling his then-French counterpart in a private conversation that while he may be fed up with Netanyahu, "You are sick of him, but I have to work with him every day."

Despite suspecting that Netanyahu was rooting for his rival in the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama tried to reset relations with the prime minister after his re-election. He made his first trip as president to Israel, and the two leaders went to great lengths to put on a happy front, referring to each other by their first names and touring some of the region's holy sites together.

The healing period was to be short-lived.

Another attempt at Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed. Israeli officials were withering in their criticism of Kerry, who had shepherded the talks, with the country's defense minister calling him "obsessive" and "messianic."

The Obama administration returned the favor last summer with its own unusually unsparing criticism of Israel for causing civilian deaths when war broke out in Gaza.

The U.S. and Israel have hit rocky patches before.

The settlement issue has been a persistent thorn in relations, compounded by profound unhappiness in Washington over Israeli military operations in the Sinai Peninsula, Iraq and Lebanon during Gerald Ford's, Ronald Reagan's and George H.W. Bush's administrations that led those presidents to take or consider direct punitive measures.

Yet through it all, the United States has remained Israel's prime benefactor, providing it with $3 billion per year in assistance and defending it from criticism at the U.N. and elsewhere.

"We have brought relations back in the past and we will do it again now because at the end of the day they are based on mutual interests," said Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. and informal adviser to Netanyahu.

"The interests of Israel and the U.S. are similar and sometime identical and I think that is what will determine in the end and not feelings of one kind or another."

Information for this article was contributed by Julie Pace and Matthew Lee of The Associated Press and by Julie Hirschfeld Davis of The New York Times.

A Section on 03/01/2015

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