American President Barack Obama has said he has not always had a fractious relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In an interview with the Atlantic, published today, Mr Obama pointed to two events that may have made the relationship between the two men difficult, but added that they had not always disagreed on political policy.
Mr Obama said he believed Mr Netanyahu could have been the leader to forge a peace deal with the Palestinians but was restricted by Israeli politics. He also described a meeting with Mr Netanyahu in which the Israeli prime minister offered the American leader a “condescending” explanation of the situation in the Middle East.
“Bibi, you have to understand something,” Mr Obama recalls telling Netanyahu, “I’m the African-American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”
He did acknowledge, however, that he made a mistake in his 2009 visit to Cairo, where he made a speech addressing the Islamic world about the reflexive tendency to blame Israel.
“My argument was this: let’s all stop pretending that the cause of the Middle East’s problems is Israel,” he told the Atlantic. “We wanted to work to help achieve statehood and dignity for the Palestinians, but I was hoping that my speech could trigger a discussion, could create space for Muslims to address the real problems they are confronting — problems of governance, and the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity. My thought was, I would communicate that the US is not standing in the way of this progress, that we would help, in whatever way possible, to advance the goals of a practical, successful Arab agenda that provided a better life for ordinary people.”
The speech, at the outset of both leaders’ terms, did not help relations with Mr Netanyahu, partly because he did not visit Israel during the tour, something his closest advisers have since said was a mistake.
However, the leaders did not always disagree. Mr Netanyahu agreed that Mr Obama’s 2013 decision to pull back from the Syrian chemical weapons crisis was the right thing to do. Mr Netanyahu described the deal as “the one ray of light in a very dark region”.
