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When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the White House tomorrow, President Barack Obama will tell him that his country could face a bleak future -- one of international isolation and demographic disaster -- if he refuses to endorse a U.S.-drafted framework agreement for peace with the Palestinians. Obama will warn Netanyahu that time is running out for Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy. And the president will make the case that Netanyahu, alone among Israelis, has the strength and political credibility to lead his people away from the precipice. In an hourlong interview Thursday in the Oval Office, Obama, borrowing from the Jewish sage Rabbi Hillel, told me that his message to Netanyahu will be this: “If not now, when? And if not you, Mr. Prime Minister, then who?” He then took a sharper tone, saying that if Netanyahu “does not believe that a peace deal with the Palestinians is the right thing to do for Israel, then he needs to articulate an alternative approach." He added, "It’s hard to come up with one that’s plausible.”

Unlike Netanyahu, Obama will not address the annual convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group, this week -- the administration is upset with Aipac for, in its view, trying to subvert American-led nuclear negotiations with Iran. In our interview, the president, while broadly supportive of Israel and a close U.S.-Israel relationship, made statements that would be met at an Aipac convention with cold silence.Obama was blunter about Israel’s future than I've ever heard him. His language was striking, but of a piece with observations made in recent months by his secretary of state, John Kerry, who until this interview, had taken the lead in pressuring both Netanyahu and the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to agree to a framework deal. Obama made it clear that he views Abbas as the most politically moderate leader the Palestinians may ever have. It seemed obvious to me that the president believes that the next move is Netanyahu’s.

“There comes a point where you can’t manage this anymore, and then you start having to make very difficult choices,” Obama said. “Do you resign yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the West Bank? Is that the character of Israel as a state for a long period of time? Do you perpetuate, over the course of a decade or two decades, more and more restrictive policies in terms of Palestinian movement? Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?”

Binyamin Netanyahu has cancelled a trip to Germany amid continuing violence between Palestinians and Israelis. A number of incidents on Wednesday scotched hopes the situation might be calming, after almost a week in which tensions have spiked amid clashes and lethal attacks. The postponement of Thursday’s summit, which was to mark 50 years of diplomatic ties between Israel and Germany, came as Netanyahu convened his top security advisers to discuss the worsening situation. Wednesday saw three separate serious incidents: in Jerusalem, outside Bethlehem, and in the southern Israeli city of Kiryat Gat, where a Palestinian reportedly stabbed an Israeli soldier and tried to take his weapon before fleeing into a building where he was shot dead.

Video footage showed armed police and soldiers running towards a building, and then in a room standing over a body lying in a pool of blood. According to police, the suspect had approached an armed Israel Defence Forces soldier after stepping off a bus and attempted to snatch his weapon. The Kiryat Gat incident will be especially worrying for Israelis, suggesting that the recent tensions – which had been largely confined to Jerusalem and the occupied territories – may be spreading to other parts of Israel. It followed clashes on Tuesday night at a demonstration in support of the al-Aqsa mosque in the seaside town of Jaffa by Israelis of Palestinian origin. The Kiryat Gat incident followed an alleged attempted stabbing by an 18-year-old Palestinian woman who was shot by an Israeli man during the incident, which took place in Jerusalem’s Old City, close to where two Israelis were stabbed to death at the weekend. In the third incident, a female Israeli settler’s car was stoned near Beit Sahour, which adjoins Bethlehem, and other settlers apparently fired on Palestinians, seriously injuring a youth. The settler attacked in her car said that a group of Palestinian youths had tried to pull her from the vehicle at the time the shooting took place. According to the Ma’an news agency, which interviewed locals, the youth who was shot was a student involved in the attack on the car. German government sources disclosed the cancellation of Netanyahu’s trip, which had already been heavily curtailed because of the situation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. An Israeli official confirmed the cancellation. Elsewhere, clashes between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli security forces across the West Bank led to dozens of injuries among Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.