Biden assures Israel of U.S. security commitment

Mar 9, 2010 — Washington Post

Janine Zacharia

JERUSALEM -- Vice President Biden met with top Israeli officials Tuesday and stressed his personal love for the Jewish state as well as the "unshakeable'' commitment of the United States to Israel's security.

Pledging that the Obama administration would prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, Biden expressed hope that indirect Israeli-Palestinian talks could soon lead to a meaningful negotiation of Palestinian statehood.

"There is no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel's security," Biden said after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the official prime minister's residence here.

Earlier in the day, Biden struck a convivial, personal and religious tone when he met with Israeli President Shimon Peres and recalled how he had acquired a love of Israel through his father, whom he called "a righteous Christian.''

"Israel captured my heart,'' Biden said. In Peres's guest book, he wrote: "The bond between our two nations has been, and will remain, unshakeable. Only together can we achieve lasting peace in the region.''

Beyond diplomacy on Iran's nuclear program or peace process with the Palestinians, Biden is on a mission to win over the Israeli public, which has felt snubbed by President Obama's decision not to visit here since taking office.

When Biden thanked Peres for meeting with him, Peres interjected: "We've been waiting for you.'' Just before the vice president arrived on Monday, the deputy speaker of Israel's parliament, Danny Danon, said Israel considered it "nothing short of an insult that President Obama himself is not coming."

Biden, who spent years at the helm of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is well known to leaders here, is considered "a longtime friend and supporter of Israel," Danon said. He arrives at a moment when Israeli-Palestinian peace talks appear to be at a standstill.

Obama is viewed here as having relegated the issue to special envoy George J. Mitchell, who announced Monday that Israel and the Palestinians had agreed to indirect talks, after years of direct conversations led nowhere. In a sign of how fragile the peace process has become, Mitchell acknowledged that the structure and scope of the indirect talks had not yet been agreed upon.

At Tuesday's meeting with Netanyahu, Biden expressed hope that Netanyahu would make concessions necessary for a peace deal with the Palestinians.

"You have done it before and I'm confident for real peace you will do it again," Biden said. The indirect talks "are just a start," Biden noted.

Netanyahu, who said he had been friends with Biden for three decades, said the U.S.-Israel bond "will help our two countries face the two historic challenges that we face today in the Middle East" -- preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and achieving comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace.

Netanyahu, in turn, urged the international community to join the United States in imposing sanctions on Iran. "I think that the international community and the leading countries of the international community have to join the American effort, and Israel has been helping out with key countries and will continue to do so," Netanyahu said.

Biden's four-day visit includes a speech in Tel Aviv on Thursday where he also will try to court the Israeli public, some of whom resent that Obama has visited Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the past year but not Israel.

In a major speech in Cairo last June, Obama raised expectations in the region that he would make Middle East peacemaking a top priority by promising to personally pursue Palestinian statehood "with all the patience and dedication that the task requires."

Instead, after so many years of direct talks that wrestled with the core issues of the future of Jerusalem, borders, security and Palestinian refugees, Mitchell's announcement Monday felt to some observers more like a setback than a success.

"It's hardly a cause for celebration that after 17 years of direct official talks we are regressing to proximity talks," said Yossi Alpher, co-editor of a Middle East blog and a former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Saeb Erekat, the longtime Palestinian negotiator, told Israel's Army Radio that the indirect talks were a last attempt "to save the peace process."

Mitchell, who in January boasted that a peace deal could be done within two years, said he hoped the indirect talks would lead to direct negotiations as soon as possible and encouraged the parties "to refrain from any statements or actions which may inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of these talks."

Just such a thing happened Monday when Israel announced construction of 112 new housing units in the West Bank settlement of Beitar Ilit. The administration had pushed hard -- but unsuccessfully -- last year for a complete freeze on settlements, and Israel's new announcement came as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was meeting with Mitchell.

The Israeli Defense Ministry released a statement saying the units were approved before Israel agreed to a 10-month moratorium on most new settlement construction in November, a move the United States had hoped would give Abbas enough political cover to return to negotiations toward Palestinian statehood.

"Israelis and Palestinians aren't ready for direct talks; their positions are too far apart," said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations who is now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Indirect talks "could legitimize the U.S. role as a broker and maybe even make some headway on borders. Fact is, the Obama administration now owns these negotiations, and sooner or later they will have to get more deeply involved if they want them to succeed."

Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. mediator and ambassador to Israel and Egypt who served both Democrat and Republican presidents, took a more skeptical view. He said it's "not understandable why we would now have them sit in separate rooms and move between them."

"I have been disappointed this past year with the lack of boldness and the lack of creativity and the lack of strength in our diplomacy with respect to this peace process. We have not articulated a policy, and we don't have a strategy," Kurtzer, who advised Obama's presidential campaign, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.

Some analysts speculated that Biden's trip was a recognition that the administration's hands-off approach had gone on too long.

"The administration finally did understand that one of the mistakes in the course of the past year was not engaging Israel at a high enough level," Alpher said. "If the Obama administration wants to have some influence here on the Palestinian issue, it can't ignore us."