Netanyahu 'chickenshit', say US officials in fiery interview

US relations with Israel came under heavy strain on Wednesday as US officials in the Obama administration accused Benjamin Netanyahu of being a “chickenshit” prime minister, “cowardly” and a man more concerned with political survival than the stability of Israel or Palestine.

Senior American officials expressed "red-hot anger" at Netanyahu and his administration to the Atlantic's diplomatic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg in a wide-ranging piece published Tuesday that warned US-Israeli relations were in a “full-blown crisis” and would only get worse after midterm elections.

"The thing about Bibi is, he's chickenshit," said one US official, using a North-American slangword meaning worthless or contemptible.

“The good thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars,” the official said.

“The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states. The only thing he’s interested in is protecting himself from political defeat . . . He’s got no guts.”

The comments underscore the fraught nature of relations between the Obama administration and Netanyahu exacerbated this week after Israel unveiled plans to build more than 1,000 new settler homes in Arab east Jerusalem, a move that Palestinian officials warned was likely to trigger an “explosion” of violence.

Netanyahu, a divisive figure in Israel who has drawn heavy criticism from his centre-right constituency for having failed to achieve his objective of weakening Hamas, hit back at the comments, pledging to “uphold the security interests of Israel and the historical rights of the Jewish people in Jerusalem".

“No amount of pressure will change that,” Netanyahu's office said.

There were also revelations that Obama administration officials are considering withdrawing diplomatic cover for Israel next month when the Palestinians move toward a bid for statehood at the UN, according to Goldberg.

Israel receives more American aid than any other country – over $3 billion annually, making up over half of US worldwide military aid, according to a recent New York Review of Books piece by Nathan Thrall, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group's Middle East and North Africa programme.

Efforts by US Secretary John Kerry to resolve the decades-long conflict between Jews and Arabs have been repeatedly frustrated.

In a further stab at Netanyahu, a vocal critic of US efforts at rapprochement with Iran over its nuclear programme, another official suggested the White House no longer believed Netanyahu would launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran to prevent it obtaining nuclear weapons.

“It’s too late for him to do anything,” the official said. “Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.”

Responding to the remarks in The Atlantic late on Tuesday on his Facebook page, Israel’s far-right economics minister, Naftali Bennett, called for Washington to renounce the comments:

"The prime minister is not a private person, but the leader of the Jewish state and the Jewish world. Such severe curse words against the Israeli prime minister are harmful to millions of Israeli citizens and Jews worldwide."

Bennett, leader of the right-wing Habayit Hayehudi party, said that if what was quoted is true, "then the current administration intends to throw Israel under the bus".

Weather the storm?

The comments received widespread coverage in the Israeli press.

But analysts say Netanyahu, who still wields broad domestic support especially among right-wing parties, is unlikely to be rattled by the incident, and that it may even serve to boost the Prime Minister's popularity.

"Netanyahu believes he can weather the storm..." said Hugh Lovatt, Israel-Palestine project-coordinator at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

"Even if there are problems on a personal level with certain Obama administration officials, relations between Israel's defense ministry and the Pentagon are still very strong."

Lovatt said that Netanyahu viewed Obama as almost "a lame duck".

 "he [Netanyahu] knows Obama only has another two years in office, and so if he can get through this he will be able to continue relying on US congress to act as a promoter of Israeli interests."

That could prove a dangerous strategy. One consequence of the fallout, analysts say, is that the US may stop shielding Israel as it has in the past by vetoing international resolutions supporting Palestinian statehood.

"Netanyahu has taken US support for granted… that the US will always cover for Israeli," said Lovatt.

"He's forcing Obama to expend a lot of political capital at a time when he’s trying to get other regional Arab states inline for the fight against ISIS. To assume or presume that the US will continue sacrificing its political capital on Israel’s behalf is a very dangerous game."