by The Associated Press and Israel Hayom Staff
Obama's visit to be focused on keeping Israeli-Palestinian tensions and suspicions of Iran's nuclear ambitions from boiling over on his watch • Officials view lowered expectations as a chance for frank conversations with Israelis and Palestinians on returning to the negotiating table.
President Barack Obama hopes
to improve his tense relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. [Archive]
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Photo credit: AP |
When President Barack Obama steps into the
Middle East's political cauldron this week, he won't be seeking any
grand resolution for the region's vexing problems.
His goal will be trying to keep the troubles,
from Iran's suspected pursuit of a nuclear weapon to the bitter discord
between Israelis and Palestinians, from boiling over on his watch.
Obama arrives in Jerusalem on Wednesday for
his first trip to Israel as president. His first priority will be
resetting his oft-troubled relationship with now-weakened Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and evaluating the new coalition government
Netanyahu laboriously cobbled together.
The president also will look to boost his appeal to a skeptical Israeli public, as well as to frustrated Palestinians.
"This is not about accomplishing anything now.
This is what I call a down payment trip," said Aaron David Miller, an
adviser on Mideast peace to six secretaries of state who is now at the
Woodrow Wilson International Center.
For much of Obama's first term, White House
officials saw little reason for him to go to the region without a
realistic chance for a peace accord between the Israelis and
Palestinians. But with the president's one attempt at a U.S.-brokered
deal thwarted in his first term and the two sides even more at odds, the
White House has shifted thinking.
Officials now see the lowered expectations as a
chance to create space for frank conversations between Obama and both
sides about what it will take to get back to the negotiating table. The
president will use his face-to-face meetings to "persuade both sides to
refrain from taking provocative unilateral actions that could be
self-defeating," said Haim Malka, a senior fellow at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies.
The trip gives Obama the opportunity to meet
Netanyahu on his own turf, and that could help ease the tension that has
at times defined their relationship.
The leaders have tangled over Israeli
settlements in the Palestinian territories, and Netanyahu has questioned
Obama's commitment to containing Iran's nuclear ambitions. Netanyahu
also famously lectured the president in front of the media during a 2011
meeting at the White House, and later made no secret of his fondness
for Republican challenger Mitt Romney in last year's presidential
campaign.
Beyond Mideast peace, the two leaders have
similar regional goals, including ending the violence in Syria and
containing the political tumult in Egypt, which has a decades-old peace
treaty with Israel.
The president's trip comes at a time of political change for Israel.
Netanyahu's power was diminished in January
elections and he struggled to form a government. He finally reached a
deal on Friday with rival parties, creating a coalition that brings the
centrist Yesh Atid and pro-settler Habayit Hayehudi parties into the
government and excludes the ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties for the first
time in a decade.
The coalition will be sworn in Monday, two days before Obama's arrival.
White House press secretary Jay Carney on
Saturday congratulated Israelis on their new government. He said the
president looked forward to working closely with Netanyahu and other
Israeli leaders to address common challenges and advance shared
interests in peace and security in the region.
Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security
adviser, acknowledged that with a new government, "you don't expect to
close the deal on any one major initiative." But he said starting those
conversations now "can frame those decisions that ultimately will come
down the line."
Among those decisions will be the next steps in dealing with Iran's disputed nuclear program.
Israel repeatedly has threatened to take
military action should Iran appear to be on the verge of obtaining a
nuclear bomb. The U.S. has pushed for more time to allow diplomacy and
economic penalties to run their course, though Obama insists military
action is an option.
The West says Iran's program is aimed at developing weapons technology. Iran says its program is for peaceful energy purposes.
Another central difference between the allies on Iran is the timeline for possible military action.
Netanyahu, in a speech to the United Nations
in September, said Iran was about six months away from being able to
build a bomb. Obama told Israel's Channel 2 this past week that the U.S.
thinks it would take "over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a
nuclear weapon."
Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the
U.S., tried to play down any division on the Iranian issue ahead of
Obama's trip. He said Friday that "the United States and Israel see many
of the same facts about the Iranian nuclear program and draw many
similar conclusions."
Obama's visit to Israel may quiet critics in
the U.S. who interpreted his failure to travel there in his first term
as a sign that he was less supportive of the Jewish state than his
predecessors. Republican lawmakers levied that criticism frequently
during last year's presidential campaign, despite the fact that
Republican President George W. Bush did not visit Israel until his final
year in office.
The centerpiece of Obama's visit will be a
speech in Jerusalem to an audience mainly of Israeli students. It's part
of the president's effort to appeal to the Israeli public, particularly
young people.
He will make several cultural stops, all
steeped in symbolism, in the region. They include the Holocaust memorial
Yad Vashem; Mount Herzl, where he'll lay wreaths at the graves of
Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, and Yitzhak
Rabin, the prime minister assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish extremist who
opposed Rabin's policy of trading land with the Palestinians for peace;
and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, a revered site for
Christians.
In a sign of the close military ties between
the U.S. and Israel, Obama will view an Iron Dome battery, part of the
missile defense system the U.S. has helped pay for.
Traveling to the West Bank, Obama will meet
with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister
Salam Fayyad in Ramallah. Obama and Fayyad will visit a Palestinian
youth center, another attempt to reach the region's young people.
Obama will make a 24-hour stop in Jordan, an
important U.S. ally, where the president's focus will be on the violence
in neighboring Syria. More than 450,000 Syrians have fled to Jordan,
crowding refugee camps and overwhelming aid organizations.
The White House said Obama had no plans to
visit a refugee camp while in Jordan, though he will be discussing with
government officials how the U.S. can increase its assistance.
In his talks with Jordan's King Abdullah,
Obama also will try to shore up the country's fledgling attempts to
liberalize its government and stave off an Arab Spring-style movement
similar to the ones that have taken down leaders elsewhere in the
region.
The president's final stop will be at Petra, Jordan's fabled ancient city.
The Associated Press and Israel Hayom Staff
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=8029
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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