The Next Presidents Mideast Mess

Even God, it seems, is tired of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute-and the never-ending standoff between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu. When a third intifada threatened to erupt recently following Israel's temporary closure of Muslim prayer at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in response to stone-throwing against Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall below, Palestinian leaders called for a 'day of rage,' and Israel dispatched more than 1,000 riot police to prepare for the worst. Commentators across the political spectrum competed with 'I-told-you-so' predictions about the start of another Palestinian uprising.

And then it poured. A torrential, almost biblical rain kept Palestinian crowds down and Israel's powder dry-for the moment, at least.

It will likely take an even more dramatic brand of divine intervention to prevent a slew of worsening Mideast problems-renewed Israeli-Palestinian tensions, Islamic terrorism, Iranian nukes and so on-from landing squarely on the desk of the next U.S. president, whether it's Hillary Clinton or anyone else. All indications are that President Obama is going to try to make a difference in his last two years, especially in securing what he reportedly believes could be a transformative nuclear agreement with Iran. But the overwhelming odds are that most of these problems will still by unresolved by the next inauguration-and that the 45th president's tenure will be as engulfed by the Middle East as Obama's has been.

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The Al-Aqsa episode occurred in the wake of the latest in a series of mini-crises between Washington and Jerusalem that have also raised the odds against a breakthrough. Most recently it was the 'chickenshit' fracas, when journalist Jeffrey Goldberg reported that a senior U.S. official-almost surely reflecting the view of the president himself, given Goldberg's record of access to the Oval Office-had used this unusual epithet in response to Netanyahu's alleged preference to prioritize political survival over risk-taking for peace.

That in turn came on the heels of another mini-crisis, when the White House refused to grant a meeting to visiting Israeli defense minister Moshe Yaalon, who had previously insulted Secretary of State John Kerry's 'messianic' badgering about peacemaking. Squeezed in between was a mini-crisis (or two) about Washington's denunciation of Israeli building projects in contested areas in and near Jerusalem, which the State Department said called into question Israel's commitment to peace.

And that's not all, as you might expect, since this is the Mideast. All of this followed a more serious crisis during the 50-day Hamas war, when the White House-irate, if not well-informed, about Israeli fire-control policy against rockets launched from Gaza urban areas-placed temporary administrative impediments to the standard release to Israel of Hellfire missiles from prepositioned stocks. In doing so, Obama shook what he likes to term the 'unshakable' U.S.-Israeli defense cooperation relationship.

That added up to no fewer than four U.S.-Israel spats in just three months. Throw in the fact that Israel was on the receiving end of nearly 4,000 Hamas rockets over the summer and that, in September, Obama effectively declared war on the murderous Islamic State, also known as ISIL, the aspiring caliphate that has gobbled up large chunks of Iraq and Syria and now has Israel (along with peace partner Jordan and other Sunni Arab allies) in its sights, and this pattern of crisis seems especially abnormal for allies as close as the United States and Israel.

Obama and Netanyahu have never enjoyed a particularly warm relationship. | AP Photo

And we haven't even talked about Iran yet. Israelis and their friends on Capitol Hill-not to mention Mitt Romney-were outraged by Obama's not-so-secret missive to Iran's supreme leader, sensing another concession from Washington with the approaching November 24 deadline for the nuclear talks. Ayatollah Khamenei responded not with a letter of his own but with a nine-point 'how-to' plan for the destruction of Israel, which only deepened contempt for what many view as the White House's naiveté toward Iranian intentions.

The question is, what now? On one hand, with midterm elections having produced a more Republican, Israel-friendly (and Netanyahu-admiring) Congress, and with Barack Obama now a lame duck, Jerusalem has reason to think that the worst is now over. Indeed, it may be a good time for the president to decide to avoid head-on collisions with Israel and focus the last quarter of his presidency instead on the long list of common challenges the two countries face.

On the other hand, if Obama is a lame duck, he's also a free bird. With two years remaining in office and no elections left to contest, the president now has the latitude to pursue relations on issues relevant to Israel without regard to the domestic political fallout-or concerns about further riling Bibi. Depending on the path he follows, his party might protest and Hillary Clinton might move more quickly and dramatically to distance herself from the boss she so faithfully served as secretary of state, but lame-duck presidents have legacy on their mind, not payback from party bosses.

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There is little doubt that the game-changing breakthrough the president seeks most is a nuclear deal with Iran. Testing the possibility of turning a new leaf with the ayatollahs has been a constant of Obama's foreign policy; it explains his reluctance to aid the Green Revolution in 2009, his refusal to retaliate for Iranian troublemaking in Iraq prior to the U.S. withdrawal, and his willingness to face down senators from his own party who wanted to tighten sanctions in the wake of the interim nuclear deal last year. The president might now believe that there is an added bonus to a nuclear breakthrough with Iran in the form of cooperation against the Islamic State.

Although Jerusalem frequently praised the president for artfully arranging tight international sanctions that brought Iran to the negotiating table, the Israelis don't trust Washington's promises on the content of a putative deal. That's both because the administration has periodically surprised Israel on key issues, such as the secret talks in Iran that launched the current negotiations, and staked out tough positions to win political points only to dial them back when they proved diplomatically inconvenient.

Robert Satloff is executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.