Opinion

Bibi bops Bam

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have opened his White House remarks yesterday by invoking Israel’s “enduring bond of friendship” with the US — but he made it clear that he won’t accept President Obama’s shift in Middle East policy.

It was, as such things go, a stunningly frank exchange.

In a jaw-dropping policy departure, Obama on Thursday called for using pre-1967 boundaries as a template for a Palestinian state, rather than as a negotiating objective.

Yesterday, right to the president’s face, Netanyahu said no.

He was quite right to do so.

The pre-Six Day War boundaries are “indefensible,” he said — indeed, they left Israel just nine miles wide at some points — and it would be folly to pretend otherwise.

Obama, in his remarks, had suggested that differences on such issues as Jerusalem and Arab refugees be laid aside in favor of “moving forward now on the basis of territory and security.”

But Netanyahu wisely resisted this, too — noting that Israel can’t negotiate questions of territory with “a Palestinian government that is backed by Hamas . . . a terrorist organization committed to Israel’s destruction.”

(And one, as he reminded the president, that “has just attacked you . . . and the United States for ridding the world of Osama bin Laden.”)

Netanyahu understands, even as Obama apparently does not, that endorsing the Palestinians’ demand on the pre-’67 lines won’t get them back to the bargaining table — just as Obama’s demand for a unilateral Israeli settlement freeze led not to new talks but more Palestinian intransigence.

Any peace agreement has to be “based on reality, on unshakable facts,” Netanyahu said — not “a peace based on illusions that will crack eventually on the rocks of Middle Eastern reality.”

To that end, he issued a challenge — one aimed as much at Obama as at Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

“Abbas has a simple choice,” he said. “He has to decide if he . . . keeps his pact with Hamas or makes peace with Israel.”

And the responsibility for seeing to it that Abbas “makes the right choice,” Netanyahu implied, doesn’t lie with Israel but with Washington.

Right again, of course.

Having emboldened the Palestinians by embracing one of their key demands, it’s up to Obama to deliver them to the peace table.