I don’t believe it would be an exaggeration to say that the meeting held between President Barak Obama and 15 of the most prominent leaders of the Jewish community in the United States on Monday will constitute a pivotal point that might restrain the momentum of the new president’s administration towards achieving a balanced settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.
The meeting, which lasted for an hour, is the first between the Obama administration and the Jewish leaders, including the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the American Jewish Committee, the Union of Jewish Leagues, and others. The meeting took place upon their request, because, as they said, they wanted to obtain clarifications about the impression that the Obama administration is taking a “tough stance” towards the Israeli government and its settlement policies.
According to the Jewish Americans, the reports about American pressures on Israel instead of the traditional pressure that the previous administrations used to apply on the Palestinians and Arab factions are akin to a report about a “man who bit a dog”, i.e. they are intriguing and worth reading, but rarely true. Obama also considered that the news about the Israeli-American differences are akin to reports about differences “inside the same family”. The president’s choice of words aroused the admiration of his Jewish guests who expressed to him their satisfaction and esteem, and commended his concern for the security of Israel and his recognition of its right to defend itself and of the special relations that link it to the United States.
The result is that the differences, which were being described as “deep”, between the stances of Obama and Netanyahu concerning the settlements became “manageable differences”, or, as the American President put it, there is now a chance for an agreement between the two sides, pending the results of the latest meeting between the Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak and American envoy George Mitchell. This is not all, as Obama confirmed that he intends to take more candid stances in the coming few weeks about what the Palestinians have to do to reach a settlement.
So we are no longer at the point at which American secretary of state Hillary Clinton said that the expansion of settlements must stop once and for all, whether it is what the Israelis call “natural growth” or new settlements. Now the talk is about narrowing down the differences regarding the issue of the settlements and the chances of reaching an understanding. This was happening while the top Palestinian negotiator Sa’ib Ureikat was confirming that the Palestinian Authority would reject any American-Israeli agreement that allows even limited settlement construction in the West Bank”. He said: “There is no compromise for the issue of the settlements. Either settlement activities stop completely or they don’t”.
It is not hard to estimate the direction that the Obama administration will take when things reach the extent of real differences between “members of the same family”. The retraction of the decision to appoint Ambassador Charles Freeman as Head of the National Intelligence Council was a preliminary sign pointing to this direction. Then came the management by the Netanyahu government of the differences that surfaced after his meeting with Obama in the White House, which some Arab media outlets optimistically believed would be a stormy one. This was followed by the similarity in the stances of the two sides towards Iran.
Despite the affirmation by the American president in a recent statement that his administration did not give Israel a green light to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities, the talk about not leaving the door of negotiations with Iran open forever and the choice of this coming autumn as a deadline for receiving Iran’s final response about the issue of the enrichment, all of the above is closer to Netanyahu’s and Liebermann’s stances than the “extended hand” to the Islamic Republic in the famous Noruz speech. The Iranian issue was also one of the main topics in the American Jewish “summit” as Jason Isaacson, the head of international affairs in the American Jewish Committee, said that Obama was extremely clear concerning the priority of building a unanimous international stance against Iran manufacturing a nuclear weapon.
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