The Day After...

Washington summit

The long-awaited summit between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama finally took place yesterday - carrying on for considerably longer than scheduled. When it was over, both men came out smiling and exchanging compliments. Obama affirmed that the "special relationship" the two countries share is alive and well.

That tells us little about how things really went inside on the critical topic of Iran's quest for nuclear weapons. It tells us nothing about whether the president was privately persuaded that peace-making with the Palestinians has been made unworkable because Fatah and Hamas are bitterly polarized, and because even the relatively moderate Mahmoud Abbas has yet to abandon maximalist demands about boundaries and the so-called right of return. Nor do we know if Obama will press Abbas to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

Perhaps the biggest unknown is whether the two men - whatever their earlier prejudices - now feel that they can trust each enough to collaborate. Though Obama and Netanyahu had their "blink" moment in July 2008 at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Monday's was their first lengthy and substantive get-together.

Obama has had greater exposure to the Palestinian "narrative" than previous presidents. Speaking to reporters after their meeting, he talked of the humanitarian situation in Gaza in the same breath as he recalled the security situation in Sderot. It would have been more helpful for him to note that Gaza would not be suffering deprivations if it wasn't led by a violent Islamist movement that uses the territory to attack Israel.

Regardless of what was said publicly yesterday, the question is whether Obama appreciates the distinction between a Netanyahu who is reluctant to foster the establishment of what could quickly devolve into Hamas-led "Palestine" on the West Bank, and a Netanyahu who is an "obstacle to peace." The two are not synonymous. Most Israelis do not have to be convinced that the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state (initially with limited sovereignty) is a clear Israeli interest. That's why the Netanyahu government is already reportedly holding discreet talks with Abbas's people on renewing negotiations.

Yet Netanyahu critics in Washington, along with the faux pro-Israel community, have been urging Obama to push for Israeli concessions on settlements as the perceived key obstacle, though they can't help but admit that the Palestinians are paralyzed by divisions and have been unwilling to accept Israel's viable proposals for reconciliation. Still, goes their reasoning, if it looks like the administration is not leaning on Israel, that "could turn opinion against Obama across the region." The question is whether Obama has himself accepted this argument.

Obama emphasized America's continuing commitment to a two-state solution, while Netanyahu said that if the two sides made progress the "terminology would take care of itself." The premier also reiterated that Israel has no wish to rule over the Palestinians and that they must rule themselves. He said he wanted to move the negotiating process along so that the two peoples could live side-by-side. Obama emphasized the road map and the obligations both sides have in fulfilling it, including a halt to settlements - a long-standing US demand.

ON IRAN the president said that America was committed to Israel's security and agreed that Iranian nuclear weapons were a threat not just to Israel, but to the US and to regional stability. Obama said he would not place a deadline on talks aimed at persuading Teheran that it is not in its interest to pursue nuclear weapons, but that obviously they could not drag on forever, and that he expected results this year. He earlier told Newsweek that the US is not taking any options off the table with respect to Iran.

Obama emphasized making progress on the Palestinian track, but in no way played down the looming menace from Iran. Netanyahu emphasized the threat from Teheran, but also said he was ready to "immediately" resume talks with the Palestinians. What was perhaps most surprising was the firmness with which Obama stressed a sequence - progress on the Palestinian front on the route to stopping Iran - so at odds with Netanyahu's view.

In the coming weeks, the president will be meeting in Washington with Abbas and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. After that, he will deliver a special address to the Muslim world from Cairo. Then we will we have a clearer picture of where the new administration is heading.

Hours Away ...Obama & Netanyahu

Obama, the realist


At 10:30 this morning Washington time, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu enters the Oval Office for a critical 90-minute meeting with President Barack Obama. That will be followed by a short photo-op and a second session over lunch.

There are those who are hoping Obama will read Netanyahu the riot act over "settlements," press him over the "two-state" issue and tell him that Israel's "privileged relationship" with America is over. Others, who keep insisting they are "pro-Israel," want him to use tough love, to impose a solution - because, supposedly, it's best in the long run.

We're hoping they will discover that Obama is a realist who understands why his predecessors' peace-making efforts failed to end the conflict.

Naturally, Washington and Jerusalem have had policy differences, yet these do not obscure our long-term mutual strategic interests. After a series of meetings with Arab leaders, and after seeing Netanyahu today, Obama should conclude that the reason there has been no breakthrough is principally attributable to Arab intransigence.

But aren't settlements the main obstacle? If only they were. Arab rejectionism predates the issue of settlements by two whole decades.

