The meeting set for Sept. 21 in New York between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not be a face-to-face one. Each man will be turned outward to his own domestic audience. Obama’s every move, every word and facial expression are being watched. Any inconsistency that emerges from the meeting with the prime minister will be used by Republican candidate Donald Trump to raise a cacophony of slander against “enemies of Israel” in the White House that includes the president’s colleague and candidate, Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Even worse for Clinton’s campaign, the man who made "Fighting Terrorism" his middle name (and the title of a book he authored) will land in New York the day after it was revealed that the explosion in the city was a terror attack. How could one hurt the American people’s best partner in the fight against the bad guys? Only a week ago they marked 15 years to the terrible massacre perpetrated by al-Qaeda at the Twin Towers. On Oct. 1, Israel will mark a year from the start of the current uprising, when Heitam and Naama Henkins were murdered in the first of a new series of stabbing attacks.

Netanyahu’s face will also be turned toward home, to the Likud Party, most of whose members signed a letter in support of a bill that would prevent homes from being demolished in the controversial West Bank outpost of Amona. His gaze is also turned toward HaBayit HaYehudi, whose leaders, Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, are threatening to advance a law (nicknamed the "law of resolution") that would prevent the evacuation. That bill not only bypasses the High Court, the attorney general and the state prosecutor and violates President George Bush’s Roadmap for Peace and Israel’s written commitment to the United States on a settlement construction freeze, but is also an instrument for the theft of private Palestinian lands. It is a law that disregards the entire enlightened world — the world that Netanyahu accused a week ago of wanting the ethnic cleansing of Jews in the West Bank.

Netanyahu excels at using pressures at home to ward off pressure from abroad. Obama’s interest in blocking Trump aligns with Netanyahu’s interest in blocking Bennett. The prime minister’s problem is that the expiration date of this shared interest is Nov. 8. From that day on, they are expected to set out on a collision course. Netanyahu’s highest interest has been and remains to maintain the status quo and to be written into Israel’s history as the leader who saved his people from a “second Holocaust,” the creation of a Palestinian state on the lands of Judea and Samaria. And Obama does not aspire to enter global history as a leader on whose watch the Palestinian state was ultimately buried under Israeli outposts.