Yes, Netanyahu has ample reason to sound alarms about the current state of negotiations with both the Iranians and the Palestinians. Both sets of talks are fraught with risks. But the argument can be made—and is being made, both by the Obama administration and many Israelis—that the far greater risk to Israel's future and to U.S. strategy in the Middle East lies in continuing a policy of confrontation.

What is most disturbing, even to some Israeli defense and intelligence experts, is Netanyahu's blunt unwillingness to compromise on either issue. Amos Yadlin, the former head of the IDF's Military Intelligence, told Israeli TV that the hard-line criticism of the interim nuclear deal with Iran misses a subtle but crucial point: The terms are good enough for a temporary freeze that will allow the negotiations to continue—which is what this is—even though they would not suffice for a permanent deal, which would require dismantlement. But the Obama administration also understands that; it has been careful to say that the real talks are only now beginning. Yadlin added the Iranians "understand that this is a test," and it would be "illogical for them to breach [the interim deal] in the next six months" by restarting enrichment toward weapons-grade uranium. He noted that President Obama has committed himself to ensuring there is no Iranian bomb, and he said that the unprecedented international consensus on a tough sanctions regime, in which Netanyahu puts so much stock, might well have collapsed had the U.S. held out for a tougher deal that would have been tantamount to Iranian surrender.

Nor was there any chance that such a surrender was going to happen. New Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, needed to appease their own hard-liners back home with some sanctions relief, in a way that Netanyahu refuses to acknowledge.

Netanyahu's obstructionism has a long history. A videotape of him speaking to a gathering of right-wing settlers in 2001 is as revealing of his true feelings about the Palestinians as his good friend Mitt Romney's infamous "47 percent" videotape was of the former Republican candidate's beliefs about the American electorate. In Netanyahu's first term, he appeared to negotiate at Wye River in 1998 and praised President Clinton for his efforts to come to an interim deal, but he later revealed to the settlers that he'd only been gaming the president. Netanyahu allowed that he had said he would honor the Oslo Accords, but then described how he had undermined them by eliciting American agreement to let him define security zones that Israel could maintain. Then he effectively defined the "entire Jordan Valley" as a military zone. "From that moment on, I de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords," he said.

American negotiators were furious with his tactics—just as Obama has been since 2009. "Netanyahu was nearly insufferable, lecturing us and telling us how to deal with the Arabs," U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross wrote in his 2004 memoir, The Missing Peace. "After Netanyahu was gone, President Clinton observed: 'He thinks he is the superpower, and we are here to do whatever he requires.'" In his successful campaign against Netanyahu in 1999, Ehud Barak used a slogan proposed by his U.S. campaign strategists Bob Shrum, Stanley Greenberg, and James Carville: "Takuah, takuah, takuah," or "Stuck, stuck, stuck." Barak later pushed for a peace deal at great speed, culminating in Yasser Arafat's heartbreaking rebuff to Barak's historically unprecedented offer at Camp David in 2000. Barak's successor, Ariel Sharon, turned over Gaza under a cloud of controversy and was planning to unilaterally disengage from some two-thirds of the West Bank, according to his former adviser, when he suffered a stroke in January 2006.