Israel can hardly dispute the long-standing US contention that settlements complicate peace-making. The State Department issued its first disapproval of "settlement activity" in January 1968, when it criticized the construction of apartment buildings on Mount Scopus and the Sheikh Jarrah areas of east Jerusalem. Nowadays, however, peace-making realists grasp that Israel will under no circumstances uproot neighborhoods and communities that are an organic part of the country.

At the same time, the Jewish state is willing to make painful territorial concessions. Didn't it withdraw from the Sinai peninsula in return for peace with Egypt? And seeing no Palestinian partner for peace, it unilaterally pulled out of Gaza in 2005. The Palestinians could have transformed the Strip into the Singapore of the Mediterranean; instead, it became Hamastan.

And yet, Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008 both offered massive territorial concessions in the West Bank and metropolitan Jerusalem - only to be rebuffed.

AS A realist, Obama is unlikely to conflate - as many do - disparate issues. Construction in strategic settlement blocs (such as Ma'aleh Adumim); house demolition in east Jerusalem; "unauthorized outposts," and natural growth in established communities beyond the security barrier must each be understood in its own complexity. Failure to do so is a recipe for deadlock.

We hope Obama will stand behind the March 2004 letter George W. Bush sent to Ariel Sharon (a reiteration of Bill Clinton's policy) making it plain that the 1949 Armistice Lines are not the realistic lines for a final-status agreement.

Everyone pays rhetorical homage to the "two-state" solution. In 1988, the PLO began hinting that it was willing to abandon the destruction of Israel in favor of two states. While the authenticity of this PLO commitment remains debatable, all Israeli premiers from Yitzhak Rabin to Netanyahu have made it plain that Israel does not wish to rule over the Palestinians.

In practice, it is the Palestinians who reject the two-state solution.

Mahmoud Abbas dismissed Olmert's plan for land swaps that would have fast-tracked a two-state solution and provided the Palestinians with the equivalent of 100 percent of West Bank territory (plus a link to Gaza). The hitch? Abbas's obdurate insistence on an Israeli pullback to the hard-to-defend '49 lines, and on the "right" of refugees from the 1948 war, plus millions of their descendents, to settle in Israel.

Given what the Palestinians have done to Gaza, Netanyahu is saying: Before we put anything like Olmert's offer back on the table, let's figure out what kind of sovereignty the Palestinians can be given without Israel's security being endangered. Obama will surely not blame Israelis for not wanting to wake up to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard base looming over Ben-Gurion Airport.

The issue, then, is not how to quickly restart negotiations, but how to avoid past pitfalls. One clear sign that the president is a realist: He's reportedly urging the Arab League to modify its 2002 initiative, transforming it from an unworkable diktat to a genuine peace plan.

That would mean getting real about boundaries, refugees - and, we trust, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

Pope Goes, Netanyahu Goes. Obama at home

Dear Readers,
Have a restful shabbat. The pope is leaving in a few hours. Traffic will return to normal.
-elliot



From Benedict to Obama


The past week showed that on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Pope Benedict XVI just doesn't get it. Next week, however, should prove that President Barack Obama does get it - which is far more essential.

Curiously, where Palestinians and Israelis are concerned, the views of the Catholic Church mirror those of the secular European intelligentsia. Together they see one reality; we Israelis see another.

We see the Palestinians perpetuating the "occupation" by refusing to negotiate in good faith and Gaza ruled by a Hamas more interested in pursuing its Islamist war-to-the-finish against us than in helping its own people. We are conscious that the security barrier was erected only after unpardonable Palestinian violence that claimed over 1,000 Israeli lives.

We know that Palestinian youth are drawn to violence primarily because of the pathological values inculcated in them by a political culture that revels in victimization and score-settling. We believe that the only way the Palestinian polity will make essential compromises for peace is for its leaders to start telling their people that painful concessions on borders, the nature of sovereignty and the right of return are necessary.

We know, too, that Hamas will never let Fatah make those compromises while its patron in Teheran looms near.

ISRAELIS were distressed by some of the remarks the pontiff made when he visited the Palestinian Authority. But they were even more troubled by his deafening silence on Iran. The Church has said that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable. Yet it has essentially ruled out military intervention as morally unjustifiable.

Why do our views on the Palestinians and Iran leave the Vatican and Europe's intelligentsia cold? Because embracing our admittedly bleak appraisal would be awkward for a Europe whose governments still subsidize trade with Teheran.

Also, we keep repeating what we oppose, while inadequately explaining what we propose. And, let's be honest, our failure to consistently honor our commitments to the international community also influences perceptions.

NEXT Monday the spotlight shifts from a Europe in denial about the Palestinians and Iran to an America forthrightly struggling to develop sensible policies. Having parlayed with Egypt's Hosni Mubarak on Monday and with King Abdullah yesterday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will hold a fateful meeting with President Barack Obama in Washington.

