White House Seeks to Publicly Mend Fences With Netanyahu, but Issues Remain

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/23/world/middleeast/white-house-mending-fences-with-netanyahu.html

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WASHINGTON — As President Obama sat with Jewish leaders at the White House last week, trying to reassure them of his deep commitment to Israel, some wanted to know whether he would soon invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for an in-person visit.

Not yet, Mr. Obama responded.

He told the group that a face-to-face meeting at the White House would probably end with Mr. Netanyahu publicly venting his complaints about the president’s policies, particularly his efforts to forge a nuclear agreement with Iran, according to people familiar with the private meeting who would provide details about it only on the condition of anonymity.

So for now, the president said, he would speak with the prime minister over the telephone, and an Oval Office invitation would wait until after the June 30 deadline for negotiating the details of the Iran deal.

After simmering tensions gave way to open hostility between the two leaders this year, the White House is working to publicly mend fences with Mr. Netanyahu and demonstrate its support for Israel, including by sending Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to speak at an Israeli Independence Day celebration in Washington on Thursday.

Yet as Mr. Obama’s response last week suggested, substantive policy differences, exacerbated by longstanding distrust, remain between the American president and the Israeli prime minister, making a full-blown public reconciliation unlikely for now.

Instead, the White House is engaged in an aggressive effort to assuage the concerns of American Jewish groups and pro-Israel members of Congress over the nuclear agreement with Iran, and to limit the potential political fallout for Democrats of what has become a bitter rift in the American and Israeli relationship.

“This administration is nothing if not pragmatic, and the issue on the table now is creating conditions for a reasonable outcome should the Iran agreement be reached,” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel and Egypt who is now a professor at Princeton.

“There was a moment in the midst of this where you wonder if anger was replacing policy,” Mr. Kurtzer continued, “but they came to their senses and said, ‘O.K., anger is not a policy, now we’ve made our point, it’s time to move on.’ ”

The outreach by the White House is a reversal from earlier this year, when the administration made little attempt to hide its outrage after Mr. Netanyahu arranged, without Mr. Obama’s knowledge, to use a speech to Congress to denounce the president’s emerging deal with Iran.

Mr. Biden’s appearance on Thursday is at an event hosted by Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States and a close confidant of Mr. Netanyahu’s whom the White House blamed for orchestrating the address.

The public feuding was on display last month before and after the Israeli elections, when Mr. Obama and his team reacted angrily to Mr. Netanyahu’s statements opposing the formation of a Palestinian state and expressing alarm that Israeli Arabs were turning out “in droves” to vote.

Despite Mr. Netanyahu’s apology for the comment on Arab voters and his attempts to walk back his comment about a two-state solution, the president and other senior officials said they were reassessing their policy options, including whether to drop the United States’ longstanding opposition at the United Nations to a resolution recognizing a Palestinian state.

In the past few weeks, by contrast, the president has spoken publicly and in personal terms of his strong devotion to Israel and has spent hours meeting privately at the White House with Jewish leaders, with little mention of any reassessment.

“We are evaluating our approach to a two-state solution, not our broader relationship with Israel,” said Jen Psaki, Mr. Obama’s communications director. “Despite occasional differences on matters of policy, our relationship is strong and enduring, as demonstrated by our unwavering support for Israel’s security.”

The change in tone reflects a sense among some senior members of Mr. Obama’s administration that the public feuding with Mr. Netanyahu had become excessive and unseemly, threatening to undermine efforts to build support for a potential Iran deal and to erode Democrats’ political advantage with Jewish voters.

There is also a wait-and-see component to the administration’s strategy. As Mr. Netanyahu forms his government, senior administration officials say they are watching what moves he will make and how he will address the issue of a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. And as talks to hammer out the details of the nuclear pact with Iran quietly gain momentum, there is little advantage for Mr. Obama in stoking divisions with Israel that are certain to sharpen should a deal materialize.

“It makes good sense and it’s encouraging that they’re pivoting back to language that underscores the shared interests we have with Israel,” said Josh Block, the president of the Israel Project, which aims to educate the public about Israel. “On the other hand, the problem with the administration’s approach to the Middle East and to Israel is not just one of rhetoric; it’s a problem of substance.”

Nathan J. Diament, executive director for public policy at the Orthodox Union, an umbrella organization for Orthodox Jewry, said that the shift in tone and Mr. Biden’s appearance on Thursday signaled “progress” in repairing the frayed ties between the United States and Israel, but that the real test of the relationship would be in how the two governments dealt with the Iran deal and the peace process in the coming months.

What is evident, though, people close to Mr. Obama say, is that after a rare flash of public exasperation with an ally, the White House is working to tamp down its confrontations with Israel.

“There was a spike in the EKG that was triggered by the prime minister’s remarks in and around the election,” said one person who attended last week’s White House meeting with Mr. Obama, “but it feels like the pulse rate has started to come down again.”