Muppet political theater

The apparently cordial exchange between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama, the final meet-up between the two while they’re both in office, takes center stage in the Hebrew press on Thursday.

Theirs was the last of 17 face-to-face meetings during Obama’s presidency, and the key point made during the brief tête-à-tête was the US president’s expressing of “concerns around settlement activity” in the West Bank. That, along with the recap of the two leaders’ fraught relationship since Obama took office eight years ago, is the focus of the news.

The settlement issue is at the core of Haaretz‘s reporting, and it cites an unnamed senior American official saying that Obama expressed to Netanyahu during their closed-door meeting “profound US concerns about the corrosive effect that that settlement activity, that is continuing when the occupation enters its 50th year, is having on the prospects of a two-state solution.”

“They were just like an old couple who learned to know one another, it’s just like that. Like the two old men from the Muppets,” a senior Israeli official close to Netanyahu is quoted in Yedioth Ahronoth saying, referring to the venerable and crotchety Waldorf and Statler. “It was a meeting with the atmosphere of the end of school.”

Israel Hayom, curiously enough, crops the quote from the senior Israeli official to omit the reference to Waldorf and Statler, merely calling the two leaders “an old couple.” Like a senior official the paper quotes, Israel Hayom aims to iron over differences with Obama and paint the meeting as positive.

The real question is which leader is which? Waldorf is senile and Statler is deaf and blind, and the two regularly berate and beat each other. Netanyahu’s senior official either wasn’t as familiar with the Muppets as he thought, or was poking fun at the two statesmen.

Haaretz’s reporter and commentator from New York, Barak Ravid, says that while settlements were not the main subject of conversation between Netanyahu and Obama, they’re at the fore.

“The settlements took up on a few minutes of the [roughly half-hour long] meeting, but they were still the subject that for the umpteenth time grabbed headlines,” Ravid writes. He says that since taking office in 2009, Netanyahu hasn’t managed to convince a single world leader, let alone Obama, that settlements are not an obstacle to finding a way to a two-state solution. “In his view it’s just a matter of time until the world understands that the reason there still isn’t a Palestinian state is only the Palestinian refusal to give up the right of return and recognize Israel as a Jewish state.”

Israel Hayom’s Boaz Bismuth tells the free daily’s readers that the country will see plenty of Obama after he leaves office, as he promised to Netanyahu. “It’s very likely that the former president will return to our region in order to fix what he screwed up on his watch,” including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bismuth says. What will he do until January, when he leaves office? he asks. “It’s hard to believe that Obama’s response will be to join the French Peace Initiative for a move to harm Israel at the Security Council.” He assures that the US would never lead from behind on the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Running contrary to assurances from Netanyahu’s people that everything was hunky-dory, Bismuth writes that during “their last meeting it was possible to see that the conflicts between the two still exists, and one can assume that even if Obama was in office another eight years they would remain.”

That assumes that Netanyahu would also be in office another eight years, a scary assumption by Bismuth.

Yedioth Ahronoth’s Orly Azoulay’s takeaway from the meeting is completely different. She says that the president’s message was to Florida, sending assurances that Hillary Clinton, like him, will be Israel’s best friend and that Jews living there should vote Democrat. “The Democratic Party remembers well how in 2000 Florida gave the presidency to George W. Bush — and they don’t want to see history repeat itself,” she writes. “In Miami they’ll love to see Obama hugging Netanyahu.”

She notes that Obama’s aide didn’t discount the possibility of Obama making a push for peace before the end of his term, and says it will likely take the form of a speech or Security Council action. But for the sake of projecting a positive image, neither what comes next nor Iran was mentioned at the powwow.