President Obama and Jewish members of Congress emerged from an hour-and-a-half meeting yesterday presenting a united front on the touchy subject of Middle East peace, but the meeting itself featured some sharp exchanges as Obama sought to quell concerns that he would impose a peace plan on Israel without the country's consent, two attendees said.
Jewish members, led by New York's Eliot Engel and Connecticut's Joe Lieberman, pressed Obama on their impression that he is putting more pressure on Israel than on the Palestinian side in peace talks, and asked about recent calls on Obama to jumpstart the process with an "Obama plan."
"I cannot impose a settlement," Obama said of the peace process, according to one attendee's notes. "Israel is a sovereign nation and the notion that I would or could do that is simply wrong.“
Obama told the group that the rift between the U.S. and Israel has been overstated -- though another attendee said he conceded some American missteps, as well as Israeli ones -- and stressed that the American commitment to Israel's military superiority is unabated.
"Everyone spoke their mind, everyone said what they felt, and the president responded," Engel said.
Another member present said the meeting was "frank and friendly, but tough."
Obama told the group he has no plan to propose his own peace settlement, though he also told them that he would not foreclose the possibility that, at some point in his presidency, he would outline principles, the attendee said.
In what one attendee described as the meeting's tensest moment, Lieberman told Obama that, in Lieberman's view, Obama was approaching the peace process with an eye toward repairing ties with the Muslim world, rather than brokering a fair deal -- a characterization Obama rejected.
Instead, Obama told the group, he sees an "opening" to press Arab States to say publicly what they say privately -- that their larger problem is with Iran, not Israel.
Obama also noted that he'd spent more time with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than with any other foreign leader, and New York Senator Chuck Schumer suggested that Netanyahu be pressed to shore up the relationship publicly as well.
Netanyahu had told Schumer privately, Schumer said, that the U.S. has done the right thing on its two most important security concerns, Iran and missiles in Syra. Schumer suggested American Jews needed to hear that publicly from Netanyahu's mouth.
"When the US is right, [the Israelis] should be saying it's right," an attendee paraphased Schumer as saying.
The members thanked Obama for that day's announcement of a unified stance against Iran from the P5-plus-one (UN Security Council Members and Germany) earlier that day, and Obama suggested they call U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to thank her.
Though Obama spent much of the gathering reassuring members that he had not intention of meddling in Israeli politics, that sentiment runs only one way: Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, I'm told, was working the phones in advance of the meeting to be arm members with Israel's view of things.
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