WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Tuesday that the prospect of Israeli-Palestinian peace “seems very dim” in the wake of pre-election remarks last week by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that he is evaluating “how we manage Israeli-Palestinian relations over the next several years.”
“What we can’t do is pretend there’s a possibility of something that’s not there,” Obama said during a news conference with visiting Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. “For the sake of our own credibility, I guess we have to be honest about this.”
His remarks were the sharpest in a series of U.S. expressions of barely concealed anger since Netanyahu, appealing for the far-right Israeli vote, said there would be no Palestinian state while he was prime minister.
Obama acknowledged that Netanyahu had issued several “correctives” since his victory in the March 17 elections, but he made clear that he “took him at his word” the first time around, as did “a lot of voters inside Israel.”
“Afterward, he pointed out that he didn’t say ‘never,’ but there would be a series of conditions,” Obama said of explanatory remarks Netanyahu has made since the elections. “But, of course, the conditions were such that they would be impossible to meet anytime soon.”
Netanyahu is feuding with the White House over an emerging deal with Iran and also has come under fire for comments he made in the final days of Israel’s election last week. Netanyahu warned his supporters that Arab voters were heading to the polls “in droves.”
Obama said the rejection of a fundamental premise of decades-long efforts, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, may trigger “a reaction by the Palestinians that, in turn, could elicit a counter-reaction by the Israelis.”
U.S.-Israeli tensions also were exacerbated by a report late Monday in The Wall Street Journal that Israel had spied on negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. Netanyahu’s office called the spying report “utterly false.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
