UPDATE: Obama and Netanyahu to meet in Washington
jewish telegraphic agency
jerusalem | President Barack Obama will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Tuesday, March 24.
Until March 21, it had not been clear whether Obama would meet Netanyahu, who is in Washington this week for the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Netanyahu’s visit comes on the heels of two weeks of tension between the United States and Israel over Israel’s announcement of plans for 1,600 new housing units in a Jewish neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem, made while Vice President Joe Biden was visiting.
Following the announcement, U.S. special Middle East envoy George Mitchell delayed a planned trip to Israel.
The two sides dialed down the tensions last week amid a flurry of phone calls, and Mitchell came to Israel this week and conveyed the White House invitation to Netanyahu, according to a spokesman for the prime minister.
During his visit to Washington, Netanyahu is also scheduled to meet with Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Netanyahu reiterated to his Cabinet on March 21 that Israel would continue to build in eastern Jerusalem. “Construction in Jerusalem is like construction in Tel Aviv,” Netanyahu said, noting that his government’s policy on Jerusalem construction follows that of all Israeli governments since 1967. That is something “we have made very clear to the American administration,” he said.
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U.S., Israel spat sets mood for AIPAC parley
by ron kampeas, jta
Israeli and U.S. diplomats were quietly working behind the scenes this week in an attempt to relieve tensions between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the two speak separately at AIPAC’s Policy Conference next week.
Clinton is to speak on the morning of the conference’s first day, Sunday, March 21, and Netanyahu is scheduled for that evening. The three-day parley will be held in Washington, D.C.
The Netanyahu administration has made clear that it wants to get past its embarrassment over a planning committee’s announcement last week of approval for 1,600 housing units in eastern Jerusalem. The disclosure came after Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Israel to express unabated U.S. support for Israel.
To that end, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, issued a statement March 16 flatly denying a widely cited report in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz claiming that he told fellow diplomats that U.S.-Israeli relations were at a 35-year low.
“I was flagrantly misquoted about remarks I made in a confidential briefing,” Oren said in a statement. “Recent events do not — I repeat do not — represent the lowest point in the relations between Israel and the United States. Though we differ on certain issues, our discussions are being conducted in an atmosphere of cooperation as befitting long-standing relations between allies. I am confident that we will overcome these differences shortly.”
However, despite a litany of “mea culpa and let’s move on” statements from Israeli leaders that began before Biden even left the Mideast, it’s not clear whether the Obama administration is ready to move forward.
Clinton did say on March 16 that U.S. and Israeli officials are in intense talks about resuming peace negotiations and moving past the breach.
“We have an absolute commitment to Israel’s security,” she said at a briefing. “We have a close, unshakable bond between the United States and Israel.”
Israeli officials told the Associated Press that Netanyahu is willing to go to some lengths to calm tensions, and he and Biden reportedly spoke on the phone March 16, though no details of the conversation were released. U.S. officials are also looking for a way to finesse their demand that Israel cancel the construction.
That set a considerably different tone from the previous week, when Clinton spokesman P.J. Crowley appeared intent on sustaining the conflict.
On March 12 Crowley said that the United States was still upset with the substance of the announcement of the housing starts, not merely its timing. Clinton told two major news outlets that the announcement was an “insult.” David Axelrod, Obama’s top political adviser and one of his unofffical liaisons, added “affront” to that vocabulary on the Sunday news shows March 14.
For the crisis to end, Israel needed to send a signal of its seriousness, said David Makovsky, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who is among the speakers at the AIPAC conference. He suggested sacking Eli Yishai, the interior minister who is partly responsible for the planning committee that made the announcement of the 1,600 housing units in Ramat Shlomo.
“It’s important to improve the atmosphere in this crisis,” Makovsky said.
Makovsky added that Netanyahu also should examine why, after promising last November to avoid such planning announcements after a similar embarrassment during his meeting in Washington with President Barak Obama, he again was blindsided.
Obama’s Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell was to return to Israel this week, but suddenly postponed his trip, which some saw as a further affront to Israel.
The Palestinian Authority announced that it would not attend indirect talks arranged by the Obama administration unless Israel cancels the east Jerusalem construction plans. The Palestinians have repeatedly said that east Jerusalem should become the capital of a Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, AIPAC leaders are hoping they can turn the conference’s attention back to the danger Iran poses toward the United States and Israel.
It’s no coincidence that Iran features in two of the four action items that the 7,000 activists will take with them to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, March 23, the conference’s last day and its annual lobbying day.
The activists will lobby for rapid final passage of a bill that would expand unilateral sanctions to target Iran’s energy sector. Both houses of Congress have passed the measure, which now must be reconciled. AIPAC wants the bill to keep its substantial bite; the Obama administration reportedly wants to carve out an exception for China as a means of drawing it into expanded multilateral sanctions.
The Iran piece of the lobbying also will include an appeal to lawmakers to sign on to letters to the Obama administration encouraging its efforts to expand multilateral sanctions through the U.N. Security Council.
Otherwise, the activists will lobby, as they always do, for passage of the foreign aid budget — it includes more than $2.7 billion in assistance for Israel, commensurate with Bush administration policies — and a letter to the administration promoting a close U.S.-Israel relationship and urging direct Israel-Palestinian talks.
That letter was planned before the fur started flying last week, but now it seems as if it couldn’t be timelier.
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