Report: Netanyahu advisor may be named ambassador to UK

Uzi Arad, the national security advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, may be made Israel's ambassador to London, Israel's Channel 2 reported Sunday. The allegedly contemplated shuffle was described as a demotion.

An aide in Arad's office reached by The Cable Sunday said she didn't want to comment on the report, and Arad himself could not immediately be reached.

But one Israeli analyst cautioned that the report, by Channel 2's political commentator Amnon Abramowitz, may be a "trial balloon" from Netanyahu's office "designed to warn Mr. Arad to shut up."

Arad made controversial comments in interviews this past week that reportedly further exacerbated tensions between the Obama and Netanyahu governments, and angered his boss.

"Senior administration officials in Washington commented with astonishment and anxiety on the interview given by Arad in response to the statements by President Obama, who said at the start of the week that the U.S. had not given Israel a green light to attack nuclear facilities in Iran," Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported Friday.

Arad, a former Mossad official, told Israeli daily Haaretz in an interview that he saw no Palestinian leadership with which Israel could pursue peace negotiations. "I also do not see a Palestinian leadership or a Palestinian regime, but a disorderly constellation of forces and factions," Arad reportedly said. 

Israeli reports said Netanyahu was infuriated by Arad's charge in the same interview that the previous Israeli governments of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert failed to stop the Iranian threat. "The leadership scattered its efforts and resources instead of concentrating them," Arad said. "It preoccupied itself with other issues, such as the disengagement and Annapolis .... it did not home in on the main issue -- Iran."

"The prime minister is not willing to discuss directly the way in which Israel governments have dealt with the Iranian threat - neither in the past nor the present," Netanyahu's bureau said in a statement reported by Haaretz.

UPDATE: An official with Israel's National Security Council, speaking on background Monday, said Arad isn't leaving his job.