Inside story or Israbluff: What Obama and Netanyahu discussed at the Whitehouse and how Ha'aretz knows

Nobody knows what President Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu discussed at the White House, but Ha'aretz and some others are trying really hard to make the case that the US is applying pressure on Israel to make peace. Netanyahu requested a meeting with Obama and went out of his way to keep the appointment, because he likes getting bawled out. In an unconscious parody, Haaretz offered this "proof" that Obama was pressuring Netanyahu to make peace during their meeting last week.

 

Many words have been written in the Israeli media about the meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House last week, but not one word of its content has been leaked, to the journalists' great distress. Nonetheless, after the White House released a photograph of the two leaders in the Oval Office private dining room, one can in fact discern that the U.S. president stressed to the Israeli premier the historic importance of advancing peace in the Middle East.

 

In the photo, which was released on Friday, the pair are sitting around a dinning table, speaking and smiling as if the relations between their two countries had never been strained. A painting hangs on the wall beside the two leaders, which if Netanyahu did not see it, or saw it and did not understand its significance, then Obama, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, must have taken the trouble to explain to him its historic importance.

 

In the picture, which was painted in 1865 by the artist George Peter Alexander Healy, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, is seen conferring with William Sherman, Ulysses Grant and David Porter, the commanders of the Union army. During conversations the four men held on the River Queen steamboat on March 27 and March 28 of that year, just over a week before the end of the U.S. Civil War, they discussed the conditions of the peace treaty they would offer the defeated Confederate forces. The accord, even if it had many deficiencies, brought about the reunion of the North and South, the economic recovery of the South, the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of African Americans.

 

 Obama's message to Netanyahu, if there really was such a message, is quite clear: If you end the blood feud and make a peace of the brave, you will be remembered in history as a great leader, like Lincoln (the former president most esteemed by Obama).

Ha'aretz offers this as serious analysis, not a joke. Nobody checked how long the painting had been hanging there. Ha'aretz also forgot to mention the main condition of the peace agreement that ended the US Civil War: unconditional surrender of all the Confederate forces. As can be seen in the digitally enhanced enlargement below, Barack Obama is clearly laying it on the line to Bibi, right? Well if you can't see that, you don't have the right sort of imagination probably. I don't either, I guess. You have to be a Ha'aretz reporter. To me, a person of limited imagination, it looks like Bibi is talking enthusiastically and Barack is listening politely.   

 

 

At least, in this version of their account of the meeting, Ha'aretz admits that nobody really has any idea what was discussed. Previously, they had a somewhat different story as I noted (see here) which qouted an "expert:"

 

But Dr. Stephen Cohen, President of The Institute for Middle East Peace and Development Partners in Peace, called the meeting "a non-meeting."

 

"They just talked past each other. I don't see how they can save Abbas by just saying that they want to save Abbas," said Cohen, who is also the author of the recently published book Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East.

How does he know? Was he there? I don't see anyone in that photo besides Obama and Netanyahu, do you? And why would Benjamin Netanyahu  ask for a special meeting with Barack Obama in order to save Mahmoud Abbas? Would Abbas do that for Netanyahu? What does Abbas need saving from? He is president for as long as he wants to be president after all.

 

Ami Isseroff:

 

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