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One day after Mr. Obama laid down a tough line on negotiations with the Palestinians, Mr. Netanyahu replied in kind, inches from Mr. Obama, in his office. In side-by-side chairs, Mr. Netanyahu leaned toward the president, looked directly at him, and excoriated his new Middle East policy.

An Awkward Photo Op

"A peace based on illusions will crash eventually on the rocks of Middle Eastern reality," the Israeli leader lectured, suggesting the Obama formulation was based on just that.

Mr. Obama sat somewhat stiffly and mostly looked to reporters in the room as he repeatedly praised the bond of friendship between the two countries.

When the Israeli prime minister spoke, it was with force and passion. He gestured with his hands as he talked about his vision of peace, while Mr. Obama sat with his elbow on his armchair and his chin in his hand.

Ever since political advisers figured out politics equals performance, there have been few unscripted moments. Typically such situations occasion smiles and jokes and words of friendship and unity.

Few moments compare with Friday, even in the tortured history of the Middle East peace process, said Aaron Miller, a former Middle East negotiator now at the Wilson Center, an international affairs think tank in Washington.

"Diplomacy thrives on the absence of clarity and honesty," he said, but Friday there was plenty of both. "It's virtually unprecedented."

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute seems particularly adept at upending the stagecraft. When President Bill Clinton hosted Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at the White House for the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, Mr. Clinton had to put a hand on both men's shoulders and squeeze them together into a handshake. Grim-faced, Mr. Rabin quickly pulled his hand back.

Awkward moments span the globe. In 2006, a Falun Gong practitioner slipped into a White House ceremony, credentialed as a reporter, to heckle Chinese President Hu Jintao over allegations that China was removing organs from living members of her group and selling them. For several minutes during the ceremony, the woman screamed in English and Chinese, urging President George W. Bush to "stop him from killing."

Mr. Bush suffered worse, though, two years later, when in 2008 on a final visit to Baghdad, an Iraqi reporter hurled two shoes at him, shouting in Arabic, "This is your farewell kiss, you dog!" Later, the president joked, "I didn't know what the guy said, but I saw his sole."

In 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev were walking through a model home at an American exhibit in Moscow when they suddenly started exchanging views on the merits of capitalism vs. communism in a moment known as the "kitchen debate."

At one point, Mr. Nixon jabbed his finger at Mr. Khrushchev and said, "You don't know everything." Strolling through the American exhibition, Mr. Khrushchev walked by several voting machines and declared, "I have no interest in them."

Stephen Hess, an expert on presidential history at the Brookings Institution, remembers the moment: "You do not expect world leaders to confront each other in a nonscripted way. It was a surprising television event."

Write to Laura Meckler at

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