Perhaps no event better illustrates the foreign policy shift in Washington than the reception Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will get when he arrives Wednesday for his first U.S. visit since the election of Donald Trump.
Where the hard-line Mr. Netanyahu and President Obama famously had trouble getting along, Mr. Trump has become known for his forthright and repeated vows to prove “there is no daylight between America and our most reliable ally.”
Although the general mood will be warm, there could be moments of tension. Mr. Trump and his aides have appeared to criticize the Netanyahu government for its accelerated policy of Jewish settlements on land Palestinians want for an independent state, signaled that the U.S. for now will abide by the Iran nuclear deal, and slow-walked Mr. Trump’s promise to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.
Still, on a symbolic level, both sides will be looking to show that tensions of the recent past are gone.
“Both President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu have a very big stake in wanting to demonstrate that whatever problems were with the last administration, they are now gone, said Dennis Ross, who served as the top U.S. diplomat to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the George H.W. Bush and the Clinton administrations.
Mr. Netanyahu told reporters in Jerusalem that he would handle ties with the U.S., in a “prudent manner,” but he offered few specifics.
The alliance between Israel and America has always been extremely strong. It’s about to get even stronger. President Trump and I see eye to eye on the dangers emanating from the region, but also on the opportunities,” Mr. Netanyahu said as he boarded a plane to Washington, The Associated Press reported.
Analysts say Mr. Trump may use Mr. Netanyahu’s visit to announce the listing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps — the powerful branch of the Iranian military charged with protecting the principles of the country’s Islamic revolution — as a terrorist organization. At a minimum, the two men are expected to make a joint public condemnation of Iran’s recent activity across the Middle East.
Mr. Netanyahu, who was first elected in 1996 and has since been in and out of power in Israel through successive U.S. administrations, will also be putting some heavy issues on the table, including Mr. Trump’s expressed desire to cooperate with Russia in defeating the Islamic State in Syria, where Tehran and Moscow are working together in support of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“Netanyahu is [not] against seeing U.S.-Russian cooperation,” Mr. Ross said, but he wants to be sure “that whatever comes out of Syria, it can’t be a new front that Israel faces on its border with the [Iran] Revolutionary Guard and with Hezbollah.”
The two leaders are also expected to discuss the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which repeatedly frustrated the efforts of the Obama administration and former Secretary of State John F. Kerry.
As president-elect, Mr. Trump slammed the Obama White House for breaking with practice and refusing to block a December U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction in Palestinian areas of the West Bank. The move was widely seen as a sign of Washington’s growing impatience with Mr. Netanyahu and settlement policies.
Mr. Trump may stand with Israeli hard-liners on the issue. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, now a top White House aide, along with David Friedman, Mr. Trump’s nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Israel, have deep ties to the Israeli settler movement.
But the Trump White House surprised many last week by suddenly issuing a warning to Israel that the construction of new settlements “may not be helpful” to peace efforts — a move that suggested Mr. Trump’s wider view of the situation could be similar to traditional American foreign policy.
The White House has said the issue will be on the table Wednesday, but analysts contend that efforts will be made to avoid the appearance of any friction.
“Even if the two men disagree on Israel’s policies, we are likely to see a return to where disagreements between allies are discussed quietly and respectfully, behind closed doors,” said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank.
With Netanyahu visit, Trump faces difficult test on Israel this week
Donald Trump this week could become the latest president to backtrack on a campaign-trail promise to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Or he could become the first president to make good on that pledge, at the risk of unleashing chaos in America’s relationship with the Arab world.
Moving the embassy would mean that the U.S. formally recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, undermining Palestinian hopes of anchoring a future state in the eastern part of the city — and thereby potentially making it impossible to restart stalled Middle East peace talks. Already, Arab allies have warned Trump against the move, while Israel has encouraged him, at least in public.
A decision could come by Wednesday, when the unpredictable president hosts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. A day later, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will grill Trump’s pick to be U.S. ambassador to Israel, bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman.
Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump vowed to move the embassy. In the statement announcing his nomination, Friedman said he looked forward to working “from the U.S. embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.” And just days before his inauguration, Trump reportedly responded to a journalist asking him about his pledge by saying, “You know I’m not a person who breaks promises.”
