Obama and Netanyahu: An Awkward Photo Op

• MAY 20, 2011, 4:17 PM ET

Obama and Netanyahu: An Awkward Photo Op

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By Laura Meckler

If President Barack Obama was hoping that a White House photo opportunity today with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would paper over differences between the U.S. and Israel, he must have been sorely disappointed.

President Barack Obama meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in the Oval Office Friday.  (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

He and Mr. Netanyahu spoke with reporters after a two-hour meeting that lasted much longer than originally scheduled. The meeting came a day after Mr. Obama made a major address on the Middle East, angering Israel by calling for peace talks with the Palestinians to be based on Israel’s 1967 borders.

Mr. Obama strained to accentuate the positives – as is customary during such White House photo ops. “We agreed that there’s a moment of opportunity that can be seized as a consequence of the Arab Spring but also acknowledge there are significant perils as well,” he said.

When it was his turn, Mr. Netanyahu  delivered a lengthy and highly unusual lecture in a setting designed to highlight only the most polite political interactions.  Mr. Netanyahu bluntly told Mr. Obama that he would not accept his conditions for reviving peace talks and at one point turned and warned him that “a peace based on illusions will crash eventually on the rocks of Middle Eastern reality.” While he referred to the nations’ “enduring bond of friendship,” he set out to explain exactly how his counterpart was wrong about Mideast peace negotiations.

The two leaders sat side-by-side. Mr. Obama sat back in his chair, somewhat stiffly and mostly looked to the reporters in the room as he spoke. Mr. Netanyahu leaned toward Mr. Obama and looked directly at the president as he expressed disagreement with his newly announced Mideast policy. (The White House transcript of the leaders’ remarks is here.)

Mr. Netanyahu  said that Palestinians “will have to accept some basic realities.” But he might as well have said: “The U.S. is going to have to accept some basic realities.”

First off, he said Israel is not returning to the borders in place before the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel was attacked by its Arab neighbors but emerged from the war having garnered significant new territory. Some of that is the land that will make up a new Palestinian state.

“While Israel is prepared to make generous compromises for peace, it cannot go back to the 1967 lines, because these lines are indefensible,” Mr. Netanyahu told reporters, sitting beside Mr. Obama. “So we can’t go back to those indefensible lines, and we’re going to have to have a long-term military presence along … Jordan.”

In his speech, Mr. Obama had said the issue of Palestinian refugees will have to be worked out, but he didn’t take sides on that question.

Mr. Netanyahu said it is obvious that the heirs of the Palestinians who were displaced in the 1948 war for Israeli independence are not going to be absorbed into Israel.

“Sixty-three years later, the Palestinians come to us and they say to Israel: accept the grandchildren, really, and the great-grandchildren of these refugees, thereby wiping out Israel’s future as a Jewish state,” he said. “So that’s not going to happen. Everybody knows it’s not going to happen. And I think it’s time to tell the Palestinians forthrightly, it’s not going to happen.”

And he got personal, equating Hamas, one faction within the Palestinian leadership, with al Qaeda. “Hamas has just attacked you, Mr. President, and the United States for ridding the world of bin Laden,” he said, turning to Mr. Obama. “So Israel obviously cannot be asked to negotiate with a government that is backed by the Palestinian version of al Qaeda.”

–Carol E. Lee contributed to this post.