When the right-wing Benyamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister of Israel the first time round in 1996, Clinton-administration officials barely disguised their bitter disappointment. For the next three years, relations between the U.S. and Israel would be dominated by tempests-in-teapots such as what an Israeli bulldozer might have been doing in a particular neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
Let’s grant that the Likud party’s policy of Jewish settlements in occupied territories is an obstacle to peace. That should never have been allowed to draw all attention away from the far more deadly and intractable obstacles to peace on the Palestinian side. Alas, history is repeating itself.
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