NYT editorial: Politics Over Peace

Early in his most recent tenure, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, spent a lot of time trying to persuade President Obama and others that he was serious about making peace with the Palestinians. Only a hard-liner, like him, could pull it off. If only.

With the peace process crumbling, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with Mr. Netanyahu for seven hours on Thursday. She went in insisting that she still believes that Mr. Netanyahu and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, are “very committed to a two-state solution.” There was no sign of a breakthrough.

If Mr. Netanyahu is willing to make the hard choices necessary for peace, it’s not evident these days. What is evident is that he has decided that mugging for his hard-line coalition is more important than working with President Obama to craft a peace deal — and counting on his newly empowered Republican allies on Capitol Hill to back him up, no matter what he does.

Since last week’s American elections, Mr. Netanyahu’s government has published plans for 1,000 new housing units in a contested part of Jerusalem. That same day, on a trip to the United States, Mr. Netanyahu implicitly faulted Mr. Obama for not threatening to attack Iran. “If the international community, led by the United States, hopes to stop Iran’s nuclear program without resorting to military action, it will have to convince Iran that it is prepared to take such action,” he told the Jewish Federations of North America.

(More here.)