JERUSALEM — Infuriated by pressure from Washington, Israel's prime minister summoned the American ambassador.
"You have no moral right to preach to us," he lectured the envoy. "What kind of talk is this, 'punishing Israel'? Are we a vassal state of yours? Are we a banana republic?"
That scolding was 28 years ago, but it echoes as a cautionary tale.
Today, President Obama is pushing a reluctant Israeli government to halt the growth of Jewish settlements and embrace the goal of a Palestinian state. In the 1981 showdown, Prime Minister Menachem Begin held his ground after the Reagan administration suspended a strategic cooperation pact to protest Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights. The territory, captured from Syria in 1967, remains in Israel's hands.
Now, as Obama launches an audacious new effort to make peace in the Middle East, his influence will be limited in similar ways by the regional leaders he must work with.
"We have a 'yes we can' president who believes he can make it happen, but he faces a 'no you can't' reality in a region that has changed for the worst over the past eight years," said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. Middle East negotiator.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, back in office a decade after his first term, has pledged to resist Palestinian independence. The Palestinian movement is in disarray, with the U.S.-backed leadership in the West Bank at odds with militant Hamas rulers in the Gaza Strip over the issue of a permanent peace with the Jewish state.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia, traditional leaders of the Arab world, are ruled by wavering octogenarians who are hesitant to step in as peacemakers.
Meanwhile, Iran's Islamist allies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, have boosted their arsenals with logistical help from Syria and taken on Israel's army. Both pose a threat to Israel's borders, giving Iran, which the U.S. and others fear is bent on developing nuclear weapons, the power to sabotage any Israeli-Palestinian accord. Iran's ties with Syria and patronage of Hezbollah also help keep Syria and Lebanon formally hostile to Israel.
Against this inauspicious backdrop, the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict offers few examples of fruitful American diplomacy.
Shlomo Avineri, a former Israeli diplomat who teaches political science at Hebrew University, notes that the U.S. has sometimes managed to rein in Israeli military advances when regional stability was at risk, as it did in Egypt at the end of the 1973 war, and has helped secure agreements when Israel and its adversaries were close.
