One can assume that the background material presented to US Secretary of State John Kerry in preparation for his Dec. 15 meeting in Rome with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu included choice comments made by Netanyahu’s partner in government and in the Likud Party, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, regarding the administration of which Kerry is a senior member.

Israel Army Radio aired a recording Dec. 10 in which Ya’alon explained the reason for what his listeners consider the excessively slow pace of construction in the settlements. The minister told rabbinical college students in the Etzion settlement bloc that the slow construction stems from pressure on the part of the Barack Obama administration and urged the youth, impatient to pour additional cement into the settlement construction cauldron, to bide their time. He remarked that the government was being careful “not to antagonize” the United States too much and ended his remarks by expressing his relief that the days of the current administration in Washington were numbered. “This administration won’t be around forever,” he told his listeners.

Ya’alon’s recording exposes Netanyahu’s “diplomatic horizon”: elections in the United States, on the one hand, and elections in Israel, on the other. Behind closed doors, Netanyahu refers to President Barack Obama as Jimmy Carter — the former president considered by the Israeli right wing to be a Palestinian agent after daring to call the occupation “apartheid” in his 2006 book, “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.” Like Ya’alon, Netanyahu is counting on the assessment, or hope, that in a little over two years, his Republican friends, who conquered Capitol Hill in the 2014 midterm elections, will retake the White House as well. Then, the Americans will stop going on and on about freezing settlement construction, a permanent arrangement with the Palestinians and similar left-wing hallucinations. All he has to do is maintain his grip on power for another term and form another settlers’ government under the guise of the 2009 Bar-Ilan speech.

For now, most of Netanyahu’s efforts are directed at persuading Kerry, and through him Obama, to defuse the land mine in the proposal that the Palestinians plan to bring to a UN Security Council vote this month. This land mine is the proposed recognition of the June 4, 1967, lines as the basis for the permanent border between Israel and Palestine. The 1967 borders are considered by the Israeli political right, and even some in the center, to be “Auschwitz borders,” an expression attributed to Labor’s late Foreign Minister Abba Eban, signaling Israel’s annihilation.