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Obama Steps Back Into a Conflict He Avoided With Support for Israel, Obama Gains Leverage Over Netanyahu
(about 7 hours later)
WASHINGTON — By sending Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to the Middle East to put an American imprimatur on a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, President Obama has thrust himself squarely into a conflict he has largely avoided over the past two years. WASHINGTON — In the fractious relationship between President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the shoe may have just shifted to the other foot.
The stakes for him, and for the United States, are high. If Washington can help broker a deal to quell the violence, it could set the tone for Mr. Obama’s second-term relationship with three pivotal players in the region: Israel, the Palestinians and, most crucially, Egypt. After more than a year of Mr. Obama needing — and not getting — much support from his Israeli counterpart in his efforts to woo American Jewish voters at home ahead of his re-election, it is now Mr. Netanyahu, Israel experts say, who needs Mr. Obama to help shore up his support at home.
Mr. Obama has been unstinting in his public support of Israel over the past several days, while an American-financed antimissile system, Iron Dome, has destroyed scores of incoming Hamas rockets. The crisis holds the possibility of resetting the president’s often-fraught relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli leader is facing an election in January, and if there is one thing that Israeli voters do not like, scholars say, it is any kind of daylight between their prime minister and the American president in times of strife.
But Mr. Obama has also reached out multiple times to Egypt’s recently elected president, Mohamed Morsi, urging him to play a calming role with Hamas, the militant group that governs Gaza. As the United States gropes for a relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood-led government in Egypt, much will depend on how Mr. Morsi navigates this perilous moment. After a year in which Mr. Netanyahu made no secret of his support for Mitt Romney, now might seem a perfect time for Mr. Obama to return the favor. And yet, as Israel and Hamas — and their proxies, the United States and Egypt — struggle to agree on a cease-fire in the fighting in Gaza, he has not done so.
At one level, Mrs. Clinton’s emergency mission seems deeply familiar – an American secretary of state jetting into yet another Middle East conflagration. Mrs. Clinton’s predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, spent her final weeks in office in 2009 desperately seeking an end to the last major outbreak of fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Instead, Mr. Obama has sent Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to help seal a cease-fire agreement. He has been steadfast in his public support for Israel’s right to defend itself from rocket attacks from Gaza. And he has made no mention of the need for “restraint” from Israel in its bombing campaign, which would be interpreted as an American effort to pressure Israel.
But for Mr. Obama, such direct involvement is a sharp shift from his hands-off posture of the past two years. Having expended energy and prestige on a futile effort to restart peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians during his first two years in office, a frustrated Mr. Obama had largely pulled back from that effort – as did his secretary of state. Mr. Obama has struck as vigorous a pro-Israel stance as President George W. Bush did when he faced similar crises, in Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in 2006 and in its last Gaza incursion, in 2008.
When his special envoy to the region, George J. Mitchell, resigned in May 2011, Mr. Obama replaced him with David Hale, a career diplomat with a much lower profile and a less ambitious portfolio. Mrs. Clinton, having made frequent trips to Israel, stopped traveling there regularly. The president has been on the phone almost daily with Mr. Netanyahu, and even more often with President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader whom Mr. Obama has been leaning on to broker a cease-fire. And it is Mr. Obama who has provided financing for the Iron Dome missile defense system, which has prevented hundreds of rockets from hitting Israeli targets.
Mr. Obama’s waning appetite for Middle East peacemaking coincided with his re-election campaign, which made any attempt to jump-start a moribund process seem politically unwise. His relationship with Mr. Netanyahu, which soured early on because of his demand that Israel stop building Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, deteriorated further when Mr. Netanyahu appeared to favor Mitt Romney in the election. All of this, Middle East experts say, means that Mr. Obama may have buttressed his own standing with the Israeli public, and is now in a far better position to start pressing Mr. Netanyahu on issues from the Israeli siege of Gaza to Iran to the dormant Middle East peace process, where he has had little leverage.
