WASHINGTON — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel told President Obama on Friday that he shared his vision for a peace between Israelis and Palestinians and then promptly listed a series of nonnegotiable conditions that have kept the two sides at an impasse for years.
After a meeting at the White House that was far longer than scheduled, the two men sought to paper over what is by all accounts a frosty relationship, pleading mutual support for the enduring bonds between their countries. Mr. Netanyahu, however, bluntly rejected compromises along the lines outlined by Mr. Obama in a speech the day before in hopes of reviving a moribund peace process, looking directly at the president in the Oval Office to warn against “a peace based on illusions.”
Israel flatly refuses to negotiate with a Palestinian Authority that includes Hamas, the faction that now controls Gaza, he said. Nor will Israel accept the return of Palestinian refugees on Israeli soil, an issue Mr. Obama had suggested on Thursday should be deferred while the two sides worked on borders and security issues.
Most significant, Mr. Netanyahu said that Israel would not accept a return to the boundaries that existed before the war in 1967 gave Israel control of the West Bank and Gaza. Mr. Obama for the first time publicly called for those borders to be the starting point for negotiations to create a Palestinian state, but said they would have to be adjusted to some degree through land swaps to account for Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a nuance that Mr. Netanyahu ignored.
“Remember that before 1967, Israel was all of nine miles wide; it’s half the width of the Washington Beltway,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “These were not the boundaries of peace. They were the boundaries of repeated wars.”
Mr. Obama, for his part, did not back away from his proposal the day before. But he reassured Mr. Netanyahu that Israel’s security would remain paramount in any American push to resolve the conflict, and he said the Palestinians would face tough choices over the role of Hamas, which Mr. Netanyahu called “the Palestinian version of Al Qaeda.”
“Our ultimate goal has to be a secure Israel state, a Jewish state, living side by side in peace and security with a contiguous, functioning and effective Palestinian state,” he said. “Obviously there are some differences between us in the precise formulations and language, and that’s going to happen between friends.”
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