Yet Netanyahu, at 46 just three years younger than the president and equally quick-witted, seemed at times to echo his counterpart. During his whirlwind round of meetings in Washington and New York last week, he all but appropriated the axiom of the last Clinton campaign: ““It’s the economy, stupid.’’ On relations with the Palestinians, he stuck to the broad generalizations that won him a narrow victory over Clinton’s favorite, Shimon Peres, in May elections. That played well: to the horror of Palestinians and Israeli liberals, Congress roaringly cheered his pledge never to allow Palestinians any form of sovereignty in Jerusalem. Pressed for specifics on what he will grant Palestinians, he punted. ““My mandate is to handle the national aspirations of the Jews, and not of the Palestinians,’’ he said. Netanyahu ran for daylight, though, when it came to his vision for reform of Israel’s only partly deregulated economy. In effect, he changed the subject.
Netanyahu’s economic message permitted him both to sketch a rosy future for his region and to play the faithful disciple of American thinking. Careful to compliment every governmental downsizer in sight – from Clinton to Newt Gingrich to New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani – he portrayed privatization of Israel’s economy as a cure-all. Tapping the country’s potential through deregulation, he said, will help neighboring regimes fight off fundamentalism, keep Israelis from moving to cheap apartments in the occupied territories and wean Israel off the $1.2 billion it receives in U.S. economic aid annually. Netanyahu isn’t the first Likud leader to make such pledges. One problem: Israel’s huge public-sector unions are a key constituency of the parliamentary opposition.
But Netanyahu wasn’t budging from his demands for more accountability from Yasir Arafat and Hafez Assad. And Clinton was in a poor position to squeeze, even if he had thought it seemly to so early in an ally’s administration. Facing re-election himself, he can’t afford to drive away Israel’s American supporters by even hinting at the kind of threat George Bush used to move the previous Likud-bloc government. Or so said leading Israeli pundits, still trying to decide whether their new leader is a right-wing ideologue or a pragmatist. ““Clinton still doesn’t know how to treat the prime minister,’’ wrote Yoel Marcus in Ha’aretz. ““We don’t know, either, not even approximately, who and what he is.''
Together, the two barrel-chested, graying baby boomers looked as if they could have been behind closed doors talking about duck hunting. But Clinton mostly listened, and he was oddly passive during a joint press conference. He acknowledged that the peace process was undergoing ““a period of adjustment’’ in which participants needed to ““try to minimize the negative and maximize the positive and get through it as well as possible.’’ When asked about his support for Peres during the Israeli election campaign, Clinton reddened. Netanyahu smoothly rescued him, saying: ““Mr. President, we didn’t discuss the election results.’’ Clinton replied, amid laughter, ““We didn’t discuss it at all. That’s right.''
Netanyahu can’t finesse the peace question forever. In Hebron, Palestinian kids are again throwing stones. U.S. officials are ““parsing the negatives,’’ as one put it. If Netanyahu simply seems to be setting up conditions that can’t possibly be met – agreeing to talk to Syria, but ruling out a return of the Golan Heights – he’ll soon seem merely a slicker version of Yitzhak Shamir, who once admitted that he signed on to the peace process mainly to stall talks. An Israeli prime minister, one Clinton aide noted, is judged on ““security, economics and relations with Washington.’’ And Bill Clinton is deeply invested in the peace process. Five photos of Mideast treaty signings hang on the wall right outside the Oval Office. Charming as he may be, Clinton undoubtedly will use all the leverage at his disposal to hang a sixth.