For Mr. Obama, the timing of the Gaza eruption underscores what is likely to be a recurring tension in the second term: his desire to reorient America to Asia, while the ancient conflicts of the Middle East keep pulling the United States back to that region. For the moment, diplomats and analysts said, Mr. Obama is unlikely to press Mr. Netanyahu too hard. But as negotiations over a cease-fire take shape, the president could use his new leverage on issues like lifting Israel’s blockade of Gaza and allowing greater freedom of movement for Palestinians and their goods across borders.
The president made a historic postelection visit to Myanmar, capping a diplomatic opening that is part of a heightened American engagement in the region. But Mr. Obama found himself working the phones late at night with Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Morsi, pleading for “de-escalation” in the Gaza conflict. “There’s been a reversal of the balance between Bibi and Obama,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former United States ambassador to Israel and an author of “Bending History,” a study of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy.
Mrs. Clinton, too, has devoted much of her time to Asia, developing a fast friendship with the Burmese pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. But a day after Mrs. Clinton accompanied Mr. Obama on a visit to her lakeside home, she had to race to her plane and fly overnight to Tel Aviv to meet with Mr. Netanyahu and to travel to Ramallah to meet with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. “Bibi backed the wrong horse,” Mr. Indyk said. “Now the Israeli public is appreciating Obama’s support in a way that they never have before. So Bibi cannot position himself as saying no to the president of the United States.”
For Mrs. Clinton, whose final days at the State Department seemed destined to be dominated by questions over the deadly attack on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya, the fighting in Gaza may instead bring her term to a close on a more familiar theme. Robert Malley, program director for the Middle East and North Africa with the International Crisis Group, said, “When the president decides he’s going to engage on the other side of the peace equation, does he try to cash in, and get something in exchange for the support he showed for Israel at this stage?”
Administration officials said it was too soon to talk about making demands of Israel; until the Gaza crisis is settled, they say, Mr. Obama’s focus is on preventing further loss of life in both Israel and Gaza. But one official said the president was intent on restarting the moribund peace process between Israelis and Palestinians in his second term. That may be easier said than done. Mr. Malley points out that even if Mr. Obama tries to restart peace talks, so much has happened that “the ground has shifted.”
For one thing, the Hamas militant group, which controls Gaza and with whom the United States does not talk, has increased its standing as a representative of the Palestinian people, while the Palestinian Authority — America’s preferred partner — has become increasingly sidelined in the West Bank.
Moreover, neither side has shown much interest in moving from entrenched positions on the “final status” issues that have bedeviled peace negotiators for more than 30 years. Mr. Obama, so far, has been unwilling to invest the kind of political capital and negotiating muscle it will take to force a peace deal on the Israelis, Palestinians and other Arabs in the region.
As Mr. Obama weighs his approach, he can draw from history. American presidents have not hesitated to weigh in on Israeli elections — not unlike what Mr. Netanyahu did to Mr. Obama — and with similarly dismal results.
In 1995, for instance, after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the White House of President Bill Clinton was open about its preference for Shimon Peres over his election rival, Mr. Netanyahu, former officials recall, in part because it believed Mr. Peres would carry on Mr. Rabin’s commitment to the peace process.
But even after Mr. Clinton championed Mr. Peres’s proposals at a conference in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition won the election in May 1996, and Mr. Clinton was left to deal with an antagonistic partner.
“We are terrible at this, and it makes no sense,” said Aaron David Miller, a longtime Middle East negotiator who is now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Mr. Miller, who described the relationship between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu as “the most dysfunctional I’ve ever seen,” said that by saving his political ammunition now, Mr. Obama would have “the leeway, latitude and influence later to cajole him on Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian issue.”
In their conversations during the crisis, there has already been a perceptible change in the tone between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu, according to officials. “There’s a real sense of how important these conversations have been,” said Dennis B. Ross, a former senior adviser to Mr. Obama on the Middle East.
Assuming that Mr. Netanyahu stays in power after January, Mr. Ross said that the prime minister and Mr. Obama would have a chance to bring a new perspective to their relationship — in a Middle East landscape transformed by the Arab Spring.
“They know they’re going to be together,” Mr. Ross said. “And they know that some of the political considerations which seemed important will no longer be as important.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 20, 2012Correction: November 20, 2012

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the Iron Dome antimissile system. It is American-financed, but not American-made.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the Iron Dome antimissile system. It is American-financed, but not American-made.