AVOID a confrontation with the new American administration. That is what Israel’s defence minister, Ehud Barak, sought to persuade his prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, on Sunday April 19th. Rather, said Mr Barak, turn up in Washington, DC, next month with your own Israeli peace plan. This should recognise the Palestinians’ right to an independent state but only subject to stringent limitations and qualifications in the interests of Israel’s security.

Mr Barak delivered his lecture on Sunday at a meeting of Israel’s new “kitchen cabinet”—Mr Netanyahu, Mr Barak and the new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman—convened as part of an ongoing review of policy on peace and the Palestinians.

The defence minister’s remarks came in leaked driblets from the secret consultation. Publicly Mr Barak, the leader of the Labour Party, has been careful not to criticise or dissent from Mr Netanyahu, who heads the more rightist Likud. By the same token, Mr Netanyahu has been unwontedly reticent on his own views and plans, for fear of prematurely ventilating differences with the Obama administration.

The prime minister is apparently still loth to embrace the two-state solution and abandon his election platform, which spoke of “economic peace” as distinct from full political peace between two equal states. In leaks of his own last week, Mr Netanyahu aired the demand that the Palestinian Authority accepts Israel’s self-definition as “the Jewish state”. In local diplomatic casuistry, that would imply the Palestinians’ renunciation of the “right of return” of their refugees.

The prospect of a showdown with a new American administration, which fills rightist Israelis with trepidation and at least some leftist ones with hope, has arisen every four years since the occupation began after the 1967 war. It has never materialised. Despite ups and downs, relations between the superpower and its unruly client have grown steadily closer over the decades. Efforts by all the successive American administrations to stop Israeli settlement building in the Palestinian areas have been resisted or ignored.

Speculation this time has focused on the fact that Mr Netanyahu made tentative plans to visit Washington, DC, early in May, but the White House let it be known that the president would not be available. Mr Netanyahu then indicated that his government had embarked on a policy review. His visit is now expected to take place towards the end of next month. By then, however, Barack Obama will have received Jordan’s King Abdullah and got an earful about the Netanyahu government’s recalcitrance.

A particular target of Arab ire is Mr Lieberman, leader of a Russian-immigrant party, Yisrael Beitenu, which campaigned on an anti-Arab platform and emerged as the third-largest party. After a blustery start, Mr Lieberman seems to be settling into a quieter mode. At the weekend he announced the appointment of a young Israeli-Arab diplomat as a member of his inner staff.

Mr Obama’s peace envoy to the region, George Mitchell, a former Senator, admonished Israelis and assured Palestinians last week that “two states” remained the bedrock of American policy. He made a point, in his public pronouncements, of describing Israel as the Jewish state, but there is plainly no interest on the American side in seeing this issue of nomenclature become a big obstacle between Israelis and Palestinians. Mr Barak urged Mr Netanyahu not to make Palestinian recognition of Israel’s Jewishness a precondition for negotiations. Mr Netanyahu has said that he would not.

When Messrs Obama and Netanyahu do meet at last, some observers expect America’s president to push for a “grand bargain” involving American and international pressure on Iran in return for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. Mr Netanyahu, more than any other Israeli politician, has been ominously outspoken since the mid-1990s on the existential threat to Israel, as he sees it, of Iran’s attaining nuclear weapons. Mr Obama’s policy of attempting dialogue with Teheran worries some Israeli policymakers. But there is also a growing awareness here that the policy’s success, as well as the strength and effectiveness of Sunni Arab opposition to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, may hinge on America’s ability to show substantive progress on Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab peacemaking.