But the president has, since taking office, eased off his campaign-trail certainty that the diplomatic mission should move. A 1995 law makes it U.S. policy to relocate the embassy to Jerusalem, but successive presidents have used their waiver authority under the legislation to delay doing so, worried about scuttling Arab-Israeli peace efforts. Barack Obama’s last waiver lapses in June — roughly when Israelis celebrate a holiday commemorating Jerusalem reunification.
“The embassy is not an easy decision,” Trump told the Israel Hayom daily in an interview this week. “It has obviously been out there for many, many years, and nobody has wanted to make that decision. I’m thinking about it very seriously, and we will see what happens.”
That echoed Trump’s hedging in a January 29 interview with Christian broadcaster CBN. While “there is certainly a chance” that he’ll move the embassy, the president said, “this has two sides to it; it’s not easy to do it – it’s not easy – and I will make a decision over the not-too-distant future.”
Trump could also try to find what might be seen as a middle path – recommitting the U.S. to moving its diplomatic mission in Israel but without a clear timetable for doing so. Or he could let his future ambassador to Israel work out of the modern diplomatic facilities the U.S. maintains in Jerusalem, without formally calling his office an embassy. Because of the size of those facilities, there would be no immediate need to build a new embassy, a step that would require Congress to approve money.
The question of whether to move the embassy is just one of many looming over Trump’s stated goal of resetting relations with Israel – and especially with Netanyahu. The prime minister clashed constantly with Obama on a personal level. Bilateral relations were more complex, as Obama chased the Iran nuclear deal over Netanyahu’s fervent and public opposition, while the U.S. stepped up military and intelligence cooperation with its staunch Middle East ally.
As a candidate, Trump promised to tear up the Iran nuclear deal, and expressed support for Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It’s not clear whether the president agrees that Middle East peace requires the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, a position dubbed the “two-state solution.” White House officials have ducked repeated questions about whether he endorses that approach, and a recent written statement mildly critical of Israeli settlements notably omitted any reference to it.
The two-state solution would see Israel and the Palestinians work out their borders and the status of Jerusalem. Israel claims the city as its capital, but the Palestinians want East Jerusalem as their capital.
Still, Trump recently criticized Israel for pushing ahead with new home construction in the West Bank, using language that hints at support for the two-state approach.
“They [settlements] don’t help the process. I can say that. There is so much land left. And every time you take land for settlements, there is less land left,” he told the Israel Hayom daily this week. “I am not somebody that believes that going forward with these settlements is a good thing for peace.”
Defense Secretary James Mattis is known not to favor the embassy move, seeing it as an unnecessary provocation that could inflame anti-American sentiment across the Arab world. And a Trump aide recently told Yahoo News that opposition to the embassy move from Jordan’s King Abdullah carried weight with the White House.
Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman al-Safadi said after talks in Egypt last week that the king had taken up the issue when he met informally with Trump in Washington on February 2.
“In our view, Jerusalem is extremely important; our firm stance is that we reject any unilateral efforts that attempt to change the Arab, Muslim and Christian identity of the holy city,” Safadi said. “This stance has been clearly articulated by his majesty, and we have conveyed our viewpoint on the outcome of any decision that threatens the identity of Jerusalem clearly and honestly to the United States administration.”
In his final press conference, Obama did not directly address the embassy question, but warned that “when sudden unilateral moves are made that speak to the core issues or sensitivities of either side [in the Middle East], that can be explosive.”
The sensitivities of the issue are clear on official government websites. The CIA’s World Factbook says this under the entry for Israel’s capital: “Jerusalem: note – while Israel proclaimed Jerusalem as its capital in 1950, the international community does not recognize it as such; the US, like all other countries, maintains its embassy in Tel Aviv-Yafo.” (Over at the State Department, the page that normally would include such details is “currently being updated.”)
The issue led to some infamously awkward moments in the Obama White House, including a back-and-forth in which White House spokesman Jay Carney tried to duck the question. And the White House changed a transcript of Obama’s eulogy for the late Israeli president Shimon Peres, striking “Israel” from a dateline that read “Jerusalem.”
Courtesy:
