A Few Minutes with Danny Ayalon

During the Biden-Bennett meeting at the White House two months ago, the words “two-state solution” didn’t cross the president’s lips even once. Instead Biden offered a few noncommittal words about “regional prosperity.” This wasn’t a trivial gesture. Here too was evidenced the administration’s desire not to complicate matters for Bennett and his new coalition, in the fear that it will collapse and throw Israel back into the endless cycle of elections, at the end of which parties such as Meretz, Labor, and Ra’am may not be in the coalition.

Bennett, for his part, toned down his remarks against the Iran nuclear deal, which the US aspires to rejoin. With this, both sides tried to revive the old state of affairs in which Washington and Jerusalem laundered their dirty linen in private without publicizing their disputes.

But last week, something changed. It started with Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s labeling of six Palestinian NGOs as terror groups. This step drew not only open criticism from the State Department, but also a clarification that Israel had acted alone without notifying the administration in advance. Israel countered that they had in fact alerted the Americans, and the State Department repeated its claim that no, they hadn’t received a heads-up. The whole farce was public. And if this wasn’t enough, the State Department also harshly critiqued the government’s decision — again Benny Gantz’s — to authorize 3,000 housing units in the settlements.

So what’s going on? Is this the end of an all-too-brief honeymoon between the Democratic administration and the unity government in Israel?