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Chapter Twenty-Five

I had hoped that in facing down the nuclear threat from Iran, I could nudge Bibi towards a reengagement with the Palestinians – not with great enthusiasm, but as an act of pure political pragmatism. There were only two ways we could stop the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon: for the Americans to make sure that happened, or not to hinder Israel from doing so. Either was going to be a lot harder if there was tension with the new American president, Barack Obama, over moves to revive the peace process with the Palestinians.

I didn’t expect it to be put to the test so soon. Yet within weeks of our taking office, President Obama launched an effort to restart negotiations, declaring it “intolerable” that there was still not a Palestinian state. He was explicit about what Israel needed to do. In an Oval Office meeting with Bibi in May 2009, and in a speech in Cairo the next month, he called for a total halt to settlement construction on the West Bank. US opposition to settlements wasn’t new. For years, Washington’s position had been that they represented “an obstacle to peace.” The main issue wasn’t even the creation of new settlements, since there had been almost none in recent years. It was the expansion of existing ones. The Jewish population on the West Bank had been about 190,000 when I became Prime Minister. In the decade since then, it had grown to 315,000 – more than half-a-million if you counted the Jewish neighborhoods built inside the expanded, post-1967 boundaries of Jerusalem. The expansion – “natural growth” as we euphemistically described it to the Americans – was what President Obama now wanted Bibi to end.

I had no illusions about how hard it would be to get him to agree. With each passing year since Camp David, the pro-settlement right wing in Israel had become more confident and influential. In a way, the settlers and their supporters – passionately devoted to a “Greater Israel” and opposed to any Palestinian state – had become the 21st-century equivalent of the kibbutz avant-garde of a half-century earlier. The rise of Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party was the latest sign, alongside a move rightward within the Likud itself. For Bibi to say yes to a settlement freeze would mean putting aside his own short-term political interests in recognition of the importance of our alliance with the Americans. He’d actually done this, twice, during his first term as Prime Minister. He had agreed to give the

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