President Obama said Tuesday that he saw “movement in the right direction” on the thorny issue of Israeli settlement construction in Palestinian areas, and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, a visitor to the White House, said prospects for restarting Middle East peace talks were good.
The leaders’ cautiously optimistic comments coincided with a sign that the Israeli government was trying to lower tensions with the United States on the settlement issue. That signal was in the form of an announcement by Israel’s housing minister that his government had not given final approval for any new housing projects in the West Bank since it took office in late March.
While the gesture from Jerusalem does not affect settlement housing units under construction, it at least allowed the American and Egyptian presidents to say they were hopeful about getting peace talks started again.
The Obama administration has demanded a freeze on all settlement construction, saying that such a move would create momentum for a peace agreement in the Middle East. The conservative-leaning Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has balked at the demand, resulting in an unusually public dispute between Israel and the United States.
Speaking after meeting in the Oval Office with Mr. Mubarak, who was on his first visit to Washington in five years, Mr. Obama said that a climate had developed for “positive steps” in the region. “We had an extensive conversation about how we could help to jump-start an effective process on all sides,” he said.
Mr. Mubarak said through an interpreter that he supported American efforts to achieve a lasting peace, particularly attempts to get Israelis and Palestinians “to sit together and to get something from the Israeli party and to get something from the Palestinian party.”
“If we perhaps can get them to sit together, we will help,” Mr. Mubarak said. At another point, in an allusion to restarting overall peace talks, he virtually echoed Mr. Obama’s remarks, saying, “We are moving in the right direction.”
While the two presidents had positive words, it was not clear from the meeting whether Mr. Mubarak had agreed to any tangible steps toward better relations with Israel — something the Obama administration has sought from all of Israel’s Arab neighbors as a means to restart the peace process.
The administration has been pressing moderate Arab nations to take confidence-building measures, including granting overflight rights to Israeli civilian aircraft, increasing cultural cooperation and allowing Israel to open interest sections in foreign embassies abroad.
Some Arab countries, notably Saudi Arabia, have publicly rejected such steps, though American officials insist they are more receptive in private.
The meeting between the two presidents, their third, was marked by a warmth that was notably absent between Mr. Mubarak and President George W. Bush, who annoyed the Egyptian leader by pushing him to relax his authoritarian rule.
In striking contrast to his chilly relationship with President Bush, Mr. Mubarak said President Obama had “removed all doubts about the United States and the Muslim world” with his “great, fantastic” speech in Cairo in June.
In Jerusalem, hours before the Oval Office meeting, the Israeli housing minister, Ariel Atias, and other officials emphasized that the hiatus in issuing government invitations for bids for new housing projects did not constitute a formal settlement freeze. Indeed, some building is continuing in the settlements, with up to 2,500 housing units under construction in projects that have already been approved.
President Obama’s meeting with Mr. Mubarak has been accompanied by speculation on the latter’s future, inevitable now that he is 81 and, by some accounts, emotionally devastated by the unexpected death in May of his 12-year-old grandson Mohammed, which caused him to delay his visit to Washington.
Mr. Mubarak has been in power for nearly 28 years, and there has been mounting speculation over an eventual succession in Egypt, fueled in part by a recent government crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group that is legally banned but is tolerated and even has a presence in Parliament.
President Obama said Egypt was “uniquely positioned in some ways” in the quest for a Middle East peace, since it had a strong relationship with Israel as well as the Palestinians and other Arab states. “Everybody’s going to have to take steps; everybody’s going to have to take some risks,” he said.
Egyptian spokesmen said earlier that Mr. Mubarak was expected to lay out the Arab perspective: that confidence can be built, above all, if Israel freezes settlements; but also that Israel should improve living conditions in the West Bank, ease pressures on Gaza and consent to negotiate all issues on the table, including the final status of Jerusalem.
The Netanyahu government, citing agreements reached between Israel and the Bush administration, is trying to negotiate new understandings that would allow it to continue some limited construction in existing Jewish settlements. Mr. Netanyahu faces heavy political opposition to a freeze from his Likud Party and its hawkish partners.
“There is no freeze,” Mr. Atias, the Israeli housing minister, said in an interview with Israel Radio. And Mr. Netanyahu’s office issued a statement denying a report published in the Israeli news media on Tuesday that the prime minister, the housing minister and the defense minister, Ehud Barak, had agreed to freeze settlement construction until early 2010.
“There is not, and never was, an agreement” for a West Bank construction freeze, the statement said.
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