Why is Obama Being So Friendly to Netanyahu?

As jokes go, President Obama’s aside to Benjamin Netanyahu at Ben Gurion Airport, near Tel Aviv, wasn’t exactly a rib tickler, but it set the tone for what we can expect over the next couple of days. “It’s good to get away from Congress,” Obama said, and, according to reporters on the scene, the Israeli Prime Minister responded with a chuckle. Just a couple of old buddies catching up and having fun.

In reality, of course, the two leaders don’t agree on very much at all. Back in 2011, there was the famous slip, when a microphone caught Obama grumbling about Netanyahu with Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French President. And earlier this year, as Netanyahu was preparing for a general election, there was another flap when Jeffrey Goldberg, of The Atlantic, reported that, in the weeks after a United Nations vote on the status of the Palestinians, “Obama said privately and repeatedly, ‘Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are,’” and that the President believed the Israeli leader, with his policy of constructing new settlements in the West Bank, was leading his country down a path, in Goldberg’s words, “toward near-total isolation.”

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