Obama and Netanyahu, who have a history of testy White House encounters, showed no outward sign of tension, looking cordial and businesslike as they held their first face-to-face talks in 13 months.
Advertisement
Earlier Monday, Israeli Cabinet Minister Silvan Shalom, Netanyahu’s designated negotiator with the Palestinians, said the prime minister would outline for Obama a number of confidence-building gestures toward the Palestinians, including easing restrictions on communications, water usage, work permits in Israel and Palestinian development in the West Bank.
Another topic of discussion at the meeting is the stalemate concerning trying to find a solution for Israeli-Palestinian peace and how to achieve a two-state resolution between the two countries, but this is not expected to be solved before Obama leaves office in 2016, say officials.
Their relationship has always been frosty, most recently over the US-led nuclear deal with Iran.
“Sometime in the following two years” of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, Israel wants to use the weapons it will receive from the United States to target the nuclear “sites where Iran is developing nuclear capacities for peaceful usage”, he noted. He added, “I remain committed to a vision of peace of two states for two peoples, a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state”.
But the snarky remarks from White House spokesman Josh Earnest weren’t good at all.
“It’s no secret that the prime minister and I have had a strong disagreement on this narrow issue”, Mr. Obama said of the nuclear deal.
“Even as they can have a difference on an issue as consequential as the Iranian nuclear deal, they can direct their governments to co-operate at an unprecedented level”, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said ahead of the meeting.
Last week, Obama administration officials, laying out their hoped-for outcomes of Monday’s meeting, said they accepted there would be no peace agreement in the near term. “To say that we [must] have this ethnic purification as a condition for peace, I think its anti-peace”, he added.
“It was one of the best meetings I’ve had with Obama”, the president said, according to the Times of Israel.
That reality frees Netanyahu to gloss over his past resistance to a two-state solution.
Israel now gets about $3 billion a year in US assistance and Israel reportedly wants to bump that up to almost $5 billion.
Netanyahu said the US and Israel have a “shared destiny” that assures a strong alliance.
The president did not ask Netanyahu to freeze settlements, Netanyahu said. Ran Baartz, a conservative commentator, has suggested in Facebook posts that Obama is anti-Semitic and that Secretary of State John Kerry can not be taken seriously.
Advertisement
Offering the combative Israel Prime Minister a lengthy Oval Office handshake, Mr Obama hailed the “extraordinary bond” between the two countries and said Israel’s security was a “top” foreign policy priority for his White House.
