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09/19/2005:

"Four Years of Unruly Diplomacy in Israel"

TEL AVIV, Sept. 18 - Daniel C. Kurtzer has spent the last four years trying to represent the United States to Israel, two countries that think they understand each other.

"I think this is the most complicated, complex and politically challenging relationship of any we have in the world," Mr. Kurtzer said. Not only do the leaders have inevitably close relations and connections that often bypass the ambassadors in Tel Aviv and Washington, "but the other country is a key factor in the domestic politics of the other."

"The sense of intimacy at the top tends to make it challenging for both the ambassador in Washington and here to stay in the game and manage the policy flow," Mr. Kurtzer said in an interview last week. It can lead to misunderstandings, like the Israeli assumption that its sale of antimissile weapons to China would not really matter to the United States, which was outraged. The Middle East as an issue "has been at the nexus of the most serious foreign-policy issues of the last 25 years," he said, so as a job, "it's hard to do."

By most accounts Mr. Kurtzer, an observant Orthodox Jew with close family ties to Israel, did his job well, first as ambassador to Egypt beginning in 1997 and then to Israel, beginning in July 2001, as the hopes for peace he helped nurture as part of an agreement reached in Oslo more than a decade ago crashed and burned in suicide bombings and a cycle of retaliation.

"It took him awhile to realize that Oslo was over," said Yossi Klein Halevi, a writer for The New Republic and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a conservative research organization in Jerusalem. "But he proved to be a fast learner. I think he began to see the Oslo process the way most of us here had come to see it, as a disaster for Israel."
Full: nytimes.com