There are those who want the president to outline to the premier the contours of an imposed solution. We trust they will be sorely disappointed. Peace doesn't have to be "imposed" on us. Zionism's greatest triumph would be a comprehensive resolution of the conflict in which Jewish rights are finally recognized.

Still, this will be a historic opportunity for Netanyahu to make it clear that this government does not oppose a Palestinian state - that, indeed, by asking tough questions about the nature of such a state, the prime minister is arguably taking the prospect more seriously than his recent predecessors.

Everyone pays lip service to the need for a Palestinian state, but Washington knows that the most pressing item on the regional agenda is the Iranian bomb. That is what it is hearing behind closed doors from Arab leaders - including those who tell waiting reporters that the Palestinian issue is paramount.

CIA director Leon Panetta was recently in Israel, reportedly to urge Israeli leaders not to surprise the administration by acting precipitously on Iran.

There is a camp in the administration that is arguing, "Better an Iran with a bomb than the bombing of Iran." On May 18, in the privacy of the Oval Office, Netanyahu needs to make Israel's "red lines" unmistakenly clear and tell Obama how right he was in saying that a nuclear Iran is a game-changer.

"Iran first" isn't an Israeli gambit to change the topic from the Palestinians. It is a sound evaluation that coolly identifies the only way forward.

Netanyahu has already made plain his determination, right away, to improve life for West Bank Palestinians on the economic front. An assurance from Obama that right behind the administration's current efforts to engage the mullahs stands a menu of crippling sanctions should be matched by Netanyahu's parallel assurance that once the Iranian menace fades away - taking the threat of Hamas and Hizbullah with it - his government will push hard, too, to meet the Palestinians more than half-way on the diplomatic front.

Pope in Israel -- Continued

Limits of interfaith


Perhaps we expect too much of priests, rabbis and imams. We want our clergy to be spiritual beacons, above the temporal fray; and to be politically savvy. Alas, on this earth there is no unscrambling politics and religion. And this inevitable mingling of the holy and the profane sometimes leaves us dismayed that those who claim a deeper understanding of the Creator's will should behave parochially.

Still, man is a political animal and in his image did he create religion.

At Yad Vashem on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI spoke mostly as a theologian - which left many Jews wanting. Granted, the German-born pontiff expressed opposition to Holocaust denial: "May the names of these victims never perish! May their suffering never be denied, belittled, or forgotten!" Yet his pledge on arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport to "honor the memory of the six million" would have been better fulfilled had he referenced the relationship between the Church's age-old "teaching of contempt" and what the Nazis did.

It was a stark contrast to the March 2000 visit by the charismatic John Paul II, who found a way, politically, to combine personal testimony with the Catholic attestation: "The Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love, and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place."

At the Western Wall on Tuesday, Benedict's decision to speak briefly in Latin in theological vein, citing the Book of Lamentations, seemed eminently sensible. Moments earlier, on the Temple Mount, visiting what the Holy See diplomatically referred to as "Mosques Square," he also delivered an altogether apolitical, mildly theological statement about the children of Abraham.

Only at Hechal Shlomo, where his Orthodox audience received his denunciation of moral relativism with silent approval, did the pope manage the right combination of politics and religion, saying: "The Catholic Church is irrevocably committed to the path chosen at the Second Vatican Council."

We found ourselves feeling oddly positive about the Chief Rabbinate yesterday.

Politically and theologically, the Jewish world speaks to the Church in three ways - via world Jewish bodies; via biannual meetings between the chief rabbinate and the Vatican; and via the Israel Foreign Ministry. Hechal Shlomo united all three channels. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar and his Ashkenazi counterpart Rabbi Yona Metzger acquitted themselves well - they could have been mistaken for the national religious chief rabbis of old. Their performances almost justified their annual budget.

And yet, to Palestinian Arab ears, their remarks must have sounded politically loaded.

WITH HIS vitriolic Monday night performance at Notre Dame, the chief Islamic judge of the Palestinian Authority, Sheikh Tayseer Tamimi, embodied the most awful combination of politics and religion.

Tamimi stole the podium to deliver a harangue bereft of spirituality and drenched in the politically profane. Remember that Tamimi represents - not Hamas, but the moderate side of Palestinian religiosity. His Christian compatriots, no more moderate, waved PLO flags at yesterday's papal mass in the Kidron Valley, amid a sea of Vatican and Israeli flags. And if you missed the Palestinian Authority's apology for Tamimi's theatrics, so did we. The dirty little secret about interfaith work is that it's invariably spearheaded by non-Muslims.

