Obama 1, Netanyahu 0 [Updated]

I guess Bibi didn't think this one through:

When this week got underway, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apparently thought he was going to lose his re-election bid. This fear led the Israeli leader to adopt some desperate measures.

“I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state today, and evacuate areas, is giving radical Islam an area from which to attack the State of Israel,” Netanyahu said Monday. “This is the true reality that has been created in past years,” he added, vowing to increase settlement construction in East Jerusalem.

Asked if that meant Netanyahu intended to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state if he remained prime minister, he replied, “Indeed.”

Bibi has since tried to walk back this "flip-flop," but nobody appears to be buying it. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said today that Netanyahu's pre-election statements show that he is "no longer committed to a two-state solution," which “means that the United States is in a position to re-evaluate our thinking.”

The big problem for Bibi is that most everyone thought he was full of shit anyway when he endorsed the two-state solution:

[I]n Washington, many officials have long suspected that Mr. Netanyahu was never serious about making peace with the Palestinians or about the American-brokered negotiations toward such an outcome that collapsed last spring. So when a right-leaning Israeli news site asked him directly on Monday, “If you are prime minister, a Palestinian state will not be established,” and he answered, “Correct,” they pounced.

Mr. Earnest said, “This is not a situation where the prime minister is creating some daylight between himself and President Obama,” Rather, the remarks created some daylight between Mr. Netanyahu and “Democrat and Republican presidents in the United States and every single member of the House of Representatives,” he said, referring to a unanimous House resolution late last year endorsing a two-state solution.

What I like the most about this whole clusterfuck is that Bibi will certainly try to get the United States to bail him out, but we won't because Obama absolutely hates Netanyahu.

Payback's a bitch, ain't it.

UPDATE:  From The New York Times:

President Obama waited nearly two full days before making a congratulatory phone call to Mr. Netanyahu on Thursday evening, as his administration was still seething over the Israeli leader’s pre-election comments.

In a striking indication of how bitter tensions remain between the two, Mr. Obama told Mr. Netanyahu directly that the United States would have to “re-assess our options” after the prime minister’s “new positions and comments” on the two-state solution, according to a White House official who spoke without authorization to detail the private conversation.

It'll be interesting to see how Republicans in Congress respond to all this. Of course they'll support Bibi over Obama, but I look forward to seeing how it will all play out.