The pope, visibly discomfited by Tamimi's tirade - though he didn't understand it - left earlier than scheduled, after a forced handshake with the Muslim cleric. Dozens of Arabs in the interfaith audience applauded the sheikh's anti-Israel calumnies.

The Vatican, to its credit, criticized Tamimi for this "direct negation of what a dialogue should be." To that, amen.

Tamimi will be delighted to learn that the Protestant World Council of Churches is planning its own week-long blitz in June: agitation against the "occupation," "settlements" and Jewish rights in Jerusalem. Fortunately, WCC-affiliated churches are in decline, whereas evangelical denominations displaying profound empathy with the Jewish state are thriving.

Since there is no separating politics from religion, the best we can strive for is that the spiritual in religion informs our politics more than the worst in our politics informs our religion.

Pray we have the wisdom to know the difference.

The King's London Times Interview

Taking a break from the pope today. But I was stuck in "pope traffic" last night. Our reporters and chief photographer (who are out there in the field) tell me they are exhausted from covering the pope. Nothing like it, they say. They have to show up hours ahead of schedule to events to get through extremely tight security...
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Abdullah's Vital Role

As the Royal Jordanian Airlines jet carrying Pope Benedict XVI to Israel taxied toward the waiting dignitaries yesterday, the cockpit side windows were adorned with the Vatican and Israeli flags. That was in keeping with protocol, yet it was a remarkable sight: a Muslim carrier bringing the Catholic pontiff to the Jewish state.

Then, too, there was the afterglow of the warm hospitality extended to the pope earlier by King Abdullah II and Queen Rania.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is interested in meeting with Abdullah before he sees President Barack Obama next week in Washington. Yesterday, however, directly after welcoming the pope, Netanyahu was off to Sharm e-Sheikh for lunch with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and talks about the new government's approach to the Palestinian issue, Iran and, presumably, Gilad Schalit.

Abdullah, for his part, has met with Obama (on April 21); addressed the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC (last Friday); and granted (yesterday) a major interview to London's Times - headlined, on page one: King's Ultimatum: Peace Now Or It's War Next Year.

Throughout, he's been hammering home the message - delivered with regal understatement - that Israel is to blame for the negotiating impasse with the Palestinians, and that it has maybe 18 months to submit to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. Everything, he says, hinges on the Obama-Netanyahu meeting. If there is "no clear American vision" - read: If Obama doesn't lean hard on Israel - the president will lose his credibility, and the region will go up in smoke.

THE KING is a genuine moderate. His father made peace with Israel in 1994. In a region prone to shrill bullying, Abdullah prefers reasonable-sounding persuasion.

And yet it is striking that all his recent pronouncements held hardly a hint of Arab self-criticism; not a word about what the Palestinians need to do for peace.

The king naturally wants to end the "occupation." He claims the "Arab Peace Initiative is the most important proposal for peace in the history of this conflict." And he warns that "any Israeli effort to substitute Palestinian development for Palestinian independence" is unacceptable.

But the king surely knows that:

# Israel has no interest in "occupying" the Palestinians. That's been the stance of every premier from Rabin to Netanyahu. It is the Palestinians who have prolonged the "occupation" by rejecting generous offers to end the conflict (the latest proffered by Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni at the end of 2008).

# The Arab initiative, as it stands, is a fatally flawed take-it-or-leave-it diktat. Too bad, then, that just last week, Jordan denied it had agreed to a reported Obama administration suggestion that it spearhead efforts to make the plan more palatable.

# The Palestinians are hardly ready - today, right now - for total sovereignty. They are violently divided between the West Bank and Gaza. Fatah itself is polarized between generational factions. Palestinian political institutions are, shall we say, embryonic.

Stampeding the creation of a militarized "Palestine" would endanger both Israel and Jordan (a majority of whose population is Palestinian).

The good news is that moderate Jordan can play a vital role in fostering peace. We don't mean via such Abdullah platitudes as - "We are offering a third of the world to meet them with open arms" - but by working to narrow the differences between the parties. For no one understands the dynamics of Palestinian polity or appreciates the geostrategic lay of the land west of the Jordan River better than the king.

Rather than expecting Obama to deliver Israel prostrate, the king needs to lobby the Arab League for essential improvements to its plan: removing unrealistic demands for a total Israeli pullback to the hard-to-defend 1949 Armistice Lines; dropping their insistence on a Palestinian "right of return" to Israel proper - no more than a mechanism for demographically asphyxiating Israel; and adding a necessary plank committing the League to recognizing the legitimate rights of the Jewish people to self-determination.

The king does an excellent job of making the Arab position seem reasonable. But he could better advance the cause of peace by helping to make it reasonable in practice.